Underground, Overground Read online

  If you stand over those grates today and crouch down (risking the malevolent stares of passing cabbies), you will see a black baffle plate littered with cigarette ends. You will eventually hear a rising roar from below, and you’ll feel the warm updraft as the train runs beneath your feet. If you were also enveloped in steam, you’d also have the beginnings of a ghost story, but then London is full of black holes that take you back into the Underground past. Some of these are on the Underground, some are not. One is on the Overground: the railway called the London Overground, I mean. The under-river tunnel on that line between Wapping and Rotherhithe is pitch black when viewed from the trains that traverse it, but if it were to be illuminated, passengers would see that they were in what resembles the undercroft of a Gothic cathedral. That was the first of the deep-level Tubes … in a way, and it was once incorporated into a Tube line … of sorts.

  Or you could say the Tubes were more truly portended by what lies beneath a certain brick turret near the Tower of London that is ignored daily by thousands of visitors to the Tower. We will soon be lifting up that booth, so to speak, and looking into the momentous tunnel beneath. I take a perverse pleasure in seeing people streaming past it, or in watching City commuters ignoring the stone company crest of the City & South London Railway on the outside of Moorgate station. The simple motif on the crest says it all: trains in tunnels under a wavy river. Don’t the passing crowds know how important was the work of that railway? It built what became the Bank branch of the Northern Line, and I suppose that most Northern Line users do try to ignore the Tube, or they see it as incidental penance of their life in London, but if it weren’t for the Tube, they probably wouldn’t be in London. In fact, there wouldn’t be a London for them to be in – not one like the present city anyway.

  You might object to the moles under the lawn, but what if the moles actually planted the lawn in the first place? In the inter-war period, the Underground would reach out more dramatically, horrifically some would say – The Thing That Crawled Out of the Ground! – to make the vast commuter city of today. It did so partly to solve successive crises of unemployment and partly, and somewhat less nobly, to acquire more passengers. Since we, the passengers thus acquired, are stuck with the Tube, I say why not understand it? The Northern Line commuter who reads this book will learn why the Northern is not so much a line as a network (and a right dog’s dinner into the bargain); they will learn why it had the first suicide pits under its tracks (it’s because of the Depression rather than anything depress ing about the line); and they will find out about London Underground’s ultimate answer to those who complain persistently about the Northern. Turning to Central Line users, I say: Do you know about your glamorous line’s association with the West End shops? Do you know why so many of the station interiors are coloured white? Do you know about the personage known as Sonia that it foisted on London?

  The Central is my own favourite line. I lived on it for years, and appreciated its high train frequency in the rush hour. The other day I was at Marble Arch in the peak, and I saw a young boy rushing onto the platform in the company of a man who was probably his grandfather (well, I hope it was). As the train came in, the boy exclaimed delightedly, ‘Just in time!’ He probably didn’t know that another would be along in ninety seconds. It is amazing that trains should be manifested so frequently, like a conjurer pulling endless rabbits out of a hat – and this book will explain some of the technical and operational wonders of the system. For example, it features an account of Underground electricity written by somebody who can’t change a plug (me), for people who can’t change a plug.

  The London Underground is the oldest Metro in the world. It has 250 miles of track and 287 stations. At the time of writing, 1.1 billion passenger journeys are made on the Underground every year, the highest figure ever recorded, and more people use the Tube than the rest of the national rail network. You can push these superlatives of scale only so far. Shanghai has more track; the Paris Metro and the New York Subway have more stations. The Paris and Moscow metros are busier. But because the London Underground was never properly planned but just sort of sprawled, and because it was built over the course of 140 years, it is far more revealing of the history and character of the city it serves than any of the above systems. And at the risk of sounding like the compiler of a book of Underground curiosities (this book, I stress, is a full history, albeit one without footnotes and thickets of technical data), I might also mention that it is by far the weirdest of the world’s metros. Quite a lot of Londoners know about the dummy houses in Leinster Gardens, Bayswater, which were built to screen a cutting of the Metropolitan Line. But I believe I am the first person to write about what the people who live alongside those façades make of them – or indeed whether they have in fact noticed that they are not real houses.

