London Under (14 page)

The Victoria Line was succeeded by the Jubilee Line, originally to be called the Fleet Line since its route followed the path of the ancient river. But in 1999 it was directed towards parts of South London that the underground had not previously reached; it now reaches its quietus, having passed through its southern stretch, at its eastern terminus in
Stratford. In the course of its excavation it traversed the ground beneath the oldest
parts of London. The line travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic pottery and
Roman tiles, a twelfth-century
quay, a thirteenth-century gatehouse and a fourteenth-century wool market. Mosaic floors, and painted walls, have also been identified. When the Jubilee was taken beneath
Southwark High Street it found an older street, dating from AD
60, lined with houses of clay or timber; ruts were observed in the street, made by carts and chariot wheels. Now the commuter, or passenger, passes over them at a different speed. When the line went out to
Stratford it unearthed an Iron Age settlement and a Cistercian monastery of the twelfth century. “It’s chaotic down there,” the architect of the Jubilee Line extension said, “you can’t believe what’s going
on.”

The Tube is still in large part an old place. It is Victorian. Abandoned tunnels run nowhere, known as “dead tunnels,” snaking their way through the living system; they are sometimes damp, and sometimes dusty, with the patina of past time along their walls and floors. The
tunnels beneath the Thames have a layer of moss that has somehow grown across the sheets of metal panels. The danger of
flooding is still great; many hundreds of pumps discharge 6,600 gallons of water each day in order to preserve the system.

The Underground curves and swerves beneath the surface, some tunnels in a constant state of movement. The tunnels beneath the
City of London still follow the medieval street plan in order to curb the risk to ancient buildings. They are also a vast reservoir of mortality, with large amounts of human hair and skin to be
removed each night between 1:00 and 5:00 in the morning. These are the only hours when the
Underground rests. Metal staircases, and chambers, and abandoned shafts, lie beneath the ground; there are brick arches, of the same construction as the nineteenth-century sewers. The Underground might therefore be seen as a sewer, through which people are sluiced. That is why, at the beginning of the enterprise,
The Times
doubted that Londoners would ever wish “to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul sub-soil of London.” The Waterloo and City
Line, opened in 1898, was known as “the Drain.”

Yet the Tube system, 150 years old, is ever renewed. It resembles London itself in its capacity for growth and change.
Baker Street was opened in 1863, and is still crowded with travellers. In 2007 the whole system carried 1 billion passengers. It is bewildering, but it has been reduced to order in the now famous “Tube
map” that has become an emblem of the city itself.

If in 5,000 or 10,000 years’ time the map of the Underground is uncovered, its purpose and meaning might be irrecoverable. There will be debate over the precise significance of “white city” and “seven sisters,” “gospel oak” and “elephant and castle,” but the principle of the red and blue and green lines may be lost upon our remote descendants. It is not really a map at all, and is described by the social
historian
Eric Hobsbawm as “the most original work of avant-garde art in Britain
between the wars.” An abstract created by an Underground employee, Henry Beck, in 1931, it reminds some of Mondrian, and others of a diagram for electrical wiring. Beck himself did work in the signalling department, where he devised circuits for the current. Yet his design is simple, clear and memorable; it gives an air of
rationality to what is in reality a haphazard and chaotic system. The city itself is identified as a series of horizontals, verticals and diagonals with the greatest emphasis upon central London. “If you’re going underground,” he said, “why bother with geography?” So he presents a utopian vision of the capital.

People waiting for the lifts at the
Bank underground station on the Central Line in 1901
(illustration credit Ill.31)

The architecture of the Underground has also had a significant history. The first stations resembled vast
basilicas with arches and alcoves fitfully lit by gaslight. In its early days the ticket office of
Bank station was located in the crypt of St. Mary Woolnoth, thus contributing to the sense of sacred space. Baker Street station itself was described as having “a gloomy, catacomb-like appearance.”
Some people were awed, and some frightened, by the journey into these smoking caverns beneath the earth. The walls of the stations were plastered with advertisements for Nestlé’s Milk, Bovril, and other commodities. Above ground these early stations were built of white brick with slate roofs and stone dressings. Other stations were given a Moorish, or a Gothic, tone. The City and South London Railway preferred to construct great domes to house the workings of the lift
shaft, complete with cupola and weather vane. They are still to be seen, as at
Clapham Common.

