Underground, Overground (21 page)

Electric trams – those ungainly, boat-like things that so aggrieved the motorist, because they ran down the middle of the roads, and passengers would have to step
into
the roads to get on to them – were for the working classes, and the LCC saw them as a means of extracting the poor from the remaining rookeries of central London. Trams were cheaper than Tubes and buses; the seats were hard; there were ‘No Spitting' signs everywhere; the ‘top deck of the tram' was notorious as a venue for naughtiness. They carried adverts for the
News of the World
, Bisto or beer (‘Drink Worthington Ales'), and their termini were often pubs. A style guide of the 1930s for journalists on the
Daily Express
tried to bring trams upmarket by insisting they be called ‘tramcars'. They were transport for the masses in the literal sense that, between the time of their electrification and the early 1920s when buses became more comfortable and commodious, trams carried more passengers than the buses and the Underground combined.

Whereas the Underground generated private owner occupation in the suburbs, the LCC would build subsidised council housing in the 1920s, sometimes following the arrival of the Underground (as at Morden), sometimes not (as at the Downham estate at Catford). But there would eventually be a convergence. The UERL would become London Transport, which would take over the trams of the LCC. The LCC would initiate the campaign for the Green Belt, which the men at the top of London Transport would support. And public transport in London would eventually fall into municipal ownership, albeit under the GLC rather than the LCC.

After their approach to the LCC, Gibb and Speyer moved their fire-fighting to a different front, by re-negotiating with
shareholders the imminently due redemption of £7 million pounds' worth of fantastical ‘profit-sharing notes' that Yerkes had issued in 1903 against subsequent profits that never materialised. The notes were converted into long-term debt, and the company was saved from bankruptcy. The next task would be to make Tube-use part of the culture of London, and in this connection we will be meeting the double act of Stanley and Pick. But before I introduce our bill-toppers, here is a brief preliminary entertainment …

The shuttle services of the Underground have their cult followings, their runtish condition attracting the sympathy vote. We have ridden the Chesham Shuttle at the far end of the Met, and we will be riding the Epping–Ongar at the eastern end of the Central. But the machinations of Yerkes also created the only shuttle to operate in central London. I refer to the Aldwych Shuttle, which briefly gave rise to the glamorous ‘Theatre Express'.

The Great Northern & Strand Tube, it will be recalled, was the decongestant for Finsbury Park favoured by the Great Northern main-line railway company. It was originally going to terminate to the south at Holborn, but the LCC was engaged in a programme of slum clearance in order to create the above-mentioned rather blank and pompous thoroughfare called Kingsway and its companion-piece to the south, the Aldwych, which links the Strand to Fleet Street. So the plans for the Tube line changed. It would now encompass Kingsway by terminating south of the new street, somewhere in the vicinity of the Aldwych. When the plan for the line was taken over by Yerkes, he decided to combine it with the proposed Brompton & Piccadilly Circus Railway, by extending the latter from Piccadilly Circus to Holborn. The proposed Aldwych extension was thus
left dangling, but the tunnel between Holborn and the Aldwych was dug nonetheless because it was felt that the theatres and new offices around Aldwych would be worth serving, even if the line towards it would be merely a spur to begin with.

Holborn station, incidentally, did not get the Leslie Green treatment because it was to be situated on Kingsway, and the LCC required it to fit in with the look of the new street. Therefore the station is clad in grey Portland stone. The station at Aldwych, which would initially be called Strand,
was
given a full coating of oxblood tiles. It was situated on the south side of the Strand, on the site of the Strand Theatre, and that was a bad omen. Here was a line meant to serve the theatres of the Strand, yet one of those would have to close to make way for it. The theatre closed on 13 May 1905 for building to begin, interrupting the run of a play called
Miss Wingrove
, written by a man with the titillatory name of W. H. Risque. Imagine the irritation of Mr Risque on learning that his play was coming off because the theatre was to be turned into a Tube station. His irritation would surely have been doubled had he known that the only reason the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton had pounced on that particular site was that it had offered the correct alignment for an extension of the spur line to Waterloo – permission for which would soon be
rejected
by Parliament.

