Underground, Overground (14 page)

The platforms at Wapping and Rotherhithe are narrow. Being listed, they can't be widened. They were further smartened up with the arrival of the Overground, and they're decorated with pretty panels depicting the history of the tunnel, but behind them the water still rushes.

Having always been the runt of the Underground litter, and having been incorporated into the system merely as a by-product of the creation of the Inner Circle, the line now plays its part in the realisation of a different dream: a great outer circle, or railway
M25. That's what London Overground will become when the wide arc of the old North London Railway that it incorporates is mirrored by a similar arc to the south, this loop representing the somewhat tardy fulfilment of a plan first recommended by a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1863.

Yes, it was rather bizarre to make a former underground line into part of a network called London Overground, and at Whitechapel the Overground goes
under
the Underground. But let's not spoil our happy ending for the East London Line.

The next stage of our journey towards the first Tube line takes us to a bit of blustery riverside pavement at Tower Hill and a brick booth that resembles a stray turret from the adjacent Tower of London. Around the top are the words ‘London Hydraulic Power Company. Tower Subway Constructed
AD
1868' – a fairly perplexing inscription, given that the booth is in suspiciously good condition, and obviously post-dates 1868.

It marks what used to be the public entrance to a cable railway that ran beneath the Thames for a few months in 1894. There was a single carriage on a 2 foot 6 inch gauge track. It was winched along the tunnel by the cable attached to a steam engine, which also powered the lifts. There were not many takers for this claustrophobic ride, and the tunnel suffered the same fate as Brunel's tunnel. It became a walkway; and it ceased to be even that later on in 1894, when the great edifice in whose shadow you stand as you contemplate the turret was opened: Tower Bridge. Why would anyone walk under the river when they could walk over it? In 1926 the booth was built as a monument to the Subway, and an advert for the London Hydraulic Power Company, who installed pipes in the tunnel for the supply of hydraulic power to businesses on either side of the river. Today the tunnel carries optical cables.

What is important about the Tower Subway is the method of its construction.

In 1862 an engineer called Peter William Barlow (whose brother William Henry Barlow built St Pancras station) was sinking cast iron cylinders into London clay in order to create mid-river piers for an entirely different bridge – the Lambeth Suspension Bridge (demolished in 1929). Barlow would swing the process through 90 degrees. He would install iron rings in the process of digging a tunnel, these rings making unnecessary the manically toiling bricklayers who had followed Brunel's Shield. The idea was developed by his assistant James Henry Greathead, a South African by birth, who perfected what became known as the Greathead Shield. With this he engineered the Tower Subway, and it would be used as the basis of all subsequent tunnelling shields.

The first thing about the Greathead Shield was that it was smaller than its name suggested. It wasn't very ‘great', I mean. It weighted just over 2 tons – whereas Brunel's giant climbing frame of a shield had weighed 120 tons – and was barely 5 feet long. When I first saw a drawing of one, I was reminded of a stub of pencil or a cigarette butt, and its lightness and manoeuvrability made me think that building a Tube line through compliant clay might not be so difficult after all (and indeed it wasn't, and isn't). The shield was basically an iron sleeve in which – after some preliminary mechanical loosening of the clay – not more than half a dozen men dug. Iron tunnel segments were then assembled within the sleeve, which was jacked forward, cutting into the next lot of clay like a pastry cutter, with the jacks braced against the flanges of the previous tunnel segments. Every time the sleeve was pushed forward, a thin gap remained between the newly assembled tunnel segments and the surrounding clay. Liquid cement was injected into this gap via holes in the segments, further reinforcing the tunnel.

The Greathead tunnelling shield – developed in the 1890's by James Henry Greathead – enabled the creation of the deep level Tubes. It is essentially a cylinder within which men or machines can dig. Iron tunnel rings are also assembled within the shield, which is gradually pushed forward (pastry-cutter like) by jacks braced against those rings.

The booth at Tower Hill symbolises the coming of the Tubes, and the peculiar martyrdom of Londoners: they would travel underground, in narrow tunnels lying between about 60 and 200 feet below the surface.

This engineering breakthrough coincided with a psychological urge to burrow deep underground, whether as a function of urban trauma or the need to escape from it. In
Underground Writing
David Welsh identifies this urge in the work of turn-of-the-century novelists. William Delisle Hay's novel
Three Hundred Years Hence
(1881) describes a world 50 feet down – which is about right for a Tube – whose inhabitants use a subway of ‘terra-cars'. (Sound familiar?)
The Coming Race
(1871) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton concerns a people called the Vril-ya, who inhabit chambers beneath the earth connected by tunnels and derive their power from an ‘all permeating' fluid which they called Vril, and which
we
might call electricity. Welsh focuses particularly on H. G. Wells:

… there is a descent into the earth at some distant future point in
The Time Machine
(1895); the discovery of a lunar underworld in
The First Men in the Moon
(1901) … All of these subterranean locations suggested that underground railways could be perhaps the first stage in a process of migration beneath the city.

It was geology that facilitated the migration. In 1908 Granville Cunningham, General Manager of the Central London Railway, would write: ‘It seems that the beautiful homogenous clay of London had been designed by Nature for the very purpose of having tunnels pierced through it, and it would be a great pity to balk nature in her design.' The London Tubes would be buried in the accommodating London clay, thus circumventing the ban on railways in central London, but there is not so much of that
clay in south London, or ‘The Surrey Side', as it was euphemistically known in the posher Edwardian guidebooks. That is partly why north London has more Tubes. (Another reason is that the south is better served by main-line trains.)

