Underground to Everywhere E-Book

Stephen Halliday

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 465

Beschreibung

London's Underground is one of the best-known and most distinctive aspects of the city. Since Victorian times, this remarkable feat of engineering has made an extraordinary contribution to the economy of the capital and played a vital role in the daily life of generations of Londoners. Stephen Halliday's informative, entertaining, wide-ranging history of the Underground celebrates the vision and determination of the Victorian Pioneers who conceived this revolutionary transport system. His book records the scandal, disappointments, and disasters that have punctuated the story and the careers of the gifted, dedicated, sometimes corrupt individuals that have shaped its history. It also gives a fascinating insight into the neglected, often unseen aspects of this subterranean system - the dense network of tunnels, shafts and chambers that have been created beneath the city streets.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword by Maxwell Hutchinson

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chronology

Introduction: Early Days and False Starts

1    Terminal Connections

2    Down the Tubes

3    The American Connection

4    The First Baron Ashfield: Underground to Anywhere

5    Metroland and its Family

6    Lorenzo the Magnificent: the Underground’s Artistic Heritage

7    The Underground at War: 1914–18; 1939–45

8    The Post-war Underground

Postscript

Notes

Appendix

Bibliography

Copyright

FOREWORD

by Maxwell Hutchinson

I first travelled on the London Underground in 1953. I was 5 years old. My parents brought me down from Grantham in Lincolnshire by the Flying Scotsman to wave at the queen the day after her coronation. It is a day that I will never forget.

I travelled on a main line steam train for the first time in my life, but that experience paled into insignificance compared with my childhood discovery of the London Underground. My father, who was an architect, had endeavoured to explain to a child precisely what the Underground was. Firstly, he explained, there were moving staircases called escalators. I failed utterly to understand what he was talking about despite the eloquence of his description. At the bottom of these strange staircases that went deep under the earth’s surface, there were trains travelling in tunnels – like the famous tunnels to the north and south of Grantham on the East Coast Main Line but (as I thought) hundreds of feet under the surface of London. To the young mind, the whole idea seemed utterly preposterous.

When we arrived at King’s Cross, already soiled and a little weary from a hundred miles in the inadequate post-war carriages of the Flying Scotsman, we were carried along by the crowd still buoyed up by their enthusiasm for the coronation of our new young queen.

Descending the steps into the Underground, the first thing that struck me was the smell. It is still one of the system’s mysterious trademarks that haunts me whenever I am away from London. There is nothing quite like the odour; it is unmistakable and lingers on the clothing with, for me, a mixture of abhorrence and affection. I am conscious that as a daily traveller on the Underground I must smell of the very place in what many consider to be an unpleasant way. On the other hand, I can wear this odour as a badge of honour. I don’t own a motor car; I don’t own a bicycle. For me, the Underground is my chauffeur-driven transport system. After the smell, I remember the intolerable crowds and the fact that everybody smoked. The escalator surpassed my wildest imaginings. It was with fear and trepidation that I stepped off the metal spikes at the top only to be transported down and down on a ride that was far better than anything I had experienced at a fairground. As for the trains themselves, frankly, I was terrified. The people, the dark, the snapping guillotine of the doors and the speed were like nothing I had ever experienced. Happily, that sense of wonderment, magic and respect has never vanished.

The London Underground system is one of the great wonders of the world. Londoners take it for granted. Infrequent British visitors boast of their command of the system and foreigners simply do not understand how it works. I have met many an American who has bought a ticket in Piccadilly Circus to travel to Leicester Square failing to understand their proximity and assuming, understandably, that the fact that both locations have stations means that they must be beyond walking distance.

At the beginning of the great endeavour beneath the streets of London, there was an ambition which seemed as impossible as supersonic flight, space travel, or the human genome project. Yes, it was proposed, trains could travel in tunnels to the very heart of the capital and carry willing commuters out to the sylvan glades of the suburbs. What heroism there was in the hearts and minds of the men who made this happen. When I explain to people at Baker Street or Great Portland Street that these stations were designed to accommodate steam trains, they cannot cope with the idea. Things are bad enough with electric power – how in the name of reason could trains have been pulled by steam? – but they were.

The economic, social and cultural history of the tube system seems to be cyclical. Success, failure, ambition, achievement, thrill, insolvency and personal ambition are woven into a 200-year history as rich and entertaining as any to be found.

Londoners never call it the Underground, quite simply, ‘The Tube’. This is a term of affection; an endearing way of describing a system which has, at various times, facilitated travel, encouraged enterprise and protected the population from the dangers of war. I would like to believe, but this may not be borne out by fact, that at least until the 1970s the London Underground was still considered by Londoners to be an efficient and beneficial contribution to their daily lives. It is sad indeed, at the beginning of the third millennium, that this awe-inspiring concoction of engineering achievements has become such a vile object of hatred. This reversal of public esteem has nothing whatsoever to do with the achievements, which are set out in this book. It is simply a product of neglect, under-investment and poor management.

In reading the gripping story so eloquently told in this book, I am struck by the role of certain individuals in the totality of the achievement. Will the American Bob Kiley, so ingeniously engaged by Mayor Ken Livingstone, match the achievements of his fellow American, Charles Tyson Yerkes? Will any of Leslie Green’s neglected red tile tube stations ever be restored to their former glory? Harry Beck’s map of the Underground is my favourite graphic device of the twentieth century. Frank Pick, in choosing Charles Holden as his principal architect, gave this country some of our most important icons of the modern movement. Nikolaus Pevsner told me that Arnos Grove station was as important as any of the buildings of the Bauhaus – I believed him, and when I saw it for myself, he was right (I actually prefer Southgate). Roland Paoletti’s role in engaging the country’s greatest architects to design the Jubilee Line stations continues this tradition of single-minded individuals who dedicated their time and energy to improving the transport conditions for Londoners.

