The Subterranean Railway (15 page)

Watkin, incidentally, set about creating an even more direct rival to the Eiffel Tower, a similar but bigger construction at Wembley, also with the aim of attracting passengers on to his railway. But like many of Watkin’s schemes, the project was only half completed. Watkin had wanted Gustave Eiffel himself to build a tower higher than his eponymous 900-foot-high steel spire in Paris. When Eiffel turned down the job, the contract was awarded to a rival firm with a similar plan for an eight-legged steel tower with two platforms each containing restaurants, theatres, exhibitions and even Turkish baths. The first stage, 155 feet high, but with only four legs, was opened in 1896 but attracted remarkably little custom. While, in the first six months, 100,000 visited the park where the tower was the centrepiece, fewer than a fifth, barely 100 people per day, paid to climb up it. Most visitors to the site were more interested by the cycle track and the sports ground laid out around the tower or were content simply to view from the ground what soon became known as Watkin’s folly. By the time the park opened, Watkin, weakened by his stroke, was too ill to push the project forward and the tower was never completed, but its first stage survived for a decade before being demolished. The site was used after the First World War for the British Empire Exhibition and the internationally famous football stadium, which would have pleased Watkin as they both attracted considerable railway traffic.

Another boost to Underground use was the growing entertainment market. Theatres were booming and, more significantly in terms of numbers, music halls were springing up everywhere in London: by the early 1890s there were thirty-five, with total audiences of 45,000 nightly. Many of these, including the biggest, the Oxford Music Hall at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, were in central London, within easy reach of a railway or Underground station.

While leisure travellers were an important market, especially in certain key locations and particularly for the District, the financial health of the underground companies was dependent on development around the stations which they served. Although some historians refuse to give credit to the railways or the Underground for creating much of London, arguing that railways tended to follow, rather than stimulate, development, much evidence points the other way. The confusion results from the length of time it took for the whole process of development to unfold. Even once, after a few years, substantial numbers of houses had been built, they would not all be occupied by commuters. The suburbs would soon have a few shops and artisans to service the needs of those with jobs in central London and these roles would not require commuting. Moreover, for every commuter there would also be possibly half a dozen servants and family members whose lives centred around home. These basic facts, of course, were of no use to the chairmen of the railway companies, who would urge patience on their desperate shareholders by explaining that passenger numbers would eventually increase.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the change brought about by the railways was significant and, most important, long-term. These former villages would never be the same again and over the space of half a century, as they began to merge with one another, their independent origins would be quickly forgotten. Take, for example, West Kensington, a rural area where the arrival of the District line prompted building that was ‘rapidly carried on where speculative builders had money or credit; the tall houses, detached or semi-detached, or in
closed lines improperly called “terraces” which ultimately became the sides of streets, rose up in a few months, roofed and windowed, calling for tenants’.
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It was, to a great extent, happenstance that dictated which markets such developers decided to go for. In West Kensington, the large houses were, according to the local builders Gibbs & Flew, provided with ‘hot and cold water … while the encaustic tiles, stained glass and marble fenders give them an attractive appearance’. Other areas, such as the squares near Ladbroke Grove station, never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries in north-west Kensington. It was only with the gentrification process which started nearly a hundred years later, in the 1970s, that these squares started to attract the class for which they had been built. Yet, a few hundred of yards away, at the Holland Park end of Ladbroke Grove, the houses, many perched on the hill, retained their desirability and have always been occupied by the rich.

Paddington, terminus of the first Underground line, even failed to attract the right sort of developer, let alone tenant. Its situation was always precarious because of its proximity to the foul rookeries of North Kensington and to the houses which were run up in the Harrow Road, intended for poor railway workers, smiths and labourers. Indeed, the construction of the Metropolitan Railway made matters worse for Paddington by creating a demand, albeit temporary, for cheap lodgings, prompting the departure of the ‘respectable’ working class and the decline of the area into a slum.

Crudely, though, the arrival of the Metropolitan or the District stimulated the building of housing aimed at the affluent, even if eventually they could not be attracted there, whereas the horse tram services which simultaneously sprang up catered for poorer folk. The tram network was developed along the major highways of London, making, as Roy Porter put it, ‘inner-suburb living easier for those lower on the social ladder’.
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Trams were banned from the West End and from all but the borders of the City because they were perceived
as being only for the lower orders and the local councillors feared they would bring down the tone of the area.

Of course, the railway companies, once they had seen the high usage on the early London suburban railways and of the Underground, also began to provide an extensive network of local services whose stations stimulated massive development. Whole swathes of the Greater London area were filled in as the railways focused on local traffic. In particular, the railways made travel to the outer suburbs such as Croydon, Bromley, Harrow, Wanstead and Walthamstow possible, as no other form of transportation could have brought so many people into the capital fast enough. This was, mostly, a middle-class phenomenon. The working classes could not afford the cost of commuting added to the rents which, in most of the areas reached by the railways, were still relatively high. The exceptions were some of the districts served by the Metropolitan with its workmen’s trains and the north-east quadrant of London where places such as Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Tottenham (all now, incidentally, connected to the Underground network on the Central or Victoria lines) saw the rapid construction of large concentrations of low-rent houses in dull, serried ranks, aimed at manual workers who were served by Great Eastern services. That company had been required to provide workmen’s trains at the startlingly cheap rate of twopence for journeys as long as twenty-two miles return as a condition for having cleared a vast swathe of working-class housing to build its Liverpool Street terminus, and it continued offering these incredibly low fares until 1920. Slightly more salubrious suburbs, such as Chingford, Enfield and Wood Green, were populated mainly by clerical workers who were able to purchase half-price tickets on trains which ran slightly later than the workmen’s services.

