Underground, Overground (25 page)

After an inquest into an Underground suicide in 1921, the Westminster Coroner observed, ‘There was something about the roar and rush of the Tube train which was terribly fascinating to a person if he were alone on the platform.' Alone-ness may be an important consideration. Two hundred people try to kill themselves under Tube trains every year, of whom half are successful. The number has not risen commensurate with the great increase in Tube usage of recent years, and my friend Stuart, who works on the Underground, says this is ‘because people are embarrassed about doing it in front of a crowd'. He added, hauntingly, ‘On a Sunday night back in the late Sixties, it was only you and the driver anywhere east of King's Cross.' In-house at the Underground, they are known as ‘one-unders' or ‘jumpers'. But in her novel
King Solomon's Carpet
Barbara Vine writes: ‘Even those who cannot dive, who would not dream of diving into water, dive, not jump, in front of the oncoming train.' I cannot say whether this is true.

The new, joined-up line we are dealing with continued to be known by its two earlier names, although it was billed as a double act to the extent that posters would advertise ‘Charing Cross – For Pleasure; Bank – For Business'. Portmanteau names were suggested: Mordenware, Medgway, Edgmorden, Edgmor. Whichever
Railway Magazine
journalist had described ‘Bakerloo' as a ‘gutter title' would have been spinning in his grave – providing he were dead, that is. ‘Northern Line' was settled on in 1937, when it was being further extended, this time once again in a northerly direction (from Archway).

If the extensions to the Northern Line were the work of Ashfield, the roughly contemporaneous extensions to the Piccadilly were driven through by Frank Pick.

The spur to action was the blockage at Finsbury Park, which – it will be remembered – was the northern terminus of the Big Tube and the Piccadilly Line. It was also a station of the Great Northern main line, and any passenger wanting to proceed north from Finsbury Park had to either go by bus or tram – causing a rush-hour scrimmage every day as thousands of commuters changed mode – or use the Great Northern's trains. The company had made sure of this by an Act of Parliament in 1902 banning Underground extensions beyond Finsbury Park. By 1923 Frank Pick had risen to Assistant Managing Director of the Underground Group; the Great Northern was part of the London & North Eastern Railway; and there was a public campaign against its Finsbury Park veto. Pick arranged for photographs of the rush-hour scrimmages to be distributed to the press, and in 1925 the LNER caved in.

Pick began lobbying for an extension of the Piccadilly, and the funding for this would come not from the Trade Facilities Act but from equally dour-sounding legislation providing cheap money for job creation schemes: the Development (Loan Guarantees and Grants) Act was passed by the government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, in response to another spike in employment. It might be objected that most of the unemployment was in the north of England, but unemployed industrial workers did migrate to London to work on the extensions, which required tunnel rings, cabling and concrete produced in the north.

Pick's final plan for the Piccadilly involved an extension northwards to Cockfosters and westwards from Hammersmith beside the overcrowded District Line stretch towards Hounslow and Uxbridge, the Piccadilly trains running as expresses between
Hammersmith and Acton Town. The plan would also involve the rebuilding of fifteen Piccadilly stations in central London.

Twenty-two tunnelling shields were used in the construction of the northern extension, which took just three years to build: between 1930 and 1933. It stands in relation to the two suburban branches of the London & North Eastern Railway (to Welwyn and to Hertford) like the middle stump of a cricket wicket, and Pick made the case that it would not therefore steal passengers from those branches. Rather, it would create its own passengers in an area where there was ‘an entire absence of development'. The two branch lines are still there (operated by First Capital Connect and National Express East Anglia), and the Piccadilly still runs between them. If you step out of, say, Arnos Grove station and walk about, you can see the Edwardian villas that the big railway brought, and the Thirties semis the Tube brought, although according to the man at the ticket barrier, ‘It still felt rural up here until the 1960s. There were lots of gaps between the houses. It was a great place to grow up because you still had bits of fields and trees, and then there were the marshalling yards and goods depots of the railway – I liked all that.' Today the big railway lacks all glamour. New Southgate station is a hellish bunker. The adjacent Victorian Gothic building that used to be the railway hotel now has buddleia growing out of it, and a sign proclaims ‘Cars Bought for Cash' … Whereas Arnos Grove Underground station, with its circular ticket hall, remains elegant, and contains a shrine to the man who designed it, whom we will be meeting in a minute. But first, a verdict on the Piccadilly Line as a railway.

