The Subterranean Railway
Read The Subterranean Railway Online
Authors: Christian Wolmar
THE SUBTERRANEAN RAILWAY
Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster. His previous books include
Broken Rails: How Privatisation Wrecked Britain’s Railways
and
Down the Tube: The Battle For London’s Underground
. He writes regularly for the
Independent
and the
Evening Standard
, and frequently appears on TV and radio on current affairs and news programmes. He is currently working on a new history of the railways in Britain.
‘An absorbing history of the Tube... Christian Wolmar is best known as an indefatigable journalist’
Michael Leapman,
Independent
‘Moaning about the Tube has been one of Londoners’ favourite pastimes for more than 100 years. Few acknowledge the fantastic achievements of the pioneers who created the subterranean network, or think about the many ways in which it has transformed London... Wolmar’s book demonstrates that the Underground is cause for celebration, not complaint’
Nick Rennison,
Sunday Times
‘We mostly view the engineering miracle beneath our city streets with indifference or irritation. All we want to know is: does it work well or not? Christian Wolmar would like us to learn to love it. He is an unashamed Underground buff... Now he shares his fascination, in an entertaining and informative history’
Paul Barker,
Evening Standard
‘Next time you find yourself on a crowded tube platform, cursing the Northern Line for its dirtiness and unreliability, remember this: you’re making Christian Wolmar very angry...
The Subterranean Railway
is both a history and a defence of the tube, impelled by frustration with how little respect Londoners accord one of the world’s greatest engineering feats...
The Subterranean Railway
captures the enthusiasm and excitement of the early years... using a deft selection of facts and anecdotes’
John O’Connell,
Time Out
‘An epic tale featuring business rivalries, technical troubles, audacious gambles, rows, risks, and triumphs.
The Subterranean Railway
... is a timely reminder of how important it is that such an achievement is not left to suffer a legacy of sad decline’
Editor’s Choice,
The Good Book Guide
‘A book full of astute judgements, which deserves, and will repay, public attention’
Colin Ward,
The Architects’ Journal
‘Entertaining and accessible... Highly recommended’
Oliver Green,
The Victorian
‘An excellent overview of what is an extraordinary feat of engineering’
Christopher Sell,
The Engineer
First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2004 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
This revised and updated paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2005.
Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2004
The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
9 8 7
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 4354 023 6
ePub ISBN 978 1 8488 7253 0
Mobi ISBN 978 1 8488 7253 0
Designed by
www.carrstudio.co.uk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent
Atlantic Books
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
In memory of Eric Mattocks,
squatter extraordinaire and rail enthusiast,
whose library I have gratefully inherited.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The staff of the London Transport Museum and, in particular, the library have been extremely helpful in meeting my requests for information and allowing me to visit the Acton Depot several times. Thanks also to the staff of the British Library, a wonderful but greatly undervalued resource.
Thanks are also due to: my agent, Andrew Lownie; my researcher, Gully Cragg, who found many of the gems; John Fowler and Mike Horne for reading the text and picking up errors; and Scarlett MccGwire who not only read the text but also made many helpful suggestions.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In this book, I have used ‘tube’ normally to refer to the deep-level lines and ‘Underground’ for the whole system even before the name was in current use; the Metropolitan District is referred to as the District to avoid confusion; and, to make the book more easily readable, I have avoided acronyms as much as possible.
P
REFACE TO THE
2012 EDITION
This is a particularly opportune time to revise this history of the Tube. Not only is January 2013 the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway, but much has happened in the seven years since the paperback edition was published.
That edition went to press with very little space to devote to the awful events of 7 July 2005 when bombs were placed on three Tube trains and a London bus killing fifty-two people, as well as the four bombers. Moreover, the deeply flawed and very expensive Public Private Partnership, originally billed as a thirty-year £30bn refurbishment programme financed by the private sector for the Tube, has effectively come and gone in the intervening period. Therefore as well as incorporating various corrections uncovered by readers and revisions which I have made, including dealing with several omissions such as the little-known nineteenth century attacks on the system by Irish terrorists, there is an entirely new chapter which covers both the events of 7/7 and the aftermath, as well as the running and eventual collapse of the PPP. Incidentally, an earlier book of mine on the PPP,
Down the Tube
, which has long been out of print, is now available on Kindle through Amazon, and details its development and introduction, in the face of advice from virtually every expert in the field.
