Underground, Overground Read online

  UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND

  ALSO BY ANDREW MARTIN

  NOVELS

  Bilton

  The Bobby Dazzlers

  The Jim Stringer Series:

  The Necropolis Railway

  The Blackpool Highflyer

  The Lost Luggage Porter

  Murder at Deviation Junction

  Death on a Branch Line

  The Last Train to Scarborough

  The Somme Stations

  The Baghdad Railway Club (forthcoming)

  NON-FICTION

  Funny You Should Say That: Amusing Remarks from Cicero to The Simpsons (editor)

  How To Get Things Really Flat: A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and other Household Arts

  Ghoul Britannia: Notes From a Haunted Isle

  UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND

  A PASSENGER’S HISTORY OF THE TUBE

  ANDREW MARTIN

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London ECIR OJH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Andrew Martin, 2012

  ‘The Burial of the Dead’ taken from The Waste Land © Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

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  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

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

  ISBN 978 1 84668 477 7

  eISBN 978 1 84765 807 4

  The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

  A NOTE ON THE TITLE

  On London Underground, there are the cut-and-cover lines running just below the surface, and the Tubes properly so-called, which are on average about 40 feet down. But ‘Tube’ is now used as shorthand for the whole network, not least by London Underground itself, as in ‘Upgrading Your Tube’; and it is used to mean the whole network in the title of this book. It tends to be older Londoners who hold on to the distinction. A friend of mine was visiting his mother who lives about 500 yards from Parsons Green station on the District, which is a cut-and-cover line. At the end of the evening she said, ‘How are you getting back?’ He said, ‘Oh, on the Tube’, and she looked at him absolutely blankly. ‘What Tube?’ she said. ‘There is no Tube here.’ To her and to all other sticklers for the distinction I apologise, and I offer in mitigation the fact that my title does take note of the paradox that seems to embody the overall perversity of the Underground: 55 per cent of it is on the surface.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE: ‘Dad, I’m off to London’

  INTRODUCTION: Transport for London … and vice versa 1

  CHAPTER ONE: THE WORLD OF CHARLES PEARSON

  The gadfly

  Pearson’s London

  The New Road (and the new traffic)

  Pearson’s Plan A and Pearson’s Plan B

  Pearson meets the businessmen

  CHAPTER TWO: THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY

  The line is built – and opened

  What was it like?

  But could you breathe?

  A class-conscious railway

  CHAPTER THREE: THE METROPOLITAN AND ITS ASSOCIATES

  The Hammersmith & City and the ‘Extension Railway’

  The City widened

  Towards Leinster Gardens

  The Metropolitan District: the rather uninteresting railway

  How not to draw a perfect Circle

  Closing the Circle

  By the way: the Circle re-opened

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND THE EXPANSION OF THE DISTRICT – AND A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

  The expansion of the Metropolitan

  By the way: the fate of the grand vision

  The expansion of the District

  Hiatus

  CHAPTER FIVE: DEEPER

  Brunel’s tunnel

  By the way: the East London Line

  The Tower Subway

  The first Tube: the City & South London Railway

  CHAPTER SIX: THREE MORE TUBES

  The Drain (the Waterloo & City Railway)

  A red carpet (the Central London Railway)

  The Big Tube (the Great Northern & City Railway)

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ENTER YERKES

  Charles Tyson Yerkes: a good deal of a dreamer

  Traction current explained

  By the way: the Chelsea Monster

  Yerkes’s babies: the Bakerloo, the Piccadilly, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead

  By the way: the Aldwych shuttle

  CHAPTER EIGHT: EVERYWHERE IN TRAINS

  Enter Stanley and Pick

  Persuading people to make journeys it had not occurred to them to make: the Underground poster

  The end of walking (and the expansion of London)

  By the way: Metroland

  CHAPTER NINE: NORTHERN AND PICCADILLY

  Another monster: the Northern Line

  The Piccadilly Line (or the Pick-adilly Line)

  Holden

  CHAPTER TEN: 1933 AND ALL THAT

  The London Passenger Transport Board

  By the way: the Lost Property Office

  The map

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: NEW WORKS

  The New Works programme

  By the way: Epping–Ongar

  The red trains (the ’38s)

  By the way: passenger flow

  Exit Pick

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE WAR AND AFTER

  The war

  After

  The Victoria Line (or the railway in a bathroom)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MODERN TUBE (OR LIVINGSTONE’S WARS)

  Enter Livingstone

  The Jubilee Line

  Livingstone returns

  The Upgrade

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: LONDONERS AND THE TUBE

  Rites of passage: the notches on the Travelcard

  The morbid interest

  Proper fans

  CONCLUSION: MODERN WONDERS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PICTURE CREDITS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  ‘DAD, I’M OFF TO LONDON’

  I have always been keen on the London Underground, even though I was born in Yorkshire. I was like Richard Larch in A Man from the North (1898), by Arnold Bennett: ‘There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that pertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination.’