  The Underground is also full of gaps, some of them literal. I refer to the notorious gaps between the trains and the platforms, and we will be meeting a man who can name them all. These gave rise to the ‘Mind The Gap’ announcements – which, incidentally, will bring us to another story set in Bayswater, this one involving Michael Winner, and a somewhat presumptuous voice-over man. But some of the gaps are more widely defined as mysterious lacunae, both big and small. When I lived out east on the Central Line, there was a Ladies but no Gents at Leytonstone station. At Roding Valley there was a sign saying ‘Waiting Room’ but no actual waiting room. Our Underground generally begs a lot of questions. Why is there no Tube at Crouch End, or in much of south London? Why is there a Mill Hill East but no Mill Hill West? Why are the Metropolitan Line tunnels between Baker Street and Finchley Road so much smaller than the other tunnels on that line? And why do the westbound Piccadilly and southbound Victoria Line platforms at Finsbury Park occupy spaces much bigger than the other platforms on those lines?

  With understanding may come appreciation. This book does not intend to make rail enthusiasts of its readers, although we will be meeting the modellers of the Underground, the people (all right then, the men) who voluntarily attend lectures on the subject or who try to visit every station within a twenty-four-hour period, following arcane rules that proscribe, for example, the use of Spacehoppers when transferring at street level between termini. We will be asking why the red trains of 1938 were so popular, and why so many men and women want to own bags made of a certain District Line seat moquette. But the wider point is that much of the Underground is beautiful, and I don’t just mean the countrified surface stations, many of which have valanced canopies, well-tended flower beds, un-vandalised benches and actual smiling staff – all the elements that draw amateur photographers to the branch line stations on the ‘big’ railways. The Underground somehow doesn’t count in the lexicon of railway romance. It seems that less is more: that it is better to have one or two trains a day than to have one every few minutes.

  But it is not hard to tune into the romance of the Underground. Look at the towering arcaded walls of the brick ravines through which the Metropolitan runs, with the backs of houses tottering above. The appeal of the cut-and-cover lines is in the sense of being backstage, or down in the basement, of operating covertly. The deep-level Tubes, too, have a glamour, or at least an anti-glamour. There are the constricted, cash-strapped halts of the Victoria Line, which are like so many bodged 1960s’ bathrooms; and there are the palatial stations of the Jubilee Line extension, which were built in direct reaction against those bathrooms. But the best Tube stations are those jewel-like ones in the middle of town, on the Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Northern Charing Cross branches, and we will be hearing about the young man called Leslie Green, who worked himself into an early grave in order to create a unique scheme of coloured tiles for the platforms of each – schemes that have been carefully restored in the least talked-about part of the current Tube Upgrade.

  And then there is Frank Pick, who, like many of the very best people, came from York, and spent most of his working life as an Underground executive trying to rationalise a city
that he had found confusing and overwhelming on boyhood visits from the north. He is the man behind the Underground roundel, the most brilliant and elemental logo since the Christian cross. When seen illuminated outside a Tube station located alongside one of the approach roads to London (for example, Hillingdon, when returning to the city from the west), it kindles in me a surge of uncomplicated affection for a city that usually arouses more mixed emotions. It was also on Frank Pick’s watch that the diagrammatic Underground map was introduced – that comfort blanket for Londoners, which reassures them that their city makes sense, even though in fact it doesn’t, precisely because of the expansion caused by the system that the map depicts.

  Frank Pick: one of the two most important men on the twentieth century Underground. He was a fastidious, sometimes cranky individual (the ink in that pen is green), but with a great sense of style. He used the Underground to rationalise a city he’d found confusing on boyhood visits from the north. But he also oversaw the expansion of the Underground, and in so doing, he admitted that he had made London more bewildering still.

