Underground, Overground (24 page)

A few years later the restaurant closed, and in his book
Betjeman Country
(1983) Frank Delaney transcribes a note he saw
written on brown paper and pinned to the shuttered entrance: ‘Ann – hope you get to see this message, sorry about wrong directions. The Alsop Arms is on Gloucester Place remember. Hope to see you there later on. Bye for now and love Brian. X.' You can always rely on the Seventies for bathos. What was the Chiltern Court Restaurant has long since been a chain pub, but at least it's a Wetherspoon's chain pub, where the beer's decent, and at least it's called the Metropolitan Bar, and retains the crests of the Metropolitan Railway around the walls.

Metroland was almost the Metropolitan's last adventure before it was absorbed into London Transport, but not quite. In 1932 it built a further extension between Wembley Park and Stanmore … which proved the wilful Met to be like a bear in a child's storybook, reaching up high for honey from a bees' nest, only to have the whole nest collapse onto him.

The new extension overloaded the tracks into Baker Street. The Metropolitan wanted to construct its own relief line into Baker Street, but since this was a highly built-up area, that line would have had to be in a long tunnel – and an extra-wide one at that, to accommodate the big trains of the Met: an expensive business. Instead, Stanmore would be served – from 1939 – by a new, northern branch of the Bakerloo Line, running mainly on the surface. The Met's own trains would run ‘express' from Baker Street to Finchley Road, then to Wembley Park. The stations in between were closed in November 1939 and – in most cases – duplicated on the new Bakerloo branch. But there was no new namesake for the two stations immediately north of Baker Street: Lord's and Marlborough Road. The surface building of the latter was a Chinese restaurant for a long time and is currently hidden behind builders' screens. The former had only been called Lord's – at the suggestion of the MCC – since June 1939. Before that it had been called St John's Wood.

Lord's is sorely missed, especially by cricket fans who object to
carrying their picnic hampers and beer cans the half-mile from the new St John's Wood station. If they spent less time consuming picnics and beer, they might find it easier, but still the cry goes up ‘Re-open Lord's station!' and it is never quite stilled, even when you point out that the hotel now called the Danubius Regent's Park has been built on top of it. Perhaps if London Underground were to call St John's Wood station Lord's, then the cricket fans might
think
it was nearer. (Some readers may be less concerned with the fate of Lord's and more preoccupied with the fact that, surely, the Bakerloo does not go up to Stanmore. It stopped doing so in 1979, when – in what was becoming a farcical game of pass the parcel – the branch became the northern part of the new Jubilee Line.)

Incidentally, while Betjeman kept his tone light in his
Metroland
documentary, he had, back in 1960, written of an un-named ‘High Road' in the main Metroland county, Middlesex:

Black glass fascias of chain stores, each at a different height from its neighbour, looked like rows of shiny galoshes on the feet of buildings. Corner shops and supermarkets seemed to be covered in coloured plastic, like the goods they sold. All too soon the wrappings would be torn off and left to blow about municipal rose beds and recreation grounds. Somewhere, if I had dared to raise my eyes above the crowded pavement, there must have been sky.

The railways that would be fused to create the unwieldy Northern Line were the City & South London and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway, known as the ‘Hampstead Tube'. The former, it will be recalled, was absorbed in 1913 into the portfolio of the Underground Electric Railways Limited, which had lately finished building the latter from Charing Cross to Camden, where the line bifurcated to Golders Green and Archway.

House builders were following that Golders Green prong with particular avidity because it went into open farmland. The speculators were nominally independent of the railway but may have included among their number some American cronies of Charles Yerkes who shared the epiphany he experienced on his visit to the verdant terrain of Edwardian north London. We don't know exactly what brought on that epiphany, but we can be pretty sure it was something to do with money. Land values at
Golders Green had risen rapidly from the moment the line was proposed, but they did so in a climate of acrimony.