  My father worked on British Rail, and I had free first-class train travel on the national rail network in the form of a Privilege Pass. I also had free travel on the London Underground, which seemed almost indecent, given that my dad did not work for the Underground and that I came from 250 miles north of London. If at all bored in York, I’d say, ‘Dad, I’m off to London’, and I’d collect up my Priv Pass and a handful of the privilege Underground ticket
s that were usually lying about the house. (Whereas normal Underground tickets in the Seventies were made of green card, the privilege tickets were green and white card – special, you see.) ‘Well, don’t lose your Pass, or I’ll get sacked,’ my dad would say.

  London wore me out. But then I had a very exhausting method of traversing the city, which involved pinballing about from one public street map to another. In theory you could work out your route by pressing buttons that illuminated little light bulbs, but the ‘You Are Here’ part had always been carefully vandalised, and without that you might have been anywhere. So I’d take the Tube, because the Tube map I could understand. But precisely because it is schematic rather than geographically accurate, with the central area magnified for clarity – so that the distance between Archway and Highgate on the Northern Line, which is about a mile, is shown as being less than the distance between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square on the Piccadilly Line, which is about 800 feet – I would take journeys I didn’t need to take, for example from Piccadilly Circus to Leicester Square, which is the shortest trip possible on the Underground. ‘When in doubt take the Underground’, urged an early Underground poster showing a bewildered little bowler-hatted man with an illuminated ‘Underground’ sign behind him. That little man was me.

  The Underground was my ally in London. I was the son of a railwayman, and what was the Underground but an incredibly high concentration of railways? Also it offered a key to the city … so maybe I wouldn’t get off at Leicester Square. I might stay on all the way to Manor House, where I would step out and have a walk around, always keeping Manor House station in sight, just as Doctor Who keeps the Tardis in sprinting range when he lands on a new and possibly dangerous planet. I would travel to a place on the slightest of motivations, to find things out. Was there a Manor House at Manor House? (No, only a pub called The Manor House.) Was there a hill at Gants Hill? No; that would be almost as naive as expecting a hill at Dollis Hill. (There isn’t even an apostrophe at Gants Hill, a deficiency it shares with Parsons Green but not Earl’s Court. But by way of compensation, there is a beautiful Underground station.)

  In my boyhood, the system was not what it had been in the triumphalist inter-way heyday, and nor was it like the spruce, sparkling (if badly overcrowded), upgraded Underground of today. In the Seventies the system was run-down and demoralised. Road transport was the future; the Underground was being ‘managed for decline’, and the system was filthier even than the streets above. You were not to lean against the station walls, or that was your rally jacket ruined. In most of the stations about a quarter of the tiles would be broken. Sometimes the station name was meant to be spelled out by tiles, and Londoners’ toleration of the position at, say, Covent Garden – rendered for years as something like ‘COV—T G—DEN’ – implied an impressive broad-mindedness on their part.

  You could actually see the atmosphere in the stations: it was sooty, particulate. There is an Underground poster from the late Thirties by Austin Cooper that advertised something as unmysterious as ‘Cheap Return Tickets’ but did so with an abstract image: a lonely searchlight trying to penetrate a jaundiced miasma. That was the Underground of my boyhood: a marvel of engineering but also a dream space, in which people of all classes and races would float past you, with the strange buoyancy of a passing carriage. In the case of the people in your own carriage (or ‘car’, since the Underground is riddled with American railway terminology), you could look at them directly, or you could look at their reflections in the windows, and they would be sunk in their own dreams; all this under electric light, so that it always seemed – as it always still seems – to be evening on the Tube, which is my favourite time of day. The trains then still had smoking carriages, and I would sit in these because their passengers seemed the friendliest – and I would smoke in the smoking carriage, because it seemed the done thing.

  The trains also had guards: a Gothic-looking priesthood, with their ill-fitting black uniforms and black DMs. They carried covetable, riveted black leather holdalls that contained the big key that unlocked the control panel by which they opened and closed the doors, and billy-cans they used for making tea at ‘tea points’ (basically kettles secreted behind panels in the station walls). I liked the way they would close their own guard’s door after they’d pressed the button to close all the other doors, and they would then hang out of the carriage as it sped along to the tunnel headwall. They did this just for the hell of it, I thought. The guards were pale men, possibly as a result of spending too much time underground. Like most Londoners, they were slightly disreputable-looking, and intimidatingly self-contained. It was impossible, I reasoned, to be more of a Londoner than a Tube guard, since they actually operated the city. In the Seventies the guards did not command public address systems, but they would sometimes – when they could be bothered – bawl out their catchphrase ‘Mind The Doors’, and I couldn’t believe they weren’t doing it in a spirit of irony or, more likely, sarcasm. The idea that such a vast populace could be suborned by such a gnomic phrase … it didn’t make any sense, unless perhaps the passengers were in on the joke. (In the incredibly boring Underground horror film Death Line, from 1971, a dying cannibal who inhabits an abandoned tunnel somewhere near Russell Square station can speak no words of English except for a distorted version of ‘Mind The Doors’, which he has picked up, parrot fashion, from having heard it so many times.)

