Underground, Overground (5 page)

There was also a Hackney carriage nuisance, a private carriage nuisance, a cart-and-wagon nuisance and horse-and-rider nuisance. In
London: The Biography
(2000) Peter Ackroyd quotes a work called
Memories of London in the 1840s
, which speaks of a London sound, ‘as if all the noises of all the wheels of all the carriages were mingled and ground together into one subdued, hoarse, moaning hum'. Again, the early railways only fanned the flames. They brought more goods and more people into the city – to stay for good, or to depart at the end of the day.

As Pearson well knew, the roads in and around the City were particularly narrow and labyrinthine, therefore liable to clogging. The City was built to a medieval street pattern that remains. Those gold-paved lanes were sacred, but the approaches could be altered. In the 1840s, Oxford Street was extended towards the City through some slums by means of the bleak New Oxford Street. The Fleet Valley (thronged with the rookeries of the poor) made a north–south barrier that would be cleared by the building of Farringdon Road. A little later the baleful, and balefully named, Holborn Viaduct – which looks designed for midnight suicide bids – would traverse this from west to east. It is a fact that all the streets designed to relieve Victorian traffic jams are dead streets. Ask yourself: have you ever had a good time on
any of the above-mentioned roads? Or on that blackened runnel called Queen Victoria Street? Or on grey, monumental Kings-way, which is on a scale to suggest a triumphal procession, but with the reason for the celebration forgotten? (It was opened in 1905, to relieve narrow Drury Lane and even narrower Chancery Lane.) To see the streets that these bold thoroughfares replaced, I recommend
Lost London, 1870–1945
(2009), by Philip Davies, with its ghostly photographs of sagging, timber-framed houses. It is the London of Dickens, who had nothing to say about the coming of the Metropolitan Railway, even though he lived for seven years after its opening, and to whom accordingly we now say goodbye.

The density of the traffic was one of the reasons why, as Pearson would say before a Parliamentary Commission in 1846, ‘A poor man is chained to the spot. He has not leisure to walk and he has not money to ride to a distance from his work.'

By his railway, Pearson would free the poor man.

Pearson's first idea, set out in 1839, was for a railway in a wide, covered-over cutting. It would connect a giant half-underground station at Farringdon with stations all over England. It would also connect – at cheap ticket prices – Farringdon with new estates of cottages for artisans and clerks which he said ought to be built 6 miles north of London. The appeal of Farringdon was that this slum-ridden area was being redeveloped by Pearson's new employers, the Corporation of London. This was in conjunction with the transfer of the livestock market at Smithfield (the one to which the cattle had been driven via the china shops of Oxford Street) to uncluttered Islington.

This railway plan may sound dramatic – more Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
than metropolitan railway – but it was conceived at
a time when the potentialities of railways seemed infinite. Pearson's railway would be drawn by atmospheric power, a fad of the 1830s and 1840s – a ‘rope of air', as the great engineer Robert Stephenson once described the method. Trains were propelled by a piston set in a pipe lying between the rails. The piston was sucked along by stationary pumping engines that created a vacuum. This utopian transport ideal (a smokeless railway!) figured in the more fantastical of the early railway schemes. In the mid-1850s, for instance, Joseph Paxton would propose an atmospheric ‘Great Victorian Way' encircling the whole of central London. The trains would run within a 72-foot-wide glass arcade that would also accommodate shops, roads and walkways and pedestrians – all of which suggests that the success Paxton had scored in the building of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 had rather gone to his head.

Incidentally, a number of atmospheric railways were built and operated, most of them justifiably obscure. But one became an object of fascination to the more troglodytic sort of Londoner.

