London Under (2 page)

Lower Robert Street is still forbidding; it is one of the few underground streets in London, and of course has the reputation of being haunted by a murdered prostitute. In his
Picturesque Sketches of London
(1852) Thomas Miller described the region of shadows lying between the Strand and the Thames with “the black-browed arches that span right and left, before and behind, covering many a rood of ground on which the rain never beats, nor the sunbeams sleep, and at the entrance of which the wind only seems to howl and whine, as if afraid of venturing further into the darkness.” They were another reminder of the London depths.

T
he geology of London is a clue to the labyrinth beneath. The city sits upon a bed of sand, gravel, clay and chalk that make up the
London Basin. Deep beneath them are the rocks of the Palaeozoic period shaped hundreds of millions of years before; no one has reached them yet. Above them lie levels of ancient materials that are known as Gault clay and upper greensand. In turn they support broad bands of chalk laid down when the site of London lay below a vast sea. Upon the chalk rests the clay. London clay is thick, viscous, and malleable; it is a greenish blue colour, but in its upper reaches it is reddish brown. It was formed more than fifty million years ago. This is the material in which the underworld of London sits. It is the material through which the tunnels of the underground railway are burrowed. The clay is compressed so heavily that all of its moisture has fled; but if the pressure is lifted it will expand and, in the words of the geologist, “come on.” We may interpret this as “come forth.”

Above the clay is a mixture of sand and gravel from which the springs of London rise; elevators and escalator-shafts lower passengers through this sandy medium. The glaciers of the Ice Age formed the rivers that still flow beneath the surface, and descend from the upper levels of the London region into the Thames. We
inhabit an inconceivably ancient space. London is based upon clay, while Manhattan is established upon layers of hard rock known as mica-schist. That accounts for the preponderance of skyscrapers in the latter city. But may it not also help to explain the manifest differences in behaviour and attitude between their citizens?

London is slowly sinking into its clay, while Manhattan seems to rise and rise into the empyrean. So we go down to the clay and the water, the old elemental things of London. They are the origin, and they may also be the ending. The deep
groundwater of the city is rising, and 15,400,000 gallons must be pumped out each day to save the entire structure.

C
ertain creatures roam the underworld.
Rats, and eels, and mice, and frogs, abound. The brown rat from Russia is the most abundant. The native black rat was in recent years supposed to exist in certain underground quarters, beneath
Oxford Street and
Canning Town, but it is now more likely to be extinct.
Sigmund Freud described the rat as a “chthonic animal,” an emblem of the uncanny rather than the horrid; it is a reminder of the darkness, of all that we fear. The underground can also be seen as a representation of the human unconscious, the formless and inchoate source of our instincts and desires. It preserves the “truth” of our identity.

It is hard to estimate the number of rats beneath the city, but urban legend that they exceed the human population can be discounted. Supersonic sound is sometimes used in the sewers, sending the vermin mad with panic so that they dash themselves against the walls. It is difficult to envisage the scene. They are in any case diminished by natural forces; if they cannot escape, they are drowned in heavy rainstorms. They are rivalled by the cockroaches that can live partly on human excrement. The oriental or common cockroach,
Blatta orientalis
, scuttles beneath the streets of central London. It lives and thrives in a horde. Reports also sometimes circulate of white crabs existing upon the walls of underground tunnels, but that may be fantastic rumour. There have even been descriptions of scorpions, an inch long and pale yellow, on the
Central Line. White atrophied creatures are often known as cavernophiles.

Stray dogs, lured by the warmth and the chance of food, come into the depths. Pigeons hop on and off the trains at convenient stations. A form of mosquito, not otherwise known in England, breeds in the tunnels with a captive population upon which to feed. The species, known as
Culex pipiens
, entered the system in the early part of the twentieth century and has been expanding ever since. A magazine,
BBC Worldlife
, reported that “the insect has evolved so fast that the difference between the overground and underground forms is as great as if they
had been separated for thousands of years.” At a deep level beneath the earth the mosquitoes have returned to their primeval origins.

The underworld is the place to which our waste and excrement are consigned. For that reason
public lavatories were once placed under the ground, to be reached by a flight of downward stairs. Those who worked underground—the miner or the “flusher” of sewers—were to be feared. They were contaminated. They were closer to the devil. Radical political groups, characteristically using terror and violence as their weapons, are still known as
“underground” movements.

When a system of underground railways was first proposed in the middle of the nineteenth century, a popular preacher declared very seriously that “the forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil.” When the trains did run beneath the surface, their noise was compared by one reporter to “the shrieking of ten thousand demons.”

The dead are also buried beneath the ground. So the underworld is a place that induces grief. The spaces beneath the City
churches were filled to bursting by the nineteenth century, and there are reports even from the medieval period of noxious vapours issuing from beneath the surface.
The
plague pits of London can be found from Aldgate to Walthamstow. These are the
areas where, if you dig, you may “let the plague out.” This fear is not entirely misplaced; the bacteria of the bubonic plague have long since been eroded, but the spores of
anthrax can survive for hundreds of years.

