Underground, Overground (33 page)

The opening of the Jubilee Line in 1979 coincided with a rather indeterminate, or experimental, period in Underground station decoration. The coming of the line to Baker Street was celebrated with a Sherlock Holmes theme at the station. The tiling here is actually from a Bakerloo platform, but it photographs better than the wispy (if charming) illustrations from the Holmes stories that feature on the Jubilee platforms themselves. The author suggests (tentatively) that nowhere in the stories are Holmes and Watson described as arriving at or departing from Baker Street station.

It had long been acknowledged that south-east London was badly served by public transport, and it was always the idea that the Jubilee should head in that direction. The particular route it ended up taking – through Docklands – was a result of the fact that the regeneration of that area by private capital was a major project of Thatcherism. Olympia & York, the developers of Canary Wharf, did contribute to the costs of building the line, but not nearly as much as had been envisaged. British Gas also contributed towards the building of North Greenwich station, which would serve their aim of redeveloping the land on which the East Greenwich Gasworks had stood. North Greenwich is today the station for the O2 Centre, a fact announced on every train passing through. But in 1999 the O2 was the emerging Millennium Dome, that vast symbol of … something or other that became the second magnet for the extension after the Canary Wharf development had been completed. And by now Tony Blair's ego was on the line (so to speak) just as Margaret Thatcher's had been.

It was essential that the guests at the opening of the Dome be taken there by Tube, and so it was also essential the line be
completed by the end of 1999, which it was (just), the effort adding considerably to the expense of construction. The extension opened along its entire length on 22 December 1999, at a cost of £3.5 billion pounds, £2 billion over-budget.

I rode the extension in its first week, carrying an Underground press release so emboldened by the positive reviews of the station architecture that it was headed ‘What's
Your
Favourite Station?' I interviewed some passengers, and a man at Canada Water said, ‘Why all this grey? What's wrong with a bit of colour … Some red here and there? Tell you what,' he added confidentially, ‘a bit of
green
wouldn't go amiss.' At Canning Town a woman whispered, awestruck, ‘It's so clean, isn't it?' The line remains pristine, and the scale of the stations is still striking; the passengers within, riding the banks of escalators, descending through the multi-levels, resemble the numerous extras in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
. You could fit the whole of Canary Wharf Tower into Canary Wharf station; you almost need a Tube train to get from one end of it to the other. But North Greenwich is even bigger. You could fit the QE2 into
that
… And North Greenwich is
not
grey. There the moulded concrete and polished steel that characterises the extension gives way to giant ovoid pillars clad in mosaic tiles of dark blue, the melancholic but reassuring shade of an old-fashioned police lamp.

The ride comes above ground after North Greenwich. Next comes sprawling West Ham station, followed by even more sprawling Stratford, where the Jubilee, the Central, the Dockland Light Railway, London Overground and two national railway lines coincide beneath an over-sailing glass roof. This is the Olympic station, and the last time I was there, when I wanted to have a look at the new stadium, I found myself directed towards it by signs leading me through part of that reverberating hangar the Westfield Stratford City Shipping Centre, and I didn't approve. Not that anyone gives a stuff because I am just another
of the extras on the set, but I mean … talk about ‘exit through the gift shop'.

Compare the other end of the Jubilee. In the small but pretty ticket hall at Stanmore local information is displayed behind glass panels, and it has been the same local information for years, if not decades. Alongside notices about Stanmore Choral Society and Stanmore Bowls Club is the following: ‘The Bird Walk of Canons Park meets during autumn, winter and spring on the first Sunday of every month at the Donnefield Avenue entrance to Canons Park. The walk is led by Robin, an RSPB member who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of ornithology.'