In 1863 the Post Office built a driverless underground atmospheric railway for carrying mail from the District Post Office, Eversholt Street, to Euston station; two years later it was extended to the General Post Office in St Martin's Le Grand. The building of the line was symptomatic of the road traffic problem in London at the time. The tracks were 2-foot gauge, the tunnels about 4 feet wide, and the carriages resembled the ‘logs' on log flumes seen at amusement parks. The line had the superbly business-like name of the Pneumatic Despatch Railway but was plagued by air leakages and abandoned in 1880. From 1913 the Post Office built an electrical underground railway from Paddington and Whitechapel, serving nine stations at its peak. Like its predecessor, it was driverless, with 2-foot gauge tracks but wider tunnels. Guests could sample the line in a VIP passenger car, decorated with the monograms of British monarchs
from George V to Elizabeth II. It closed in 2003, the Post Office, besieged by competitors in communications, unable to justify the cost. In a civilised world it would re-open, relieving the streets of some lorries.

But to return to Joseph Paxon, in spite of his grandiosity, there was nothing inherently eccentric about proposing underground or half-underground railways in the mid-nineteenth century. The Victorians were moles. In the nineteenth century about fifty railway tunnels of more than a mile in length were constructed, compared to three in the twentieth century. The very first proper inter-city railway, the Liverpool–Manchester of 1830, had involved two tunnels under Liverpool, both longer than a mile. According to
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History
, it is cheaper to build a tunnel than a cutting of more than 60-foot depth.

In 1846 a Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini was set up to establish ground rules for the numerous applications to build railways into London. Pearson put his scheme to the commission in heartfelt terms:

The passion for a country residence is increasing to an extent that it would be impossible to persons who do not mix much with the poor to know. You cannot find a place where they do not get a broken teapot in which to stuff, as soon as spring comes, some flower or something to give them an idea of green fields and the country.

But the Commission rejected Pearson's plan, and any other that sought to infringe the rights of central London landlords. The Commission recommended against new stations in the West End or the City, and the boundary line to the north would be the New Road. The presumption against railways in central London would remain effective until 1858 (Victoria Station),
with one exception, which we will consider shortly. The inadvertent effect of this ruling was the creation of the lines and stations of the London Underground, because these would avoid the ban.

Now to Pearson's Plan B …

In 1851 the Great Northern Railway had reached London and begun operating into a terminus at Maiden Lane, just north of the New Road. In 1854 they moved up to the New Road itself, with the opening of King's Cross station, east of Euston. The railways were alighting on the New Road like birds perching on a branch (the Midland Railway would open St Pancras, between Euston and King's Cross, in 1868), and Pearson took note. Whereas his first scheme had ignored the New Road stations, and simply sought to upstage them with a bigger and better – and madder – station of his own, his second plan tried to co-opt them.

It involved a railway going beneath the New Road and connecting some or all of the main-line termini gathered there and then bending south towards the City (so far, so sensible), where it would conclude (and here his fancifulness broke out again) in another vast half-underground City terminus: a complex involving two stations, one for long-distance and one for local traffic, both with numerous platforms 300 yards long, with a 13-acre goods yard and engine stabling facilities. This time it was proposed the terminus would connect to some more tangible workmen's estates – the north London suburbs being built along the route of the Great Northern Railway.

The Corporation was interested in the idea, because it thought it might lead to the main-line railway companies funding municipal improvements in Farringdon, and in 1852 Pearson deposited his City Terminus Bill in Parliament. It was always doomed. The main-line railway companies might welcome an underground connection that would enable them to run through to the City,
but why would they underwrite a vast terminus that would take away their business? Yes, an argument for the great City Terminus would be the amount of road traffic it might spare the city streets. But a stronger argument against was the amount of road traffic it might
create
. Plus, it contravened the ban of 1846.

What was required now was the intervention of some men who were not gadflies.

The logic of Pearson's arguments was accepted, up to a point, by a consortium of businessmen. In August 1854, after Pearson's own scheme had failed in Parliament, the consortium obtained royal assent for what had initially been called the Bayswater, Paddington & Holborn Bridge Railway, and which gradually became the ‘North Metropolitan' and finally the Metropolitan Railway.