The cupola of Clapham Common station, 1930s
(illustration credit Ill.32)

The
Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, at the beginning of the twentieth century, erected single-storey stations faced and decorated with moulded terracotta blocks of red, known as “ox-blood”; the shining tiles can still be seen in stations such as
Gloucester Road and the now disused Strand. The association between the underworld and
animal sacrifice has been maintained. A wall of these blood-red tiles can be found off the
Brompton Road beside the Oratory; it marks the spot where the Brompton Road station once stood. These ox-blood bricks are in sharp contrast with the light brickwork of the
District Line stations, erected in the same period. Within the station itself the motif changed to one of bottle-green
tiles, with the upper walls of white plaster.

In the 1920s the
Hampstead Line developed a style that became known as “suburban classical,” with the stations graced by coupled Doric columns carved out of Portland stone. The pitched roof, of pyramidal shape, was covered with red Italian tiles so that the stations resembled Roman villas of an earlier date. They provided what one pamphlet described as an “inviting doorway” into the world beneath the ground.
The
City and South London Railway, in the same period, preferred stark cubic forms of Portland stone that resembled Aztec temples. They can still be seen at
Hounslow West and at
Tooting Broadway. Within the ticket hall of Hounslow West are laid elaborate tile friezes which conjure up an air of geometrical frenzy; the total effect
resembles that of a sarcophagus.
Such stations can still provoke a sense of unease.

When in 1930 the Piccadilly Line began to stretch northwards towards
Cockfosters, twenty-two tunnelling shields were mustered for the underground work. In the process some of the most memorable underground stations were built under the influence of
Walter Gropius and the
Bauhaus movement; the bold cylindrical or rectangular shapes, as, for example, at
Arnos Grove and
Sudbury Town, became instantly recognisable as portals to the underworld. Interior
lighting was subtly modified to introduce a warmer mood into the otherwise bleak surroundings. Opal glass shades, and reflectors, cast a more even glow. They were believed to promote the concept of “night architecture,” being as visible in the darkness as in the light. They were the
last of the truly innovative stations of the twentieth century, but they were perhaps no more welcoming than their predecessors.

The
art of the Underground has an honourable place in the culture of London. The traveller descends slowly into an animated world of signs and
posters. Some of the advertisements along the escalator are now moving films, bold and garish. The colourful and sometimes strident posters on the walls of the stations continue a tradition as old as the Underground itself. The passenger is surrounded by vibrant
line and colour. The murals of David Gentleman at
Charing Cross display the stages by which the masons and craftsmen of the late thirteenth
century created the Eleanor Cross beyond the station. (In fact the cross is a replica, and is in the wrong place.) The head of Sherlock Holmes adorns the tiled walls of
Baker Street station. The mosaics of Eduardo Paolozzi decorate the walls of
Tottenham Court Road station.

The gateways to the underworld have also been embellished with striking images. A statue of an archer surmounts
East Finchley station, conceived in a style strongly reminiscent of ancient South American civilisations. His bow is aimed directly down the length of the tunnel. Griffins were carved into the walls of
Aldgate East,
St. Paul’s, and other stations; the
griffins were the monsters that protected
gold mines and buried treasure, and thus suitable creatures to guard the Underground.
A figure of Mercury is to be found over an entrance to
Bank station, and a cherub once stood above
Oxford Circus.

David Gentleman’s murals on the Northern Line platforms at Charing Cross, 1979, showing the building of the Eleanor Cross
(illustration credit Ill.33)

The latest extensions of the
Jubilee Line, south of the river, have been rendered memorable by some of the most striking architecture in contemporary London.
Canary Wharf and
North Greenwich, designed by Norman Foster and Will Alsop respectively, are triumphs of postmodern engineering. They are the dramatic portals into the underworld, and at the time of completion were
described as secular cathedrals. With their vast canopies of glass and underground caverns of steel, they represent the force of the collective will and the great general drama of the human spirit. It is the spirit of the Underground itself.

You may experience what has been called the fear and madness of crowds. Once you are immersed in this other-land, removed from the familiar world, you may suffer from inexplicable terrors.

It is a solitary experience, even though you are never alone. There is nothing joyful about the proximity to a hundred or a thousand individuals estranged one from another. The Underground is a deep pool of individual solitudes. Somehow “I” is now indistinguishable from “them.” It is a profoundly egalitarian, or flattening, process.