It is sad that a younger generation of Londoners will not see the tube as I saw it for the first time. For them, it is unreliable, expensive, overcrowded, dirty and, with the rise in street crime, potentially dangerous. This book will, I am confident, re-kindle a sense of enthusiasm, respect and awe for the hidden glory of London Town.

Maxwell Hutchinson, July 2001

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing this book I have incurred many debts, not least among my family and colleagues, whose opinions on London’s underground railways have often been canvassed by me at inconvenient times. My wife Jane, a midwife, my daughter Faye, a nurse in a Liverpool casualty department, and my son Simon, a soldier keeping the peace in one of the world’s troublespots, all have more stressful jobs than I do, but they have listened patiently to accounts of the more colourful characters and events that surrounded the building of the London Underground. These events included suicide, bankruptcy and the creation of what one commentator has called ‘the largest art gallery in the world’. My colleagues, especially Jane Fletcher and Lucia Ingham, have helped me by doing parts of my job that I should have been doing myself. My employers, Buckinghamshire Business School, allowed me the time to do the research and the staff of the Guildhall Library, the Metropolitan Archives and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale demonstrated the tact, which is such a necessary quality of librarians, in helping me to find original materials when I didn’t always know what I was looking for. Simon Murphy of the picture library at the flourishing London’s Transport Museum in Covent Garden patiently found most of the pictures which the book contains. I was very fortunate in the latter stages of my research to make contact with Anthony Bull, whose clear and accurate memory of the Underground, supported by comprehensive diaries, stretches back to before the Second World War; David McKenna, who worked with Frank Pick before the war and Sir John Elliot in the difficult period of the 1950s; Paul Garbutt, who witnessed and described the dramas of the 1980s; and Richard Hope, editor of the Railway Gazette, whose personal involvement with some of the people and events of the last twenty years gave me insights that documents alone would not have provided. Ian Arthurton began his career with the Underground as an engineer, became chairman of the Railway Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and moved on to become the London Underground’s director of Passenger Services. Fortunately for me, he combines a keen interest in the early history of the London Underground with an ability to describe, clearly and succinctly, the mysteries of the Public Private Partnership that will play a crucial role in the future of the network.

As I began work on this book I learned of the sudden, untimely death of Roger Hoyle, whose friendship I enjoyed for almost forty years. Roger, an airline captain with British Airways, had a lifelong interest in railways and their history, which was eclipsed only by his devotion to his wife Jane and his three daughters, Susan, Sally and Anna. I regret that he will not be able to read this book, which I dedicate to his memory.

Stephen Halliday, May 2001

PROLOGUE

In the 1850s Victorian London was not a pleasant place, especially for the traveller. Gustave Doré has recorded the hideous congestion as pedestrians, horsemen and horse-drawn vehicles jostled for space in its overcrowded streets. The predominant smell was that of horse-droppings, thousands of tons of which awaited the arrival of flies to consume their daily feast. At the end of the nineteenth century the invention of the internal combustion engine was greeted as a solution to air pollution! In 1855 Sir Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace and hero of the Great Exhibition of 1851, told a Parliamentary Select Committee that: ‘It takes a longer time to go from the London & Brighton station at London Bridge to the Great Western station at Paddington than from London Bridge to Brighton.’

In 1815, in an attempt to improve the capital’s traffic, more use began to be made of the Thames. A steamboat service began between Greenwich and the City, with departures every fifteen minutes, and in the following twelve years four new toll-bridges across the river were built at Vauxhall, Waterloo, Southwark and Hammersmith, each charging a halfpenny or more to cross. However, by the 1850s river transport offered no relief since the Thames was the receptacle for London’s sewage, as well as a source of its drinking water. Pedestrians crossing its bridges during a hot summer did so at a steady jogging pace, handkerchiefs held to their noses. In July 1855 the great scientist Michael Faraday travelled by boat from London Bridge to Hungerford Bridge and recorded that ‘The whole of the river was an opaque, pale brown fluid … Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface. The smell was very bad.’ Three years later, in the hot summer of 1858, the stench was so appalling that Members of Parliament fled from the chamber, led by Benjamin Disraeli, who was heard complaining about ‘that Stygian Pool’ that the Thames had become. The Times called it ‘The Great Stink’.

The solution to London’s problems of congestion and filth required an unorthodox combination of heroic engineers, egotistical financiers and visionary managers. The engineers, working with new materials, new machinery and new techniques, built the world’s first underground railways and the first tunnel beneath a river. They were initially condemned by the press for their folly, then praised for their vision. Sir Edward Watkin, the egotistical chairman of the Metropolitan Line, the world’s first underground railway, attempted to make it part of a system running from Manchester to Paris via a Channel tunnel, which he actually started to build until Parliament (of which he was a Member) stopped him. Whitaker Wright raised the money to start to build the Bakerloo Line but went bankrupt, was jailed for seven years for fraud and committed suicide in the hallowed precincts of the new Law Courts in the Strand. His successor was Charles Tyson Yerkes, an American financier who had been jailed for fraud in Philadelphia and confronted by an angry mob brandishing nooses and firearms in Chicago. He finally fled to London from a disorderly private life in the USA. Having raised the money to build three tube lines by a series of stratagems, the legality of which was debatable, he died, leaving his organisation on the verge of bankruptcy. For most of its existence the network has struggled to gain the investment it needed.

In the twentieth century the London Underground served as a refuge from German bombs; as ‘the biggest art gallery in the world’; as a symbol of London itself, through its famous route-map; as a political football; and even as a means of transport. In the years between the two world wars, London’s underground railway was the envy of other nations, setting standards of comfort, reliability and design to which other systems aspired. In the post-war period it has struggled to cope with London’s ever-growing passenger traffic despite chronic under-investment, though its connection to Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport, has more than fulfilled Sir Edward Watkin’s dream of making it a link in an international transport system. A journey begun on the London Underground can literally lead to anywhere in the world: truly an Underground to Everywhere.

As the network enters the twenty-first century there are signs that the problems of investment are at least being confronted, although disagreements remain about how the money should be found. This is an account of the London Underground’s eventful and often florid history, written in the hope that it will once again become the urban transport system that others envy and seek to copy.

