Underground, Overground (36 page)

While my father was working on British Rail in the 1970s, we had a neighbour who was a travelling salesman – a man who practically lived in his car and loved his car. He believed that trains were uneconomic, inefficient and somehow (even though we'd invented trains) anti-British. He said that, if he were running the country, he'd scrap the railway lines and replace them with fleets of buses running along an improved network of roads. ‘And would they be long buses with comfortable seats?' my father asked. ‘They would,' he said; ‘they'd be longer and wider than normal buses and much more comfortable – also faster.' ‘And would they run in quick succession?' inquired my father. ‘Yes,' said our neighbour, ‘they'd follow each other almost continuously.' ‘Then that would be called a
train
,' said my father, scoring a rhetorical coup only slightly tarnished by his constant re-telling of the story over subsequent years.

My father retained his commitment to rail travel in the years when the motor car was in the ascendant. Today the motor car is not taken seriously as a solution to the problems of mass
transport, and the transport planners of south-east England – and the mayor of London himself, judging by his Transport Plan – think in terms of trains and underground trains in particular with all the burrowing fervour (if less of the social idealism) of Charles Pearson himself. Or you might say the planners are echoing the words of that head of the post-war railway executive John Elliot, who on 1 June 1958 said, ‘We must get people underground … Our policy is to get more and more people underground.'

The Underground itself will not be much increased, although it seems as though the Northern Line will be extended from Kennington to Battersea. Another course, so to speak, will be added to the dog's dinner … because the Northern Line is already over-complicated. (Then again, TfL is also considering prising it apart at Camden, allowing a simplified, and therefore more frequent, service to the trains north of there, which would require the complete rebuilding of Camden Town station – and therefore of much of Camden Town itself – in order to allow changing en masse between the branches.)

The Big Dig, however (it's only a matter of time before it's called that), will be Crossrail: 73 miles from Heathrow and Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. Crossrail, its spokespeople want to make clear, is definitely not ‘a Tube'. They don't think the term does justice to a line with full-size trains, only 13 of whose 73 miles will be ‘in tunnel'. But those 13 miles go through central London, and where the Underground interchanges with Crossrail, its own stations will be boosted and glamorised, especially at Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road. The tunnelling shields for Crossrail will incorporate a canteen and toilets, and there is to be a tunnelling academy at Ilford, to train the thousands of employees in mole-like arts. That other half-underground line, Thameslink, is to have a capacity increase; and Crossrail will probably be followed by Crossrail 2 (a tunnel from Chelsea to Hackney), just as High
Speed 1, through Kent (which starts and ends in a tunnel), will be followed by High Speed 2, heading north (which will also start in a tunnel).

Crossrail (Crossrail 1, that is – let's keep our feet on the ground) will apparently alleviate congestion on the Central, Jubilee, Bakerloo and District Lines by ‘between 20 and 60 per cent', which is just as well. The Tube Upgrade, which will be completed about when Crossrail opens in 2018, will provide a 30 per cent increase in capacity to a system that is unfortunately
50
per cent over capacity. And the population of London is expected to rise by nearly 20 per cent by 2030. The Tube, in other words, will continue to be crowded … at which point I take off my London bowler hat and put on my northern flat cap, and say that the only answer is to make the whole of the neglected rest of the country into a giant Enterprise Zone. Get everyone who hasn't got a good excuse for being in London out of it. The Tube made the city too big, and it remains too big. In these moods I look at London through my northern filter. In London people will think nothing of going (by Tube) from Finchley to Wimbledon, a journey that might easily take two hours, in which time you could travel so much more bracingly from London to York, but Londoners are blinded to the comparison because their journey is ‘all within the same city'.

How is that city to be regarded in the twenty-first century? A centre for the elite, and the suburbs for the … less elite? It is clear that suburban living has its appeal, hence the middle-class flight from the centre of London which only began to be reversed with the loft-living movement of the Eighties. But it is hard to find a defence of suburban living in literature. I wonder how many residents of suburban London – I'm one of them myself – feel a sense of alienation from the city in which they live owing to their apparently marginal status. It is said that Crossrail will bring 1.5 million people within a ‘one-hour commute' of central London, which sounds like no fun at all.

Philip Ross is an author, a transport consultant and CEO of Unwork.com, which ‘challenges the way we work'. His research has discovered that the length of commute considered ideal by Londoners is ten minutes. Ross therefore proposes alternatives to the great respiration of London, by which we are sucked into the centre in the morning and exhaled in the evening. He favours ‘polycentric working', so people are not tied to the central offices of their corporations, where, apparently, their desks are in use for less than half the day. Technology enables people to work remotely from their desks, why not also remotely from their offices? Philip Ross does not mean working from home. His research shows that people don't want to do that. They go stir crazy. Rather, they might work in an annexe of the company's main office, and that annexe might be in Finchley, or Wimbledon … or Surbiton. The biggest single starting point of commuters working in Canary Wharf is Surbiton. So why don't they just stay in Surbiton? At least for some days of the week, or until midday, getting the work that can be done in Surbiton out of the way before coming into HQ for meetings and the face-to-face stuff. This way journeys would be staggered, which has long been the aim of the Underground. (Remember the command designed to stop everyone going home at the same time: ‘Play Between Six and Twelve.') Staggering could also be promoted, Philip Hall cunningly suggests, by Tube customers receiving a top-up to their Oysters in return for not travelling in the peak times.

