Underground, Overground (10 page)

A well set-up, bourgeois Victorian railway then … except that right from the start the District was broke, and the reaching out to west London and commuters, and the chasing after exhibitions and pleasure trips, were a desperate attempt to pull in revenue in support of its main task: the building of the base of the cursed Inner Circle. This was to be built beneath property considerably more desirable and expensive than even those in the District's suburbs, and the costs of way leaves, of compensation, underpinning and outright purchases would prove crippling. That Christmas Eve opening in 1868 from South Kensington to Westminster? Desperation. The District was hoping for a big Christmas Day traffic.

That first stretch incorporated Sloane Square (where the Westbourne river had to be captured and inserted into its pipe), Victoria (there would be no profitable connection to the main line station until a subway was built in 1878) and St James's Park. It cost £3 million, absorbing all the debenture and share capital the company had taken up. Investors were now warier of Underground railways. They had seen that the Metropolitan was bringing in lower returns, having broached its City extensions. But the newly established Metropolitan Board of Works (the first London-wide authority) pressed the District to continue with the next part of the plan – Westminster to Blackfriars – so that the building of the railway could go in tandem with the construction of the new Thames Embankment and the sewer it incorporated. The District Railway staggered into Blackfriars in May 1870. This stretch incorporated Embankment (called Charing Cross on opening) and Temple station, which had to have a very modestly proportioned station building on the insistence of
the Duke of Norfolk, who owned the land on which it was built, and where the trains under the glass roof of the station were not allowed to blow their whistles, at the insistence of the barristers in the nearby Inns of Court. The District may seem to have been unfairly burdened with travails, but it should be remembered that many other railway companies had wanted to build central London railways, and it was widely anticipated that a completed Circle Line would bring huge profits. Widely, but wrongly.

Initially, the District operated shuttle services along its own line, using the rolling stock of the Metropolitan because, according to the agreement between the companies, the District would build stations and lines but not operate trains. It was not happy with this arrangement, and in 1870 the District broke away from the Metropolitan, a decision associated with the arrival as Managing Director of James Staats Forbes, already mentioned as General Manager of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway.

The District ordered its own engines and carriages, and so now it was a proper railway. It asserted its independence by creating its own platforms at the stations it was supposed to share with the Metropolitan, namely those where the railways converged in the south-west corner of the not yet circular Circle: High Street Kensington, Gloucester Road and South Kensington. It also built its own connection between High Street Kensington and Gloucester Road, duplicating the Metropolitan's line around that corner, which was already known as the ‘Cromwell Curve'. The District's duplication – which would allow it to save money (it would not have to pay to use the Metropolitan's tracks here) – would be used intermittently and cause a number of legal disputes. It too was sometimes known as the ‘Cromwell Curve', so the whole matter is confusing. A couple of years ago my wife and
I were out with another couple in a pub. The women were talking schools, and I leaned across to ask the other man (a trainspotter, albeit of a sophisticated sort), ‘What can you tell me about the Cromwell Curve?' He smiled seraphically for a while, saying, ‘You know, I think I'll settle for just being asked the question.'

It's possible that Arthur Conan Doyle was also interested in the Cromwell Curve. In the Sherlock Holmes story
The Bruce-Partington Plans
, which was written in 1908 but set in 1895, the body of Arthur Cadogan West, a civil servant, is dropped onto the top of an Underground train somewhere west of Aldgate, where the body is discovered. Holmes surmises that it must have been lowered onto the carriage at a place where trains pause and the carriages roofs are accessible. Holmes has a ‘vague memory' that a west London street called Caulfield Gardens overlooks an Underground cutting, where the trains stop because of an intersection with another railway. To summarise the thousands of words of internet speculation about the whereabouts of the fictional Caulfield Gardens … it has been suggested that what Conan Doyle – as opposed to Holmes – vaguely had in mind was the junction of the Cromwell Curve with the line carrying District trains west of Gloucester Road. (The story, by the way, contains this superb message sent from Holmes to Watson: ‘Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel and a revolver.')

In July 1871 the District crawled a bit nearer to the Metropolitan in the south-
eastern
corner, progressing beyond Blackfriars to Mansion House. Now an ‘Inner Circle' service began to operate, albeit with a gap between Mansion House and Aldgate. So if you wanted to go from, say, Blackfriars to Farringdon, you could only go the long way round. The trains ran every ten minutes.

In 1872, following a series of financial setbacks, the Met brought in Sir Edward Watkin as chairman. He was also
chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincoln Railway, and of the South Eastern Railway, the latter being the great rival of the London, Chatham & Dover because of territorial disputes in Kent. Staats Forbes, now of the District, had been running the London, Chatham & Dover during these clashes, and the two now imported their rivalry to London.

By 1875 the Metropolitan and the District were carrying about 100 million passengers a year on their branches and their unclosed circle. The figure today for the entire Underground network serving a larger city is 1.1 billion, so the number is impressive. But it ought not to surprise us because London, as we've seen, was booming, with rapid population growth creating not only crowded trains but also more traffic ‘locks', and congestion on the streets of the City. So the Metropolitan Board of Works pressed again for the completion of the Circle. But the penny was beginning to drop: even a successful railway could be crippled by its capital costs.

The Metropolitan and the District being unwilling to complete the Circle, another group of opportunists set up the Metropolitan Inner Circle Completion Company to do the job. (There was no escaping that word ‘Metropolitan'.) This it proposed to do in conjunction with the building of a spur to Whitechapel, connecting with the East London Railway, which ran from New Cross in south-east London to Liverpool Street via Wapping. The Met and the District wanted a piece of this action. As we will see, they had both been spreading out into the western suburbs when they were supposed to be building the Circle – ‘playing away' like a couple in a bad marriage. Here was a chance to pick up passengers from the other side of London.

