London Under (10 page)

By the thirteenth century, when some of the larger streams had run dry or had degenerated into open sewers,
water was sent through
pipes of lead; the slow dissolution of the metal must have had a noticeable effect upon the health of Londoners. In 1236
Gilbert de Sandford was granted “liberty to convey water from the town of Tyburn by pipes of lead into the City.” This
Great Conduit, as it was known, ran down what is now
Oxford Street.
Conduit Street marks its passage. It then turned into
Holborn before eventually reaching
Cheapside where it was discharged from a great pump known as “the Conduit in Chepe.” A smaller conduit, built at the other end of Cheapside by Paul’s Gate, was called “the pissing conduit” by reason of its constant discharge of water. The system was, for the period, a remarkable feat of civil engineering, and the presence of the two
conduits formed the emblematic centre of London at times of pageant or royal entry. They created a blessed space.

Other conduits were erected as the city expanded. White Conduit Street in
Islington marks another source, while Lamb’s Conduit Street in Holborn commemorates the benefaction of
Sir William Lambe. A conduit known as the Standard rose on Cornhill, and was a landmark of the city. These conduits also became the home of ritual, like most sites of underground water. The mayor and aldermen would visit each one in turn; “they hunted the hare and killed her” according to
John Stow, before enjoying a feast “at the head of the conduit.”
The banquet was followed by the hunting of the fox. These great pumps, however, proved to be a hindrance to the ever increasing traffic of the city; by the middle of the sixteenth century many of them had been removed.

The Cornhill conduit, 1800
(illustration credit Ill.20)

Other sources of
water were also deployed, most notably in the
New River built by
Hugh Middleton at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This flowed from Amwell and
Chadwell Springs in Hertfordshire into North London. A fountain playing at the corner of
Rosebery Avenue and
Arlington Way, where once
Thames Water had its headquarters and where Sadler’s Wells still stands, marks its final destination. The shape of a great reservoir can still clearly be seen close by in
Claremont Square. This is a very watery part of London. But the new river, like its older companions, has gone beneath the earth. It has been driven underground.

By the eighteenth century several
water companies were laying pipes beneath the surface, with attendant problems of fierce competition and territorial struggle. Some London streets contained the pipes of three or four different companies vying for mastery. The companies joined together in 1811, but the subsequent monopoly did nothing to improve public health. Water flowed for very limited periods, sometimes as little as ten minutes each day, and there was no water on Sundays. Improvements were slow, gradual and random. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the creation of the
Metropolitan Water Board, was the public supply of
water guaranteed. A huge water main was built, 19 feet beneath the surface, in 1955. This was followed, at the end of the twentieth century, by the construction of a ring water main lying at a depth of 130 feet; it encompasses the city in a loop of 50 miles, its central tunnel being some 7½ feet wide. It provides half of London’s water, all of it moved by gravity alone. One of the great pumping stations that control the flow of water can be seen at
Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, where a towering
pump has been installed. Beneath the traffic island, at the bottom of
Park Lane, another
pumping station has been built. You would never know that it was there.

The London Water Ring Main
(illustration credit Ill.21)

Another visionary scheme, from an earlier era, consisted in the provision of
gas by means of pipes under the ground. The first of them was laid in the summer of 1805, when a newspaper described how “the inflammable gas, which is quite transparent or invisible, began to flow into the pipes soon after eight o’clock”; a lamplighter lit each lantern in turn, instigating “a clear, bright and colourless light” that would soon transform the streets of London. Shadow and darkness were banished from the main thoroughfares. “It would have been a sight worth seeing,”
Charles Dickens wrote in his weekly magazine,
All the Year Round
, “the laying of the first gas pipe—and a picture worth drawing.” He believed that act to have been of more historical importance than the landing of Julius Caesar or the sealing of the Magna Carta. He had an essentially Victorian belief in power, and understood that gas would inaugurate a new order of things.

Yet there were serious misgivings about the nature of this new underground force. It was claimed that mounds of earth, each one the size of Primrose Hill, would be needed to keep the gas down. Fears of explosions were often expressed. Some of the pipes, from a myriad of new companies, were laid at too shallow a depth. In 1867 the
Fenians—the Irish nationalists of the period—blew up a gas main in
Clerkenwell as part of their campaign
of terror in the 1860s, and a barrel of gunpowder was found beside a large
gas-holder in
Shoreditch. The largest explosion of gas in the city occurred at the end of October 1865, when eleven workmen were killed by the accidental lighting of 1,000,000 cubic feet of gas at the
London Gaslight Company. People walking a mile from the scene were thrown violently to the ground. The thing that lurked beneath, the thing that created terror, was now gas.