This polycentric approach would boost the suburbs. The annexe-office workers would buy their coffees and sandwiches, and perhaps much else, there rather than in the middle of town, and ideally from an independent retailer. It would help raise morale in the outlying places, and London might truly become the collection of villages it is often romantically said to be … and the Tubes might become tolerable.

The needle is likely to lurch further towards ‘intolerable' when mobile phones become usable on the network. On the plus side, the new ‘S' stock trains that will eventually be running on all the cut-and-cover lines will be air-conditioned. That is good news because the earth around the tunnels on all the Underground lines gets hotter every year. It is hard to make deep-level Tube trains air-conditioned, because there isn't the space for the equipment, but there has been a general ‘cooling programme' in place across the network since 2006. The new trains will also be fully ‘walk-through', with no carriage end-doors. Travelling on them is like riding on a sinuous, moving corridor. It's less claustrophobic than the old arrangement, but now you can no longer choose the carriage not occupied by the declaiming loony.

Will Underground trains be completely driverless? The new signalling being installed as part of the Upgrade will allow this, and the development, allowing a faster throughput of trains, might arise from, or be stopped by, a battle with the unions. Mike Brown, Managing Director of London Underground, envisages driverless trains within twenty years. There might be a ‘train captain' on board, as on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), but this would be an unenviable role on our packed Tube: the train captain would be condemned to live in a permanent rush hour. Or the train might be completely unattended. Either way, lasar sensors detecting any movement on the tracks (but disregarding the movement of, say, pigeons or mice), and platform edge doors, as in the Jubilee Line extension stations, could make Tube suicide rarer. One benefit of driverless trains is that you can sit right at the front and have that privileged, hypnotic, driver's-eye view of a ride through the tunnels. On the DLR, or on the driverless Line 14 on the Paris Metro, I always try to sit at the front. (It's usually just a matter of elbowing aside some ten-year-old boys; I can then get on with pretending to drive the train.)

It's likely that ticket offices will also be closed, as ticketless
travel comes in. (The barriers will effectively pickpocket you, by debiting the bank card in your wallet rather than your proffered Oyster.) It is my understanding that the vast majority of the stations on the Underground, unlike those on the Paris Metro, will continue to be staffed because of safety worries formulated after the King's Cross fire, but with the constant pressure for ‘productivity increases', such speculation is dangerous. In fact, all speculation about the future of the Underground is dangerous …

One of the new ‘S' Stock trains that will be coming to all the cut-and-cover lines. It is walk-through, a moving hotel corridor (there are no end-doors to the cars). It is also air-conditioned, but the residual seating points to an over-crowded future.

Before me is the edition of
Modern Wonder
comic for 20 August 1938. It shows a streamlined Tube train racing through a tunnel in cross-section: ‘There are four of these trains now in service on the Piccadilly Line.' The strong implication is that they are the future of Tube travel. The trains were a subdivision of the famous '38 stock, but the fashionable streamlinings brought a speed increase of precisely nothing (Tube trains didn't go fast enough to feel the benefit) and some passengers – older ones especially – thought they looked ridiculous, just as I think cyclists wearing Lycra look ridiculous. Those trains had been taken out of service by the time the war started, and some of the carriages came to a bathetic end as air-raid shelters at Northfields and Cockfosters.

I once interviewed a German businessman who tried to interest London Underground in technology that would project images onto tunnel walls so that, as the train moved, passengers would see a lateral film. The idea was that it might be used for advertising, or to show, say, the Yorkshire Dales on a sunny day, making for a less stressful ride. A friend of mine says that, in a future, more civilised London, there will be mattresses in the suicide pits – to provide a soft landing for those who survive the attempt. I'm sure Charles Pearson would have approved of that, while lamenting the necessity for the suicide pits in the first place. What would he have made of the way his creation has unfolded? You'd have to sit him down and give him a stiff drink
before unveiling the whole story. The real ‘facer' (a word he might have used to denote a shock) would be the realisation that, in creating the Metropolitan, he had created the modern Metro-
polis
. But I wonder what detail would have horrified him, or tickled his fancy the most? Here is the writer with whom we began, Arnold Bennett, in a work called
How To Live on 24 Hours A Day
: ‘There was a congestion of traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the congestion people actually began to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd's Bush! And you say that isn't picturesque!'

This has not been an official history of the London Underground, but the press office of Transport for London has been most helpful, especially Ann Laker. Several senior Underground people have given me interviews, and Mike Ashworth has given me more than one. I should also mention that every time I have asked a question of a member of staff on the Undergound they have tried to help me without first asking ‘Who are you?' and ‘Why do you want to know?' (Perhaps they
should
be asking those questions, but I am glad they are not.)

I am grateful to Brian Hardy and Piers Connor of the London Underground Railway Society, and to John Scott-Morgan, railway author. Each of these men, it seems to me, knows everything about the Underground – or at least, they answered every question I put to them straight off the top of their heads. Piers Connor, incidentally, runs one of the most comprehensive and clearly written websites about the Underground in all its aspects, at www.tubeprune.com. (The name stands for Tube Professionals' Rumour Network.)

I would like to thank Niall Devitt, of the London Transport Museum, and Peter Saxton for invaluable assistance with the text, and Wendy Neville, also of the Museum, for letting me in free. On Underground electricity I am grateful to Eddie Wearing; on Underground gas lighting, Chris Sugg (see website on gas lighting www.williamsugghistory.co.uk); on Underground Steam, Oliver Densham of the Southwold Railway Trust; on general London history, Lisa Freedman and David Secombe (his elegant website is at thelondoncolumn.com); on Brunel's tunnel, Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.