  Frank Pick failed in his mission to rationalise London, as he admitted, and in having promoted the expansion of the Underground, which in turn caused the expansion of the city, he realised he had created a monster which he tried to contain by the imposition of the Green Belt. He goes down as a martyr to the Underground, one of a series of men (and one woman: Mrs Thatcher) whose plans for it did not quite work out as they had intended, and who came to see that it acts more like a wilful organism than a machine to be regulated. I am attached to this idea of the Underground martyrs. It suits my notion of the Tube as something essentially melancholic. The roundel is, to me, a setting rather than a rising sun, and if the carriages rattling through the dark tunnels are akin to any fairground ride, it is the ghost trains, their anxious occupants wondering what they’ve got themselves into and sitting braced against the shocks to come. (I venture to suggest, by the way, that this book features the only frightening Underground ghost story.)

  But if that sounds too negative, I ought to mention that you are about to read a book by a person who regards a Tube journey as an end in itself, someone who takes a Tube train for the same reason as other people go to the theatre: to look at people, to see a spectacle – the oppressive brick arch over Baker Street’s oldest platform, say, or the river when viewed from a District train blamelessly rocking its way towards salubrious Wimbledon on a summer’s afternoon. Or I’ll drift out east on the Central, hoping to experience the proprietorial feeling of being the very last person on the train as it lumbers into Epping; or I’ll deliberately take the last train to High Barnet, because I like seeing it ‘flagged away’ from each successive platform by a guard holding a torch that shines a green beam towards the driver. (Don’t blame me for the terminology by the way; I suppose a green flag was once used.) The last train provides a ribald cabaret every night of the week for the cost of a ticket – with a special, X-rated performance on Saturdays – and if I do go right to the very end of the line, I feel a sense of gratitude for the hard work of the driver, as he paternalistically walks along the carriages, and knocks on the windows to wake any sleeping drunks. But in my experience people normally do wake up in time for their stop. It’s programmed into them. They unconsciously know the sequence of lurches and jolts that bring them to their ‘home’ station. Many of the significant events in their lives – job interviews, first dates, last dates – will be framed by two Tube rides. The Underground trains course through their bloodstreams, so to speak, and I feel an atavistic connection with that last train; I experience a kind of pang as it is shunted into the depot to join its sleeping brethren. But it is now time to ride the very first train, and to meet the man who brought it about.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WORLD OF CHARLES PEARSON

  THE GADFLY

  The first stretch of the Metropolitan – Paddington to Farringdon (1863) – was the world’s first urban underground railway. It was built to make money, but had been originally conceived with a philanthropic motive, as a means of improving the lives of the London poor, by a man called Charles Pearson.

  Pearson (1793–1862) wasn’t an engineer or a town planner. He was a solicitor, and this seems to have annoyed the Railway Magazine, which, reflecting on Pearson in 1905, said, ‘At first blush, there does not seem to be much connection between railways and lawyers.’ Another perplexing thing about Pearson is that he was both politically radical and the Solicitor to the Corporation of London, the body that runs the City, which was no more known for progressive politics in Victorian times than it is today.

  He was the son of an upholsterer and feather merchant of St Clement’s Lane, London. The one photograph that survives of him shows a burly, harassed-looking figure sitting at an untidy desk. He was perpetually busy; it was hard to keep up with him. In an article called ‘The Solicitor and the Underground’ in the Law Society’s Gazette of 1953, a certain D. Heap suggested that Pearson ‘felt passionately about whatever cause was for the uppermost in his mind’, while the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him a ‘gadfly’.

  Pearson campaigned for the right of Jews to hold public office, and for the abolition of capital punishment. We can see the hand of Pearson on the north side of Christopher Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire of London in Monument Street in the City. The inscription written there had blamed the fire on ‘Popish frenzy’, which was not forensically accurate. The website of the Monument states that this slur was deleted in 1830; it is not stated that the deletion was the result of a campaign by Pearson.

