Underground, Overground (8 page)

Steam engines survived on the cut-and-cover lines until 1971, pulling maintenance wagons at night after the electricity had been switched off. This was three years after the abolition of main-line steam, and people would write letters to the newspapers saying they'd seen, or heard, a ghost train. A recent post on the excellent ‘District Dave's London Underground Site' ran as follows:

In 1968/9 as a callow youth, I moved into digs … in a house with a long garden that backed onto the Met between West Harrow and Rayners Lane. Strange noises woke me in the wee hours of my first night there. Looked out of the window, and saw a ghostly silhouette of a steam loco standing there, complete with eerie glow from the cab. Scared the cr**p out of me, since I had lived in Cornwall for years, and had no idea there was still steam on LT.

The railway author John Scott-Morgan is in regular touch with a man who drove those trains. He, like George Spiller, said the atmosphere was beneficial, and at the time of writing he is ninety-six.

At the time of his death Charles Pearson was campaigning for a workmen's estate to be built a few miles west of Paddington. That didn't happen. He also campaigned for cheap workmen's fares on the Metropolitan, and that did come about. At first, the Metropolitan provided cheap trains voluntarily. Later, a legal requirement to provide workmen's fares would be laid upon the company in return for the right to extend its lines. The early workman's fare was a 3d. return ticket usable in third class on trains departing at 5.30 and 5.40 in the morning. The usual third
fare was 5d. return, so the saving was a shilling a week, or a pint of beer every day of the six-day working week. (A first-class return was 9d.)

In a pamphlet of 1865 called
The Shops and Companies of London and the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain
Henry Mayhew interviewed workmen who had availed themselves of the fare. He presages his account with a eulogy of the Met: ‘This subterranean method of locomotion had always struck as being the most thoroughly cockney element of all within the wide region of Cockaigne', which is humour (albeit not of a funny sort), and which reminds us that the tireless chronicler of the London poor had also once been the editor of
Punch
. Early one morning he stood on the platform at Paddington, which was ‘a bustle with men, a large number of whom had bass-baskets [wicker baskets] in their hands, or tin flagons, or basins done up in red handkerchiefs. Some few carried large saws under their arms.' It was widely agreed that the ‘cheap and early trains' were ‘a great benefit to the operative classes'. One man told Mayhew that he lived ‘almost in the open country' – in Notting Hill – where he was able to afford two rooms for what one cost in the middle of London. And the railway saved him a 6-mile walk to work.

Mayhew's survey found that 69 per cent of Met travellers went by third class, 20.5 per cent second, 10.5 per cent first. The Met would abolish second class in 1905 at the time of electrification. It would go down to one class in 1941 – by which time it was the Metropolitan
Line
– and its passengers would make a beeline for the ex-first seats, just as third-class passengers had made a beeline for the ex-second seats after 1905, since they had not been physically removed or sabotaged to make them less comfortable. All the
Tubes
had only had one class since their inception – all except one, whose name need not bother us for the moment, but which fell into the ownership of guess which class-conscious company? The Metropolitan.

It may seem that the Met was a snobbish outfit, a betrayer of the egalitarian dreams of Charles Pearson, but in being one of the pioneers of working men's fares the company had helped to bring about a revolution that would allow the working classes to live in London. Cheap trains would supersede Gladstone's well-meant Parliamentary Trains. The acts authorising the subsequent Underground lines would include a stipulation that cheap early morning fares be provided, and the Cheap Trains Act of 1883 would standardise the terms for all railways. The working man's railway par excellence was the Great Eastern, whose cheap fares were responsible for the great bulge of north-east London, and the growth of Walthamstow, Tottenham and the environs.

A couple of years ago I met a woman in a Suffolk pub who was very proud of having just bought an Edwardian house in Leytonstone, east London. I told her that her property was almost certainly built as a result of the Cheap Trains Act. She seemed deflated as, I must admit, was my intention. ‘Are you sure it was called the
cheap
trains act?' she asked. ‘I mean, as crude as that?' ‘I'm afraid it was,' I replied.

Working men's fares began to be abolished from the early 1950s, but there is one wispy, ghostly survival of the scheme on the Underground. For most purposes the morning peak, with its more expensive travel, is defined as 4.30 to 9.30 a.m., but in the case of Oyster Card single fares, the morning peak begins at 6.30. It is the less well-paid jobs that require people to travel before 6.30 (you still see men with their tool bags on the first Tubes of the day), so the generous impulse behind the working men's tickets has not entirely died out.

It was always envisaged, by government and the directors of the Metropolitan, that the railway would expand, and an easterly extension towards Moorgate was authorised even before the opening of the original stretch. In 1864 a Joint Select Committee of both houses of Parliament came out in favour of an ‘inner circuit', a loop joining the main line termini to the north with those that were emerging to the south in the early 1860s: Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street. To make this loop, the Met would droop down from Moorgate to Tower Hill at the easterly end, and from Paddington towards Brompton at its westerly end. The base of the arch thus created would be a line running along the north bank of the river built by a separate company, the Metropolitan
District
Railway. The authorising acts were passed in July 1864, and this legislation brought into being what is today the Circle Line … all of which sounds very simple. In reality, it would be a painful process.

