Underground, Overground (11 page)

Those who live or travel in the north-west corner of central London have always spent a lot of time at Edgware Road. The District Line terminates there. (In 1926 District trains began running from Kensington High Street to Edgware Road, like a green vine growing up the left-hand side of the Circle.) Edgware Road is also a duty change-over point for Hammersmith & City Line trains; and the service on that line is regulated with ‘pauses' at Edgware Road. Even when the Circle was whole, I used often to be chucked off its trains at Edgware Road because something had gone wrong. Now – just to make this clear – it is impossible
to negotiate the north-west ‘corner' of the Circle
without
being chucked off at Edgware Road.

Incidentally, the Edgware Road we are concerned with is not to be confused (although it frequently
is
) with Edgware Road station on the Bakerloo Line, which stands about 500 yards away, or with Edgware station on the Northern Line. Edgware Road (Bakerloo) is a much more straightforward station than its namesake. Its users tend not to have to spend large parts of their
lives
there – they just pass through. It is also warmer, because it is underground. Our Edgware Road is essentially two island platforms surrounded by sidings and set in a cutting that's very good at funnelling icy winds.

But it has its plus points. In the ticket hall stand pink steel tubs containing well-tended plants – a memorial to the six people killed in the station by one of the terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005. It was not the first bomb at Edgware Road, incidentally. Irish-American republicans (or possibly anarchists) placed one in the tunnel just west of the station in the early evening of 30 October 1883. It damaged a passing third-class carriage, and a couple of dozen working-class men were injured, along with two schoolboys who had come up for the day from Clacton-on-Sea. Later on the same evening, the same ‘ruffians' or ‘revolutionists' detonated a bomb on the District east of Westminster, but no trains were passing at the time.

For years there was another, more eccentric, garden at Edgware Road. It was on the opposite side of the tracks from platform 1: an ornamental pond with an arrangement of garden gnomes around it. A couple of years ago I suddenly noticed that neither gnomes nor pond were there, so I stopped a platform guard at the station, and said, ‘Can you tell me about the gnomes?' ‘
What
gnomes?' he said, testily. He then evidently remembered, and said they'd been put there by a female member of staff, currently off duty. Every Christmas, he fondly recalled, she'd put tinsel on
them. ‘But what's happened to them?' I impatiently demanded, and he became testy again: ‘Not a clue, mate.' I next asked a booking hall attendant, and he said, ‘I don't know about the gnomes, but you can't see the pond because it's winter.' Do ponds necessarily disappear in winter? They do at Edgware Road.

We now turn with relief from the smoky tunnels to the open air, where the Met and the District found it much easier and cheaper to build railways by which passengers could be ensnared and brought into the vortex of the Circle. Before 1890 – before, that is, the opening of the first deep-level Tube – the District had reached what remain its westerly termini at Richmond, Wimbledon and Ealing Broadway. A couple of years later the Metropolitan had reached its own most northerly point, Verney Junction, which was as bucolic as it sounds. (Branches to Uxbridge and Watford would be completed a little later.)

The projection north of the Metropolitan begins with the two
Baker Street mouseholes previously mentioned. In 1868 those lines had reached as far as Swiss Cottage. By 1880 Harrow had been reached, and during the 1880s the push continued, to North Harrow, Pinner, Northwood … In 1892 the Met reached Aylesbury, 40 miles from London. What, the reader might ask, is a so called
metropolitan
railway doing wandering about in the Buckinghamshire countryside?

I will answer with reference to Julian Barnes's novel
Metroland
, published in 1980 but set in 1968. On page 35 the adolescent schoolboy narrator, Christopher, meets ‘an elegiac old fugger' on an Underground train at Baker Street. The fugger is a student of Metropolitan history, and he lists the most northerly stations. ‘They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddeson, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.' ‘If he went on like this,' Christopher reflects, ‘I'd cry.' The fugger then explains why the Met operated in such latitudes. ‘Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.'

The fugger's account is more or less correct, and this was all the grandiose vision of Sir Edward Watkin, who had promised the Met shareholders that their ‘great terminus' (Baker Street) would be connected with ‘many important towns'.

The leap to Verney Junction (which is not only 60 miles from Baker Street, but also a mere 8 miles from
Oxford
, for God's sake) came about through the Met's absorption of the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway. That never went to Buckingham, but it did go to Aylesbury. In fact, it went from there to Verney Junction.

The Met received income from the transportation of manure between London and Verney Junction for the farms round about, thereby gaining some benefit from the horse bus boom that was
otherwise entirely detrimental to its interests. It also built a hotel for excursionists at Verney Junction, which became the starting point of the most glamorous ride it would ever be possible to undertake on the Underground. From 1910, to drum up custom, the Metropolitan would operate a luxury Pullman service from Verney Junction to Aldgate. In other words, they attached to the train two special coaches (called
Mayflower
and
Galatea
), which exceeded in plushness the Metropolitan's ordinary first-class compartments. They were essentially restaurants on wheels. There was also a bar in the carriage. When he became mayor of London, Boris Johnson banned drinking on the Underground, but what would he make of City gents being served whisky and water in crystal glasses in the tunnel approaching Baker Street? ‘The scheme of decoration of the cars is that of the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, with remarkably artistic effect', observed the
Railway Magazine
in 1910. The window blinds were of green silk. Above each seat was ‘an ormolu luggage rack with finely chased ornamentation and panels of brass treillage'. Each of the eight glass-topped tables featured ‘a tiny portable electrolier of a very chaste design'.