CHRONOLOGY

1829

George Shillibeer’s

Omnibus

enters service from Paddington to Bank

1836

London Bridge station opens, London’s first terminus

1843

Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel opens

1852

Charles Pearson proposes an Arcade Railway from King’s Cross to Farringdon

1855

Sir Joseph Paxton tells MPs that it takes longer to travel from London Bridge to Paddington than from London Bridge to Brighton

1863

9 January: Metropolitan Railway opens, Paddington to Farringdon; world’s first underground railway

1866

Metropolitan connection to Ludgate Hill permits trains to run south of the Thames

1868

24 December: Metropolitan District Railway opens, South Kensington to Westminster

1870

Tower Subway opens; James Staats Forbes becomes chairman of Metropolitan District Railway

1871

Metropolitan District Railway reaches Mansion House

1872

Sir Edward Watkin becomes chairman of Metropolitan; feud with District Railway begins

1876

East London Railway opens, using Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel

1881

Edward Watkin’s Submarine Continental Railway Co. starts digging Channel Tunnel

1884

17 September: Circle Line completed, run jointly by Metropolitan and District

1887

R.D. Blumenfeld predicts underground railways won’t last because of the choking atmosphere in the steaming, smoke-filled tunnels

1890

4 November: City and South London Railway opens, City to Stockwell; world’s first electric underground railway; first component of the Northern Line

1891

Metropolitan Railway reaches Quainton, near Aylesbury, as part of Watkin’s dream of a Manchester to Paris link

1896

Watkin Tower opens on the future site of Wembley stadium

1898

11 July: Waterloo and City Line opens; August: construction of the Bakerloo Line begins

1900

27 June: Central Line opens the ‘Twopenny Tube’; 28 December: Whitaker Wright, instigator of the Bakerloo Line, flees from his creditors

1901

Charles Tyson Yerkes buys shares in the District Railway; buys the planned Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (second component of the Northern Line); buys the Piccadilly Railway

1902

Yerkes buys the Bakerloo Railway; electrification of Inner Circle begins

1904

January: Whitaker Wright commits suicide in the Law Courts; 14 February: Great Northern and City Tube opens

1905

December: Yerkes dies, leaving a chaotic legacy of debt

1906

10 March: Bakerloo Line opens; 15 December: Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (Piccadilly Line) opens

1907

Albert Stanley becomes general manager of the Underground Group; Watkin Tower blown up by its disappointed owners; 22 June: Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opens, second component of the Northern Line

1908

30 June: Sir Edgar Speyer rescues Yerkes’ railways from bankruptcy at the eleventh hour; the name ‘The Underground’ is adopted by all the underground railways

1909

Frank Pick appointed traffic development officer for the Underground Group

1911

First escalator installed, at Earl’s Court

1913

The Underground Group, ‘The Combine’, owns all Underground railways except the Metropolitan and the Waterloo and City Line

1914

Edward McKnight Kauffer meets Frank Pick and starts to produce posters for the Underground Group

1915

The name Metro-land coined by the Metropolitan Railway; Frank Pick founder member of the Design and Industries Association; women enter Underground service as men join the military

1916

Albert Stanley enters Parliament and becomes president of the Board of Trade in Lloyd George’s wartime coalition

1917

Londoners seek shelter from Zeppelin raids in Underground stations

1920

Albert Stanley becomes Lord Ashfield and leaves government to head the Underground Group

1921

Trade Facilities Act; first case of government support for Underground railways

1924

Euston–Camden link creates the Northern Line

1926

Golders Green Gazette

describes Edgware as a beautiful garden suburb

1927

Post Office Railway opens, Paddington to Whitechapel

1929

Development (Loan Guarantees and Grants) Act; second case of government support for Underground railways; Chiltern Court opened; Piccadilly Circus station rebuilt beneath Eros, and later becomes a listed structure; 55 Broadway opens, with furore over Epstein sculptures

1930

Pick spends seventeen days visiting European countries seeking architectural models

1932

Piccadilly Line extended to Arnos Grove with some notable station architecture; Harry Beck’s schematic map of the Underground adopted; Beck paid 5 guineas

1933

London Passenger Transport Board established, with Ashfield chairman, Pick vice-chairman

1935

£40 million plan to extend Central, Bakerloo and Northern Lines; third case of government support for Underground railways

1938

Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act sets limits to Metroland

1939

Pick’s evacuation plan implemented; Pick enters government service; public forbidden to use Underground stations as shelters

1940

Pick rows with Winston Churchill at meeting of Political Warfare Executive; the Blitz; extensive use of Underground stations as air-raid shelters; Down Street, North End and Brompton Road stations used for government and military purposes; deep shelters constructed

1941

Death of Frank Pick; military production commences at Aldenham depot and in tunnels of uncompleted Central Line; 11 January: serious bomb damage as eleven stations struck by bombs; London Aircraft Production Group set up under LT management, making military equipment in London Underground depots and tunnels

1942

London Transport Spitfire enters RAF service

1943

March: 173 people killed as they try to enter Bethnal Green station during an air raid; worst such incident of the war

1947

Central Line to Leytonstone opened

1948

British Transport Commission established, with London Transport as a subordinate executive; SS

Empire Windrush

brings first wave of Commonwealth immigrants; accommodated in Clapham Common deep shelter

1952

Route C proposed, later to become the Victoria Line; a long wait begins for authority to make the required investment

1955

Chambers Committee praises London Transport management but can do nothing to help overcome problems of under-investment; growth of car and television ownership leads to decline in off-peak travel on the Underground

1956

London Transport begins to recruit staff in Barbados

1962

Victoria Line investment authorised by HM Treasury, ten years after line first proposed; London Transport Board established, reporting to Minister of Transport

1967

Barbara Castle and Desmond Plummer agree transfer of London Transport to the Greater London Council (GLC)