The first controversy was over the effect the line would have on Hampstead Heath, which it passed beneath on its way from Hampstead to Golders Green. Even though the tunnels were to be 200 feet below ground, the Hampstead Heath Protection Society predicted they would loosen tree roots and suck away moisture. The Borough of Hampstead eventually gave permission for the line, providing a station were built between Hampstead and Golders Green, so the railway might serve the Heath by bringing visitors to it. This was Bull & Bush, which, as we have seen, was built but never opened.

The Hampstead Tube had also come up against the social reformer and philanthropist Henrietta Barnett, owner of a weekend cottage on the Heath, and the great matriarch of ‘Not in My Backyard'. She counteracted the development of Golders Green by raising funds to buy 80 acres of land to the east of the proposed station, and here the Hampstead Heath Extension was created. On a further 250 acres of land she founded Hampstead Garden Suburb, the rationale being that if the countryside of north London were to be developed, then it would be developed in the right way. ‘The Suburb', as it is known to its residents, was a spin-off from the Garden City movement. It was meant to provide homes for all classes – a vision most emphatically not fulfilled, as anyone who tried to open, say, a pub within its boundaries would quickly discover. The Arts and Crafts houses, divided by hedges and not walls, are populated exclusively by the upper middle classes.

It was an anti-Underground development, and indeed most of its houses are a long walk from Golders Green tube station. It seems odd therefore that Frank Pick should have bought a house in the Suburb, except when you recall that his own doctrine of ‘Fitness for Purpose' had its roots in the Arts and Crafts
Movement. (He lived on Wildwood Road, where there is a blue plaque, but he is not listed among the notable residents on the Wikipedia page about the suburb, whereas Vanessa Feltz, for example, is.)

Meanwhile, Golders Green was growing fast. Whereas there had been precisely one house – a farmhouse – when the Tube arrived, by the time of the First World War there were 500. In the 1920s Golders Green was promoted by the Underground Group posters – ‘A Place of Delightful Prospects' – as looking more like Hampstead Garden Suburb than it actually did. It was a dilute version of the Suburb, with smaller, less cottage-y houses, fewer trees and narrower roads. The trains running from there were always packed, even though there was no option of taking a Bank branch train from Golders Green, because the two components of the Northern Line were not yet integrated. You always had to change at Euston if you wanted to go to the City from Golders Green. That was about to be rectified, and not to help people who needed to get to work, so much as to help people who didn't have a job at all.

In 1921 unemployment rose sharply. This prompted the coalition government of Lloyd George to pass the Trade Facilities Act, by which the Treasury was enabled to provide loans at preferential rates (‘cheap money') to subsidise job creation. It was the start of an era of heavy government investment in the Underground, much of it lobbied for by that skilled networker Lord Ashfield, who had made useful contacts while President of the Board of Trade during the First World War.

The first project for which he obtained finance was the joining of the Hampstead Tube to the City & South London, the first connection being made by the burrowing of a line between Camden (bifurcation point of the former) and Euston, terminus of the latter. This junction could be thought of as a pair of scissors opened out. It was designed to enable ease of flow from two
northern lines to two southern ones, or vice versa. That sounds (relatively) simple, but if you look at a diagram of the tunnels … it's like an Escher drawing. Follow any one tunnel with your eye, and it immediately goes somewhere you didn't expect, and this over-ambitious entanglement is the reason your train almost always has to wait before entering Camden. The link was opened in April 1924, the too narrow tunnels of the City & South London having been widened to facilitate it.

In 1924 the line to Golders Green was extended to Edgware. In fact, Edgware was already served by a main-line railway – the Great Northern – but it was the coming of the Underground that promoted it from village to suburb (all right then, ‘Garden Village'). The extension caused fury in Hampstead, where southbound trains began to arrive fully loaded with the hoi polloi of rapidly growing Edgware, Burnt Oak, Colindale, Hendon, Brent and Golders Green. On the journey to work dignity could not necessarily be maintained. In 1915 Ashfield had declared overcrowding to be ‘a permanent feature of the rush hour operation of trains'. It was the price to be paid for the alleviation of congestion on the streets. At the time of writing, overcrowding is worse than ever in the peak hours as a result of the rapidly rising population of the city, and it has been a common feature of the off-peak since the introduction of the Travelcard in 1983.

