The Subterranean Railway E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 672

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Since the Victorian era, London's Underground has had played a vital role in the daily life of generations of Londoners. In The Subterranean Railway, Christian Wolmar celebrates the vision and determination of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made the world's first, and still the largest, underground passenger railway: one of the most impressive engineering achievements in history. From the early days of steam to electrification, via the Underground's contribution to twentieth-century industrial design and its role during two world wars, the story comes right up to the present with its sleek, driverless trains and the wrangles over the future of the system. The Subterranean Railway reveals London's hidden wonder in all its glory and shows how the railway beneath the streets helped create the city we know today.

Leseprobe

THE SUBTERRANEAN RAILWAY

Christian Wolmar has written for every national newspaper and appears frequently on TV and radio as a commentator on transport issues. His previous books include Fire and Steam; Blood, Iron and Gold; Engines of War; The Great Railway Revolution; To the Edge of the World; Railways and the Raj; and Cathedrals of Steam.

‘An absorbing history of the Tube... Christian Wolmar is best known as an indefatigable journalist’

Michael Leapman, Independent

‘I can think of few better ways to while away those elastic periods awaiting the arrival of the next eastbound Circle Line train than by reading [this book]’

Tom Fort, Sunday Telegraph

‘Moaning about the Tube has been one of Londoners’ favourite pastimes for more than 100 years. Few acknowledge the fantastic achievements of the pioneers who created the subterranean network, or think about the many ways in which it has transformed London… Wolmar’s book demonstrates that the Underground is cause for celebration, not complaint’

Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

‘We mostly view the engineering miracle beneath our city streets with indifference or irritation. All we want to know is: does it work well or not? Christian Wolmar would like us to learn to love it. He is an unashamed Underground buff… Now he shares his fascination, in an entertaining and informative history’

Paul Barker, Evening Standard

‘Next time you find yourself on a crowded tube platform, cursing the Northern Line for its dirtiness and unreliability, remember this: you’re making Christian Wolmar very angry… The Subterranean Railway is both a history and a defence of the Tube, impelled by frustration with how little respect Londoners accord one of the world’s greatest engineering feats… The Subterranean Railway captures the enthusiasm and excitement of the early years… using a deft selection of facts and anecdotes’

John O’Connell, Time Out

‘An epic tale featuring business rivalries, technical troubles, audacious gambles, rows, risks, and triumphs. The Subterranean Railway… is a timely reminder of how important it is that such an achievement is not left to suffer a legacy of sad decline’

Editor’s Choice, The Good Book Guide

‘A book full of astute judgements, which deserves, and will repay, public attention’

Colin Ward, The Architects’ Journal

‘Entertaining and accessible… Highly recommended’

Oliver Green, The Victorian

‘An excellent overview of what is an extraordinary feat of engineering’

Christopher Sell, The Engineer

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2004 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2005 by Atlantic Books.

This revised and updated paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2020.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar, 2004, 2020

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 864 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 84887 253 0

Designed by www.carrstudio.co.uk

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

In memory of Eric Mattocks,

squatter extraordinaire and rail enthusiast,

whose library I have gratefully inherited.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Preface to the 2020 edition

Introduction: The Phantom Railway

1 Midwife to the Underground

2 The Underground Arrives

3 London Goes Underground

4 The Line to Nowhere

5 Spreading Out

6 The Sewer Rats

7 Deep under London

8 The Dodgy American

9 Beginning to Make Sense

10 The Underground in the First World War

11 Reaching Out

12 Metroland, the Suburban Paradox

13 The Perfect Organization?

14 The Best Shelters of All

15 Decline – and Revival?

16 London’s New Subterranean Railway

Notes

Further Reading

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Traffic chaos on the streets, print by Gustave Doré

The ‘Great Victorian Way’ by Sir Joseph Paxton (Copyright © TfL reproduced courtesy of London Transport Museum)

The pneumatic railway at Crystal Palace (TfL)

Charles Pearson (TfL)

‘Cut and cover’ at Parliament Square

Notting Hill Gate station (TfL)

Sir Edward Watkin (TfL)

James Staats Forbes (TfL)

A Circle Line train approaches Aldgate (TfL)

Station advertising on the underground railways (TfL)

First-class travel

Earls Court station (TfL)

Inhospitable carriages on the first tube trains

Boat race day at Baker Street station

The Big Wheel at Earls Court (TfL)

Central London Railway locomotive (TfL)

Building a station using the Greathead shield (TfL)

A 1908 map of the Underground

A 1932 map of the Underground

A modern-day version of Harry Beck’s map of the Underground (TfL)

A 1905 poster advertising the ‘Twopenny Tube’ (TfL)

Down Street station, Mayfair (TfL)

Charles Yerkes (TfL)

A station assistant at Queen’s Park station (TfL)

Gatewoman at work during the First World War

Lord Ashfield and his daughter at the reopening of the City & South London Railway (TfL)

Sudbury Town station (TfL)

An Underground poster advertising season tickets (TfL)

The cover of the 1930 Metroland booklet (TfL)

Display of animals killed by trains at Charing Cross station, 1929 (TfL)

Frank Pick (TfL)

A 1930 poster encouraging people to go to the cinema (TfL)

A 1925 redesign of the famous roundel (TfL)

Crowds at Colindale on their way to RAF Hendon (TfL)

A crowded escalator during the Blitz (Getty Images)

Tube Refreshments Special

West Indian applicants for London Transport jobs (TfL)

A poster advertising the newly opened Victoria line (TfL)

Canary Wharf station (TfL)

The subterranean railway beneath Piccadilly Circus (TfL)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The staff of the London Transport Museum and, in particular, the library have been extremely helpful in meeting my requests for information and allowing me to visit the Acton Depot several times. Thanks also to the staff of the British Library, a wonderful but greatly undervalued resource.