Despite the various upheavals of the past few years, it is, though, not all doom and gloom. Quite the opposite. Thanks to the PPP, there has been an unprecedented level of investment in the system. While
it might have come at a high price to the taxpayer – the money has not always been spent on the parts of the system that need it most – and has resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds being squandered unnecessarily on consultants, lawyers and contractors, there have been significant improvements to the system.
Much else in the London transport scene has changed in the intervening years. The development and spread of the Oyster card has seen the most radical change in ticketing since the creation of the system. Numbers of travellers, too, have boomed, with records broken every year, exceeding 1.1bn for the first time in 2011. On busy days, especially in the run up to Christmas, there have been more than 4m passengers.
Since the publication of the book, a whole new rail system controlled by Transport for London, the London Overground, complete with roundel, has been developed out of part of the Tube’s long neglected East London Line and various other parts of the London rail network including the North London Line and the West London Line. With new trains, refurbished staffed stations and a frequent service, this has been a much welcome addition to the network, and even if officially it is not part of the Underground system, it uses Marc Brunel’s original tunnel under the Thames, once slated for abandonment.
There is lots more to celebrate, too. Construction of the long-delayed Crossrail scheme which is part underground, part conventional railway is underway as I write, and Thameslink, which uses the tracks on the Underground’s second oldest section – the extended lines between King’s Cross and Blackfriars – is also undergoing major refurbishment and improvement. While neither are officially part of the Underground, they are very much integrated into the system. And the Docklands Light Railway, which was rather neglected in the original book, but which is covered in the new chapter, continues to grow. While most of this is not subterranean, nor is, in fact, the Underground, all this investment represents a recognition of the importance of the railways in the urban context. The new chapter, therefore, tries to bring
together these recent developments to show how the system is gradually being transformed in the twenty-first century into the type of integrated rail network that, under the management of Transport for London, has been every public transport user’s dream. On the 150th anniversary of the Tube, the man behind its creation, Charles Pearson, can be justly celebrated.
Christian Wolmar, April 2012
INTRODUCTION
THE
PHANTOM RAILWAY
When I was a child, I used to be haunted by the sound of ghostly horns echoing through the night near Campden Hill where I lived. I wouldn’t learn the source of this ghoulish noise until much later, but it was the Underground which used to keep me awake. On a hot night when the windows were open, the sound felt so close and threatening that, for a while, I demanded that my poor mother sat on a chair outside my room in our little flat while I fell asleep. It was not until I started researching this book that I made the connection between my troubled nights and the railway which I used to take to school every day.
It seemed inconceivable that the source of my childhood terror should be the Underground which, surely, as its name suggests, was safely buried under the ground. But the Victorians who built it were always trying to cut corners, not least because they were beholden to shareholders who wanted to see a profit out of their enterprise. The Circle Line passes under Campden Hill between Kensington and Notting Hill Gate but the builders left the ground open above the line wherever they could in order to save the cost of covering all their excavation. Moreover, this is an early section of the Underground, built by the Metropolitan Railway in 1868 when the line was operated by steam engines and therefore these open sections provided much-needed
ventilation. Because these gaps were surrounded with walls for obvious safety reasons, they act as echo chambers and when the trains passing late at night sounded their horns to warn workers on the line, the noise reverberated far and wide, even to our flat several hundred yards away from the nearest hole.
My sleepless nights were a legacy of decisions made by the Victorian designers of the Underground. So much of Londoners’ daily lives is affected by similar considerations. My daily journey to school, too, was heavily influenced by the way in which the Underground lines had been set out by the Victorian builders of the system. Virtually every day when my Circle line train pulled out of Kensington High Street towards South Kensington, two stops down the line, it would grind to a halt in the tunnel. Why? Because the District line trains from Earls Court would be cutting across our path on a level junction and we would have to wait. Such a junction on a crowded railway would never be built today – instead there would be a flyover or tunnel – but the Victorians were constrained by the fact that they had to build their railways in the cheapest possible manner in order to have any chance of recouping their money. That junction, which was then under the West London Air Terminal being built at the time and now a Sainsbury’s, remains one of the bottlenecks of the network today, still causing grief and hassle to thousands of people every day.