1969

March: Victoria Line officially opened; Automatic Train Operation

1971

Fleet Line (later renamed Jubilee Line) authorised

1975

Moorgate disaster

1977

December: Piccadilly Line extension to Heathrow opens; Horace Cutler leader of GLC

1979

Jubilee Line opens, Charing Cross to Baker Street, taking over Stanmore branch from Bakerloo Line

1981

Labour gains control of GLC; Ken Livingstone leader; Fares Fair policy begins and leads to litigation; zonal fares introduced; passenger numbers begin to increase

1983

Margaret Thatcher wins general election, promising to abolish GLC

1984

London Regional Transport takes over the Underground from GLC; long process begins of improving productivity; one-person-operation begins

1986

Poetry on the Underground launched

1987

July: Docklands Light Railway begins operation; November: King’s Cross fire, thirty-one deaths

1993

Private Finance Initiative enables capital assets to be financed by the private sector

2000

January: Maths on the Underground launched for World Mathematical Year; July: Transport for London, under the authority of the mayor, takes over responsibility for the Underground; October: Robert Kiley appointed as London’s Commissioner for Transport; Public Private Partnership bids in preparation for management of the Underground’s infrastructure

2001

Ken Livingstone threatens the government with court action over the future of the Underground

2003

Responsibility for the Underground handed to the Mayor of London

2009

Construction of Crossrail begins

INTRODUCTION:EARLY DAYS AND FALSE STARTS

A great trunk line capable of maintaining a frequent, rapid, punctual and cheap intercommunication between the City and the suburbs without courting dangerous collisions by commingling on the same lines, creeping goods wagons with flying expresses and mixing up erratic excursionists with the migratory population of the City.

(Charles Pearson, City solicitor, describing his proposal for an Arcade Railway beneath the Farringdon Road)

The forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil.

(Dr Cuming’s view of the likely effects of an underground railway)

TOO MANY PASSENGERS

In 1801, the year of the first census, the population of London was recorded as 959,000. By 1851 it had reached 2,362,000.1 To this unprecedented growth in population must be added the daily flow of commuter traffic brought by the new railways. London Bridge, the capital’s first terminus, opened in December 1836 and by 1854 that station alone was unloading 10,845,000 passengers each year on to the congested streets of the metropolis, while a further 16 million were entering through other railway termini.2 By 1860 the ring of main line stations that serves London today was almost complete. Beginning at the first, London Bridge, and moving clockwise, the circle was formed by:

London Bridge (opened 1836)

Waterloo (1848)

Victoria (1860)

Paddington (1838)

Euston (1837)

King’s Cross (1852)

Shoreditch (1840) (replaced by Liverpool Street, 1874)

Fenchurch Street (1841 – the only terminus then within the City itself)

Others were to follow shortly, including Charing Cross (1864), Cannon Street (1866), and St Pancras (1868), and by 1860 a clear pattern had been established: the main line railways were very good at bringing passengers to the fringes of the cities of London and Westminster where, in thinly populated districts like those around St Pancras, land could be bought cheaply for terminal stations. This left the passengers to find their ways to their final destinations via bridges, streets and alleys, which in some cases dated back to the Middle Ages. The resulting confusion is well captured in Gustave Doré’s engraving of traffic on Ludgate Hill in 1872, shown on p. xiii.

THEOMNIBUS COMES TO LONDON

Some commercial enterprises sprang up to meet the transport needs of London’s growing population. George Shillibeer (1797–1866), a London coachbuilder, visited Paris in 1828 and admired the Entreprise des Omnibus introduced to that city by Stanislas Baudry the same year. Shillibeer began a similar service from Paddington Green to the Bank of England on 4 July 1829. He offered the service along the ‘New Road’ built in 1756 between Paddington and the Angel (now Marylebone Road, Euston Road and Pentonville Road) because this fell just outside the area within which Hackney Coaches enjoyed a monopoly of wheeled public transport, competing only with sedan chairs.

Shillibeer offered five services daily in each direction at a fare of one shilling and sixpence for ‘inside passengers’; outside passengers paid one shilling. The novelty of such shared urban transport is reflected in his newspaper advertisements, which emphasised that ‘a person of great respectability attends his Vehicle as Conductor: and every possible attention will be paid to the accommodation of ladies and children’. Despite such reassurance the service was not a success either for George Shillibeer or for his Parisian mentor. Stanislas Baudry drowned himself in the Seine in 1830 while Shillibeer, less drastically, went bankrupt and fled to Boulogne in a vain attempt to escape his creditors. After a short spell in a debtors’ gaol, he achieved prosperity by patenting a new type of funeral carriage.

HACKNEY COACHES

In the reign of Charles I Captain Baily, a retired sailor who had served under Sir Walter Raleigh, hired out from the Maypole Inn in the Strand (now the site of St Mary-le-Strand) four coches hacquenees: French for a coach pulled by an ‘ambling horse’ (‘hack’), one of which the driver rode. Charles I attempted to suppress the coaches, which cluttered up London’s narrow streets, in favour of the sedan chair but they survived and in 1654 Cromwell authorised the ‘Fellowship of Master Hackney Coachmen’, licences being issued to regulate the numbers. By 1662, 300 such licences were being issued at £5 per annum, though a black market soon developed in which they were traded at higher prices. They enjoyed a monopoly of wheeled public transport within the area bounded by Southwark to the south and the ‘New Road’ (Marylebone Road–Euston Road–Pentonville Road) to the north. In 1694 the Hackney Coach Office was established, with five commissioners to issue licences and agree fares. In the same year, some masked ladies hired a Hackney Coach and took it to Hyde Park where they ‘behaved disgracefully and deliberately insulted some very distinguished people driving in their private coaches’, following which coaches (and hence taxis) for hire were banned from Hyde Park. The ban remained until 1924. In 1823 David Davies of Mount Street, Mayfair, introduced from France a new type of carriage: a one-horse two-seater cabriolet, quickly shortened to ‘cab’, painted yellow and black. In 1831 the limitation on the number of coaches was removed and stage coaches, from surrounding towns, were allowed to pick up within the area previously monopolised by the Hackneys, leading to disputes that foreshadowed the mini-cab wars of the 1960s. From 1850 control of the Hackneys passed to the Metropolitan Police who issued licences, laid down regulations on the construction of vehicles and, later, administered the dreaded ‘knowledge’ test. The first petrol-driven cab was licensed in 1903 and taximeters (a third French derivation, meaning ‘tariff meter’) were introduced in 1907. In the year 2000 there were about 16,000 licensed taxi cabs, technically known as Hackney Carriages, whose 20,000 drivers would probably be surprised to learn of their dependence upon French terms to describe their vehicles. In July 2000 Transport for London, under the authority of the mayor, took over responsibility for regulating taxis.

