London Under (18 page)

Londoners sleeping on the
escalators in 1940
(illustration credit Ill.40)

The government, and the officials of London Transport, soon understood that the situation was not going to be improved by inaction. Seventy-nine stations were designated as shelters for the civilian population; season tickets were issued for those using them regularly, and elementary measures of hygiene and sanitation were imposed. Wooden bunks were installed, to be replaced by metal versions when the wood became infested with vermin. It was determined that six people should occupy 6 feet of platform; three lay in bunks against the platform wall, while three others lay in front of them upon the platform itself. White lines were drawn, 8 feet and 4 feet from the edge of the platform, to designate sleeping areas. A special group of tunnel inspectors came into operation, and before long a refreshment service was introduced. Fifty-two lending libraries were established, and automatic cigarette machines were put in place. Some shelterers produced their own newspapers. The
Swiss Cottager
, for example, introduced itself to “nightly companions, temporary cave-dwellers, sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage station of the Bakerloo Line from dusk to dawn.” In its second number it advised that “vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”

It was perhaps what the authorities had feared, a world beneath the world. It was another city below the
surface city. An underground race had been born. Yet it was still a fetid and noisome world, with the forced proximity of tens of thousands of people in barely habitable conditions. It resembled the rookeries of nineteenth-century London, and might have produced a population just as fearful and desperate. It also furnished an abiding image of the underworld as a place of filth and refuse.

There were casualties. When
Trafalgar Square station was bombed, seven people died. A similar incident at
Bounds Green killed nineteen people.
Balham station suffered a direct hit, killing sixty-four. One of the survivors recounted how he heard a massive roar overhead just before all the lights on the platforms went out. This was the nightmare of those living under the ground, with the return of primordial darkness. “Then there was a smell of gas, and the children were shouting out for their gas masks. I got my torch and I flashed it up and saw water was pouring down in torrents.” He managed to open an emergency escape hatch. He still had the scars on his hands where people had been clawing at him. Other bombs penetrated the underground world. One train driver recalled that “I seemed to have a sort of fear of the tunnel—of something coming through the tunnel.” A signalman at King’s Cross recalled “a terrible rush of wind. I stood over the levers and put my fingers in my ears. I remember feeling a rush of wind, and when I woke up I was lying down on the floor.”

So there were the familiar fears of fire and
flooding
associated with the underworld. The tunnels under the Thames were deemed to be most at risk; if a bomb pierced the tunnel and the water of the river came in, half of the entire Underground system would have been quickly deluged. From Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street, from Hammersmith to
King’s Cross, the water would have raged through the tunnels at an enormous velocity. So a sequence of twenty-five flood-gates was constructed, some of which still survive at the entrances of certain vulnerable tunnels. In the event only one tunnel beside the river suffered a direct hit. An old tunnel connecting Strand and
Charing Cross stations was penetrated; 200 yards of its length were immediately filled with water but, fortunately, it had been sealed at both ends with concrete plugs.

Crypts and underground warehouses were also in use. Two huge subterranean facilities in the East End, “Tilbury” under Commercial Road and
“Mickey’s Shelter” under Stepney, became havens for the local population. Mickey’s Shelter was named after a hunchbacked dwarf, by trade an optician, who organised the 10,000 people taking refuge with authority and resolution. He was one of the kings of the underworld. He had come forward in the face of the inaction of the government. The people had taken over the shelter and ran it for themselves. The administration had to all intents and purposes abandoned them.

In the autumn of 1940 the Tilbury shelter was
described as “a dim cavernous immensity” and as a “vast dim, cathedral-like structure.” An observer reported that “the floor was awash with urine.… Some horses were still stabled there, and their mess mingled with that of the humans … The place was a hell-hole, it was an outrage that people had to live in these conditions.” This was the underground world to which the East Enders had fled. No heroism, or bravery, manifested itself; only misery and squalor.
Henry Moore also visited Tilbury and in his notes recorded “Dramatic, dismal lit, masses of reclining figures fading foreground. Chains hanging from old cranes.” This could have been the lower depths
of the nineteenth century outlined in the engravings of Gustave Doré. Yet misery has no history.