Beneath the streets, 1900 (illustration credit Ill.22)

Water was once pumped, at a pressure of 400 pounds per square inch, beneath the streets of central London; it created hydraulic power, by means of which lifts rose and fell, safety curtains were drawn up and down, presses fired into action. By the early 1920s, 200 miles of
hydraulic pipes had been laid beneath the surface of the city; the water has gone, but the pipes survive to carry other services such as cable and fibre optic networks. Ceramic pipes of the early nineteenth century were in time exchanged for cast iron. The nineteenth century was the age of cast iron, and its sturdy skeleton of services still lies beneath our feet. Cast iron was in part replaced by spun iron, and spun iron by serviceable polyethylene. But there are still many iron pipes in use for the transportation of gas; the last ones will not be removed until the spring of 2032.

A door within the plinth of the
statue of Boadicea, on
Westminster Bridge, leads to a tunnel some 6 feet in
height that goes beneath the Embankment to all points east. This is the highway for a host of pipes, from the
cables of the telephone companies to the pipes of the gas and water industries. Many such underground avenues weave beneath the streets. Nerve tunnels run from
Piccadilly Circus to
High Holborn, from
Tottenham Court Road to the
National Gallery, and from
Islington to Soho. They all employ gratings for ventilation, through which can be seen the panoply of surface life; yet from this vantage the outer world somehow becomes alien and unusual. The oldest of these tunnels, beneath
Garrick Street, was laid in 1861. They are all controlled by another “circus” of installations beneath Piccadilly Circus. The life and activity beneath the streets are of immense size and complexity. Under the ground flow telecommunications, gas, drinking water, fibre optics, light, electricity, district heat mains, non-potable water, private wire networks and vacuum waste.

There are signals and pulses in the darkness beneath. London was the first city in the world to harbour an entire telephone system under the ground. The wires and cables went deeper and deeper, some of them carried through tunnels built by
British Telecom and the
London Electricity Board. Hundreds of thousands of miles of cable take electricity into every dwelling and place of work; it is the life force beneath the surface. The tentacles of the
National Grid touch the cables at a number
of points through the agency of 12,000 sub-stations that lower the voltage. The heat is so intense that every cable has to be well insulated.

Otherwise there would be a reprise of the situation experienced by
John Evelyn in the autumn of 1666, after the Great Fire, when “the ground under my feet was so hot as made me not only sweat, but even burnt the soles of my shoes and put me all over in a sweat.” He contemplated an underground world where “the very waters remained boiling; the voragos [abysses] of subterranean cellars, wells and dungeons formerly warehouses still burning in stench and dark clouds of smoke like Hell.” This is the heat now being exploited by a process known as “underground thermal energy storage,” by means of which excessive heat or cold can be stored in the earth for later use in public buildings. So the ancient earth can still become an agent of social change.

Yet the fear of fire and heat beneath the ground, the definition of hell itself, still survives. The electric
cables are buried in trenches, ducts,
conduits and tunnels. They run through the tunnels of the London Underground, but small tunnels were also built for the purpose of holding them. Tunnels, for example, lie beneath the Thames. Other tunnels, some 80 or 90 feet beneath the surface, have recently been built; one of them runs under
City Road, and another goes under the city itself. Forty feet beneath
Leicester Square lies a vast electricity station on three levels. No one is aware of its presence,
except for those who service it. It is entered by a small steel trap-door at the corner of Leicester Square and
Panton Street, just to the left of the half-price ticket booth. It is disguised to baffle or to prevent unwanted visitors. The ticket office itself is the ventilation shaft for the operation. A new tunnel has been built by the
National Grid beneath London, running from
Elstree to
St. John’s Wood; it is 12½ miles in length and almost 10 feet in width. It is known as
the London Connection.

Night workers laying an electric cable, 1930
(illustration credit Ill.23)

Our voices are carried beneath the ground. If they
could be heard, a vast roar would echo and re-echo through the streets of London.
British Telecom owns a region of the underworld, a domain crossed by thousands of miles of wires and
cables running 100 feet beneath the earth. Many miles of tunnels pass in all directions beneath the capital, linking exchange with exchange. Fibre optic cables turn words and whispers into waves of light that flow beneath our feet.