Thanks are also due to: my agent, Andrew Lownie; my researcher, Gully Cragg, who found many of the gems; John Fowler and Mike Horne for reading the text and picking up errors; and Scarlett MccGwire who not only read the text but also made many helpful suggestions.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In this book, I have used ‘tube’ normally to refer to the deep-level lines and ‘Underground’ for the whole system even before the name was in current use; the Metropolitan District is referred to as the District to avoid confusion; and, to make the book more easily readable, I have avoided acronyms as much as possible.

PREFACE TO THE 2020 EDITION

As I write in the summer of 2020, the London Underground is carrying fewer people than at any time since the Second World War and is facing a financial crisis of unprecedented proportions as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. The system, along with the rest of Transport for London, is on life support, being bailed out by a reluctant government which is gradually regaining control by forcing through fares rises and other measures. As a result, the future of the system is in doubt. While this does not represent an existential crisis, as the Underground will always be a central part of the capital’s transport infrastructure, the reduction in passenger numbers and the consequent loss of income means that any future investment or expansion plans are likely to be reassessed.

Four months after the beginning of the lockdown, there is little sign that life will return to normal any time soon. The infection rate and the death toll are both far lower, but theatres remain closed and football and cricket are being played behind closed doors. Crowded tube trains full of strap-hanging commuters breathing all over each other are an increasingly distant memory and it is not at all certain when the fear of infection will be sufficiently reduced to allow people to feel confident again about travelling in those conditions. It may well be a year or more before theatres can reopen and crowds can attend sports events, all of which will continue to delay a return to normal.

As a result of fears of catching the disease on public transport, backed by very strong messaging about insisting that only ‘essential travel’ should be undertaken, passenger numbers at one point plummeted to around 5 per cent of normal and have been slow to pick up because of continued injunctions from the authorities not to use public transport. As a result, car use is bound to increase in the capital, although moderated in central London by a steep increase in the congestion charge, and many journeys previously undertaken on the Tube will now take place on the roads.

While the crisis caused by the pandemic will eventually be overcome, the situation it will leave behind is mixed. On the positive side, there is much to cheer. Compared with when the first edition of this book was published more than a decade and a half ago, there have been substantial improvements, with new trains, refurbished stations and easier ticketing systems. Crossrail, now to be called the Elizabeth Line, provides the most significant improvement to London’s railway network in a generation, if not since 1906–7 when three Tube lines were opened within a year. The Elizabeth Line is rather misnamed since it is not like the existing Tube services, but rather it is a full-sized railway running under the centre of the capital, built to modern standards of safety and space. Air-conditioned, with platform doors and serving nine large below-the-surface stations in central and southeast London, it will relieve overcrowding on several Underground lines and will give many people far quicker access to the centre of the city than was hitherto possible, as it will obviate the need for many to access the Underground via a mainline station. Although Crossrail’s opening, now expected, though not confirmed, to be in 2021, has been delayed by three years and costs have gone up by at least £3bn to £18bn, Londoners will be amazed when the services start running. It is a genuine twenty-first century railway, quite unlike the dingy Tube lines, and will offer a standard of comfort that is far above that on any other local rail services in the capital.

Yet, hanging over the future of the London Underground is the concern about whether the peak numbers attained in the late 2010s will ever be reached again. There is no doubt that many people will have discovered the possibility of working at home, at least for part of the week, and therefore passenger numbers are bound to be depleted for some time to come. It goes further than that. The very nature of the central London economy is dependent on the hustle-bustle created by its cafés, restaurants, sandwich bars, cinemas and theatres. If a significant number stop going to work, offices will become empty, and the kind of inner-city decline seen the world over in the post-war car-oriented period will return. We have got so used to complaining about overcrowded trains and buses that we have forgotten that without these vast numbers using public transport, it no longer becomes viable. Therefore, if many of these passengers fail to return to use the system, not only will it reduce the likelihood of further investment and perhaps a return to the dog days of the post-war period described in this book, but also it may result in a much wider loss: the vibrancy and buzz of one of the world’s most successful cities. The London Underground is the beating heart of the capital and when it is ailing, so is London.

Christian Wolmar, July 2020

INTRODUCTION

THEPHANTOM RAILWAY

When I was a child, I used to be haunted by the sound of ghostly horns echoing through the night near Campden Hill where I lived. I wouldn’t learn the source of this ghoulish noise until much later, but it was the Underground which used to keep me awake. On a hot night when the windows were open, the sound felt so close and threatening that, for a while, I demanded that my poor mother sat on a chair outside my room in our little flat while I fell asleep. It was not until I started researching this book that I made the connection between my troubled nights and the railway which I used to take to school every day.

It seemed inconceivable that the source of my childhood terror should be the Underground which, surely, as its name suggests, was safely buried under the ground. But the Victorians who built it were always trying to cut corners, not least because they were beholden to shareholders who wanted to see a profit out of their enterprise. The Circle Line passes under Campden Hill between Kensington and Notting Hill Gate but the builders left the ground open above the line wherever they could in order to save the cost of covering all their excavation. Moreover, this is an early section of the Underground, built by the Metropolitan Railway in 1868 when the line was operated by steam engines and therefore these open sections provided much-needed ventilation. Because these gaps were surrounded with walls for obvious safety reasons, they act as echo chambers and when the trains passing late at night sounded their horns to warn workers on the line, the noise reverberated far and wide, even to our flat several hundred yards away from the nearest hole.