  If I found the Tube trains morbidly fascinating, I had a simpler enthusiasm for the escalators. Everyone likes going on escalators as far as I know. It feels like a free ride, and the longer they are, the better. The only escalator in York was at Marks & Spencer’s, and people would hesitate for ages before getting on, apparently waiting for the right stair to come rolling along, whereas Londoners would step on while reading a newspaper.

  My journeys were given a further spice by fear. A train travelling at a little over 20 miles an hour (the average speed of a Tube train in central London) with tunnel walls one foot away on either side feels much faster than one going at the same speed through fields. Surely the tiny clearance would eventually prove insufficient, and the train would scrape against the wall? Or the tunnel would collapse; or the train would run into another train coming the other way or, failing that, into the back of a slower one going the same way. In short, I considered the idea of trains in subterranean tunnels to be a very daring and audacious one. I was also disturbed by the noises of a Tube train, such as the roaring of the air-brake compressor, which sounds like a roar of defiance from the train. (The train will not go unless there is sufficient pressure to release the brakes, hence the noise.)

  I have now lived in London for twenty-five years, during the early part of which I commuted from outlying parts of the city to central newspaper offices, latterly the London Evening Standard. After I left the Standard, I began writing a column called ‘Tube Talk’ for the paper’s magazine, ES. This was in the second half of the Nineties, when the Underground was fitfully emerging from its post-war slump and becoming once more a fit subject for conversation. Every week I would receive a quantity of letters justifying the columnist’s epithet ‘a bulging postbag’ (about six). Cumulatively, I received hundreds of letters in which people got off their chest things that had been bothering them about the Tube for years. Didn’t anyone at London Underground know that the announcement, ‘This train terminates at Morden via Bank’ was ungrammatical, there being no place called ‘Morden via Bank’? Why couldn’t every third train in the rush hour contain no seats? Why wasn’t there a Tube station at Victoria Coach Station? A poet called Roger Tagholm wrote in to say he’d seen a man carrying a surfboard down the escalator at Tottenham Court Road. (‘Now that was weird.’) Tagholm himself had published a series of poetic parodies with Underground themes. One was called The Rubaiyat of Totteridge and Whetstone; his take on The Waste Land, which included the lines ‘On Moorgate Station/ I can connect/Nothing with nothing.’ An exasperated woman informed me that, for a year, there had been a s
ign at Kentish Town reading, ‘Warning, Keep Clear, Grille May Be Dirty’, and when I mentioned this in print, the staff at Kentish Town kindly sent me the sign, but whether they cleaned the grille I don’t know.

  INTRODUCTION

  TRANSPORT FOR LONDON … AND VICE VERSA

  In a novel by Dorothy Whipple called High Wages, which was published in 1930 but set in the Edwardian period, young Jane Carter arrives at Euston station from the fictional Lancastrian town of Tidsley. It is her first visit to London. She steps onto the Euston Road and takes in the scene. ‘Not beautiful certainly, but how exciting! What cars, what buses, what bicycles, what horses – and what was that running with a roar under a grating?’

  The roar under the grating was the Metropolitan Railway, currently trading – in somewhat reduced circumstances – as the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground. The stretch of the railway that ran under the Euston Road opened 150 years ago, in January 1863. It went from Paddington Bishop’s Road station, now called Paddington, to Farringdon Street station, now called Farringdon. It was the first urban underground railway in the world (there had been long underground stretches of main-line railways, also railways in mines), but the Metropolitan was very nearly the only outfit ever to use steam trains on a subterranean railway (it was also done in Glasgow), so its project was only half-modern, and the tunnels under the Euston Road were badly polluted until 1905, when the Met began to be electrified.

  By ‘grating’, Dorothy Whipple refers to the grilles along the middle of the road that were installed in 1871 and 1872 for ventilation, the Metropolitan having given up pretending it didn’t have an air quality problem. There were a dozen, each 28 feet long by 2 foot 6, and in London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986) Alan A. Jackson has this to say about them:

  The author’s father, who worked at the Railway Clearing House in Eversholt (then Seymour) Street, Euston, used to recall that these grilles afforded a lunchtime diversion for the younger clerks, whose custom was to keep them under close surveillance. The reason for this was that should any lady be unwise enough to stand over them whilst a train was passing below, the force of the blast would raise her skirts in a satisfyingly revealing fashion.