In 1831 the Hackney Coach monopoly was effectively abolished and from this time omnibus operators were allowed to ply their trade within the central area. George Shillibeer had argued for the abolition of the Hackney monopoly on behalf of ‘the middling class of tradespeople whose finances cannot admit of the accommodation of a hackney coach and therefore necessitated to lose that time in walking which might be beneficially devoted to business’. However, it may be doubted whether the congested streets of the central district would have enabled much time to be saved until the heroic street building programme of Sir Joseph Bazalgette began to take effect in the 1870s.

SIR JOSEPH BAZALGETTE, 1819–91

Between 1856 and 1888 Bazalgette, one of the greatest of Victorian engineers, built more of London than anyone else, before or since. He did this in his capacity as chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, London’s first metropolitan government. Bazalgette built the system of sewers and pumping stations which intercept London’s sewage and convey it to treatment works. Before his great works the sewage had flowed into the Thames and thence into the water supply, causing cholera epidemics which killed 40,000 Londoners. He built the Victoria Embankment between Westminster and Blackfriars bridges to house the largest of his sewers, to provide a route for the District and Circle Line and to provide a new road from Westminster to the City. He also built the Chelsea Embankment and the Albert Embankment on which St Thomas’s Hospital stands. The embankments reclaimed 52 acres of land from the Thames, speeding the river’s flow and helping to turn it into one of the cleanest metropolitan rivers in the world. He built three bridges across the Thames: Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea. He created many of London’s finest streets, including Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Queen Victoria Street and Northumberland Avenue, demolishing slum tenements and rehousing 40,000 people in the process. He also created some famous parks, including Battersea Park, Finsbury Park, Southwark Park and Victoria Park, Hackney. Virtually all of his works are still in daily use, unnoticed by most of those who depend on them to travel, relax or spend a penny. A full account of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s work is to be found in The Great Stink of London.

MORE RADICAL SOLUTIONS

In other quarters it was coming to be recognised that a solution more radical than the omnibus was needed to the problems of moving millions of people in London’s central area. In 1846 a body of commissioners was appointed to consider a number of railway projects which had been proposed to Parliament.3 They heard evidence from one of the most celebrated railway engineers, Robert Stephenson – co-inventor, with his father George, of the Rocket and engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway. Stephenson explained that he had, in 1836, prepared plans to extend the London and Birmingham Railway all the way to the Savoy Wharf on the Thames, the site of the present Savoy Hotel. This was to be achieved by running in a tunnel beneath Gower Street and Covent Garden. This early plan for a railway beneath the streets of London had been abandoned in favour of a terminus at Euston. The commissioners were impressed by the many protests about the disruption to property, traffic and life that would be caused if main line railways were allowed to penetrate further into the densely populated cities of London and Westminster. For these reasons they concluded that, ‘on the North of the Thames no Railway now before Parliament or projected be permitted to come within the limit described’ (south of the Marylebone Road–Euston Road–Pentonville Road line), thus excluding main line railways from the central area.4

CHARLES PEARSON’S ARCADE RAILWAY

However, during their deliberations the commissioners heard of another scheme with a similar vision of taking a railway into the heart of the City. This was the plan of Charles Pearson (1794–1862), solicitor to the City of London and MP for Lambeth from 1847 to 1850. A successful solicitor with a number of notable achievements already to his credit, Pearson had campaigned successfully against the practice of packing juries in political trials and secured the admission of Jews, previously barred, to the freedom of the City of London. He also persuaded the City authorities to remove from the inscription on the Monument the lines that attributed the Great Fire of 1666 to the machinations of Catholics. Pearson presented to the commissioners a blueprint for what was, eventually, to become part of London’s first underground railway.5 It was described as an ‘Arcade Railway’ which would run from Farringdon, in the City, north towards the projected Great Northern Railway terminus at King’s Cross. The railway would run just below street level in an arcade, following the line of the River Fleet along what is now Farringdon Road. In the years that followed, Pearson developed and promoted his plan with single-minded determination in a series of pamphlets and public meetings. In 1852 he published a pamphlet calling citizens to attend a meeting at the London Tavern, Bishopsgate, a popular meeting-place for such events. He proposed to explain his ‘City Central Terminus’ at Farringdon which would link the City:

by means of a great trunk line capable of maintaining a frequent, rapid, punctual and cheap intercommunication between the City and the suburbs without courting dangerous collisions by commingling on the same lines, creeping goods wagons with flying expresses and mixing up erratic excursionists with the migratory population of the City. Mr Pearson will explain and illustrate his project by models and maps of immense size.6

In his pamphlet Pearson argued, with remarkable foresight, that building more roads would simply generate more traffic and that sub-surface railway projects of the kind he was advocating were the only solution to London’s overcrowded alleys and congested streets. Much of the area through which the railway was projected to run had recently been cleared by the City Corporation. In 1830 Farringdon Street, from Ludgate Circus to the present site of Holborn Viaduct, had been built by demolishing some slum dwellings. The Bartholomew Fair at nearby Smithfield had degenerated to a state of ‘rowdiness and debauchery’ for which it was shortly to be permanently suppressed. In 1852 the Corporation had acquired 75 acres in Copenhagen Fields, just north of King’s Cross, to which it proposed to relocate the Smithfield cattle market; its continued presence in the City was alarming shopkeepers whose premises were regularly wrecked by livestock running wild, often with the encouragement of their drunken drovers.7 A Clerkenwell Improvement Commission, established in 1840, had set about extending Farringdon Street north of Holborn to create what is now Farringdon Road and, in the process, had demolished a lot of semi-derelict property but the area still accommodated some of London’s worst slum tenements and sweatshops.

