Underground, Overground (6 page)

The Fleet looks safely contained now, although you never know. It surprises me that no terrorist has made common cause with the surly and embittered Fleet, which, in Peter Ackroyd's words, became ‘a river of death' as it sidled through the meanest streets of London en route to the Thames. In
London: The
Biography
Ackroyd describes its progress with melancholy relish. It ‘moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London … Then it flowed down into Chick Lane … the haven of felons and murderers.' The Fleet made its last public appearance in June 1862, when it burst into the Met building works east of King's Cross. There is a famous illustration of the resulting chaos of collapsed brickwork, littered with wooden buttresses heaped as for a giant's game of pick-up-sticks.

The inundation is described in Arnold Bennett's novel
Riceyman Steps
, which was written in 1923, but set in 1919:

On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its restless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel. The crown of the arch of the mighty Fleet sewer had broken.

The central character's uncle tells the story ‘with such force and fire' that he has a stroke and dies. The London Underground has been tangling with the buried rivers of London ever since – and with the Thames. What became the Jubilee Line was initially called the Fleet Line, an act of propitiation, perhaps, to this most abused river. When I mention that Fleet pipe at Farringdon, people will tend to say, ‘Yes, and it appears again in that great big pipe that goes over the platforms at Sloane Square station', which is
very satisfying since it gives me the opportunity to point out that the Fleet would not suddenly veer west at Farringdon in order to make a beeline for Chelsea. The river carried in the pipe at Sloane Square is the Westbourne, and the pipe is said to shake in a rainstorm. Behind one of the innocent-looking doors on the platform at Sloane Square is a horizontal metal grille, beneath which is a pump, working away in the seething tributaries of the Westbourne. But that's nothing compared to Victoria Station, where a million gallons a day are pumped away, most of it from the Tyburn brook. There is a pumping house underneath the station that an Underground press officer once refused to let me see, sadistically adding, ‘It resembles the set of
Phantom of the Opera
.' It is possible that the Waterloo & City line is nicknamed ‘The Drain' because of the water pumped away, but there are other theories, the line being drain-like in so many ways. At the start of the Second World War floodgates would be installed at the ends of the under-Thames sections of the Bakerloo and the Northern lines to save them from inundation should bombs damage the riverbed.

The other famous image from the Metropolitan before its official opening is a photograph of ‘Mr Gladstone at the Private View'. It was taken on 24 May 1862, and it shows Gladstone, Mrs Gladstone and John Fowler, the swaggering and super-rich engineer of the Met, together with other dignitaries and shareholders of the line sitting in two rough contractors' wagons. The photograph reveals that Edgware Road had an arched glass roof, which it would lose soon after opening for the sake of improved ventilation. When I was writing my ‘Tube Talk' column, a woman wrote to me praising Edgware Road. ‘What you have at Edgware Road is sky.' What you also have is howling wind.

(Most of the cut-and-cover stations had elegant, arched glass roofs, and most have now lost them. The surviving glass roof at Notting Hill Circle and District platforms is the reason you will
generally feel good while waiting there. John Betjeman's poem ‘Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Station' was triggered by the loss of the glass roof – ‘Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station' – and its replacement by low-level awnings as a result of repairs in 1955, following war damage. Aldersgate, incidentally, was on the Metropolitan extension beyond Farringdon. It started life in 1865 as ‘Aldersgate Street', and is today Barbican.)

Mr (and Mrs) Gladstone are given a preview of the Metropolitan Railway. They are at Edgware Road (which used to have a roof). Gladstone was very involved with railways and thought they were too important to be unregulated. He insisted on cheap trains for the travelling poor, and envisaged railway nationalisation. He lost money on Underground stocks, and his coffin would be carried to Westminster Abbey on the District Railway.

In the Gladstone photo, the sitters look too small for their conveyances, and this is because they were sitting in extra-wide – that is, broad-gauge – wagons of the Great Western, which would run along the Met on broad-gauge tracks (7 foot 2 inches between the rails), together with trains using standard-gauge tracks of 4 foot 8½. In the Met's own language, the line ran ‘on the mixed-gauge principle', which makes the arrangement sound almost sensible. That broad gauge did not last long, and all Underground trains today run on the standard gauge. But there is a continuing distinction between the
loading
gauge (the size of the trains) of the deep-level Tube trains and the loading gauge of the cut-and-cover trains. The latter are bigger – as big as mainline trains. That's why they're less claustrophobic, and it's why drivers on the cut-and-cover lines refer to the trains driven by their colleagues on the Tubes as ‘Hornbys' – toy trains.

The early Underground trains were essentially ordinary steam trains that just happened to be running below the streets in the middle of London. Being ordinary trains on ordinary tracks, they could then continue, having emerged from their tunnels, in the open air, which meant they became much entangled with main-line railways. In May 1898, for example, the funeral train of our Mr Gladstone would be brought from his country estate at Hawarden to Westminster station on the District Line via Willesden Junction. One of his biographers notes, ‘Victorians saw no indignity in a coffin for a state funeral arriving by Underground.' But I don't think it would be seemly that a Prime
Minister be brought to his final resting place by a deep-level
Tube
train.