The Holborn–Strand link was opened in November 1907, about a year after the rest of the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton had opened. Two-car trains shuttled back and forth in the two tunnels. Whether there were any passengers on those trains is another matter. Aldwych was well served by buses and trams, and the new offices filled up only slowly. If you wanted to go further north than Holborn on the spur, you had to change at Holborn, and people couldn't be bothered. However, a through northbound service to Finsbury Park did operate in the late evenings between 1907 and 1910, and this was the ‘Theatre Express'.
It was meant to serve theatre-goers who lived on the main line stops beyond Finsbury Park – say, Enfield. They would change from Underground to main line at Finsbury Park and arrive home at about midnight, looking glamorous in their evening wear and happily clutching their theatre programmes. But there weren't enough culture vultures in places like Enfield to justify the service.

In 1915 Strand station was renamed Aldwych as a result of a pointless little
pas de deux
, by which Charing Cross station on the Hampstead railway was renamed Strand (before reverting to Charing Cross in 1973). In 1918 the shuttle trains were running from the western shuttle platform at Holborn to the eastern one at Aldwych. The station was fading away. In the First World War, National Gallery treasures were stored on the disused platform. In the Thirties the shuttle was down to a one-car service. In 1939 Geoffrey Household set the opening chase sequence in his novel
Rogue Male
– which is a
series
of chase sequences – in Aldwych. The unnamed hero is being pursued by the agents of a fascist power:

The working at Aldwych is very simple. Just before the shuttle is due, the lift comes down. The departing passengers get into the train; the arriving passengers get into the lift. When the lift goes up and the train leaves, Aldwych station is as deserted as an ancient mine. You can hear the drip of water and the beat of your heart.

The service was suspended altogether in the Second World War, when part of the line became a bomb shelter, and the station was used again for art storage. The Elgin Marbles were transferred from the British Museum to Aldwych, where they, along with hundreds of Londoners, sheltered from the bombs.

After the war the shuttle resumed, but the disused platforms
gained an identity crisis, being used for mock-ups of stations on the Victoria Line, the Jubilee Line and the extension to Heathrow of the Piccadilly. Also films were shot on the branch:
Conspirator
(1949),
A Run for Your Money
(1949),
The Clouded Yellow
(1950),
The Gentle Gunman
(1952). The middle two are good, the other two abysmal.
Death Line
(also abysmal) was filmed there in 1972. Meanwhile, the station awaited its shot at the big time. Plans for the link through to Waterloo were revived and died. What became the Jubilee Line was originally going to pass through Aldwych on its way east, but it would terminate at Charing Cross instead (although not for long).

Aldwych station was closed in September 1994, and the Photo-Me booth that had been inside the station was dragged outside, to stand before the shuttered façade so that at least some public service survived on the site. It was very sad, but then again I've been to some excellent parties in the closed-down station. In April 1997 I found myself descending in the gated lift at Aldwych with a vodka and ginger beer in my hand and Janet Street-Porter standing next to me. This was a ‘happening', organised by an art group called Artangel. A distorted disembodied voice repeatedly told us to stand clear of the doors, to have our tickets ready for inspection. A man on a gantry in the ventilation shaft played blues on a saxophone while a woman in a white dress paced up and down in front of him. I learned that a Prodigy video had just been shot in the station, and ‘part of an episode of
Bramwell MD
', whatever that is. A few months later, Artangel organised another moody installation in Aldwych that was dreamed up – possibly literally – by the art critic John Berger, who in his youth had used the shuttle to get to Holborn Art College (now Central St Martins School of Art). Berger had since abandoned Holborn and rain in favour of the Haute Savoie and blue skies, and the event was supposed to elide – by visual and aural effects – the experience of Tube travel with the experience of being in a certain
cave in Chauvet, France, where 70,000-year-old paintings had recently been discovered.