Henry Moore,
Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers
, 1941
(illustration credit Ill.41)

These conditions underground promoted political radicalism, as if an “under-class” were truly ready to revolt. The
Swiss Cottager
denounced the government’s “indifference amounting almost to callousness, neglect, soulless contempt for elementary human decencies.” Partly as a result of public anger and concern, the government did begin the construction of eight deep-level shelters beneath existing underground stations, each of them able to hold 8,000 people; they were laid at a depth of approximately 90 feet. Half of them were converted to other uses as the war continued, but certain portals in the form of large
Martello towers can still be seen on the surface as troglodytic monuments. That of
Goodge Street stands on the corner of
Chenies Street and
Tottenham Court Road, while that of
Stockwell has been converted into a war memorial. These portals could be knocked down, and the deep tunnels filled in, but what would be the purpose? Underground space has acquired the status of dark matter, unseen yet somehow maintaining the structure of the visible world. The portals are the gateways to immensity containing all that is hidden and all that is forgotten.

A character in
The War of the Worlds
(1898) by H. G. Wells, in fear of the extraterrestrial invaders, states that

The fantasy of the underworld as a place of safety goes very deep. It is also an atavistic home. The female protagonist of Margaret Drabble’s novel
The Middle Ground
(1980) cannot resist the odour of a street grating; she succumbs to the “powerful odour of London” that allows her to “escape the prison of the present into the past, where dark spirits swarm in the fast-moving flood.”

Other fantasies are of a more surreal cast. The tribes of Inner Mongolia believe that their country harbours portals to a giant tunnel that leads to a subterranean world dating from prehistory. The notion of a prehistoric world buried beneath the surface is compelling, and has excited the attention of many visionaries; Jules Verne’s
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1864) is one example.

Reports and speculations abound on the subject of an underground race. The narrator of Michael Moorcock’s
Mother London
(1988) had once sought safety in the Underground system in the period of the Blitz, and since that time had become obsessed with “lost tube lines.” These led him to fascinated speculation about the presence of an underground world beneath the surface of the city. “I discovered evidence that London was interlaced with connecting tunnels, home of a troglodytic race that had gone underground at the time of the Great Fire.… Others had hinted at a London under London in a variety of texts as far back as Chaucer.” Reports are common of “lizard people,” inhabiting caverns beneath the earth, and of the survivors from a sunken continent known as
Lemuria. All is true in underground writing. Other narrators have told stories of tall beings that inhabit an underground world. They may be benign, meaning no harm to those above the surface, but there have also been tales of cannibals and other predators who attack those who live upon the outer earth.

The classic expression of this fantasy is to be found in Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1895) when the narrator travels to the site of London some 800,000 years in the future. The Eloi live upon the surface in apparent bliss, but they are in fact being reared by a pale race of underground creatures known as the Morlocks; the Morlocks feed upon the Eloi, suggesting that the power and energy of the surface civilisation come from beneath in a
world of mechanism. The underworld was a place where “great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the by, was very stuffy and oppressive …” It seemed that “Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed!” Wells wrote his novel in the London of the early 1890s, at a time when the Underground system was in the throes of its expansion. So the narrator of
The Time Machine
remarks that “there is a tendency to utilise the underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.”

Legends and rumours concerning great kingdoms under the ground, with ancient tunnel systems leading to the upper world, are ubiquitous. Yet fantasies have an odd way of approximating or anticipating reality; if London continues to grow, taking up all available space, it may in some remote future be obliged as a last resort to go under the ground. Charles Knight, the mid-Victorian chronicler of London, was once moved to suggest that London might go the way of Babylon. He would envy the “delight with which the antiquaries of that future time would hear of some discovery of a
London below
the soil
still remaining.” That subterranean city exists even now.

The underground world also invites images of the sublime. The vastness of the space, a second earth, elicits sensations of wonder and of terror. It partakes of myth and dream in equal measure. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” Edmund Burke wrote, in his
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), “…  is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” He added that “terror is in all cases whatsoever … the ruling principle of the sublime.” So we may view the underworld. The individual is unimportant in this subterranean world, a mere shadow on the wall—if, indeed, shadows can be seen in such darkness. There is a world, or worlds, within the world. Within the interior of the globe there may be a vast sea. There may be worlds where ancient creatures roam or where trees walk.

In Wells’s
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1910) the narrator journeys through a subterranean world beneath London where there are “fluctuating pictures of swathed halls, and crowded vaults seen through clouds of dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles of sleeping places, illimitable vistas of pin-point lights.” This is a vista of immensity, taken up by many accounts of vast
and elaborate underground civilisations with wild and delicate architecture, with a strange and suffused light, with marvellous perfumes and music. The underworld is a place of fantastic future cities, and Oswald Spengler believed that the cities of the future would indeed resemble great caves or caverns of stone. The fantasy only precedes the reality. In certain areas of London, where space is expensive, many owners of properties are already digging down and creating large subterranean spaces for a variety of uses. Some houses have been extended four storeys beneath the earth.