  He got his job with the City Corporation in 1839, when his advocacy of an Underground railway to serve the City began properly. You might say that he brought about the Metropolitan in the same way that Winston Churchill was said by Clement Attlee to have won the Second World War: by ‘talking about it’. And if he hadn’t talked about it, and if he hadn’t brought it about, then London might never have had an Underground because, as Christian Wolmar writes in The Subterranean Railway, ‘the advent of the motor car in the late nineteenth century, followed quickly by electric railways 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.’

  PEARSON’S LONDON

  In the middle third of the nineteenth century, when Charles Pearson was campaigning for what would become the Metropolitan Railway, London was changing more than at any time before or since. A map of 1845 shows the city extending east not much beyond the City, to the south not much beyond Camberwell, with Clapham as a distinct village. It extended west not much beyond Kensington and Paddington, with Hammersmith as a distinct village, and to the north not much beyond the New Road – which ran from Paddington to a little way north of the City – with pretty Hackney as a separate village.

  A map of 1900, by contrast, shows a London more than twice the size of the 1845 city. All the places mentioned above as being separate villages had been comfortably absorbed. London in 1900 extended to Stratford and Woolwich in the east, to Sydenham and Streatham in the south. Associated with this expansion were three factors, all intermingled. First, growing prosperity: London was rising to its ascendancy as a capital of empire and greatest city in the world. Second, growing population: 1 million in 1800; 2.5 million in 1850; 6.5 million in 1900. The third factor was the coming of the railways.

  The first railway terminus in London was south of the river, at London Bridge, which was opened by the London & Greenwich Railway in 1836. The station was – and is – approached by viaduct, and the humble properties beneath were ‘cleared’. That is to say that the poor were evicted, and their homes demolished. ‘London Bridge station’ sounds like a pretty solid phenomenon, but it would be constantly knocked down and rebuilt, as other companies muscled in on what had been started by the London & Greenwich. During the 1840s, the South Eastern Railway would begin running
into London Bridge, as would the London & Croydon, and the London & Brighton (which would amalgamate in 1845 to become the London Brighton & South Coast Railway). Property was cheaper in south London than in north London, which harboured both the commercial centre of the capital – the City – and the mansions of the West End. It was cheaper to build both railways and suburbs to the south, and commuting – which Charles Pearson called ‘oscillating’ – began between the village of Greenwich and London Bridge. (The term ‘commuting’ is from America, and did not become established in Britain until the 1940s.)

  The Corporation of London did not like railways, and was against having them within the boundaries of the City. Railways were a threat to property. In 1836, when the London & Greenwich began operations, the Corporation was refusing permission for the Commercial Railway to build a terminus within the City, mainly on the grounds that it would only add to traffic congestion. But the Corporation then relented, and in 1840 the London & Blackwall Railway, as the Commercial had become, opened a line from the docks into Fenchurch Street station. This is not the present Fenchurch Street station, but it was on Fenchurch Street, which was – and is – within the City of London. So here was a station that had broken through. The line into Fenchurch Street grew in the 1850s, and in 1866 the London & Blackwall was absorbed into the Great Eastern railway, whose cheap train fares would be responsible for the bulging out of north-east London.

  In between the London & Greenwich and the London & Blackwall, two other railways, more typical of their time, arrived in London. The first was the London & Birmingham, which launched Euston station in July 1837. In 1838 it celebrated its arrival with a stone giant arch, which was demolished in 1962. The London & Birmingham did not, at this point, cater for commuters. It did not create an inner London passenger station north of its Euston terminus (the first stop after Euston was at Harrow); instead, it built a giant goods yard, its main interest being the carriage from south to north of freight and passengers – or rather, from north to south, because the L&B emanated from Birmingham, and the early railways generally uncoiled from the north, and were funded by northern industrial wealth.