There is no darkness like the darkness under the ground. It is pitched past pitch of black. You cannot see your hand before your face. The darkness enters you, as if you do not exist any more. In nightmare, this is what happens to you after death. You are suspended in eternal night. But no night is as black as subterranean blackness. It takes away all instinct for motion, because there is nowhere to flee.

It can be a vision of hell itself. In all representations of supernatural justice, heaven is above and hell is below. The topography is as fixed as east and west for the rising and setting of the sun. Order and harmony are the properties of the lighted world. All below is shapeless, formless, void. Forgotten things, discarded things, secret things, are to be found deep below.

Saxon coffins of the same material lay beside them. Beneath these vestiges of a vanished civilisation were Britons, with ivory and wooden pins showing that their shrouds had been laid in rows. Below these were Roman remains and pieces of Roman pavement. Beneath these Wren found sand and seashells.
Ludgate Hill had once been under the sea.

A trackway from the
Bronze Age has been found on the
Isle of Dogs. Gravel streets from the Anglo-Saxon period follow the course of
Maiden Lane and
Shorts Gardens,
Floral Street and King Street; the houses along
Drury Lane were 39 feet long, 18 feet wide. The bustling life persists, but the evidence for it has gone under the ground. We are treading upon our ancestors. As soon as the original city was built above the ground it began to sink. As it descended beneath the earth ground-floor rooms were transformed into basements, and the front door became the door to the cellar; the first floor was then the street level. The oldest of these remains now lie some 26 feet beneath the surface. The whole history of the city is compressed to little less than 30 feet.

When the valley of
the Fleet river was being cleared in the middle of the nineteenth century the pavement of an old street was discovered at a depth of 13 feet; the paving stones had been worn smooth by the passage of traffic and by innumerable footsteps. Below this street were found piles of oak, hard and black, of which the purpose was not clear. A few feet below the oak were
ancient wooden pipes, which were essentially the hollowed trunks of trees. All these layers of city history were packed so tightly together that they formed a solid mass of clay, gravel, wood and stone. Just at the level of the street, a great number of pins were scattered. Whether they were hairpins, or sewing pins, the sources do not reveal.

Excavation of a Roman pavement in Walbrook in 1869
(illustration credit Ill.2)

There have in fact been stray discoveries of underground London over the centuries.
John Stow, in the sixteenth century, reports the discovery of the shank-bone
of a “monstrous” man who stood at a height of 10 or 12 feet. It was found within St. Paul’s Churchyard among other bones. It seemed to Stow, therefore, that tales about a race of giants inhabiting the earth were actual truth. It is clear that these “gyants’ bones” were in fact those of a mammoth. It is sufficient to note the fact that there were considered to be marvels buried under the ground.
Coins and small
statues were always being found but, according to the law of the land, “treasure hid in the earth and found shall belong to the Crown.” In the medieval period there was little interest in what lay beneath, except as a possible home for buried treasure. The underworld was otherwise the domain of demons, and should not be touched. The first Englishmen to conduct proper archaeological studies,
John Aubrey and
William Stukeley, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, decided to concentrate on more visible sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury. Stukeley did find evidence of Julius
Caesar’s camp by
Old St. Pancras Church, and traced the line of Roman roads through eighteenth-century London; but that was the extent of his interest. The city was in any case expanding so rapidly, extending in all directions, that no real attention was paid to the subterranean world. In a period of exponential growth, the past does not exist.

Yet it was there. In 1832 a colossal head of the emperor Hadrian was retrieved from the Thames in which it had been buried for 1,700 years. In 1865 a gang of workmen,
digging beneath the surface of
Oxford Street, found a curious trap-door. They opened it and were astonished to find a flight of sixteen brick steps. They followed them and “entered a room of considerable size.” The walls were built of red brick, with eight arches originally designed to let in the light. In the middle of the chamber was a pool or bath, about 6 feet in depth. It was half-full of water, and a spring could still be seen bubbling up. It was in all probability a Roman
baptistery in which the water still flowed from a tributary of
the Tyburn. Yet it was demolished to make way for new building. There was still very little interest in what lay under the ground and it was consigned to what one contemporary publication called “the abyss of oblivion.”

When in 1867 building work was being undertaken in
Bouverie Street, off
Fleet Street, the crypt of an ancient
Carmelite monastery was revealed. It was promptly converted into a coal cellar. In the nineteenth century the world under the ground was considered in some way to be dirty and diseased. Subsequent excavations in 1910 revealed that this crypt “is of dressed stonework.… Deep ribs, springing from the angles and from the centre of each side, meet in a large boss carved with a rose.” So in imagination the monastery of Whitefriars rises from the ground of Fleet Street and its environs. We may see the monks in the garden walks and hear them singing their orisons. The Cheshire Cheese tavern rests upon the northern gatehouse; a garden lane, just
beyond the northern wall of the monastery, has become
Wine Office Court. Part of the crypt can still be seen in
Ashentree Court, off Whitefriars Street. It nudges the passer-by into the consciousness of the past, but it is not much visited. When
County Hall was being built, in 1910, part of a Roman
ship emerged from the black silt of the ancient river; it had been sunk by a stone cannonball at the end of the third century. Thus, in random and accidental manner, that which had been buried once more came into the light.