PARLIAMENTARY TRAINS

To rid the City of these embarrassments, Pearson’s plan depended upon the use of ‘parliamentary trains’. These had been created by Gladstone’s Regulation of Railways Act of 1844, which required railway companies to provide a daily service of covered passenger carriages, travelling at an average speed of at least 12mph, and charging not more than one penny per mile. Pearson had calculated that 50,000 slum dwellers could be rehoused in 10,000 ‘artisan cottages’ 7 miles to the north of Farringdon, each with 400 square yards of garden, and that parliamentary trains would enable them to travel each day to their places of work in the City. The area thus freed of slums could then be redeveloped for commercial purposes, and this would more than compensate for the capital cost of the railway. Everyone would benefit. It was a visionary scheme that involved building six standard gauge and two broad gauge tracks (for Great Western trains) beneath a 100ft-wide road, which eventually became the site of the present Farringdon Road. The eight tracks ran to a 20-acre terminus station at Farringdon with facilities for passengers and freight, the latter to serve the projected new Smithfield meat market, which was eventually completed in 1868. Pearson’s bold plan required a substantial initial investment for a radical but untried idea.

Pearson’s scheme was not without its opponents. The fiery preacher Dr Cuming told an open air meeting at Smithfield that the forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil. Despite these apocalyptic prophecies Pearson’s proposal attracted much admiration though not a penny of the money he needed. Nor did he have much luck. The Great Northern Railway had taken powers to subscribe £170,000 to the ‘Arcade Railway’, which would enable it to run trains from King’s Cross to Farringdon. Unfortunately one of its officers, Leopold Redpath, had misappropriated the money and used it for ‘the furnishings of magnificent houses and the purchase of articles of vertu by one who was undergoing the penalties of the law for his conduct’. Redpath was sentenced to transportation for life but that didn’t help Pearson.8 In 1859, in what can only be described as an early use of direct mailing techniques, Pearson mailed to 15,000 citizens a Twenty Minutes Letter to the Citizens of London in Favour of the Metropolitan Railway and City Station.9 Each pamphlet, besides the customary arguments in favour of Pearson’s scheme, contained a share application form and a penny black postage stamp to encourage a prompt reply. There is no record of the response to this enterprising piece of company promotion, but neither this nor his ‘models and maps of immense size’ resulted in the project being started. Pearson’s scheme had been overtaken by the events described below.

CRYSTAL WAYS

In the meantime, Parliament had appointed a Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications which sat for three months in 1855 and considered a number of radical solutions.10 Several of them involved trains which were to be propelled by atmospheric pressure, an idea that briefly attracted the interest of many eminent railway engineers – to their cost. The idea had been patented in 1838 by two engineers called Samuel Clegg and Jacob Samuda, and required a cast-iron tube to be laid between the running rails. Within the tube was a piston which was attached to the underside of a passenger train. At the end of the line a stationary steam engine pumped out the air in front of the piston, the resulting vacuum causing the piston, with the train attached, to be drawn forward into the vacuum by the air pressure behind it. The system was very attractive for railways being built in enclosed spaces since no smoke or steam was generated by the train itself. However, the idea depended for its effectiveness upon the creation of an airtight seal around the piston and this proved to be its fatal weakness. The inventors of the system, Clegg and Samuda, built a 2-mile demonstration railway at Dun Laoghaire in Ireland, which worked intermittently and impressed several visitors, notably Isambard Kingdom Brunel who insisted to critics that ‘mere mechanical difficulties can be overcome’ and adopted the system for the South Devon Railway in the 1840s. Leather, beeswax and tallow were employed to create the critical airtight seal but the beeswax and tallow melted in hot weather and the leather became stiff and hard in cold or wet weather, so the system was reluctantly abandoned by Brunel. A similar fate befell the London–Croydon–Epsom Railway, where the ‘airtight’ pipe provided a comfortable home for rats.

SIR JOSEPH PAXTON, 1801–65

Son of a farmer and apprenticed to a gardener, Paxton so impressed the Duke of Devonshire with his enthusiasm and ingenuity that the duke appointed Paxton head gardener at Chatsworth and took him on a tour of Europe to gather ideas. Paxton created the famous Chatsworth fountain, 267ft high, and a 300ft glass conservatory which he based on the structure of a lily brought home from South America by a botanist. The success of the conservatory inspired him to design, on similar principles, the 23-acre Crystal Palace (the name sneeringly coined by Punch in a critical article) for the Great Exhibition of 1851, after 233 other designs had been rejected by the organising committee. He completed the design, based on pre-fabricated interchangeable panels, in nine days. It held 14,000 exhibits, was visited by 6 million visitors and generated enough profit to start building the South Kensington museums. The structure was dismantled and re-erected at Sydenham, South London, by navvies whose work so impressed the authorities that they used them as a model for the ‘Work Corps’ employed in the Crimean War. They later developed into the Pioneer Corps. The Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Sir Joseph Paxton whose ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard Under Glass’ impressed MPs but was ruinously expensive. (Illustrated London News)

Despite these setbacks the ‘atmospheric’ system of propulsion was proposed for two of the schemes that the Select Committee examined at length. On 10 May 1855 they examined a proposal from Mr William Moseley, an architect, called ‘The Crystal Way’. Moseley proposed to build a railway 12ft below street level between St Paul’s Cathedral and Oxford Circus, with a branch to Piccadilly Circus. It would be covered by a wrought-iron ‘superway’ across which pedestrians could pass for a toll of one penny, the trains being visible beneath them. The walkway itself would be enclosed within a glass arcade (hence the name ‘Crystal’), with arcades of shops, houses and the occasional hotel on either side. If it had been built it would have been a Victorian shopping mall with a railway beneath. While recognising the visionary character of Moseley’s scheme, costing an estimated £2 million, the committee members were more impressed by a similar scheme put forward by the ‘apostle of glass’ Sir Joseph Paxton MP.11 Four years earlier, Paxton had made spectacular use of glass in creating the pre-fabricated pavilion for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Although contemptuously dismissed by Punch at the time as the ‘Crystal Palace’, the pavilion had been a triumph so the committee paid careful attention to Paxton’s proposal for a ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, which he had patriotically named the ‘Great Victorian Way’. In his evidence to the committee Paxton claimed that it took longer to travel from London Bridge station to Paddington station than it did to travel from London Bridge to Brighton.