The closed-down station still looks like a Tube station, in its coat of oxblood tiles, and no doubt many baffled tourists every day start hunting for it on the Tube map. But the name it bears is its original one, Strand, the second name Aldwych, which overlay Strand, having been removed. It seems to be going back in time, and it would be good if it became a theatre again, bringing some bright lights to a dull corner of London. Apparently the outline of the proscenium is clear to see in the booking office, if you know where to look. The Strand Theatre could open with a production of
Miss Wingrove
, or I could write a light-hearted Edwardian time-travel play especially for the occasion. It would be called
… Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted.

Contemporary Londoners are no more likely to have heard of Stanley and Pick than of Yerkes, but if any two men made London what it is today, it is these two.

Yet they were both from modest backgrounds and were not even Londoners but northerners by birth. Albert Stanley was also American in a way, because his family emigrated from Derbyshire to Detroit in 1880, when he was six, and he began his railway career as an office boy in the Detroit Street Railways Company. (Railways were in his blood, in that his father was a coach painter for Pullman, the luxury-carriage makers.) He was soon
running
the Detroit Street Railways, and then those of New Jersey. His coming to London, and his rise through the ranks of the Underground Electric Railways of London was made possible by the support of the American shareholders, who saw him as one of their own and believed he would look after their interests, about which they were wrong. Stanley became General Manager of UERL in 1907 and managing director in 1910, and one of
his first acts was to unite the three Tubes owned by the UERL under one management, which the American shareholders had specifically not wanted to happen, fearing the loss of capital gains (a misplaced fear since their shares were, as Stephen Halliday points out in
Underground to Everywhere
, ‘virtually worthless').

Stanley – who became Lord Ashfield in 1920 – was a persuasive, charming man (very keen on women, and vice versa), who wanted to build himself an empire of transport in London. He smoked cigars and wore suits made by Henry Poole of Savile Row, which were known for their ‘American cut'; he had a good sense of humour and a knack for publicity. On the evening of 13 May 1924, a baby girl was born on a Bakerloo train. The child was christened – Stanley had the world believe – Thelma Ursula Beatrice Eleanor (think about it), and Stanley agreed to be her godfather, with the proviso that, ‘It would not do to encourage this sort of thing, as I am a busy man.' (The disappointing fact of the matter is the child was actually christened Mary Ashfield Eleanor.)

Frank Pick was a much chillier proposition. The son of a Methodist Lincolnshire draper, he grew up in York. After qualifying as a solicitor, he worked under George Gibb of the North Eastern Railway (and subsequently the Underground). The North Eastern was the biggest and most grown-up of the pre-grouping railway companies, being an early electrifier, the first railway to employ graduates, and a pioneer of market research and sophisticated advertising. The fastidious Pick lacked ‘the common touch'. He didn't drink; he certainly did not smoke cigars, and when, during the Second World War, he crossed the path of a man who did, the chemistry was terrible, as we will see. For Winston Churchill, Pick was ‘the impeccable busman'. He was a workaholic, who communicated by memos written in tiny handwriting – and always in green ink. He joined the UERL in 1906, and in 1912 he sent one of his terrifying green ink missives to Stanley complaining about the ineffectual way the
Underground Group advertised itself, and so Stanley put him in charge of Advertising and Traffic Development.

From then on, Pick devoted himself to rationalising London – a doomed project, but nobody has ever given it such a good go as Pick. On his own boyhood visits to the city from York he'd been fascinated and appalled by the place: ‘There was too much of it; it was hopelessly confusing.' Using the highest standards of design, he sought to tidy it up, make it knowable. In a biography of Pick,
The Man Who Built London Transport
(1979), by Christian Barman, he is quoted as writing to a friend during the Great War, ‘Another thing that seems to me so stupid is that here in London with unlimited opportunities one takes no advantage of them at all. When I lived in York or Newcastle I was much better able to know what was moving in things than I am now when I am in the middle of it.' Yet he would be responsible for the further expansion of London, to the point where the city once again dismayed him by its size.