The Jubilee Line extension has played its part – albeit slowly – in making Canary Wharf an easterly rival to the City. Whereas its working population was only 15,000 when the extension opened, it is now 90,000, and predicted to double by 2020. At the time of writing, the Jubilee is receiving a bad press because of the disruption caused by the implementation of ‘moving block' signalling. But all of that will be forgotten about when the system is fully working. Then again, the sheer inaccessibility of south-east London before the extension was built may also be forgotten about. During the opening week it was still fresh in the memory of one woman I spoke to at Canary Wharf. She said, ‘I love this station.' I asked why, and she said, ‘Do you know how many buses it used to take me to get to the West End? Four.'

Ken Livingstone became the MP for Brent East in 1987 and set about irritating the Labour leadership just as he had irritated Mrs Thatcher. He had no time for the triangulations of Tony Blair, and didn't care for Blair's idea of returning a limited measure of local democracy to London by means of a mere ‘strategic' body (it would set policy and run services through proxies, not
directly), to be called the Greater London Authority. It would be mainly concerned with policing and transport, something called Transport for London (with that ingratiating lower-case f in ‘for') replacing London Regional Transport. But there was a vacancy for a star, since the Authority would be headed by an elected mayor, who would be rather lightly overseen by an elected twenty-five-member Greater London Assembly. Livingstone wanted the job, to the annoyance of Blair, whose idea of a London mayor was a benign elder statesman who had outgrown political squabbling.

Frank Dobson was selected as the official Labour candidate for mayor, but in the election of 2000 Livingstone stood against him as an independent, and won. Here he was in charge of transport again. He had the power to set fares and to introduce road pricing for London, and this he did, by his introduction of the central London Congestion Charge, with the money raised going into public transport. The Tube being ‘at capacity', he improved the bus network so as to accommodate as many as possible of the motorists who would now leave their cars at home. (London buses now provide a de luxe service – they're regular and well maintained – and almost half the people using them pay nothing to do so, being under eighteen or of pensionable age. So the buses are not as cheap to operate as they once were, and they no longer subsidise the Underground.)

Livingstone was empowered to appoint a Commissioner for Transport to run TfL (of which London Underground Limited was a wholly owned subsidiary), and he chose an American, which ought not to surprise us by now: Robert Kiley, a man with a tough-guy persona who'd revitalised the New York Subway, the money raised by the issue of bonds backed by the guaranteed fare income of the system. Bond issues have long been favoured by Livingstone as the cheapest method of raising funds for the Underground, and a transport expert recently suggested to me
that, because of its ‘rock solid' fare income, London Underground had a better credit-worthiness than most European governments. But built in to the legislation that had created the Greater London Authority Act of 1999 was a new scheme of funding that took the principle of contracting out to bizarre lengths of complication: the Public Private Partnership (or PPP).

The PPP was not privatisation, which the Conservatives had been proposing, but it was the next best, or worst, thing. London Underground would operate the lines, but two consortia of engineers, or ‘infracos' – Metronet and Tube Lines – would be contracted to maintain them over a period of thirty years, during which an Upgrade would be implemented that would compensate for the thirty years of neglect after the war.

The infracos would be financially rewarded or penalised, according to extremely abstruse mathematical formulae that were supposed to characterise good or bad customer experience. In essence – and I am not disguising the desperation with which I reach for that phrase – the consortia won or lost according to how much time they saved the customers. One problem was that the contracts did not sufficiently motivate the consortia to make improvements; another was the cost of creating a contract for every Underground relationship. What had been an organic entity became a stiffly working machine built by lawyers charging hundreds of pounds an hour. Another problem was the demoralisation of Underground managers, caused by the implied statement ‘Only the private sector can be trusted to modernise the Tube.' Oh, and the PPP was never meant to fund the entire Upgrade; it would provide only about a quarter of the money, and the rest would come from government. Livingstone and Kiley fought the plan all the way to its implementation in 2003.