My sleepless nights were a legacy of decisions made by the Victorian designers of the Underground. So much of Londoners’ daily lives is affected by similar considerations. My daily journey to school, too, was heavily influenced by the way in which the Underground lines had been set out by the Victorian builders of the system. Virtually every day when my Circle line train pulled out of Kensington High Street towards South Kensington, two stops down the line, it would grind to a halt in the tunnel. Why? Because the District line trains from Earls Court would be cutting across our path on a level junction and we would have to wait. Such a junction on a crowded railway would never be built today – instead there would be a flyover or tunnel – but the Victorians were constrained by the fact that they had to build their railways in the cheapest possible manner in order to have any chance of recouping their money. That junction, which was then under the West London Air Terminal being built at the time and now a Sainsbury’s, remains one of the bottlenecks of the network today, still causing grief and hassle to thousands of people every day.

But, despite the daily delays endured while crammed into crowded carriages, like many children of my generation I fell in love with the Underground at an early age. It represented freedom and adventure, a seemingly limitless network of stations with wonderfully exotic names such as Cockfosters and Burnt Oak. There were no automatic gates in those days and for a couple of pence thrust hurriedly into the hands of the ticket collector together with a mumbled mention of the previous station, I had the freedom of the system for a day. There were even stations, like nearby Holland Park, where you could exit the system for free provided you were prepared to walk up the stairs rather than use the decrepit lifts. Trips to the end of the line were particularly exciting, passing places like Totteridge or Theydon Bois that still, in the 1960s, had the feel of a distant village rather than being so easily connected to what claimed to be at the time the world’s biggest metropolis. I never quite dared to venture out on the far reaches of the Metropolitan, which, I feared wrongly, had ticket collectors on the train since the distances were so great and the fares so high.

Returning to the site of my childhood adventures today, it is remarkable how little has changed on the older parts of the system since then, but a returning Victorian would be deeply disappointed at the lack of recognition of the fantastic achievement in creating this remarkable system. Indeed, most Londoners are oblivious to this history, taking the Underground for granted and, when complaining about its inadequacies, failing to recognize the reason for them.

Taking a trip along the oldest section of line, from Paddington to Farringdon, which opened in 1863 (see Chapter 2), it becomes clear why there is so little knowledge among today’s travellers. There is precious little to show that this section of line, now shared by the District, Metropolitan and Circle lines, has such a historic significance. The original stations, built in simple Italianate stone style, have all been replaced, and though some of their successors still have ‘Metropolitan Railway’ just below the roof, invisible to most passers-by, none show the original date when the system first opened.

At Paddington, I searched in vain for any recognition of the history in the tacky station entrance while the only clue inside was the fact that the platforms are in an airy space far more generously proportioned than their more recent equivalents. At Edgware Road, again much more spacious than normal stations, a large display is given over to the staff’s success in London Transport garden competitions, but, again, there is nothing about the fact that this is part of the route of the world’s first underground line.

Only at Baker Street has there been a real effort to honour the history and not just with Sherlock Holmes kitsch. There are plaques telling the story of the early days of the line and the station was refurbished in 1983 to create much of the original atmosphere, except, of course, the clean electric trains can never recreate the smoky fug of their steam forebears. Much of the original sandstone brickwork has been uncovered and freed of advertising, but the high alcoves were unfortunately covered with ghastly white tiles, out of keeping with the Victorian interior.

At Great Portland Street, originally Portland Road, the station is in an island of traffic and as I sipped a cup of tea in the small friendly café, again I searched in vain for any recognition of the history. The absence of any such signs is illustrative of the way that London and Londoners take the Underground for granted, paying so little homage to its historical significance. Indeed, some of the traces of history left on this original section of line are misleading. At Farringdon, the old name, unnoticed by the rush of commuters because it is high above the newspaper and flower sellers, is given as Farringdon & High Holborn, a rather inaccurate appellation – since High Holborn is nowhere near the station – that was only used between 1922 and 1936. Today, Farringdon is a busy through station for the Underground, and for Thameslink trains which run on two parallel lines that were, as we shall see in Chapter 3, built within five years of the opening of the Metropolitan to cope with the huge number of trains seeking to use this new underground railway. The station has recently been rebuilt and extended, too, in readiness for the Crossrail trains scheduled to arrive at the end of the decade. There is no trace of the fact that Farringdon was the original terminus where the banquet was held to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan in 1863.

London, in fact, pioneered two different types of underground railway, both of which were world firsts – those built using the ‘cut and cover’ method like the Metropolitan (now known prosaically as the sub-surface lines) and the deep tube lines drilled out of the London clay deep below the surface in order to avoid the clutter of drains, sewers and utilities which had already built up in Victorian times. There is even less recognition of this colossal achievement. The first of these deep lines (see Chapter 7), the City & South London, ran between a now defunct station, King William Street (near the present Monument), and Stockwell, and was completed in 1890, but there is little left at those stations today to indicate this was another brilliant first by the Underground’s pioneers.

Another reason for the lack of knowledge is that the London Underground has so often been ignored. It is amazing how little has been written about the effect of the Underground on London. There are countless tomes about its construction, a truly miraculous undertaking, largely, but not entirely, funded by private entrepreneurs. There has, too, been much on how the construction of the main line railways affected Britain by dramatically reducing the time taken to travel around the country. However, scant attention has been paid to the fundamental role played by the Underground in the life of Britain’s premier city.

