London Under (13 page)

The first fatality occurred in the autumn of 1864. A railway guard at
Portland Road station noticed a couple at the top of the stairs. He told them to hurry as the train was approaching. “Come on, Kate,” the man said. The couple hurried down the steps. A short while later the body of the dying woman was found on the rails. She had been drinking with her companion, and had apparently fallen onto the line.

The success of the Metropolitan encouraged other
projectors and financiers to adopt similar schemes. London was consumed with underground fever. Fifty-three projects were put forward. The Great Western and Great Northern and Great Eastern railway companies were eager to move into the capital, while the Metropolitan itself was gradually extended in all directions from
Swiss Cottage to
South Kensington and
Hammersmith. The
District Line began constructing its own portion of what became the
Inner Circle. “The engineering world,” the
City Press
reported in 1864, “is literally frenzied with excitement about new railway schemes. We would as soon enter a lunatic asylum as attend a meeting of the
Institute of Civic Engineers.”

Gustave Doré’s engraving of “the worker’s train,” the Metropolitan Line, from
London: A Pilgrimage
, 1872
(illustration credit Ill.27)

Endless internal battles were fought between the underground companies, over such matters as routes and the width of tracks, but the enterprise of tunnelling beneath London went on. In 1865 Henry Mayhew travelled on an underground train in order to interview the passengers. A labourer told him that he used to walk 6 miles each day, to and from his place of work; now he was spared the inconvenience. He lived in
Notting Hill,
“almost in open country,” and thereby saved himself two shillings a week in rent.

The first tunnels to be literally bored beneath the earth, without using the “cut and cover” method, ran from
King William Street in the City to
Stockwell in South London. The line opened in 1890, and since the journey was conducted entirely underground, the need
for windows was deemed to be minimal. Only tiny slits were placed high on the sides. It was also feared
that the passengers might panic at the sight of the walls of the tunnel rushing past them. The seats were quilted. So the carriages were known as “padded cells.” A guard stood at the end of each carriage, and announced the names of the stations en route; he also called out warnings. “Beware of card sharks on this train!” “It is forbidden to ride on the roof!” The novel insertion of tunnels into the London clay led to the notion of “the
tubes” under the earth; soon enough they became known as the Tube, a name that has persisted ever since. When the
Central Line was inaugurated in the summer of 1900 it became known as “the Twopenny Tube” because of the flat price of the tickets.

The building of these tunnels deep beneath the earth had dangers of its own; by the early years of the twentieth century they were bored by a rotary excavator that had knives at its front digging out the earth and depositing it onto a conveyor belt. Yet the atmospheric pressure at these depths was very high, and a report written in 1908 informed the
Institution of Civil Engineers that “a great deal of illness resulted among the
men, but there were not many fatal cases.” The workmen were suffering from the disorder known to deep-sea divers as “the bends.” On one occasion the air escaped through the bed of the Thames and boiled 3 feet high above the surface, overturning a boat.

Inside the “padded cell” of the City and South London Railway
(illustration credit Ill.28)

The Fleet floods destroy the underground workings at
Farringdon, 1862
(illustration credit Ill.29)

The trains on the Stockwell Line of 1890 were the first to be powered by electricity, and thus it became the first underground electric railway in the world. It also provided another innovation. There were no first classes or second classes in this new world. All
tickets were charged at the same rate, and all of the carriages were identical. It caused outrage in some quarters, and the
Railway Times
complained that lords and ladies would now be travelling with Billingsgate fishwives and Smithfield porters. Yet, as a reading of Dante would have suggested, all are equal in the underworld.

In the summer of 1867 a woman had dropped dead at
Bishop’s Road station on the Metropolitan Line, and an inquest resolved that she had died “by natural causes, accelerated by the suffocating atmosphere of the Underground Railway.” By 1898, 550 trains were passing beneath the surface of London every day. A driver told a parliamentary commission that “very seldom” was the smoke thick enough to obscure
the tunnels. One chronicler of the city recorded in his diary for 23 June 1887 that “I had my first experience of Hades today.” He was travelling between
Baker Street and
Moorgate, but the windows of the carriage were closed to lessen the effect of the smoke and sulphur in the tunnels. He added, however, that “the compartment in which I sat was filled with passengers who were smoking pipes, as is
the English habit”; as a result he was “near dead from asphyxiation and heat.” In 1897 one passenger was almost overcome
with the fumes, and was escorted up to the street and a nearby chemist’s. The chemist looked at him for a moment. “Oh I see,” he said, “Metropolitan Railway.” He poured out a glass of some remedial mixture. The passenger asked him if he had many such cases. “Why bless you,
sir,” he replied. “We often have twenty cases a day.” A proposal was made to place evergreen shrubs on the station platforms, to reduce the effect of carbonic acid, but it was not accepted.