Paxton’s solution was a railway, almost 12 miles long, built above ground but within a glass arcade, with shops and houses on either side. The line would link all of London’s railway termini and would cross the Thames three times on enclosed bridges. As with Moseley’s system, the trains would be powered by atmospheric pressure and the committee was assured that the great railway engineer Robert Stephenson MP had stated that the atmospheric principle would work in this case.12 The railway would carry freight as well as passengers but the goods trains would only be allowed to run between nine in the evening and early the following morning: a suggestion that still appeals to many urban planners struggling with heavy goods vehicles in the twenty-first century. Paxton claimed further advantages for his system, insisting that, for those fortunate enough to occupy residences within his boulevard, it would ‘almost be equal to going to a foreign climate [and] would prevent many infirm persons being obliged to go into foreign countries in the winter’.13 The cost was enormous: £34 million. In comparison, Brunel’s Great Western Railway cost £6 million and Bazalgette’s main drainage just over £4 million. Paxton acknowledged that the cost was too great for any company to bear and suggested that it be underwritten by public funds: a most unattractive proposition for Victorian politicians who were wedded to laissez-faire economics and still cherished the hope of abolishing income tax.

UNDERGROUND RAILWAYS IN OTHER CITIES

When the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863, as described in Chapter One, it was the world’s first underground railway. In February 1886 the Liverpool to Birkenhead railway opened (though it could be argued that this was little more than a tunnel beneath the Mersey). In the following month, March 1886, Glasgow, the second city of the Empire, inaugurated the Glasgow City and District Underground Railway, followed by the Glasgow District Cable Subway in 1897. The first foreign city to build such a railway was Budapest, whose 2-mile line opened ten years later, in 1896. The Paris Metro, its construction prompted by the advent of the 1900 Paris Exhibition, opened on 19 July, just in time for that event. Work on the New York Subway began in the same year and Berlin’s followed in 1902. Madrid’s underground railway opened in 1919 and was a coveted prize during the Spanish Civil War. At one time in 1937, one end of the line was held by Franco’s forces and the other by the Republican government. Moscow’s system opened in the 1930s, much of it built by forced labour under the brutal direction of Nikita Khrushchev, whose reputation it thereby helped to make. In Italy, Mussolini prepared plans for Rome’s underground railway but these were put aside during the Second World War and the system finally opened in 1955. Besides building the world’s first underground railway, London also built the first deep-level tube, now part of the Northern Line, as described in Chapter Two.

Nevertheless, perhaps out of respect for the hero of the Great Exhibition, Paxton’s plan was one of nine selected by the committee for further consideration and it was particularly commended because it ‘possesses many features of remarkable novelty’. However, they were even more impressed by the evidence presented by the ever-persistent Charles Pearson, campaigning for his Farringdon terminus. In his evidence Pearson gave some hint of the commercial pressures supporting his plan when he claimed it was:

monstrous that commercial men should be tolerating a system where the poor are living upon ground which is worth £750 per acre per annum, when they might be transferred nightly in twenty minutes to land that is to be obtained for £200 an acre.14

In their conclusions, the committee recommended that ‘the different metropolitan Railway Termini should be connected by railway with each other, with the docks, the river and the Post Office, so as to take all through traffic off the streets’, adding that the work should be ‘carried out by private enterprise’. They particularly commended ‘Mr Charles Pearson’s plan for a railway from Farringdon Street, communicating with the Great Northern station [King’s Cross] and the Metropolitan Railway’.15

These few sentences formed the blueprint for London’s first underground railways, into which Pearson’s scheme would shortly be absorbed.

CHAPTER ONE

TERMINAL CONNECTIONS

Utopian and one which, even if it could be accomplished, would certainly never pay … The whole idea has been gradually associated with plans for flying machines, warfare by balloons, tunnels under the channel and other bold but hazardous propositions of the same kind … an insult to common sense.

(The Times, 1861, referring to the Metropolitan Railway)

The line may be regarded as the great engineering triumph of the day.

(The Times, 1863, referring to the Metropolitan Railway)

THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY

Plans for a sub-surface railway to provide a link between the City of London and main line stations to the north had been in existence for several years. The Great Western Railway was particularly concerned that Brunel’s terminus at Paddington, opened in 1838 on what was then the fringe of the built-up area, was too far from the City for its passengers’ convenience. In 1854 a bill was presented to Parliament, the cumbersome title of which reveals its purpose: ‘The Metropolitan Railway, Paddington and the Great Western Railway, the General Post Office, the London and North Western Railway and the Great Northern Railway.’ The plan, originally devised by a financier called William Malins, was to link Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross by a railway running beneath the Marylebone–Euston–Pentonville road, picking up passengers from each station. The inclusion of the General Post Office secured the support in Parliament of Rowland Hill MP, who in 1844 had invented the penny post. A former chairman of the Brighton Railway Company, Hill was an enthusiastic advocate of rail transport and was concerned about the delays to the post caused by London’s chronic traffic.