Oddly, even many biographies of London pay little attention to the system hidden anything from thirty to 250 feet beneath its surface.1 Of course there are many books which concentrate on the engineering achievements of the railway and its haphazard construction. The spectacular feat of building a railway underneath a built-up area, a concept so brave and revolutionary that it took nearly forty years for any other country to imitate it, should not be underestimated. The people who devised and developed the concept were visionaries, ready to risk ridicule and bankruptcy to push forward their ideas. This book explains how they did it, but the achievements of the Underground go way beyond its mere construction. Its role in the development of London and its institutions is probably greater than that of any other invention apart, possibly, from the telephone. Without the Underground London would just not be, well, London. Oddly, that is recognized more often abroad where the famous roundel, the ‘logo’ of the system created long before that word was ever in common parlance, is the emblematic image of the English capital. Here, with our usual disdain for engineering and our inability to recognize our own achievements, we have tended to ignore the magnificent organism living permanently under our feet.

Most fundamentally, the Underground allows Londoners to traverse the city in a way which would be impossible by any form of surface transport. Yes, more people use buses every day – but many of those journeys are in the suburbs. In central London, the Underground is the way to get around town, as demonstrated by the fact that it is used both by besuited City gents and their cleaning ladies. There is something remarkably egalitarian about the Underground, and that was true right from the beginning when it attracted both the bowler hat and the cloth cap brigades; though, of course, there were separate classes for them until the advent of the deep tubes where such niceties were not possible.

But apart from uniting the capital in an unprecedented way and enabling journeys which had hitherto been impossible or incredibly lengthy, the creation of the Underground stimulated development of the city itself. This is most famously illustrated through the expression ‘Metroland’ (Chapter 12), the area of north-west London which was built and indeed marketed as a direct result of rapid access to the centre of London via the Metropolitan line. However, right from the start, those who conceived of a railway under London realized that it would create the opportunity to build new developments around stations. More than that, the poor would be able to afford decent housing thanks to the cheaper land available outside the centre of London. It did not quite work out like that, but then that is very much part of the Underground story, with plans and projects not always turning out as expected.

Probably the next greatest impact of the Underground on London is the design and architecture. The purity of the design is encapsulated most famously in Harry Beck’s map of the system, but also given expression in the architecture of numerous stations and the consistency of the use of the typeface, Johnston, devised specifically for the Underground. There is barely a streetscape in the centre of the city or in most high streets served by a station which is not made recognizably and demonstrably London by a design feature initiated by London Transport. That, of course, goes beyond the Underground, as it includes the humble bus stop with its characteristic roundel and the double-decked red buses. All this is deliberate and most of it can be attributed to the meticulous requirements of Frank Pick who, along with Lord Ashfield, did more than anyone to integrate London’s transport. It is no exaggeration to say that the pair created a brilliant system of transport management which, in the 1930s, became a world class model, envied and studied around the world (see Chapter 13).

Another breathtaking legacy of the Underground is the wealth of posters commissioned by London Transport which are of a remarkably high and, most important, consistent standard. They cover a breadth of subjects ranging from simple information on ticket offers or destinations to excursions or warnings of danger, and the designs manage to reflect their times, using contemporary styles which often, thanks to the excellence of their execution, still appear modern. Indeed, those who ran the Underground helped to design London.

Then, of course, there is the impact of the Underground system in wartime (see Chapter 14). Of course everyone thinks of the Second World War, but, as this book shows, the Underground was even used briefly for shelter in the First. Another little-told story is how in the 1950s London Transport changed the demography of the capital by recruiting directly in the Caribbean and Africa for cheap labour to run the Underground and the buses at a time of full employment among the British population (see Chapter 15). Taking this all together, it is no exaggeration to say that the Underground helped build the London we know today more than any other institution.

And now, London is getting an amazing new Subterranean Railway, the Elizabeth Line which, as recounted in Chapter 16, is far more than just another Tube line. Ironically, this will open in the aftermath of the biggest decline in passenger numbers ever seen on the Underground system as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The effect of this will last for years and will result in some change in working habits that may well mean that usage will not recover to the heights of 2019 for many years to come. Nevertheless, the Underground and the new line will still remain as fundamental parts of London’s infrastructure for the twenty-first century.

This book is an attempt to do justice to the achievement of the Underground pioneers not only for having produced a transport system which, for a time, was unparalleled anywhere in the world, but also for having helped create and transform the city. It tells both their story and that of the system they made, and shows that their achievements go far beyond the realm of transport.

Christian Wolmar, July 2004(Revised July 2020)

ONE

MIDWIFE TO THEUNDERGROUND

Underground railways were invented by a man born in the eighteenth century. Charles Pearson, who first set out the idea of running railways under cities, took his first breath in October 1793, at the height of the worst excesses of the French Revolution and more than two decades before Napoleon met his Waterloo.

As ever with history, there are various theories about who really was the first to conceive of an underground railway with the aim of alleviating the growing problems of congestion on London’s streets. But Pearson has by far the best claim. It was Pearson, the City of London solicitor, who first set out his notion in a pamphlet in 1845, suggesting a railway running down the Fleet valley to Farringdon that would be protected by a glass envelope making it ‘as lofty, light and dry… as the West End arcades’.1 The trains were to be drawn by atmospheric power so that smoke from steam engines would not cloud the glass. This, of course, was not the scheme that was eventually built, but Pearson’s concept was certainly the kernel of the idea that was to become the Metropolitan Railway two decades later along broadly the same route.

