London Under (12 page)

The Entrance to the Thames Tunnel
, by B. Dixie, 1836
(illustration credit Ill.26)

It was disconcerting; it was even frightening. It was pervaded by an air of hopelessness and dreariness, with the presence of the Thames above the brick arches as an imminent threat. “The very walls were in a cold sweat,”
The Times
reported upon the opening day, with the first visitors also afflicted by “a lurking, chilling fear.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was then the American consul in Liverpool, recorded how he had descended through “a wearisome succession of staircases” until he beheld “the vista of an arched corridor that extends into everlasting night.” It was “gloomier than a street of upper London” and seemed to him to have the fearful quality of a prison. Like any London prison it soon harboured its own particular inmates, with small stalls or shops set up in the alcoves of the tunnel by women who seldom or never saw any daylight.

But the Thames Tunnel also had other visitors. It was popularly supposed to be the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, taking over the unsavoury reputation of the Fleet Ditch; the underworld was once more calling to its proper denizens. It became known as “the Hades Hotel.” It was an embarrassment, a shadow beneath the Thames, and in 1869 it was taken over by the
East London Railway. In that capacity it has remained as an underground tunnel for the “tube” ever since. The stairs
of the original shaft were, until very recent times, in constant use by passengers.

The other tunnels under the Thames, confronting the primal fear of the river and of the darkness, have never lost their overwhelming sense of gloom. In 1869 a tunnel was built between
Tower Hill in the north and
Tooley Street in the south; it was made of cast iron rather than of brick, and was designed for the use of carriages drawn by
cables from either end.
Tower Bridge had not at this date been erected. The tunnel was as unsuccessful as its predecessor. If for some reason a carriage stopped in the middle of the tunnel, the passengers, in the sudden silence, could distinctly hear the sound of paddle steamers overhead. The river was too close. It was then turned into a pedestrian tunnel before being overtaken by the building of Tower Bridge. It has been employed ever since as a “ghost tunnel,” carrying the myriad cables and pipes that the city needs. If you enter it, you can hear the sound of the water churning overhead. It has the reputation of being one of the loneliest spots in all of London.

The same sensation can be experienced in the
Greenwich Foot Tunnel, completed in 1902. It makes its way beneath the ground between Greenwich and the
Isle of Dogs, and has remained a gloomy and intimidating place for more than a century. It is impossible not to feel the force of the water, some 53 feet above the pedestrian’s head at high tide. The tunnel is lined with white tiles,
and is always cool; it has an air of dankness. At a length of a quarter of a mile it is an unnerving space, with the constant fear of the tiles coming apart to make way for the deluge.

The tunnels beneath the river are filled with intimations of strangeness. The road tunnel known as the
Limehouse Link, running beneath the ground from
Tower Bridge to the
Isle of Dogs, was opened in 1993. Its eastern and western portals bear two sculptures. One is entitled
Restless Dream
and the other is called
On Strange and Distant Lands.
A drive through the
Blackwall Road Tunnel has variously been described as disquieting and intimidating. That is perhaps because of its proximity to the river; at some points it is only 5 feet beneath the water. The latest venture beneath the ground, the
Docklands Light Railway’s tunnel beneath the Thames between Island Garden and Cutty Sark, should also be experienced. Once the travellers are beneath the river they seem to be plunged into a deeper darkness, at once more intimate and more threatening.

More than twenty tunnels now burrow beneath the Thames, a larger number than in any other comparable city in the world; some of them are dry and disused, but their subterranean presence will endure as long as London itself.

The system itself was built before the unification of Italy and before the creation of Germany. Its first travellers wore top hats and frock-coats; there are early photographs of horse-drawn hansom cabs parked outside the underground stations.
Oscar Wilde was a commuter on these subterranean trains, travelling from Sloane Square station to his office on
Woman’s World
at the bottom of
Ludgate Hill.
Charles Dickens and
Charles Darwin could both have used the Underground. The coffins of William Gladstone and Dr. Barnardo were both transported beneath the earth in funereal underground trains.
Jack the Ripper could have travelled on the Underground to
Whitechapel; the station was served by the
East London Railway. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was an astonishing thing. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the elaborate vistas of Canary Wharf or North Greenwich, it is still astonishing. It contains and commemorates many epochs.

The first begetter of the Underground,
Charles Pearson, advanced his proposals in the 1830s; by this period the main thoroughfares of London were blocked by an assortment of horse-drawn omnibuses, drays, phaetons and hackney carriages that carried hundreds of thousands of people into the city. As for the pedestrians, there was no counting them. Pearson considered that tunnels under London were the only solution to the congestion and
delay above the ground, and suggested that underground routes should connect
King’s Cross with Farringdon
Street. But so fanciful a conception invited only derision. A correspondent in
The Times
believed that a scheme for journeys beneath the surface was equivalent to absurd notions of flying machines and tunnels under the Channel.
Punch
and other magazines published
cartoons in which the notion of an underground railway was ridiculed. “We understand,”
Punch
wrote in 1846, “that a survey has already been made and that many of the inhabitants along the line have expressed their readiness to place their coal cellars at the disposal of the company.” It would turn into “a Cheapside arcade for the penny hawkers” just as the Thames Tunnel had become.