But, despite the daily delays endured while crammed into crowded carriages, like many children of my generation I fell in love with the Underground at an early age. It represented freedom and adventure, a seemingly limitless network of stations with wonderfully exotic names such as Cockfosters and Burnt Oak. There were no automatic gates in those days and for a couple of pence thrust hurriedly into the hands of the ticket collector together with a mumbled mention of the previous station, I had the freedom of the system for a day. There were even stations, like nearby Holland Park, where you could exit the system for free provided you were prepared to walk up the stairs rather than use the decrepit lifts. Trips to the end of the line were particularly exciting,
passing places like Totteridge or Theydon Bois that still, in the 1960s, had the feel of a distant village rather than being so easily connected to what claimed to be at the time the world’s biggest metropolis. I never quite dared to venture out on the far reaches of the Metropolitan, which, I feared wrongly, had ticket collectors on the train since the distances were so great and the fares so high.
Returning to the site of my childhood adventures today, it is remarkable how little has changed on the older parts of the system since then, but a returning Victorian would be deeply disappointed at the lack of recognition of the fantastic achievement in creating this remarkable system. Indeed, most Londoners are oblivious to this history, taking the Underground for granted and, when complaining about its inadequacies, failing to recognize the reason for them.
Taking a trip along the oldest section of line, from Paddington to Farringdon, which opened in 1863 (see
Chapter 2
), it becomes clear why there is so little knowledge among today’s travellers. There is precious little to show that this section of line, now shared by the District, Metropolitan and Circle lines, has such a historic significance. The original stations, built in simple Italianate stone style, have all been replaced, and though some of their successors still have ‘Metropolitan Railway’ just below the roof, invisible to most passers-by, none show the original date when the system first opened.
At Paddington, I searched in vain for any recognition of the history in the tacky station entrance while the only clue inside was the fact that the platforms are in an airy space far more generously proportioned than their more recent equivalents. At Edgware Road, again much more spacious than normal stations, a large display is given over to the staff’s success in London Transport garden competitions, but, again, there is nothing about the fact that this is part of the route of the world’s first underground line.
Only at Baker Street has there been a real effort to honour the history and not just with Sherlock Holmes kitsch. There are plaques telling the story of the early days of the line and the station was
refurbished in 1983 to create much of the original atmosphere, except, of course, the clean electric trains can never recreate the smoky fug of their steam forebears. Much of the original sandstone brickwork has been uncovered and freed of advertising, but the high alcoves were unfortunately covered with ghastly white tiles, out of keeping with the Victorian interior.
At Great Portland Street, originally Portland Road, the station is in an island of traffic and as I sipped a cup of tea in the small friendly café, again I searched in vain for any recognition of the history. The absence of any such signs is illustrative of the way that London and Londoners take the Underground for granted, paying so little homage to its historical significance. Indeed, some of the traces of history left on this original section of line are misleading. At Farringdon, the old name, unnoticed by the rush of commuters because it is high above the newspaper and flower sellers, is given as Farringdon & High Holborn, a rather inaccurate appellation – since High Holborn is nowhere near the station – that was only used between 1922 and 1936. Today, Farringdon is a busy through station for the Underground, and for Thameslink trains which run on two parallel lines that were, as we shall see in
Chapter 3
, built within five years of the opening of the Metropolitan to cope with the huge number of trains seeking to use this new underground railway. The station has recently been rebuilt and extended, too, in readiness for the Crossrail trains scheduled to arrive at the end of the decade. There is no trace of the fact that Farringdon was the original terminus where the banquet was held to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan in 1863.
London, in fact, pioneered two different types of underground railway, both of which were world firsts – those built using the ‘cut and cover’ method like the Metropolitan (now known prosaically as the sub-surface lines) and the deep tube lines drilled out of the London clay deep below the surface in order to avoid the clutter of drains, sewers and utilities which had already built up in Victorian times. There is even less recognition of this colossal achievement. The first
of these deep lines (see
Chapter 7
), the City & South London, ran between a now defunct station, King William Street (near the present Monument), and Stockwell, and was completed in 1890, but there is little left at those stations today to indicate this was another brilliant first by the Underground’s pioneers.