And it was Pearson who masterminded the financing of the Metropolitan which saved the scheme at the eleventh hour. Indeed, Pearson was a serial promoter of such undertakings, supporting several similar projects in the 1850s, and thanks to his perseverance eventually got his way. While the importance of Pearson’s role is open to debate, it is difficult to argue against the proposition that without him, London might not have pioneered a transport system that transformed urban living. One could go further. Without Pearson metro systems might never have been developed, because the advent of the motor car in the late nineteenth century, followed quickly by electric tramways and the motor bus, could have resulted in the bypassing of the underground railways as a solution to city traffic problems given the expense and disruption of their construction as happened in most cities in the US. Paris, after all, was not to get its first Métro line until 1900 and the New York system did not open until 1904. Both learned much from the mistakes and tribulations of London’s pioneers.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, London metamorphosed from a busy commercial centre into the world’s first megalopolis. It was not surprising, therefore, that it would be the first to have underground railways, but it is, perhaps, remarkable that it beat its French counterpart by thirty-seven years.2 Whereas previously London’s rural surroundings had never seemed very far away, now the sprawling slums were interspersed with elegant Georgian squares and swathes of little factories and warehouses which had sprung up in the capital as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. Greater London’s population in 1850 had grown to 2.5 million from just under 1 million in 1800. The Georgian enclaves which had sprouted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on fields, snapped up cheaply by eager speculative developers, had enabled the relatively well-off to enjoy a new type of suburban living, away from the throng of the city. These areas, such as Camberwell, Kennington, Islington and Mile End – all fashionable again now as they were built by what Simon Jenkins calls ‘men of taste and discrimination’3 to high standards – were within a mere hour’s walk of the City in those days before traffic lights, congestion and pedestrian barriers.

Picture, for a moment, the London when Pearson’s idea for underground railways first emerged. As one historian, Hugh Douglas, eloquently put it, ‘towards the middle of the [nineteenth] century, London was dying – slowly, painfully and with a great deal of protest. No physician had to be called in to diagnose the trouble; it was all too apparent to those who lived there, for, wherever they went, they encountered the great thrombosis of traffic which clogged the highways that were the veins and arteries carrying the city’s blood.’4 The cause of the clogging of the arteries was too much affluence and good living. London – indeed, the whole country – was prospering mightily. Britain was becoming the hub of an empire and her capital was emerging as the richest city in the world. With the huge increase in population, nearly a quarter of a million people were daily coming into the City to work.

The turmoil on the roads was, however, more like a Third World, than a Western, city today. There were wagons whose drivers walked beside the horses, blocking a large part of the roadway; and large advertising vans pulled by horses whose very purpose – to be seen by as many passers-by as possible – meant their progress was sloth-like. Costermongers with carts and animals being driven to market ensured that speeds in the central area rarely rose above walking pace. The bridges were particular bottlenecks and rain would add to the chaos by turning the roads into muddy quagmires.

More and more housing was needed as increasing numbers of jobs were created in the burgeoning factories and workshops, and, most important, in the offices of the City where the demand for clerks, before the days of typewriters, was almost unlimited. Demand for transport soared. No longer did people work within the district where they lived. The first commuters5 were hardy souls who had walked from areas of low rent to commercial districts, but as London spread, this was no longer possible. Successive new transport methods were introduced throughout the Victorian era in attempts to cope with the demand, starting in 1829 with the omnibus. George Shillibeer opened the first service using twenty-seater carriages from Paddington to the Bank of England, anticipating the same route that the first Underground railway would take thirty-four years later. Although Shillibeer’s pioneering status can be questioned, as his omnibus service was little more than a stagecoach which made a shorter journey with more stops, the introduction of his service was a momentous event in the history of London’s transport. However, it was not for the masses. The fare of one shilling to travel from Paddington to Bank was expensive and would have deterred all but the wealthiest of potential commuters – in contrast the workmen’s trains of the Metropolitan Railway would, three and a half decades later, offer a whole week’s travel for just one shilling.

Horses, which from 1870 also pulled trams along iron rails, remained the mainstay of much of the transport system until the turn of the century; oats and hay were as important a source of energy as coal. The rich had their own horses and carriages, a phenomenon which, rather like the growth of the private car a century later, was a major contributor to the congestion problem, but it was damned expensive as the horses required looking after, feeding and grooming. And what came out of the rear end of horses remained a major problem: ‘The best estimate is that by the 1830s, English towns had to cope with something like three million tons of droppings every year’6 and three times that by the end of the Victorian era. And, contrary to those nostalgic pictures of old crones rushing after carriages to pick up fresh manure, the stuff was virtually worthless, barely five shillings a ton to the farmer. Therefore it was dumped in vast dung heaps in the poorer areas of town, contributing greatly to the squalor, stench and unhealthiness of Victorian London.

With the arrival of the omnibus, London grew at an even greater rate. The censuses of 1841 and 1851 show that during this decade alone an extra 330,000 migrants had flooded into the capital, making up more than one sixth of the population. These incomers were partly attracted to London by the prospect of golden streets, but mostly they were fleeing from rural areas where the crisis in agriculture had reduced employment, or from Ireland where the appalling potato famines had led to emigration on an unprecedented scale. London’s rate of growth was to continue and the capital, boosted by the burgeoning wealth of the empire and, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, an economy that was almost continually expanding, became a vortex, sucking in an ever greater proportion of the nation’s population. It was the most exciting city in the world and everyone wanted or needed to live there. While it was inevitable that the transport system had to grow to accommodate this multitude it was no means certain that underground railways would become the chosen solution.

However, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, none of the alternative forms of transport were particularly enticing. Apart from walking and the new omnibuses, there were the hackney cabs, which were expensive, at eight pence per mile, and uncomfortable, and the drivers would often go by circuitous routes to boost their income. So as more and more omnibuses, carriages and hackney cabs piled onto London’s roads in the early decades of the 1800s, it is easy to see how the idea of digging big holes under the city to transport the masses gradually began to be put forward and grudgingly accepted. Nevertheless, it took a massive leap of imagination to adopt such a radical solution and it is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which the notion of building railways under cities was radical and far-sighted.