In 2007, three years into Livingstone's second term as mayor (this time he had been the official Labour candidate), Metronet
found that it could not afford to meet its obligations under the PPP. It went into administration, and London Underground bought most of the debt, with assistance from the Department of Transport. In 2010 Tube Lines and London Underground were in dispute over funding, and this ended with London Underground buying out Tube Lines and the collapse of the PPP. The responsibility for the Upgrade has now been taken ‘in house' – that is, London Underground itself commissions private companies to ‘deliver' it, by means of ‘simple contracts for achievable jobs'.

Livingstone had been right all along. But a prophet is without honour etc., and in 2008 he was swept from office on an anti-Labour tide. Will he go down as another of our Tube martyrs? He doesn't seem the martyred type, but it is too early to say.

We are stuck with that word ‘Upgrade', although other, subsidiary designations have been used on the posters that have been half-boasting, half-apologising for it (because it does bring the dreaded ‘weekend closures') in the decade since it began. Sometimes the posters have read ‘Transforming Your Tube'; the expression ‘PPP Upgrade' is long gone and now not even to be mentioned. I like the ones that say, in Johnston typeface, ‘We have a plan', concluding with that winking-eye, the diamond-shaped full stop. Apparently the Upgrade is referred to in-house at London Underground as ‘The New, New Works', and being a traditionalist, I like that as well.

The theme of the publicity is that the Tube is ‘at capacity', with the latest, record-breaking figure being 1.1 billion passenger journeys a year. So the aim is to increase capacity by 30 per cent, by means of bigger stations, longer, more capacious trains and new signalling systems allowing a faster throughput of trains. Many
aspects of this effort have already been touched on, to which I will add mention of the expansion of both Tottenham Court Road (the new station will be six times bigger than the old one) and Farringdon to accommodate Crossrail, and the redevelopment of King's Cross St Pancras, where the circulating areas are now wonderfully airy spaces in white and dark blue.

The scale of the changes continues to seem extravagant, even though the Upgrade was cut back after the collapse of the PPP. The aspect that has been curtailed is the aesthetic improvement of the stations. Fortunately, this programme has already touched most of the stations, and it extends well beyond the central area. In charge of the Customer Environment Design Team (as you might be able to tell from the nattiness of his suits) is Mike Ashworth, the man who made the connection between the '38 trains and ‘women of a certain age'. He is from Rochdale; another ‘Man from the North' who, like Frank Pick, became entranced by the Underground on boyhood visits to London: ‘We would visit relatives in Kensal Green, and I was more interested in the journey along the Bakerloo line than I was in the relatives. My parents were mortified when they discovered I'd started writing off to London Underground asking for leaflets.'

His job title, ‘Design and Heritage Manager', is attested to by the regard the new decor has for the old decor. For instance, at Bethnal Green he implemented a couple of years ago a ‘complete replication' of its original New Works appearance, with concourse tiles of the colour known as ‘biscuit', while the ones on the platforms are yellow, with orange and black trim – all as first prescribed by Charles Holden. When the wraps came off, a woman who had used the station all her life said to Mike, ‘Well, you've just cleaned it haven't you?' All the departures from the original colour scheme that had eroded the identity of a station since her girlhood had been instantly forgotten. Further along the easterly extension of the Central Line are the stations once
served by overground steam trains. These had subsequently ‘gone everywhere' in their colour scheme, and Ashworth and his team had proposed redecorating them in the colours of the Great Eastern Railway that had built them. ‘But that turned out to be two shades of brown.' Instead, three shades of green were chosen for Woodford, Fairlop and Snaresbrook, in accordance with the colour scheme of the Great Eastern's successor, the London & North Eastern Railway.

But Mike Ashworth admits that, ‘If people can go from A to B without trouble, they don't pay much attention to the look of the station.' Or if they do, they might disapprove, suspecting that money spent on what may seem mere cosmetic changes is money wasted. Hence this letter, which appeared in the
Evening Standard
in March 2011:

It seems billions can be spent on public transport without any discernible improvement in the service. The Tubes I have used have got no more reliable in the past two years, but the Victorian wall tiles have been replaced. I don't mind if stations look 120 years old. It adds character.