London Under (16 page)

When in the spring of 1897
The Idler
published a weekly serial featuring a murderer on the loose in the trains under the earth, the number of Underground travellers dropped markedly. The adventures had hit upon a nerve of real fear. In Baroness Orczy’s
The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway
(1908) a woman is killed in a carriage of the Metropolitan Railway at Aldgate station. The murderer cannot be found, an emblem of the essential anonymity of the Underground that was confirmed in the unsolved real killing of
Countess Teresa Lubienska who was stabbed to death at
Gloucester Road station in 1957. In an underworld where everyone’s identity is in large part concealed, how will a suspect ever be captured?

In
The Mysteries of Modern London
(1906) George Sims speculates on the identity of a passenger who “travelled to
Whitechapel by the underground railway, often late at night. Probably on several occasions he had but one fellow passenger in the compartment with him, and that may have been a woman. Imagine what the feelings of those travellers would have been had they known
that they were alone in the dark tunnels of the Underground with
Jack the Ripper?” There are no individuals in the Underground; there is only a crowd. In John
Galsworthy’s
Man of Property
(1906) Soames Forsyte enters the Tube at Sloane Square and notices that “these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of fog, took no notice of each other.”

The police find the body of Catherine Eddowes in a Whitechapel cellar, murdered by Jack the Ripper in 1888 (illustration credit Ill.36)

A
project known as “Alight Here,” established in 2010, has been established to collect any poems inspired by London’s Underground stations. It is indeed the proper material of poetry.
Seamus Heaney’s “The Underground,” for example, employs the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of vaulted tunnels and lamplit stations.

There are films, too, that speculate upon the shadows cast by the world underground. In
Death Line
(1972) (distributed as
Raw Meat
in the United States) a troglodytic race preys upon unwary travellers; this is an enduring fantasy of the Underground, and has taken many forms. It exploits the fear that many disturbed or dangerous people prefer to live beneath the earth. In
The Mysterious Planet
(a 1986 serial in the
Doctor Who
dramas) set in the remote future, a race of humans lives among the ruins of Marble Arch station. In
Quatermass and the Pit
(1967) an alien spacecraft is found buried deep in an Underground station named Hobbs End; this is a genuinely disturbing film in which all the associations of the underworld, with death and with the devil, are fully exploited.

Anthony Asquith’s
Underground
, a silent film made in 1928, is an invaluable record of the Tube system at a relatively early date. The hero is a young official of the Underground, and the villain is an employee at
Lots Road Power Station; the two aspects of the Tube, the congregation of people and the raw power of the system, are subtly aligned. The film also emphasises the extent to which the Underground introduces itself into the mental and emotional life of its passengers. It becomes as much a protagonist as the characters themselves.

There is now a literature on the Underground, as well as of the Underground.
“Poems on the Underground,” a project launched at
Aldwych station in January 1986, has now been imitated by many cities and countries. The chosen lyric is placed in the carriages alongside the usual advertisements; it has often been confirmed that passengers will read and memorise the chosen poem as a memorial of their journey. The words of the poem are enshrined in the carriage and seem to float above the passengers’ heads. So poets as diverse as William Blake and Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Arthur Symons sing in concert beneath the ground. Ah sunflower … your hair is exceedingly white … Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines … as a windmill turns in the wind on an empty sky.

I understand how the Underground can become an essential part of the personality. My dreams and memories have always been associated with the
Central Line. I
was brought up in East Acton, and educated at a school in Ealing Broadway. At various points of my early life I lived at Shepherd’s Bush, Queensway and Notting Hill Gate. When I worked in an office I alighted from the train at Tottenham Court Road and then, at a later date, at Holborn or Chancery Lane. The Central Line was one of the boundaries or lines of my life. Now that I am beyond its reach, I feel free.

Yet, like the escaped prisoner yearning for his dungeon, I often dream of the Underground. I dream of lines going to improbable destinations all over the world. I dream of strange encounters on platforms with people I seem to know. I dream of coming up for air and being confronted by a transformed cityscape. I dream of running down passages in search of a platform. I dream of gliding down vast escalators. I dream of crossing the live rails from platform to platform. I dream of standing unsteadily in a carriage as it rattles along. And, yes, I dream of the Central Line.