In the mid 1840s, when the concept of an underground railway was first being elaborated, the railway age was a mere fifteen years old. It helped, of course, that the railways were also a British invention. The first locomotive-hauled railway linking two major cities, the Liverpool & Manchester, had only begun operating in 1830. As freight was the initial raison d’être for the construction of railways, London came rather late to the new technology, several years after the industrial heartlands of the north of England, where the need to move coal and other primary material more quickly than by canal led to a rapid burgeoning of the railway system. The iron road was, however, still unproven and evolving.

When in 1837 the first major line out of London to the north was completed, with Euston as its terminus, the developers of the railway did not bother to build many stations on the southern sections of the line around the capital. Other lines were also completed without serving the capital’s hinterland. This was partly because the railways reached open countryside within a mile or two of what was then a compact city, but it also represented a failure of imagination by the railway companies. They saw their role as straddling the country and carrying people long distances, rather than linking the capital with outlying villages, and failed to recognize that such short journeys were a potentially lucrative market. So the Great Northern, for example, had just four stations in the eighteen miles between its grand terminus at King’s Cross and Hatfield – Hornsey, Southgate (now New Southgate), Barnet (now New Barnet) and Potters Bar. On the Euston line, the first stop was Harrow and on the Great Western it was initially West Drayton. Despite the railways’ dramatic effect on the country, as one historian puts it, ‘until the 1860s, and arguably until the end of the century, their least important impact was in providing transport within London itself’.7

With few trains, and omnibuses slow and expensive, walking continued to be the preferred method of travel for the majority of Londoners. And even when the first suburban London railway was built, the London & Greenwich, the developers, insufficiently confident about their own project, provided a walkway alongside, charging users a small toll. The London & Greenwich opened in 1836 and was a remarkable engineering achievement as, to save on land, it was built on 878 arches, which remains to this day the longest set in the country. The grandly named ‘pedestrian boulevard’ next to the line soon disappeared as more tracks were added to the railway, which became the main artery linking the centre of London with its southeastern suburbs.

As an urban railway for people making short journeys, the London & Greenwich was a precursor to the Underground. The experiment of running short-distance trains in an urban context proved successful despite doubts as to both the viability of the technology and the extent of the potential market. The line was soon carrying 1,500 people per day at fares of one shilling for ‘imperial carriages’ and half that for ‘open cars’ on trains that ran every quarter of an hour throughout the day. Initially the line struggled to make a profit, given the high cost of constructing all those arches, and it was not until a system of local railways centred around London Bridge emerged over the next couple of decades that shareholders began to get an adequate reward. By the middle of the 1840s, with other companies running tracks on the line, 5,500 people were being carried daily and holiday times proved highly lucrative as people used the line for day trips out of London. Had north London developed such an extensive system so early, today’s Underground map would look very different and much less dense. But it was no geographical accident. Property was cheaper in the southern suburbs, which meant that they grew more quickly, thus creating a larger potential market for local rail services. The terminus at London Bridge, too, was on land that was much less expensive than property on the City side of the Thames, where it would have been unthinkable to carve out huge swathes of the estates owned by powerful aristocrats antipathetic to the new iron roads. In South London the land was the property of the Church, and the bishops who managed it – mostly the dioceses of Winchester, Rochester, London and Canterbury – were relatively welcoming to rail schemes. The bishops had also allowed cheap houses to be built on their land whose occupants were too poor to resist demolition, unlike the more affluent landlords north of the river.

So a pattern familiar to today’s Londoners was set, providing the answer to that oft-asked question as to why only the northern half of the capital is well served by the underground network: more suburban lines were built on the surface in south London than in the north, obviating the need for underground railways. It was not until the invention at the end of the nineteenth century of tube railways, which ran deep into the London clay, that the underground system was to reach across the Thames. And even then, as we shall see, the geological conditions favoured underground railways north of the river.

The first railway through north London was something of an oddity, as it followed an orbital rather than a radial route. Originally intended primarily for goods, the North London Railway opened in 1850 between Fenchurch Street and Islington and was extended, in the following year, to Hampstead Road (Chalk Farm), via Bow, from where a spur went deep into London’s Docklands. Within a few months, 7,500 people were using the quarter-hourly service every day, even though the line pootled aimlessly around north and east London before diving into the City. By linking lots of other railways, it demonstrated the enormous latent demand for rail services which was to be the spur for the creation of the Underground.

Of course there were also other social forces which created the conditions that enabled Pearson’s concept to come to fruition. The phenomenon of travelling long distances to work, mostly on foot, had begun: as early as 1836, 175,000 people crossed London and Blackfriars bridges daily, most paying tolls. While there were also poor districts in growing industrial areas such as Spitalfields and Shoreditch in the East End, the slums of central London remained the worst in the capital until the second half of the century. Censuses reveal that a modestsized house in areas such as Seven Dials or the southern end of Baker Street might be crammed with thirty or forty people.