In 1854 a parliamentary committee considered the plan and, in particular, looked at the problems posed by steam engines in long underground tunnels. John Fowler, engineer to the projected line, had asked Robert Stephenson to design a locomotive that could run the length of the proposed railway on heat and steam built up in the open air before entering the tunnel. To reassure the committee Fowler produced as a witness Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself, who insouciantly declared, ‘I thought the impression had been exploded long since that railway tunnels require much ventilation’, adding, enigmatically, ‘If you are going a very short journey you need not take your dinner with you, or your corn for your horse’.1

Over the next four years the project underwent several changes of name, directors and route, the one constant factor being John Fowler, who remained the very well-paid consultant engineer to the company. By 1858 the Fowler Railway Project, its title mercifully shortened to the ‘Metropolitan Railway’, had in effect absorbed the plans for Pearson’s ‘Arcade Railway’ referred to in the introduction. It combined the two schemes into a single line beginning at Bishop’s Road, near Paddington, which would pick up passengers from stations at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Great Portland Street, Euston Square and King’s Cross before turning south along Pearson’s proposed route to Farringdon.2 There would be connections to the Great Western tracks at Paddington and the Great Northern tracks at King’s Cross, so that the underground line could accommodate trains from these railways as well as offering its own shuttle service. The presence of Great Western trains meant that the tracks had to be laid to accommodate the company’s broad gauge (7ft) rolling stock as well as the standard gauge (4ft 8½in) stock of the other services. There would also be a connection with the new Smithfield meat market for goods trains.

In 1858 The Times reported another meeting at the London Tavern, chaired by the Lord Mayor and addressed by Pearson and by Lord John Russell, MP for the City of London.3 Their speeches prompted much cheering and some bold resolutions, but this time they also produced some money. Earlier in the year, William Malins had been replaced as chairman of the Metropolitan Railway by the stockbroker William Wilkinson, who enjoyed good City connections. The time was right. Much of the land through which the projected line would run was derelict and could be acquired at a reasonable price. In a few years’ time it would be built upon and prohibitively expensive. Baron Lionel Rothschild reminded the meeting that land was changing hands in the City for as much as £1 million an acre. Pearson had earlier urged the Metropolitan Railway directors to ‘Tell the Corporation that if they do not come forward to help you, you will wind up the affair and that will be the end of it’.4 Following the meeting the deal was done.5 The Metropolitan Railway purchased the Fleet Valley land from the City for £179,157; in return the City Corporation subscribed £200,000 to the company’s capital. The Great Western subscribed £175,000. The remainder of the capital, some £475,000, was raised from civil engineers like Morton Peto and Thomas Brassey,6 who hoped to gain contracts, as well as from the Great Northern and Metropolitan Railway shareholders.

THE METROPOLITAN LINE

The Metropolitan Railway was the world’s first underground railway, though it firmly believed that it was really a main line railway, part of which, by painful necessity, happened to be built just below street level. Its steam service opened on 9 January 1863 running from Bishop’s Road station, near Paddington, to Farringdon Street in the City of London. Its tracks were dual gauge, accommodating both the standard gauge trains of the Metropolitan Railway itself and the broad gauge rolling stock of the Great Western running through from the main line at Paddington. In 1865 the line was extended to Moorgate Street and in 1868 further extensions were made, north to Swiss Cottage and south to Gloucester Road and South Kensington. From 1864 it also operated services via Westbourne Park and Shepherds Bush to Hammersmith, on what became the Hammersmith & City Line. After 1872 its new chairman, Sir Edward Watkin (see panel on p. 38), also chairman of the South Eastern Railway, embarked upon an ambitious programme of expansion and acquisition. In 1875 he extended the Metropolitan from Moorgate to Liverpool Street and in 1882 to Tower Hill. In 1878 he became chairman of the East London Railway (see panel on p. 36), from New Cross to Whitechapel, with an onward connection to Liverpool Street, to provide a link beneath the Thames to the South Eastern Railway. In the 1880s he extended the Metropolitan in a north-westerly direction to Harrow (1880), Pinner (1885) and Chesham (1889). Amersham and Aylesbury were reached in 1892, while in 1891 he had purchased the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway, thus taking the ‘Metropolitan’ to the rural fastness of the Vale of Aylesbury. The original link to Paddington had become part of the Circle Line. Watkin’s plan, a century before its time, was to connect with main line railways to the north and take passengers from Manchester, via London, Dover and a Channel tunnel, to Paris. In 1899, after Watkin’s retirement, a further acquisition took the Metropolitan’s services to the village of Brill, 7 miles east of Aylesbury. Further extensions were built to Uxbridge (1904), Watford (1926) and Stanmore (1932), the last of these passing to the Bakerloo and then the Jubilee Line when it opened in 1979. In 1913 the Metropolitan had acquired the unloved Great Northern and City Tube (see p. 59) from Finsbury Park to Moorgate, which remained, however, unconnected to the rest of the company’s network. The Metropolitan electrified its services from 1905, though the section beyond Amersham remained steam-operated until it was transferred to British Rail in September 1961 following electrification of the stretch from Rickmansworth to Amersham and Chesham. The Metropolitan maintained its independence of the rest of the network until it was finally absorbed, protesting, by the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933.

The River Fleet bursts in on the Metropolitan Railway construction works, a scene ‘well worthy of a visit’ according to the Illustrated London News.

The new company moved into offices at 17 Duke Street, Westminster, the former home of I.K. Brunel. In February 1860 work at last began on the railway, watched with a mixture of curiosity and disdain by the press and the public. One observer recorded: ‘A few wooden houses on wheels first made their appearance; then came some wagons loaded with timber and accompanied by sundry gravel-coloured men with picks and shovels.’7

The Times was more astringent, describing the scheme as ‘Utopian and one which, even if it could be accomplished, would certainly never pay’.8 The writer added, with unconscious foresight, that ‘the whole idea has been gradually associated with the plans for flying machines, warfare by balloons, tunnels under the Channel and other bold but hazardous propositions of the same kind’. The newspaper thought it ‘an insult to common sense to suppose that people would ever prefer to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London’.

Stations on the New Metropolitan Railway as shown in the Illustrated London News on the opening of the line.