Haunted London Underground (eBook)

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LONDON AND ITS UNDERGROUND RAILWAYS

London owes its very existence to possessing a geographical position largely favourable to transport. Given its size, it is not surprising that it has a very complex un-derground-railway system. Despite its infrastructure, fabric and rolling stock creaking at the seams from time to time and the fact that it has become a political football, it has for long played and continues to have an essential part in the social, economic and cultural life of London. ‘Underground’ is something of a misnomer. Only about 42 per cent of the system actually runs below the surface.

It could be argued that it isn’t really a system at all in the strict sense of the word. In spite of the iconic nature of its logo, the station totem, the architectural merit of some of its buildings and the masterpiece of graphical design which is the Underground map, all giving a strong sense of system, the network grew up, at least until the early 1930s, in a largely piecemeal fashion. Many proposals for additional lines or extensions to existing ones have been mooted and then abandoned, never to see the light of day despite the likelihood that they were logical and would have made very useful contributions to the network. There are substantial parts of London that have never been well-served by the Underground network. Even with these reservations, the Underground is still a marvellous system. It is too easy to take it for granted; it is an essential part of the capital’s infrastructure – life in London would be very different without it, and worse.

It is impossible to appreciate the history of modern London without some understanding of how and why the underground railway network developed. What follows is a brief chronological account of the growth of what, for convenience, we will call the ‘system’. Some description and evaluation of the contribution that the system has made to London provides a useful background to the mysterious and often eerie events described in the main body of the book.

It may seem ironic to us in the twenty-first century that the London underground-railway network largely owes its origins to chronic road-traffic gridlock in the nineteenth century. It also results from the squalid living conditions endured by huge numbers of London’s working people and the laudable desire to create a means of transport which would enable them to live in healthier districts just outside the central part of the Metropolis.

The first underground line to be built ran the four miles from Bishops Road at Paddington to Farringdon and was opened in 1863. It had the effect of relieving the traffic congestion on the New Road, London’s first bypass. This is the permanent pandemonium of today’s Marylebone, Euston and Pentonville Roads. Back in the nineteenth century, this road funnelled large amounts of traffic from the north and west of London heading particularly to the City and the Docks. The line formed the nucleus of the Metropolitan Railway and was built just below street level on what became known as the ‘cut-and-cover’ method. Wherever possible, the line was built in a cutting along and under existing roads and was then bricked over except for portions left open to the elements. This method may have caused temporary chaos for traffic but it reduced the potential costs involved in the compulsory purchase of many of the buildings that lay around the path of the projected route.

The trains were hauled by steam locomotives. The fact that the line was in a relatively shallow trench open to the air for much of the route enabled some of the smoke and steam to dissipate. However, the poisonous and almost impenetrable fug in stations such as Baker Street which were entirely subterranean, caused travellers to cough, splutter, expectorate and complain querulously while also providing a helpful environment for members of the light-fingered criminal fraternity. Early underground train travel was not for the faint-hearted.

An attempt was made to operate a locomotive that would tackle the pollution problem by being ‘smokeless’. The idea was that a white-hot firebrick would heat the water in the locomotive’s boiler and as a result produce steam for propulsion but no smoke. Robert Stephenson (1803-59) designed and built the experimental locomotive in 1861. This machine produced very little smoke but also very little steam and it was all it could do to haul itself around, let alone pull a train. It was regarded as a failure and quickly disappeared from public view. It gained the derisive nickname ‘Fowler’s Ghost’ because no one was sure whether it actually existed or not.

In spite of apocalyptic predictions that the building of underground railways would disturb the Devil, who would then wreak his revenge in the ways that only he knew how, and equally dire warnings to the effect that tunnels and cuttings would collapse, the line from Paddington to Farringdon was an almost total success. So much so that there was soon talk of similar sub-surface cut-and-cover lines. One, a roughly circular route joining places of major importance, eventually became the Circle Line. Extensions were made to the Metropolitan Railway to reach Hammersmith in the west and the City in the east. Another line was the Metropolitan District which eventually reached out, far beyond the continuously built-up districts, to Wimbledon and Richmond in the south-west and Upminster in the east. The Metropolitan Railway had pretensions to being more than just a line serving London and its routes eventually extended deep into what were then almost entirely rural parts of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire before it effectively petered out in a field at the rustic spot of Brill, fifty or so miles from Baker Street. The East London line joined the inner part of the East End at Shoreditch with what became a mixed residential and industrial district around New Cross and New Cross Gate. It took over and used the tunnel under the Thames built by Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There had been many deaths during the building of this, the first significant underwater tunnel in the world.

In the central parts of the Metropolis, land values were too high to permit more cut-and-cover routes so attention turned to the building of deeper-level lines. There was already an extremely complex spaghetti of pipes, sewers and other services beneath the streets and it made sense to build below these. Crude technology was available in the form of the tunnelling shield invented by Marc Brunel for the Thames Tunnel. This was adapted to a circular form and used to build the first railway inside a tube. Opened in 1870, this line ran from Tower Hill to Bermondsey under the Thames and was cable operated. It was not very successful but Peter William Barlow modified the shield to build a line in a deep tube tunnel, also under the Thames. This was the City & South London Railway and it opened in 1890. Trains were powered by electricity. Later to become part of the Northern Line, the City & South London was hugely successful and it acted as the model for many other deep-level tube lines built over the next century. Improvements were made to Barlow’s tunnelling shield by James Greathead (1844-1896) and modern tunnelling shields could be described as updates of Greathead’s machine.

In spite of the fact that the early tube lines, such as the City & South London and the Central London Railway, provided an economic and efficient means of urban transport, it was left to a thrusting American entrepreneur, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905), to start creating a modern network in the 1900s. A number of lines had been built without any coordinated plan. Yerkes created the Underground Electric Railway Co., bringing these companies together, building short lines to join up the routes of some of the constituents, improving interchange facilities and creating an immediately recognisable brand: ‘UndergrounD’.

In 1933 control of a unified underground system passed into the hands of the London Passenger Transport Board which set about a programme of extensions to the tube system and modernisation of rolling stock, stations and other facilities. It also created an immediately recognisable house style for the system, with close detail being paid to design issues as disparate as station architecture and the moquette used for seating. The deep-level tubes played a heroic role in the Second World War, sheltering vast numbers of Londoners during the Blitz with unused tubes acting as bomb-proof factories for war supplies and stores for valuable works of art. They also housed top-secret control centres having a major influence on the Allied war effort.

Since the war, new lines have been few and slow in coming but the Victoria Line, opened throughout in 1972 and the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999 have set new standards for automation. Controversially, maintenance of the infrastructure and rolling stock has passed into private hands. A common perception is that parts of the London Underground system are now creaking at the seams, run down and overcrowded for much of the time and comparing badly with similar systems in other major European cities. It is difficult not to see London’s public transport system as a long-term pawn in party-political gamesmanship. It is perhaps a miracle that it works as well as it does.

Without question the London Underground has had an enormous social, economic and cultural impact on the Metropolis. Whatever its limitations, it has provided a ready means for people to get around quickly and easily, particularly in the central parts of London. It has acted to ‘pull together’ the remarkably disparate collection of ‘villages’ which constitutes London. It has stimulated and sometimes directly caused the growth of vast...