But the Met hadn't gone to Verney Junction just to give a luxury ride into town for country gentlemen. A little way beyond Quainton Road on that projection the Met built a prong connecting to the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The Met's chairman, Sir Edward Watkin, was also chairman of that company, which duplicated other railways' routes in an inchoate way between Manchester and Grimsby, and generally stumbled about the north. Given that he was also chairman of the other railways – the Met, the South Eastern and the
Chemin de Fer du Nord
– over whose territory he wanted to approach Paris (where he apparently kept a mistress), you might say he was trying to build a railway in the image of himself. It has been said that he was ‘frustrated only by the political and financial
problems bound up with constructing a channel tunnel', and I like that word ‘only'. In fact, the preliminary borings undertaken in 1881 by his Submarine Railway Company (which can still be seen at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff, Folkestone) were pounced on by the press as likely to facilitate a continental invasion. So that element of the plan was scotched early on.

Interior of either
Galatea
or
Mayflower
, two luxury coaches (named after winners of the America's Cup yachting race) available on the Metropolitan from 1910. The ambience was eighteenth century, and the routine was to order a whisky and water after a hard day in the City (or possibly before).

But in 1897 Watkin did create his trunk line. You can tell it was a marginal latecomer by its name: Great Central Railway. It was basically the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway with a changed name and connection to London. It came down from the north to Quainton Road, where it ran over and then (after Harrow) parallel to the Metropolitan's line to Finchley Road. Instead of diving underground with the Met at that point, it went into a new cut-and-cover tunnel of its own, running beneath Lord's Cricket Ground.

It emerged from its tunnel – to a rather muted fanfare – at Marylebone station, which opened in 1899. Marylebone station – the only one in London not used by Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson – is small because it was built on the cheap, tunnelling to the site having proved very expensive. John Betjeman compared it to a branch public library, and it is upstaged by the Grand Central Hotel to the north of it, which was built and operated by a separate company. Not only was Marylebone small but it was also sleepy, because there was never much demand for the Great Central Railway. Its rivals, the Great Northern and the Midland, would do everything they could to stifle its services, and its trains often ran empty. At first, Marylebone had no connection to an Underground line (not even the one owned by the man who built it: the Metropolitan), but in 1907 the Bakerloo Line would open a Tube station underneath Marylebone called Great Central. In 1917 this became Marylebone Tube station, and it's one of my favourites, with pale blue tiles, like an old municipal swimming pool.
Watkin attended the opening of Marylebone station in a bath chair, having recently suffered a stroke. He would die two years later, in 1901. His vision was only half-fulfilled, but his railway remained romantic and different until recent times.

The 1920s saw the creation of Metroland, the most important social consequence of the Metropolitan's expansion north, and we will be visiting Metroland shortly. But in 1933 the railway, which had tried to become a main line, would suffer the indignity of amalgamation into public ownership as part of London Transport.

In 1936 London Transport ceased operating passenger services beyond Aylesbury, but it contracted the London & North Eastern Railway to operate freight to Verney Junction until 1947, and things remained quite heroic on the north of the curtailed ‘Extension' for some years afterwards. Until 1961 the line was electrified only as far as Rickmansworth, where steam locomotives were attached or detached in place of electric ones. In the same year the stations north of Amersham were given over to British Rail. But the Metropolitan Line of today still has more stations outside the M25 than any other line. It has four: Chesham, Amersham, Chalfont and Chorleywood. Its nearest rival in this respect, the Central Line, only has one: Epping, and whereas that is in Zone 6, Amersham and Chesham are in Zone 9, a fantastical concept created especially for them. And until December 2010 the northern stretch of the ‘Extension' featured a charming side-show: the Chesham Shuttle.

When the Met first reached Chesham, in 1889, the townsfolk thought the growth of their town would be inexorable as a result. Their industries, all beginning with ‘B' (boots, beer, brushes), would boom. The connection was inaugurated with a
party on 15 May 1889. When Sir Edward Watkin arrived to take part, the town band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes'; the bells of St Mary's Church in Chesham pealed joyfully; a seven-course luncheon was served in the goods station. The cry went up, ‘At last, we are on the main line!' And so they were – for three years, until the Met decided to carry on to Amersham, leaving Chesham high and dry on a branch. This relegation was not really the cause of the decline of brush-making, which was the town's main industry. That was down to the introduction of nylon bristles. But the people of Chesham moaned about the shuttle: the waiting room at Chalfont & Latimer was too hot, or too cold; there were leaves on the line. And sometimes the drivers of steam locos (until 1961) would forget to couple up to the carriages, pulling away from Chesham with no train behind. But the drivers liked the shuttle. ‘It's a lovely turn to work', one of them once told me. ‘There are hardly any signals.' Classical music was played over the intercom in the pleasingly solid and simple, green and white waiting room at Chalfont, while its counterpart at Chesham was bedecked with Station Garden of the Year winners' certificates. (Essentially, Chesham has won the Station Garden of the Year competition every single year since its inception.) The line in-between supplies views of farmhouses, deer, sheep, gently rolling hills and the River Chess, and it is almost as strange to see these things from an Underground train as it would be to see the African savannah.