There was a growing clamour among the political classes to clear the slums and improve transport communications. The railways fulfilled, at least in part, both roles. Although railways would be banned by a Parliamentary commission from reaching the centre of London, they were driven through the poorest parts of the capital outside the central area with little regard for the local inhabitants, while the richer estate owners were able to ensure that their property was not breached. In the middle years of the century the development of the railways transformed London. As Simon Jenkins puts it,

the coming of the railways to London from the mid-1830s onwards dealt the metropolis a bigger, and certainly more lasting, blow than anything since the Great Fire. Like the Great Fire, the railways shattered both the living and working arrangements of hundreds of thousands of Londoners. Like the Fire, they ate up vast quantities of labour, material and capital, and destroyed acres of the metropolis in the process. Most important of all, like the Fire, they spun the population of London ever further from the core, speeding the decay of the central districts, yet at the same time enabling Londoners to enjoy higher standards of space and cleanliness in their housing than in any other city in the world.8

While this process was initiated by the suburban railways, of which the London & Greenwich was the pioneer, the Underground was to play a major part, with whole sections of London owing their existence to its arrival. Gradually the elements which made a London underground railway feasible were coming together. The relative popularity of the London & Greenwich showed that railways could successfully be used for short journeys and it stimulated a host of other such projects; employment was increasingly rapidly, creating, as we have seen, the notion of commuting; the continued growth of the City was leading to more and more congestion; and it was apparent that the horse was both an inefficient and an expensive source of power. Soaring land values and the vested interests of the major estate owners made surface developments in the centre of London prohibitively expensive and prompted a plethora of schemes for creating railways underneath and through London.

Pearson, therefore, was promoting an idea whose time had come. He was a visionary and an idealist, who recognized that the railways were the key to transforming the city and improving the lot of the masses. Pearson had two, somewhat conflicting, ideas: a huge central London station and an underground railway connecting the main line stations which were then emerging on the periphery of the capital. Pearson’s station would have been on the edge of the City, at Farringdon, and as well as serving the four corners of Britain, its aim – in line with his zeal for social reform – were to allow working people to live in decent conditions outside town. This would have been achieved by linking it with a new town at Hornsey or Tottenham where 10,000 cottages, each with its own garden, were to be built cheaply enough for artisans and clerks to rent. Train fares, too, would have been low enough to ensure that they could travel daily up to town for work. Pearson’s vision, therefore, was never simply about transport but had at its heart the aim of creating a better life for his fellow citizens.

Pearson had a long line of social campaigns behind him. He was born in the City, and came from comfortable middle-class stock – his father, Thomas, was an upholsterer and feather merchant – but throughout his career he took on radical causes. He became a solicitor in 1816 and was soon elected a councilman of the City of London, possibly helped by the fact that his wife Mary was the daughter of another member of the Corporation. He came to prominence by exposing the system of packing juries in trials for political offences, and his progressive views led him to take on an eclectic range of issues, from prison reform to the ban on Jews becoming brokers in the City and the removal from a monument of an inscription attributing the Great Fire to Catholics. Until his long campaign for the Underground, Pearson’s most celebrated battle on behalf of the common people had been when he tried to break the monopoly of the capital’s gas companies, each of which had carved itself out an area where it was the sole supplier. Pearson had wanted the mains and pipes to be owned by co-operatives of consumers, a remarkably far-sighted concept for the 1840s; but, after a pitched battle over the installation of a gas main between workmen employed by the Commercial Gas Company and a rival group enlisted by Pearson for the Commissioner of Sewers, he was forced to withdraw, leaving the monopoly unchallenged. It was as City Solicitor, a position he held from 1839 until his death in 1862, that he was able to smooth the way for the creation of the world’s first underground railway. Pearson had first set out the idea of ‘trains in drains’ when standing unsuccessfully in a by-election in Lambeth, but the idea survived his failure, although it was shelved while the excesses of the railway mania of the mid 1840s ran their course.

In many respects, poor Pearson can be seen as a serial but heroic British failure. He stood in several other by-elections for Parliament apart from Lambeth, always being roundly defeated, and many of his schemes and ideas never caught on, but his tenacity, perhaps prompted by these setbacks, brought the scheme for an underground railway to fruition.

Given this patchy record it is not surprising that Pearson’s contemporaries were sceptical about his early dreams of a rail line under the streets and that it took two decades for the railway to be built. Vague ideas for underground railways had been mooted as early as the 1830s, but, in truth, they were fanciful because the tunnelling technology was not really yet available. Of course, tunnels had been dug under hills and cuttings had been hewn through the countryside to create large embankments for railways, but these were in open country, not underneath the most expensive properties in Britain where the slightest subsidence would lead to exorbitant compensation claims. Victorian entrepreneurs were notably more prepared to take risks than today’s engineering companies, but not so gung-ho that they would consider such a foolhardy enterprise. Moreover, as we shall see, the method of powering the underground trains was to be a troublesome issue as electricity was the only effective means and the technology to harness it would not be available for another three decades.

Nor in these early days of the railway age were the political climate and administrative infrastructure conducive to building underground lines, which were fraught with risk while seeming to offer little potential for making money. The motivation of the railway developers was always dominated by the need to make a profit. There was little consideration of the public good in these schemes, even if they happened to be of great benefit to society. As one historian puts it, ‘the paramount consideration therefore in the minds of the projectors and managers of Britain’s nineteenth century railway system when making decisions was a simple one: what balance could be expected between the direct private costs and private benefits of the investment? . . . The Victorian railway entrepreneur was guided by experience and commonsense, raised to a very high order, not by systems analysis.’9 Considerations other than short-term profit occasionally came into play, such as building a line to stop a rival company establishing a route or to cream off business from an existing railway, but developers, unlike Pearson, were not inclined to consider the social benefits.