More serious objections were raised. It would become a haven for
Fenians and other terrorists, who would explode barrels of dynamite and destroy parts of the city. Several such explosions did indeed take place. The first of them was carried out by the
“Dynamiters” in 1881, when a charge of nitro-glycerine blew up in the tunnel of the
District Line between
Charing Cross and
Westminster stations. There have been other such events ever since, most notably on the morning of 7 July 2005 when within fifty seconds three bombs exploded on three underground trains. The perpetrators were young Muslim men, but the motives for creating subterranean terror belong to no one faith. The fear of the underground is still very real. It is associated with the terror of an inferno beneath the surface, congruent to hell
itself. Many escalator fires have started, most notably
that in
King’s Cross in 1987 where twenty-seven people were killed. It was argued by some at the time that “fires were a part of the nature of the oldest, most extensive, underground railway in the world.”

Pearson, a practical as well as an ingenious man, persisted in the face of objection and complaint. A parliamentary commission was established in 1846 to survey the state of the city’s transport.
Joseph Paxton submitted a scheme for an immense glass way circling above the streets and houses of London; the glass arcades, at a height of 108 feet, would provide lines for trains, and promenades for the people. It was a magnificent
conception, but it was impractical. The only realistic scheme lay beneath the earth. It was granted to Pearson’s
Metropolitan Railway Company. Concerns were raised about ventilation within the tunnels but
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called as a witness, declared that the proposed journeys were very short. “You need not take your dinner with you,” he said, “or corn for your horse.”

At the end of January 1860 the first shafts descended at
Euston Square and
Paddington. “In a day and a night,” one journalist wrote, “a few hundred yards of roadway are enclosed, and a strange quiet reigns for a time, in consequence of the carriage traffic being diverted.” The omnibuses were diverted down alleys and back streets, where the outside passengers had to dodge
street signs and barbers’ poles. But then the navvies arrived with their steam engines and horses. “The sound of pickaxes,
spades and hammers, puffing of steam, and murmur of voices begin; never to cease day and night.” The method was that of “cut and cover,” by means of which an area was excavated before being once more covered by the road surface. London was in a ferment of fundamental change.

The path of the underground working was clear enough. It would run from Paddington to the
Edgware Road before going under
Marylebone Road and
Euston Road; it would then use the valley of
the Fleet in order to reach the City at
Farringdon. The passenger to Farringdon still follows the same route as the
travellers in Ben Jonson’s “Famous Voyage” of 1612. The ancient Fleet river, however, was not to be wholly ignored; in June 1862 it was reported that after heavy rain “the black hole of the Fleet sewer, like a broken artery, poured out a thick rapid stream which found its way out fiercely … into the railway cutting.” The great brick walls of the tunnels rose upward with the force of the water.

The underground scheme itself was a force for destruction as well as improvement. The excavation of the valley of the Fleet destroyed a thousand homes and displaced 12,000 people who did not receive any compensation. They left their infested and infected tenements for a life of squalor elsewhere. That pattern of evicting the powerless and the poor continued throughout the construction of the underground railway in the nineteenth century. A magazine,
The Working
Man
, made its
own comment in 1860. “Where are they gone, sir? Why, some’s gone down Whitechapel way; some’s gone in the Dials; some’s gone to Kentish Town; and some’s gone to the Work’us.”

By the autumn of 1861 the underground line was partially complete, and in the spring of 1862 a group of interested observers were drawn in wagons from
Paddington to
Euston Square. Gladstone and his wife were among the party. They were invited to inspect the newly completed tunnels, and were apparently much impressed by their novel and in many respects incredible journey “under London.” It
was worthy of a narrative by Jules Verne. It offered the perfect union of science, drama and romance.

On 9 January 1863, the Metropolitan Underground Railway was formally unveiled. Pearson himself died a few weeks before the event. He had been born in the same month as Marie-Antoinette had perished on the guillotine, but he had inaugurated a service still in use in the twenty-first century. At the opening ceremony 700 dignitaries gathered at Paddington and were driven through the tunnels in a succession of trains; an engraving of
The Trial Trip on the Underground
Railway
shows the open carriages filled with men waving their stove-pipe hats into the air as they are about to pass into a tunnel. When they eventually emerged into the terminus at
Farringdon Street, they were greeted by police bands.

On the following day the line was opened to the public.
The crowds, waiting for their first journey beneath the surface of the earth, were immense; the trains were filled immediately with the cry of “No room! No room!” echoing through the underground halls. A few casualties were perhaps inevitable; the ventilation at
Gower Street station was not sufficient, and two people were taken to hospital. A
journalist wrote that “it can be compared to nothing else than the crush at the doors of a theatre on the first night of a pantomime.” It was the first underground railway in the world, a wonder and a spectacle to rival anything upon the stage. Something of its appeal can still be seen on platform five of
Baker Street, now restored to its pristine condition.

The Metropolitan Line was a considerable success, and carried approximately 30,000 passengers each day. So the trains were lengthened, and the intervals between them were reduced; they stopped for twenty seconds at each station before continuing their journey. They were driven by compact steam engines and accommodated three classes of carriage, the first class containing mirrors and carpets. They looked exactly like surface trains suddenly transported into the depths.
Some complaints were of course made about the smoke and smell in the tunnels. The guards and porters sent a petition to the company, requesting that they be given permission to grow beards as a protection against sulphurous deposits. The
locomotives themselves were given the names of tyrants—
Czar
,
Kaiser
and
Mogul
—or of voracious
insects such as
Locust
,
Hornet
and
Mosquito
. This was a tribute to their power. One of them was named
Pluto
, the god of the underworld.