The Pick plan combined expansion with the complete closure of three stations: Brompton Road, Down Street and York Road. Down Street is in Mayfair, and the locals were too posh for the Tube. At York Road, located in the fly-blown territory north of King's Cross, the opposite was the case. All human life is on the Piccadilly; the line is too cluttered with stations, having
originated from three railways serving the congested area of central London, and having then been extended. It's unfortunate, therefore, that it should be the line that since 1977 has served Heathrow. When the British Airports Authority first proposed its Heathrow Express service from Paddington in 1988, London Transport responded with its own plan to run Tube trains express to the airport, partly using
District Line
tracks, which would have provided the fastest access by Underground. This ambitious and expensive proposal did not stop the Heathrow Express, which I refuse to use because of the television screen that blares at you the whole way. I stick with the Tube, and, being a north Londoner, any Heathrow flight I take is always preceded by – and often
exceeded
by – an hour and half on the Piccadilly.

Arnos Grove station was designed by Charles Holden, and a portrait photograph of him is placed behind a window in a now disused ticket booth of the station. The booth was of the type called a passimeter. These stood like islands in the concourses of the inter-war Tube stations, and tickets could be dispensed through windows on either side. The early ones were connected to turnstiles, and a device – the actual passimeter – would count the number of passengers going through. Where they survive, they are not in use for selling tickets because (an indictment of modern London, this) they cannot be made bulletproof. Their function was to speed ‘passenger flow' in the efficient and logical stations designed by the man in the photograph.

You can see why Charles Holden appealed to Frank Pick, who as Assistant Managing Director of the Underground group had broadened his artistic interest to include station architecture, and it's for the very same reason you wouldn't have wanted to attempt a night on the town with either of them. Holden,
like Pick, was from the north – Bolton in his case, although he'd moved to Welwyn Garden City, the model for Hampstead Garden Suburb, where Pick resided. Like Pick, he was a teetotaller from a nonconformist family. They had met in 1915, at the inaugural meeting of the Design and Industries Association, which promoted the doctrine of elegant utility: ‘fitness for purpose'.

Arnos Grove station, designed by Charles Holden, with all the geometrical purity that characterised his work on the inter-war Piccadilly and Northern Line extensions. This station contains a small shrine to Holden, including a photograph showing a forbiddingly puritanical-looking man with small glasses and a red goatee beard. But he always put the passenger first, and his stations are the most beautiful buildings in the suburbs in which they occur.

Christian Barman's description of Holden suggests another unworldly figure after the fashion of the calligrapher Johnston. He evokes

a man of short stature with a calm, earnest face enlivened by the reflections from the round-rimmed gold spectacles he was never seen without. From each side of a lofty forehead, the forehead of a great chemist or mathematician, the hair hung down almost vertically; the little beard, meticulously trimmed, suggested an unimpressive chin.

Holden ‘spoke little, in a soft, colourless voice'. The picture at Arnos Grove, being in black and white, spares the viewer the colour of that goatee beard: bright red. The fact that Holden's architectural practice had specialised in spartan and light-filled hospital interiors makes him seem more rather than less forbidding, but when it came to his work for the Underground, he always put the passenger first.

His first major commission was to design the stations on the Morden extension of the Northern Line. Pick wanted something more modern for this than the countrified stations on the northern extension of the same line. Whereas they were designed to fit in, Holden's stations to the south were designed to stand out. They are geometrically simple in grey Portland stone, with wide central windows into which is incorporated a stained-glass roundel. Further roundels were mounted on masts, like cherries on cocktail sticks, and overall the stations betokened a great
confidence in the Underground's identity. The same theme would be pursued later in new station entrances for Knightsbridge and Leicester Square, and the latter (the entrance on the eastern side of Charing Cross Road) seems, in its purity, an antidote to the garish clutter of that part of the West End.