An independent inquiry recommended that the Met and the
District complete the circle, rather than third parties, and, motivated by the prospect of the East London connection, they now did so. In September 1882 the Metropolitan reached the Tower of London, where it opened a station of that name (now Tower Hill). It was made of wood, and built in sixty hours flat, before the District could object to this station being ‘bagged' by the Met as part of its own stretch of a completed Circle. A childish move, yes, and carrying the fingerprints of the stroppy Sir Edward Watkin, but it brought Inner Circle completion within sight, and in October 1884 the gap was closed by joint construction of lines between Tower of London and Mansion House.

On 6 October 1884 the Inner Circle came into operational life, using the trains of the Metropolitan and the District and running over tracks that were also cluttered up with pure Metropolitan trains, pure District trains and a variety of other services. Trains on the Circle service were about every ten minutes, as compared with every seven minutes today. Metropolitan trains ran clockwise around the outer line; District ran anti-clockwise on the inner. Yes, that's the inner rail of the
Inner
Circle. Your ticket was stamped with ‘O' or ‘I', depending on which way you were going. You were supposed to be given a ticket for the shortest route around the circle, but in 1884, when many legal differences arose over the operation of the line, you would very likely be given a ticket for the ‘O' or the ‘I' depending on whether you'd bought it at a Met or a District ticket office. So if you bought a ticket at Notting Hill Gate (a Met station) to go to Sloane Square (District), you might be sent by the ‘O' (twenty-three stops) as against the ‘I' (four stops).

The line was trouble when it opened, and it is trouble today. In 1901 the pioneer of electric tramways in America, Frank Sprague, rode around the Inner Circle. He condemned it as ‘a travesty on rapid transit'. We've already seen the difficulty of operating steam engines in tunnels, and now the wheels of those heavy engines
were wearing out disproportionately from always going clockwise or anti-clockwise.

The Inner Circle intersected with other lines at flat junctions. That is, other lines cross it on the same level, and there would be more of these junctions as the Underground developed. In the mid-1930s, when Stalin was looking to make a statement with his new Metro, he consulted Underground engineers, who offered advice to the Russian Minister in charge of the Metro project, Nikita Khrushchev. He was severely told: ‘Don't have a Circle Line – too many flat junctions.' Moscow did build a circle line, but with
flying
junctions, by which one track goes over another.

On early Underground maps the Inner Circle was not designated, but you could pick it out by looking at how the Metropolitan and District intersected, at which point it would become embarrassingly clear that the Circle was not circular at all. In her novel
King Solomon's Carpet
(1991) Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) suggests a resemblance to a swimming dolphin, ‘its snout being Aldgate … the crown of its head King's Cross, its spine Paddington'. (But for the tail she goes outside the Circle – invoking Ealing Broadway.) On Harry Beck's diagrammatised Tube map of 1933 the Circle resembles, as has often been pointed out, a vacuum flask lying on its side with the narrower top end (where the plastic cup would be fixed) pointing east, which does reflect the fact that the circle is
narrower
to the east, which was a reason not to use it for people who wanted to get from, say, Moorgate to Aldgate. It's quicker to walk.

From the 1920s, incidentally, the Metropolitan was usually shown as purple or maroon, the District green. But for much of the 1940s they were
both
coloured green and referred to as the ‘Metropolitan and District Lines'. It was during this phase that the Circle was first picked out on the map as a distinct route when, in 1947, it was delineated by a black border around the green route. It became yellow in 1949, when the ‘Inner' was
dropped. It was the Circle Line from then on. It may not have been circular, but at least it was conceptually simple in actually being a
circuit.
For a while …

Whereas the Northern Line is the villain of the Underground, the Circle Line settled down as its comedy turn, some levity being permissible since it is not usually used for the grimly consequential business of commuting. There has never been any firm conclusion about how to denote direction of travel on the Circle. Sometimes ‘via King's Cross' (or wherever) is used, sometimes ‘westbound/eastbound', sometimes ‘clockwise/anti-clockwise', but a few years ago there was an internal memo advising against the latter, since in these days of digital timepieces, the terms might not be widely understood.

The Circle generated urban myths: the man who died on it and then went round all day; the language school that conducted its classes on Circle trains, the collective daily fare being cheaper than office rental. In April 2010 the
Independent
reported:

London is in talks with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research about the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Particle physicists believe the existing tunnel can be adapted to take a small-scale ‘atom smasher' alongside the passenger line at a fraction of the cost of building a new tunnel elsewhere in Europe.

(That was on 1 April, by the way.)

Adding to the fun was the fact that the Circle had the worst train frequency of any line, the trouble being that it is not a line
but a service, its trains being guests on the Metropolitan, District, Hammersmith & City – and often unwelcome guests, since if a Circle train went slow or broke down, it would block those other lines. There were not enough access points to get trains off the Circle, or indeed on. In the morning its trains would approach the Circle from various points of the compass so as to get an even spread for the commencement of operations. One Underground staffer described this arrangement to me as being ‘like the way the Red Arrows converge from different counties for an air display … only more boring'.

In 2008, as part of the Tube Upgrade, London Underground called time on this ribaldry. The Circle Line was unpicked. It's still yellow, it's still called the Circle, but a tail has been tacked on, and this tail shadows the western bit of the Hammersmith & City Line. Circle trains come along it from Hammersmith to Edgware Road. There, after brooding for a while, they go clockwise around the circle, then anti-clockwise, then bugger off back to Hammersmith. A driver running late can now knock off duty at the Hammersmith depot rather than somewhere in the middle of the Circle. The result is a more frequent service between Edgware Road and Hammersmith, a better-regulated Circle Line (albeit with even fewer trains) and a lot more time for everyone at Edgware Road …