When I first started visiting London, my dad equipped me with a tattered edition of
The Penguin Guide to London, 1958
. The introduction blithely states:

The Underground Railways of London Transport provide the quickest and easiest method of getting from one part of the Metropolis to another. The seven named lines are connected with each other at many points, and with their numerous branches extend into almost every quarter of London except south of the Thames …

Except
half of London
in other words. Only twenty-six Underground stations lie south of the river, sixteen of them on what is called the
Northern
Line, to the genesis of which we now turn.

In 1884 Greathead was part of a syndicate that obtained powers for another subway – ‘The City of London & Southwark Subway'. The term ‘subway' sounded more sophisticated than ‘underground railway', which was associated with the sulphurous Metropolitan, and it would be adopted by New York for its own electric metro when work started on that in 1904.

As originally proposed, the line would run from Elephant & Castle to King William Street, just north of London Bridge – in other words from a busy and fully built-up major road junction to the City. It is looked back on as being amusingly dinky.
According to the
Oxford Companion to British Railway History
, ‘everything was too small'. But this was the first Tube. It ticked every box: electric power, ‘up' and ‘down' trains in separate tunnels, electric-lit carriages of a single class with room for standing, and a paying public that flocked into the trains while moaning about them. Like all the Tubes (and the cut-and-cover lines), the popularity of the service would not enable the company to recover its capital costs. Furthermore, it was
called
a Tube by its users, even if the term was not encouraged by the company. ‘Tube' was slang, but according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, one of the first users of the word in a railway context was Queen Victoria, who wrote in her journal in 1868: ‘We passed the famous Swily Rocks and saw the works they are making for the tube for the railroad.'

In 1886 digging began with Greathead's shield. Observers were surprised at the two tunnels, but it's cheaper to build two small tunnels than one big one and gives you more flexibility as to routing. It was intended that steam-winched cables would draw the carriages through the tunnels, as with the Tower Subway. But in 1886, with the cables on order, the board changed its mind: ‘After much careful consideration, the Directors have come to the conclusion that electrical force … offers the best solution to the difficulty.' Having been behind in the electrical race, London thus jumped into the lead, because this first Tube was also the first important electrical railway in the world.

In 1890 the City of London & Southwark Subway re-christened itself the City & South London Railway, and powers were granted for an extension to the growing suburb of Clapham via the already grown suburbs of Kennington, Oval and Stockwell.

The line opened between Elephant and King William Street on 18 December 1890. On 15 November 1890
Punch
ran a cartoon in which the figure of Britannia stood between two railways. On one line is a Metropolitan engine, which has the face of an elderly
debauchee and is wreathed in choking smoke; the second railway is represented by a dapper, smiling man with a head like a star. He radiates the words ‘Electric Railway' and has skates on his feet, perhaps because Greathead – the bringer of modernity, via his tunnelling shield – had once worked on the manufacture of roller skates. The Met train is called ‘Old Flame'; the newcomer is ‘Young Spark', and he addresses Britannia in rhyme:

He's just like old Pluto, Persephone's prigger;

You'll
follow Apollo the Younger – that's me!

He's sombre as Styx, and as black as …

(Actually, I think we'll leave it there.)

The generating station for the City & South London Railway was at Stockwell, and the further the trains went from it, the weaker the voltage. The electric lights in the packed carriages flickered and flared red as the little engines struggled up the incline towards King William Street, but electricity was socially smart, and the generating station would attract sightseers. One was H. G. Wells, who after his visit wrote a short story,
The Lord of the Dynamos
. It features Holroyd, the ‘chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell and kept the electric railway going'. The biggest of the dynamos is ‘The Lord', and Holroyd's ‘Asiatic' assistant, Azuma-Zi, begins to worship it as a god. He sacrifices Holroyd to it by pitching him into its mechanism, and ‘The big humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second in its heavy beating.' The only sign of the crime having been committed was that ‘Seven or eight trains had stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of the electric railway.'

In
Underground Writing
, David Welsh observes:

Wells identified an important change from the steam

underground, as the motive power of the tubes is no longer generated from the train itself. The dynamo controls the fate of the tube passengers and, by implication, the life of the city as the circulation of people can be prevented merely by the flick of a switch.

The Underground would eventually be powered by two giant power stations, as we will see, before plugging itself directly into the National Grid. Yes, there are traction sub-stations every two or three miles along every line where the voltage is stepped down, but the average punter doesn't know where they are. Essentially the power source of the Underground is invisible … which might be a matter of blissful unconcern or a cause of anomie. Is the dynamo a liberator for Londoners or an unseen slave driver?

The City & South London was also the first British passenger railway to offer only one class. In
A History of London Transport
Barker and Robbins suggest that ‘The idea of a uniform fare was copied from the New York elevated railroad', and here was the start of the American cultural influence on the London Underground that would soon take the form of direct involvement by actual Americans.

The City & South London initially had a flat single fare of 2d., but it was the Central London Railway, opened ten years later, that would be nicknamed ‘The Tuppenny Tube' for
its
flat fare of the same amount. The Central was so-called by the
Daily Mail
, which no doubt would have christened the City & South London ‘The Tuppenny Tube' had the paper existed in 1890, but it was not founded until 1896, the age of mass media lagging slightly behind the age of mass transit.