In 1928 Holden re-designed Piccadilly Circus station as part of the refurbishment of the central stations on that line. In fact, he created the Piccadilly Circus station we now know, with the subterranean concourse mimicking the Circus above, that focal point of the Empire. Whereas the Morden line stations may have seemed forbidding in their grey plainness, Piccadilly Circus is mellow and refulgent in luxurious marble and glass. There are retail booths around the perimeter of the circle, and in
Designed for London: 150 Years of Transport Design
(1995) Oliver Green describes the intended effect as that of ‘a shopping street at night'. When rising up from the platforms today, on the escalators fitted in the Holden refurbishment, the traveller still feels himself to be at the centre of … something. Perhaps it is still the centre of the world, because there are always plenty of foreign visitors there, and there's always a concentration of them queuing at the Travel Information Centre to ask (and all these questions
have
been asked): ‘How Do We Take the Tube to Piccadilly Circus?' or ‘Can I Get a By-Pass?' or ‘How do we get to Russell Crowe station?' or ‘Do you sell Octopus cards?' (The last question is not as risible as it sounds, since the travel card of Hong Kong is called an Octopus.)

But if Piccadilly Circus really is still internationally significant, then the World Time Clock, which purports to show the time anywhere by some not immediately clear method involving a moving pointer and a flattened globe, would always be working. But it is not. In fact, it is always
not
working. So perhaps the effect of Piccadilly Circus is simply to transport that passenger back to the glamorous London invoked on the Underground
posters of the inter-war years, where men in spats (Lord Ashfield loved to wear them) and cloche-hatted ladies ‘touched the riches of the West End' – that is, went shopping before repairing to an Art Deco cocktail lounge.

Holden next designed what has been described as ‘London's first skyscraper' – the headquarters of the Underground Group. 55 Broadway is a cruciform building in Portland stone, rising a dozen storeys high above St James's Park station. Just as one reads ‘Morden' as ‘modern' because of Holden's pioneering stations, so one reads '55' here as ‘SS', or at least I do, because 55 Broadway reflects the Machine Age ethos behind the great liners being built at the time and, standing as it does on an acute corner, it seems to have a prow. Pick, who took up residence in a room on the seventh floor – north-facing for the steady light – had actually been consulted on the fixtures and fittings of the
Queen Mary
, and the interior of 55 is plushly carpeted and wood-panelled, as I would imagine the passenger quarters of a liner to be. Whenever Underground employees arrange to meet me there, they say, ‘I'll meet you at 55 Broadway' in terms of reverence, never referring to it merely as ‘the office'.

It was decorated with sculptures by such eminences of the day as Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, who had long been fingered as a rum cove by the British press for his many mistresses, his shabby sweaters, his preference for sculpting primitive-looking nude figures (some of his sculptures were destined to feature in a sort of peep show in Blackpool) and for generally being a Bohemian with a capital ‘B'. In 1929 his first adornment of 55 Broadway was unveiled. The sculpture,
Night
, showed an enfeebled-looking man lying in the lap of a monumental female figure – a stylised version of Christ and Mary in the
Pietà
configuration, perhaps, but it provoked what the
Manchester Guardian
described as ‘storms of criticism rising at times into terms of full-blooded abuse'. When a second Epstein sculpture called
Day
was
revealed in July of 1929, the
Manchester Guardian
described the composition thus: ‘A large father figure with a fierce face, flat and hard and round like the sun at noon, holds and presents a male child standing between his knees, while the child stretches up his arms towards the neck of the father, his face turning upwards in a gesture of reluctance to face his task.' The writer approved, concluding, ‘Do we know that Epstein is bringing new beauty to our generation?' The answer was obviously ‘No', because
Day
aroused fury in the press, and a jar of liquid tar was aimed at it. The trouble, in short, was that the child's member was too long.