Inevitably, therefore, many railway companies got it wrong (although today’s major project developers are not much better at getting their sums right, despite the panoply of analytical tools at their disposal). After the early railways, which tended to be profitable, they built many which never made an adequate return for investors – but most of them, particularly in urban areas like London, were of great social benefit. To the entrepreneurs and their shareholders, this was no use as they had no mechanism of capturing and profiting from that benefit. So the railways were not popular, and were often portrayed in the press as rapacious and irresponsible monsters wrecking the bucolic bliss of the countryside and forcing themselves on the unwilling inhabitants of towns and cities. As one historian puts it, the railways were cast ‘in the role of a mindless juggernaut, grinding private rights into the ground in the blind quest for profit’.10 They had to be controlled, and in London, without a city-wide government, it was Parliament’s job to take a strategic view, despite the politicians’ laissez-faire instincts. From 1846 onwards, there was a series of inquiries, roughly one every decade, by Royal Commissions and select committees of Parliament into the various plans of the railway entrepreneurs. Their decisions largely shaped the rail map of the capital as it exists today and, indeed, the findings of the first one, the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini of 1846, led directly to the development of the Metropolitan line. The establishment was a response to the fact that at the height of the railway mania of the mid 1840s, no fewer than nineteen urban lines and termini were projected and it was clear that this potential wholesale demolition, and the chaotic traffic conditions it would engender, could not be countenanced, even by the Victorians obsessed with keeping government out of business.

The Commission took evidence from a diverse range of people and interests – valuers, parish bodies, the Corporation of London, even Her Majesty’s Woods and Forests, and, of course, railway developers with their retinue of traffic managers, solicitors, engineers and land agents. The key issue for the Commission was the location of the London stations. Should they be on the edge of the current conurbation or should the railways be allowed to make incursions right into the centre, creating a much more convenient service? The commissioners had to balance two conflicting needs: on the one hand, ‘if they allowed the wholesale invasion of central London presently intended, they would fill in an area already crowded beyond endurance’; on the other, if they left the termini too far out they would block up the thoroughfares with ‘leviathan waggons and vans sometimes creeping about the streets, having a few articles at the bottoms of the waggons [while] at other times with loads overhanging on each side the foot-pavement of the narrow streets and lanes through which they pass’.11

In the event, the commissioners found that the advantage of ‘bringing the railway stations further into the city appear to us exaggerated’.12 They were, of course, wrong: think how wonderful it would be to have a series of city centre railways, bringing people right into the heart of London without the need to transfer onto buses or the Underground. It was, though, an impossible dream. Even if the railway companies had been given permission to build deep into the City, the economics would have proved an insuperable barrier. The nearer the railways ventured into town, the more they had to pay for the land and the more likely they were to come up against the powerful interests of the great landowners of London. As John Moxon, chairman of the London & Croydon Railway, said: ‘Every railway we apprehend in its first mile costs more than in any other part of the line’.13 The early London termini were, therefore, crude sheds, one-storey brick houses containing little more than a ticket office. It was only when the railway companies wanted to demonstrate their power that they began building palaces like St Pancras and Euston, or elegant sheds like King’s Cross.

So the railway developers were defeated – the commissioners rejected seventeen of the nineteen proposed schemes before them, and gave only conditional assent to the other two, both extensions south of the river. Moreover, the Commission recommended a no-go area for the railways, extending from Park Lane in the west to Bishopsgate in the east and from the New Road (now Marylebone and Euston roads) in the north to the Borough in the south. The ban held, with the small exception of the incursion of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway over the Thames (see Chapter 3), until the building of Victoria station in 1858, and the line of terminals stretching today from Marylebone to King’s Cross shows how the Commission’s findings determined the future shape of railways in London.

The side effect of the Commission’s decision was to ensure that London would need an underground railway, because any link between the various stations could not possibly be built on the surface: even viaducts would have affected too much highly expensive land. The Commissioners had heard evidence from Pearson on his idea for an ‘Arcade Railway’, but the concept elicited little interest and no finance.

Although Pearson continued, in vain, to battle for his scheme for a central station long after the Commission had rejected the idea, he began to focus on his other project, an underground line joining the termini. For the next inquiry, in 1854–5, Pearson was better prepared and had dug up hard evidence for the need for his railway by taking the first ever traffic count of people coming into London. He had appointed traffic takers, checking anyone entering and leaving between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on all the principal roads to the City of London. The results revealed that omnibuses were the main method of coming into town with 44,000 passengers, on 3,700 vehicles. On the railways, 27,000 people came into Fenchurch Street and London Bridge combined, but barely any – a mere 4,200 – to the three stations to the west, King’s Cross, Euston and Paddington, a fact that did not seem to help his case for an underground railway. A further 26,000 people entered on private carriages or hackney cabs but all these numbers were dwarfed by the 200,000 who walked into the City. Pearson drew the rather obvious conclusion that

the overcrowding of the city is caused, first by the natural increase of the population and area of the surrounding district; secondly, by the influx of provincial passengers by the great railways North of London, and the obstruction experienced in the streets by omnibuses and cabs coming from their distant stations, to bring the provincial travellers to and from the heart of the city. I point next to the vast increase of what I may term the migratory population, the population of the city who now oscillate between the country and the city, who leave the City of London every afternoon and return to it every morning.14

The committee again threw out the vast majority of the railway schemes, but did recommend that there should be a railway connecting the various termini as well as the Post Office and the docks. In this it had clearly been strongly influenced by Pearson’s scheme for a railway from Farringdon to King’s Cross. It was, as one historian puts it, a seminal report: ‘The direct results of the select committee of 1854/5 have tended to be underestimated. The Metropolitan railway and the Thames embankment were both foreshadowed in the report and both were based upon recognition of the principle that railways in towns should make a contribution to public amenity and not merely intrude at will.’15 In other words the social benefit of railways had begun to be recognized, but nevertheless the committee argued that the underground railway should be developed by the private sector alone. However, as we shall see, it did eventually receive some support from the state.