Another reason for the lack of knowledge is that the London Underground has so often been ignored. It is amazing how little has been written about the effect of the Underground on London. There are countless tomes about its construction, a truly miraculous undertaking, largely, but not entirely, funded by private entrepreneurs. There has, too, been much on how the construction of the main line railways affected Britain by dramatically reducing the time taken to travel around the country. However, scant attention has been paid to the fundamental role played by the Underground in the life of Britain’s premier city.
Oddly, even many biographies of London pay little attention to the system hidden anything from thirty to 250 feet beneath its surface.
1
Of course there are many books which concentrate on the engineering achievements of the railway and its haphazard construction. The spectacular feat of building a railway underneath a built-up area, a concept so brave and revolutionary that it took nearly forty years for any other country to imitate it, should not be underestimated. The people who devised and developed the concept were visionaries, ready to risk ridicule and bankruptcy to push forward their ideas. This book explains how they did it, but the achievements of the Underground go way beyond its mere construction. Its role in the development of London and its institutions is probably greater than that of any other invention apart, possibly, from the telephone. Without the Underground London would just not be, well, London. Oddly, that is recognized more often abroad where the famous roundel, the ‘logo’ of the system created long before that word was ever in common parlance, is the emblematic image of the English capital. Here, with our usual disdain for engineering and our inability to recognize our own achievements, we have tended to ignore the magnificent organism living permanently
under our feet.
Most fundamentally, the Underground allows Londoners to traverse the city in a way which would be impossible by any form of surface transport. Yes, more people use buses every day – but many of those journeys are in the suburbs. In central London, the Underground is the way to get around town, as demonstrated by the fact that it is used both by besuited City gents and their cleaning ladies. There is something remarkably egalitarian about the Underground, and that was true right from the beginning when it attracted both the bowler hat and the cloth cap brigades; though, of course, there were separate classes for them until the advent of the deep tubes where such niceties were not possible.
But apart from uniting the capital in an unprecedented way and enabling journeys which had hitherto been impossible or incredibly lengthy, the creation of the Underground stimulated development of the city itself. This is most famously illustrated through the expression ‘Metroland’ (
Chapter 12
), the area of north-west London which was built and indeed marketed as a direct result of rapid access to the centre of London via the Metropolitan line. However, right from the start, those who conceived of a railway under London realized that it would create the opportunity to build new developments around stations. More than that, the poor would be able to afford decent housing thanks to the cheaper land available outside the centre of London. It did not quite work out like that, but then that is very much part of the Underground story, with plans and projects not always turning out as expected.
Probably the next greatest impact of the Underground on London is the design and architecture. The purity of the design is encapsulated most famously in Harry Beck’s map of the system, but also given expression in the architecture of numerous stations and the consistency of the use of the typeface, Johnston, devised specifically for the Underground. There is barely a streetscape in the centre of the city or in most high streets served by a station which is not made recognizably and demonstrably London by a design feature initiated by London Transport. That, of course, goes beyond the Underground, as it
includes the humble bus stop with its characteristic roundel and the double-decked red buses. All this is deliberate and most of it can be attributed to the meticulous requirements of Frank Pick who, along with Lord Ashfield, did more than anyone to integrate London’s transport. It is no exaggeration to say that the pair created a brilliant system of transport management which, in the 1930s, became a world class model, envied and studied around the world (see
Chapter 13
).
Another breathtaking legacy of the Underground is the wealth of posters commissioned by London Transport which are of a remarkably high and, most important, consistent standard. They cover a breadth of subjects ranging from simple information on ticket offers or destinations to excursions or warnings of danger, and the designs manage to reflect their times, using contemporary styles which often, thanks to the excellence of their execution, still appear modern. Indeed, those who ran the Underground helped to design London.
Then, of course, there is the impact of the Underground system in wartime (see
Chapter 14
). Of course everyone thinks of the Second World War, but, as this book shows, the Underground was even used briefly for shelter in the First. Another little-told story is how in the 1950s London Transport changed the demography of the capital by recruiting directly in the Caribbean and Africa for cheap labour to run the Underground and the buses at a time of full employment among the British population (see
Chapter 15
). Taking this all together, it is no exaggeration to say that the Underground helped build the London we know today more than any other institution.