I wonder whether the Grand Old Man, sitting in that wide wagon at Edgware Road, had any premonition of that later Underground event, or of the fact that he would lose £25,000 on Met and District stock in the 1880s. According to H. G. C. Matthew in
Gladstone, 1809–1898
(1997), he took the loss ‘fairly equably'. Although Gladstone seems to us high-minded and remote, he was keen on public transport. He once said that the best way to see London is from the top of a bus. In 1900 the
Railway Magazine
ran a feature called ‘How Some Celebrities Occupy Their Time When Railway Travelling'. In spite of the present tense, it included dead celebrities, and it noted that Gladstone had occupied himself by translating the odes of Horace. As President of the Board of Trade in the 1840s, he was aware of the dangers of leaving so important a social force as railways unregulated. In fact, he showed himself willing to entertain railway nationalisation, and his Railway Act of 1844 reserved to the state the power to take control of the companies should they behave irresponsibly. Those powers were never used. He also required the operators to run ‘Parliamentary Trains' – one each day calling at every station at a fare of not more than a penny per mile for Third Class.

The Metropolitan Railway opened to the public on 10 January 1863. The
Illustrated London News
wrote:

… it was calculated that more than 30,000 persons were carried over the line in the course of the day. Indeed, the desire to travel by this line on the opening day was more than the directors had provided for; and from nine o'clock in the morning till past midnight it was impossible to obtain a place in the up or Cityward line at any of the mid stations. In the evening the tide turned, and the crush at the

Farringdon-street station was as great as at the doors of a theatre on the first night of some popular performer.

The line's begetter, Charles Pearson, had died of dropsy on 14 September 1862. He had naturally refused a payment from the Metropolitan in return for his advocacy of the line, but the company paid an annuity of £250 to his widow.

The line was an immediate success, and well reviewed. On 30 November 1861
The Times
had called the proposed railway ‘Utopian', adding that ‘even if it could be accomplished, [it] would certainly never pay'. It described the scheme as ‘a subterranean railway awfully suggestive of dark, noisome tunnels, buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life'. But on the opening day
The Times
reported the Metropolitan to be ‘the greatest engineering triumph of its day … ingenious contrivances for obtaining light and ventilation were particularly commended.' (Two decades later, however, on 7 October 1884, the paper would be back to square one, reporting the journey from King's Cross to Baker Street to be ‘a mild form of torture which no person would undergo if he could help it'.)

The Times
objected to the atmosphere, but let's consider first the physical environment. The line connected the (quite) fresh air and semi-rural setting of Paddington to the heart of the City at Farringdon. If you travelled in that direction, you were on the ‘up' line; the opposite direction was the ‘down', and if I ever meet anybody who sticks with those terms, I will shake them by the hand. (Eastbound and westbound came in later, when the Americans got involved in the Tube.) The up and down lines ran next to each other in vault-like tunnels, whereas the Tube trains would occupy their own tunnels. That's why the cut-and-cover lines
are more human than the Tubes. They are more companionable. You can see people going the other way – your perspective is broadened.

No surface building of the original Metropolitan survives. Perhaps this doesn't matter. They were tackily decorous: Italianate, and clad in imitation white stone. In
London's Metropolitan Railway
(1986) Alan A. Jackson calls them ‘cheap and nasty'. For the nearest equivalent we are referred to Bayswater, built when the Met pushed south of Paddington in 1868. Most of the stations, as noted earlier, had glass roofs, and the grandest glass-roofed station was the Met's King's Cross, a little way to the east of the main-line station. It was knocked down in 1910, and in the 1940s the whole cut-and-cover operation at King's Cross was swept beneath the main-line station. The glass roofs were elegant, but of particular interest to the Victorians were the brick-roofed stations. The young readers of
Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century
(1876), by Robert Routledge, were directed towards Baker Street and Gower Street (now Euston Square), which were ‘completely underground', showing ‘great boldness and inventiveness of design'. Great Portland Street was originally completely bricked over, but the arch was opened to the sky at the western end, and it remains so today. The boldness has also been lost at Euston Square, where horizontal iron girders now traverse the roof. They penetrate the lateral skylights – brick holes made through the springing of the roof arches – that were a feature of that station, and of Baker Street, where they survive in modified form. Because the streets have been moved around overhead, the apertures no longer necessarily rise up towards daylight, so electric light has been fitted into them to duplicate the effect.

The grandest survivor of the original Metropolitan is Baker Street, which would become the headquarters of the Railway, its spiritual home. But here it is my duty to address an anomaly
that must have been vexing the brighter sort of tourist since the late 1980s. Then, an administrative change at London Underground brought the Metropolitan Line under the control of the department running the Hammersmith & City Line. As a result, the purple of the Metropolitan Line ceased to appear on the Tube map west of Baker Street, and the line from there to Paddington was shown as belonging to the Hammersmith & City and the Circle Line only. The operational change this reflects means that today all Metropolitan trains approaching the historical platform at Baker Street from the east are whisked north at the last moment, to proceed along the Metropolitan's north-pointing ‘country' branch. There is no longer anything Metropolitan – neither ‘Railway' nor ‘Line' – running through the beautiful brick-vaulted station that is so liberally decorated with illustrated panels proclaiming ‘Metropolitan Railway 1863' and ‘The world's first Underground Railway'.