The notion of hidden treasure is a pervasive one. The
London Silver Vaults are below the ground of
Chancery Lane, and the Crown Jewels were until recently kept in a bunker beneath the Tower.

The temptation to bury precious objects is very strong, especially in times of danger. Criminal fraternities may bury their gains for many months before retrieving them. Jewels,
coins,
gold and silver plate, will still lie under the ground. If they could be unearthed, they would dazzle the city. A hoard of
Roman gold coins, placed within a purse and then within a box, has been found in the
City of London. During the Great Fire of 1666
Samuel Pepys buried his Parmesan cheese and wine in his London garden. His was an ancient instinct. The underworld, however, is not always safe. In the same conflagration the booksellers of
St. Paul’s Churchyard put all their stock into the parish church of
St. Faith’s, in the crypt of the cathedral, but the collapsed roof of the cathedral broke through. When the booksellers opened the vault the rush of air made the paper leap into flames and the books burned for a week. Charles Dickens exhibited a proper London fascination for underground places when he declared in an essay,
“The City of the Absent” (1861), that “the deserted wine-merchants’ cellars are fine subjects for consideration; but the deserted money cellars of the
bankers, and their plate cellars, and their jewel cellars, what subterranean regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these!”

The
Jewel House in the Tower of London, 1841
(illustration credit Ill.37)

The lamp still burns brightly. As the price of
gold rises ever higher many London
banks are building larger and deeper vaults to accommodate the precious metal; they are great caverns of treasure. It is estimated that 250 million ounces of gold are concealed beneath the ground. But no London cellar is more wonderful than the vaults of the
Bank of England. They contain the second biggest hoard of gold bullion on the planet. A network of tunnels, radiating out from the bank, runs beneath the City streets. Several thousand bars of 24-carat gold, each one weighing 28 pounds, are stored within them. They may be said to light up the bowels of the earth.

Y
ou would not know, on walking along
High Holborn or
Whitehall, that there is a secret world beneath your feet. There is no echo, no sign or token, of corridors and chambers below the surface. You would pass its gateways without giving them a second glance. Everything is contrived to seem as normal as possible. It is only when you understand the nature of underground London that you come to realise that everything is in fact something else. So the contagion of secrecy spreads.

In the centre of the capital, where the government agencies are situated, an underground world has been created. It is made up of tunnels, exchanges, bunkers, cubicles and larger command spaces. Many of them
were created in the period before and during the Second World War; others were constructed at the time of nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. Yet despite the passing of these immediate dangers, some of them are still in use for purpose or purposes unknown.

The arrival of the ingots, 1930
(illustration credit Ill.38)

In 1939 a tunnel was constructed from the south side of
Trafalgar Square to
the Cenotaph, but this was only the first stage in what became a large underground network. The original tunnel was soon extended to what
purported to be a telephone exchange in Craig’s Court at the top of
Whitehall; the exchange is still there, and remains almost completely unnoticed. The tunnels were then deepened and widened to take in
Parliament Square,
Great Smith Street,
Pall Mall,
Marsham Street,
Horseferry Road, with an emergency exit in the basement of the
old Westminster Hospital. It is an extensive network of underground life connected with the workings of the government.

A door can be found at the bottom of the
Duke of York Steps that lead down from
Carlton House Terrace into
the Mall; a very large extractor fan is fastened to an adjacent wall. The door itself is barely visible. Another portal is to be found on the opposite side of the road, within the great ivy-covered bunker on the edge of
Horse Guards Parade known as the Citadel. There were once four such “citadels,” the portals to subterranean London. Of more open access are the
Cabinet War Rooms buried beneath
the Treasury. But other rooms and tunnels connected to it are not available for public inspection, for the simple reason that they are connected to the same complex beneath Whitehall.

In 1942 a vast and elaborate underground structure was built 100 feet beneath
High
Holborn, extending from
Furnival Street and
Chancery Lane to
Red Lion Street in the north. It was designed to contain a deep bunker and a telephone exchange. An entrance can be found at 39 Furnival Street, and another at 31 High Holborn.
They are both easy to miss, and are deliberately designed to be as unmemorable and as unobtrusive as possible. In
Furnival Street are two black double doors that might lead to a warehouse; above them is a large iron pulley, for moving freight, and an air vent. Ventilation shafts are also visible in the adjacent
Took’s Court.