This process meant that more affluent residents fled further out to the likes of Epping and Barking, leaving behind houses which were often then pulled down by the rampant developers because they were too large for the rents that the working class could afford and the builders could not be bothered to adapt them. The availability or
otherwise of workmen’s trains therefore created segregated suburbs, with the appropriate type of developers following the railway. The definition of ‘workmen’ was sometimes determined more by the time of their regular train than by their true position in society. In 1898, the
Railway Magazine
published a photograph of the arrival of a workmen’s train from which, as one historian put it, ‘the majority of the passengers passing through the barrier were wearing the silk hats and morning coats that were then
de rigueur
even among junior employees in city offices’.
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The Underground played a vital role in stimulating this growth not just because of the suburban incursions made by the District and Metropolitan but also because it took people right into the heart of the City and the West End, whereas rail passengers were left on the fringes. Without the Underground to connect the various termini, the extensive development in the second half of the nineteenth century could never have taken place so quickly. London grew from a population of 2.8 million in 1861 to over 7 million fifty years later. That outward push was further accelerated by the development of a new office economy, centred around the West End which had a burgeoning number of offices and was also establishing itself as London’s premier retail centre. Employment in the City was also expanding, with many former residences being turned into offices, and resulting in more commuting. Whitehall, very convenient for Underground travellers, was filling up with civil servants, of whom there were 160,000 by the early 1900s. The ministries dealing with education, the colonies, war and the Navy all grew substantially in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods as the state increasingly adopted a more interventionist role, and the great majority of these civil servants worked in London.

The Underground system was not only used by vast numbers of commuters, both directly and connecting in from the main line railway, but also attracted other sections of the population who travelled on it for business or leisure purposes. For example, there were the innumerable messengers who, before the invention of the
telephone, were the principal way of conveying information quickly between offices.

Even more important were the various groups of leisure travellers. The most significant in terms of numbers were the shoppers visiting the large department stores which had begun to spring up following the opening of the Army and Navy store in 1872. Surprisingly, the biggest shops were not initially sited in the centre, but were rather like today’s out-of-town developments, attracted to the fringes of the metropolis for the same reason: the cheapness of land. Thus Harrods, which had first been transformed from a small grocery into a general store in 1861, was already flourishing by 1880 and employing 100 people. The biggest success story, though, was at Bayswater where Whiteleys became the most impressive of the early department stores. The Westbourne Grove shop opened in 1863, a few weeks after the first section of the Metropolitan, which terminated a mile away in Paddington. By 1872, the store occupied ten shops and employed over 600 people and was, of course, served by Bayswater station which had opened in 1868. Others were brought in by omnibus, of which 700 per day were serving the area by 1885. The District considered the market to be so important that it even launched a parcels service to relieve shoppers of their goods on the homeward journey.
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A trip to the shops in Bayswater or Knightsbridge, and later Oxford Street, was little different from a visit today to the huge modern malls such as Bluewater or Lakeside. The popularity of shopping did much to boost the railways’ off-peak travel, which was vital for their economic well-being. Catering solely for commuters is never enough to sustain a railway, given that they make two trips per day at peak hours, leaving the expensive rolling stock unused for the rest of the time. There were also, of course, the weekend leisure travellers who came to visit London’s parks as well as the museums and exhibitions. The Underground may not have brought them all in, but it certainly smoothed their passage around the capital.

Even from the perspective of a modern-day viewpoint, it is impossible
to disentangle these various phenomena. Certainly the railways, and the Underground in particular, did enable many people to make journeys that would otherwise have been impossible. All these exhibitions, shops and shows would not have sprung up without this new ability to travel around the capital. But the extent to which each mode of travel was responsible is difficult to discern.

The popularity of the Underground attracted unwanted attention, too – from terrorists. The first attack on the Underground took place as early as 1883 when, on 30 October, two bombs were detonated by Irish independence fighters. One went off near Praed Street Station, (now incorporated into Paddington) on a Metropolitan train heading towards Edgware Road, and the other on a District train between Westminster and Charing Cross (now Embankment).

Neither explosion caused any fatalities, and injuries – mainly from flying glass – were slight. There was no subsequent panic in London, although, despite the efforts of the police and offers of reward, the perpetrators were never found. Bombers struck again in February 1884, and this time their plans were more ambitious as they attempted to attack four major London stations – Victoria, Charing Cross, Ludgate Hill and Paddington – simultaneously, but only the one at Victoria actually detonated. Fortunately, the station was almost deserted and again no lives were lost, but nor was any culprit found.

These attacks on stations and the Underground were part of a wider bombing campaign by a group known as
Clan na Gael
including a particularly audacious attempt to blow up Scotland Yard which caused some damage to its records on Irish republicans and, but for the failure of some of the dynamite to detonate, might have resulted in the building’s total destruction.

This spurred police on to mount a big investigation. Security was tightened up on public buildings, but the Underground system was vulnerable. There was another bombing on 2 January 1885, in the tunnel of the Metropolitan Line between Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King’s Cross stations. This time the bomb blew up in
the tunnel, rather than on the train, and again caused little damage. Indeed, it was not realized there had been an attack until the train reached King’s Cross and the investigators reckoned it was caused by a bomb from a train going in the other direction. That attack was the work of a man called James Cunningham who was arrested later that month after having been seen lighting the fuse for an attack on the Tower of London in which four people were seriously injured. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for both attacks and the bombing attempts by these ‘dynamitards’ as they were known petered out as several men had blown themselves up and, thanks to informers and splits in the organization, twenty-five others given penal servitude.