In 1926 the two parts of the nascent Northern Line were also nipped together to the south, compounding the operation complexity. This was done by means of a link from Charing Cross (now Embankment station) on the Hampstead Tube to Kennington on the City & South London, with a new station – Waterloo – incorporated on the way. An under-river loop had originally been created at Charing Cross-now-Embankment so that it could function as the southern end of the railway. Trains coming into the station would go round this U-bend and head north again. Now the loop became superfluous, but part of it was
retained for through-running: hence the extreme curvature of the northbound Northern Line platforms at Embankment. (The abandoned, under-river part of the loop was breached by bombs that fell on the bed of the Thames in the Second World War, but floodgates activated during air raids to protect the Tubes running under the river had come into play, and the line was not flooded.)

In conjunction with these works, the new joint line was extended south beyond Clapham Common to the village (but not for long) of Morden, with six new stations created on the way. (Whereas the stations on the northern extension were in homely, bucolic style so as to fit in with the garden village fantasy, the ones to the south were more distinguished, and we will be meeting their architect, Charles Holden, shortly.)

The extension north beyond Golders Green was above ground except for a tunnel between Hendon and Colindale; the southerly one was below ground. Here was a deep-level Tube reaching far into the south London suburbs, and the tunnel between East Finchley and Morden via
Bank
– that being the long way round – was the longest in the world at 17½ miles, and remained so until the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Why deep-level? Because it ran through territory already built up. Why was it already built up? Because it was served by the main line Southern Railway, which had agreed to the Morden extension as a quid pro quo for the District not proceeding from Wimbledon to Sutton.

In
The Man Who Built London Transport
, Christian Barman writes that, ‘The prospect of having to work a double train service starting on a single joint line to diverge on to a pair of lines, and then re-uniting on the other side of London to run on a single line again, was not received with much enthusiasm by the operating men.' There would have to be a great deal of ‘weaving in and out of trains', partly because those going to the City would take ninety seconds longer to reach Camden Town than those
via the West End. A friend who works for the Paris Metro tells me that the signallers on that thoroughly rational system, involving lines that in almost every case start from point A and finish at point B, with no divergences to points C and D, are in awe of the men who signal the Northern Line. They would appreciate taking on such a challenge themselves, but only for an afternoon or so, by way of a short intellectual game. They wouldn't care to do it day in, day out, for decades. A man who worked for the Underground once told me that if anyone complained persistently about the line, they would be invited to come to the control room at Coburg Street to watch the signallers at work. ‘They expect to see a lot of blokes lounging around drinking coffees and having a laugh. When they see the intensity of concentration involved, they usually shut up.'

The joining of the two lines might have been designed to create operating difficulties, and in the Eighties and Nineties, this together with other problems caused by an ageing train fleet caused Dick Murray, transport correspondent of the
Evening Standard
, to begin referring to the Northern as the ‘Misery Line', a name that stuck.

The south-pointing extension was, like the developments at the northern end, funded by a Trade Facilities grant designed to counteract unemployment and economic depression, a fact poignantly attested to by the creation of what are commonly called ‘suicide pits' beneath the tracks in its stations. Officially, they are called ‘
anti
-suicide pits', which sounds less like an inducement to kill yourself, but then again, the pessimistic purpose of these trenches between the running rails was to facilitate the removal of dead bodies rather than the saving of lives. Yes, you might fall directly into the pit, the incoming train going above you, but you'd almost certainly encounter one of the two electrified rails on the way. The Morden pits were 1 foot 4 inches deep. The ones that spread across the network in the 1930s were
2 foot deep. They do not exist on the cut-and-cover lines, where the under-frame of the trains is supposed to provide ‘greater clearance'.