Some claims were made that the atmosphere of the Underground had benign effects, just as the sewer workers of the period believed that their labours rendered them healthier. The underworld may be seen as a source of strength. The fumes were so beneficial that
Great Portland Street station was “used as a sanatorium for men who had been afflicted with asthma and bronchial complaints.” Acid gas was said to cure tonsillitis.
It was also reported that an anorexic suddenly developed a ravenous appetite after a single journey on the Twopenny Tube. It was something to do with the temperature of the tunnels.

The effect of the smoke, however, was to accelerate demands for electric traction that had proved so successful on the Stockwell Line. In 1905 the
Inner Circle was converted for the use of electrical trains, and soon enough other lines were electrified. The days of the underground steam engine were over. Comfort could be purchased at a price. By 1910 a sixpenny ticket allowed
the traveller access to the first-class
carriages of the Metropolitan Railway’s Pullman cars; the carriages contained morocco armchairs set in the replica of a drawing room with mahogany walls. Electric lamps were placed on side-tables, and blinds of green silk covered the windows. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were served.

In 1911 the first escalator was introduced at Earls Court station, to unite the platforms of the District and
Piccadilly Lines. The promotional literature promised that the passenger “can step on to the stairlift at once, and be gently carried to his train. A boon that the mere man will also appreciate is the fact that he will not be prohibited from smoking, as in the lift, for the stairlift is made entirely of fireproof
material.”

A porter was employed to shout out, through a device known as a stentorphone, “This way to the moving staircase! The only one of its kind in London! NOW running! The world’s wonder!” Some travellers screamed at the prospect of alighting from the moving steps, and placards invited them to “step off with the left foot.” A man with a wooden leg was employed to ride up and down the escalator to instil confidence in the nervous passengers.
It was, according to a contemporary report, “as good as a joy-wheel.” An experimental spiral escalator was installed at
Holloway Road tube station by an American company, but it was never used. Yet this was an extraordinary new world beneath the surface of the capital.

So the lines grew and grew. The
Inner Circle was complete, and in the first years of the twentieth century it took seventy minutes to journey around the circuit by steam train; a hundred years later, the trains are only twenty minutes faster. By 1907 the Baker Street and Waterloo Line had reached
Edgware Road, and was known as the “Bakerloo”; the
name was considered to be vulgar and a “gutter title.” The line between
Holborn to
the Strand was opened in the same year, and was eventually named the
Piccadilly Line; the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead railways were merged into one large company called the
Metropolitan District Electric Traction Company.
This conglomerate had already begun to build its own power station at Lots Road, by the Thames at Chelsea, in order to provide power for the newly electrified service.

Like the city above, the Underground grew haphazardly and pragmatically; it was not planned logically or as a whole. Many levels were in place, many lines converging and diverging, with corridors and stairways, lifts and
escalators comprising the pieces of an infernal or divine machine. Tunnels were built ever deeper. New stations were erected, and older stations abandoned. It was guided by the imperatives of money and of power, rather
than the interests of the citizens. In the first instance it was administered by capitalist financiers of dubious reputation. That is the London story.

In 1908 a meeting of the various subterranean companies
was convened to find a common name for their enterprise. The choice was between “Tube” and “Electric” and “Underground”; the last was chosen. This was the time when the “bull’s-eye” device was first used as a symbol for the service.

At work in the “Shield,”
Great Northern and City Railway, 1920s
(illustration credit Ill.30)

The system was in place, and remained largely unaltered until the 1960s when the
Victoria Line was constructed. It was the first new line across central London in fifty years and acted as a service network, with each of its stations connecting to another line or to a surface terminus. In the course of its construction fossils
buried fifty million years before were discovered. They now reside in the Natural History
Museum. Their discovery is another indication of the depth at which the tunnels were laid; the lowest depth of the Underground system lies 221 feet beneath
Hampstead Heath, where the
Northern Line runs. At
Westminster station the
Jubilee Line, the most recent to be built, lies 104 feet beneath sea level. At this point the clay surrounding the tunnels
absorbs the heat and stores it, gradually becoming hotter and hotter;
temperatures of 65° Fahrenheit (18.3° Celsius) have been recorded in the adjacent earth. So ventilators were required to keep the temperature at an average of 70° Fahrenheit (21° Celsius); but in the recent years of expansion the heat within the earth has risen once more, and the average temperature of the deep level tubes is now 86° Fahrenheit
(30° Celsius). Underground is 10° warmer than overground.