It would run beneath the New Road from Paddington to King's Cross, there drooping south towards the City, just as Pearson's scheme had done. But there would be no sprawling terminus – instead, a more modest station at Farringdon. The line would connect to the Great Western main line at Paddington, in return for which that company would invest in the Metropolitan. There would also be a connection at King's Cross to the Great Northern main line, in return for which that company would
not
invest in the Metropolitan. (But it would have to pay to use the tracks that would carry its trains through to the City.)

The consortium set about a faltering campaign to raise the million pounds required, a job made harder by the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. It should by now be apparent that Charles Pearson was not the sort of man to resent the success of a rival scheme, especially one that might bring the social benefits he had sought by his own proposal. In 1859, when it looked as though the Metropolitan Railway Company would be wound up
with no line built, he wrote a pamphlet:
A Twenty Minutes Letter to the Citizens of London in Favour of the Metropolitan Railway and City Station
. Gadfly he may have been, but by this ‘letter' he persuaded the Corporation of London to invest £200,000 in the line, a most unusual example of a public body investing in a Victorian railway. The Corporation also sold land in the Fleet Valley cheaply to the Metropolitan. What was its motive? The answer lay in the above-mentioned property development scheme. The corporation had just opened its new cattle market in Islington, and it had plans for clearances in the Fleet Valley that would make way for the new Farringdon Road, and adjacent meat market. It was felt that the Metropolitan Railway would serve the meat market, since it would carry both passengers and freight, and that it would reduce road congestion in the City. In fact, it would do the former but not the latter. Transport begets transport, and the coming of the Met to the City would only attract more of those swarming buses.

The construction of the first stretch of the Metropolitan Railway began in October 1859, and the line was opened to the public on 10 January 1863. It was built on the cut-and-cover principle. The railway was laid into a shallow grave. The road, mainly the New Road, was dug up, and the tracks were laid down in a brick cutting that was then roofed over, with the road replaced on the top of the roof. For this reason a cut-and-cover railway is in engineering terms technically a bridge (because of the roofing-over) rather than a tunnel. The crown of the tunnel arches are sometimes just inches under the road. The early Underground lines were all built on the cut-and-cover principle, because tunnelling technology was not sufficiently advanced to make deep-level Tubes. (The cut-and-cover lines are the Metropolitan, District, Hammersmith & City, and the Circle, which is not so much a line as a service that uses the tracks of those other lines.)

The first stretch of the Met was built for most of its length
beneath the centre of New Road. It was advisable to avoid building an underground railway beneath private houses at the time, because the law would require you to buy those houses. The Met of 1863 was not
entirely
covered over. When it bends south between King's Cross and Farringdon, it is in open cutting. Go to Swinton Street, WC1, five minutes' walk south and east of King's Cross. It's a ghostly street of powdery-looking terraced houses. Where the terrace comes to an end on the south and east side, an 8-foot wall takes over. You know there must be something fascinating beyond that wall because someone's tried to stop you seeing over, and there are shards of glass embedded in the top. However, there is a small step or foothold; find it, and look over the top. Then look down and you'll see filthy pigeons on a brick ledge; look further down to discover the secret of Swinton Street: the tracks of the Metropolitan. Wait for a train, and you will observe that it traverses that crevice with satisfying violence, but not sufficient to disturb the pigeons, which are in league with the line. Go to Swinton Street in the evening, and you're back in the King's Cross of
The Ladykillers
: crepuscular, fumacious, railway-haunted.

Or take an eastbound Met from King's Cross outside the rush hour, when you ought to be able to find a window seat. Again, look up, to see the beautiful brick valley made by the Metropolitan: the towering arcaded walls with brick struts going over. It's like being in the moat of Gormenghast Castle. This is hard-core London, and just before Farringdon station you will be able to glimpse the vast steel pipe that carries what was the Fleet River and is now the Fleet sewer over your head.