Before we broach the Circle saga, two other extensions of the Met need to be mentioned. The first is the Hammersmith & City Railway – now the western part of the Hammersmith and City
Line
. It was built and jointly funded by the Metropolitan and the Great Western, even as they were arguing over operation of the Metropolitan. It opened in June 1864, running north on 20-foot-high viaducts from the pretty village of Hammersmith via Shepherd's Bush to Latimer Road (where there was a connection to a Kensington station via the West London Railway) before proceeding north and east, to connect with the original westerly terminus of the Metropolitan, at Paddington (Bishop's Road). There it dived underground, eventually enabling its train services to run over, and be entangled with, the easterly extensions of the Metropolitan and the District.

The Hammersmith & City is an annoying railway – an anomaly or distracting complication, like a hair in the gate of a cinema projector. For example, that connection to west London would allow trains of various operators to run from north to south London in complicated ways. And although built by the Met and Great Western, it was initially owned by a third company: the Hammersmith & City Railway Company, and the line only exists because two of its directors owned land along the route, which they could – and did – sell back to the railway at vast profit.

The line would feature on Underground maps as part of the Metropolitan, and was therefore coloured purple along with the rest of the Met. But in 1989 it became pink (‘Why do I got to be Mr Pink?' says Steve Buscemi in
Reservoir Dogs
), the colour denoting a line running from Hammersmith to Barking. From 2008 its original westerly stretch also doubled as part of the Circle service – an ‘extension' of the Circle Line, like a piece of Sellotape pulled away from the roll. And one further complication: the original Hammersmith & City Railway was built on the high level.

It has its charm, though. Royal Oak is like a country branch line dropped down amid the main line approaches to Paddington. It's as if two very different train sets got mixed up in the same box. Westbourne Park is also countrified, with valanced canopies and fancy ironwork (which is painted a dingy yellow). West of here, it ascends to its viaduct where, 20 foot off the ground, the Westway seeks to emulate it: two scruffy reprobates shouldering their way through a not very pretty streetscape: the one a railway built by corporate buccaneers, the other a road constructed as part of a discredited plan to girdle London with motorways. A lot of streets and squares, built speculatively with the coming of the Hammersmith & City, failed to go ‘up' as expected. Christian Wolmar notes:

The squares near Ladbroke Grove station … never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington. It was only with the gentrification process which started a hundred years later, in the 1970s, that these squares started to attract the class for which they had been built.

People who'd been with me at university in the early Eighties were part of that gentrification process, and I associate it with the smell of dope smoke floating through the shabby-genteel house bordering the H & C.

As for Hammersmith itself, that's now a transport hub, but unfortunately cars were invited to the party, so the centre is a roaring roundabout. There are two Underground stations. That serving the District and Piccadilly is on one side of an un-crossable road called Hammersmith Broadway; that serving the Hammersmith & City is on the other side. Whichever exit you emerge from, at whichever station, you are immediately lost.

Before moving on to the Metropolitan's painful encirclement of central London in supposed partnership with the District, there is an emerging north-pointing prong that ought to be noted. In April 1868 a line was constructed north from Baker Street by the Metropolitan & St John's Wood Railway, a subsidiary of the Met that would be incorporated into the parent in 1872. The line went up to Swiss Cottage, occupying for much of the way a single-bore tunnel that only accommodated one train like a deep-level Tube tunnel, even though the line was built on the cut-and-cover principle associated with vault-like tunnels holding two trains. There was barely room to open the outward swinging doors of the Metropolitan carriages, and since there were no corridors connecting the compartments of these carriages, the passenger had just better hope that no prolonged delays occurred within the tunnel – because they would have been prisoners.

In 1872 a second, parallel, single-bore tunnel was built to serve the line, creating the possibility of
two
train loads of passengers being trapped. But these little tunnels, emerging into the open at Finchley Road (reached in 1879) were the start of something big. By the early twentieth century it would be possible to think of them as two mouseholes in the skirting board of a wall separating two great ballrooms. On the south side was the ballroom of central London and the City; to the north, the ballroom of the suburbs that would grow up alongside this rapidly extending projection of the Metropolitan, suburbs made famous in the Twenties as Metroland. The line was known – and still is known to elderly traditionalists – as ‘The Extension Railway'.

We are about to broach the fraught saga of the Circle Line, but there is another Metropolitan spin-off that comes first, one that
has always appealed to me by the baleful beauty of its name: the City Widened Lines or ‘The Widened Lines' for short. Its modern legacy is the central core of the Thameslink service, and whereas there are still elderly buffers who speak of ‘The Extension Railway' (described above), or call the Circle Line ‘The Inner Circle', you will not find many Londoners who speak of Thameslink as ‘The City Widened', and if you did find one he'd probably be wearing a bowler hat.

This is a story of north–south connection, and it begins with the fact that late in 1863 the Great Northern Railway completed a subterranean connection from its terminus at King's Cross to the tracks of the Metropolitan enabling the Great Northern to run through to the Met's easterly terminus at Farringdon Street. As mentioned, the Met, in its descent towards the heart of the City, extended in 1865 from Farringdon Street to a station called Moorgate Street (now Moorgate), via Aldersgate Street (now Barbican).

In making this extension, the Metropolitan also built a connection from Farringdon Street towards an overground railway that had just barged its way into the City from Kent. This railway was the London, Chatham & Dover. In 1860 it had obtained an Act permitting an exception to the ban on railways in central London recommended in 1846. The line would traverse a bridge at Blackfriars before running along a viaduct to a station called Ludgate Hill.

In proceeding north from the Thames towards Ludgate Hill station, the line crossed over an iron bridge spanning Ludgate Hill itself (between what is now a Waterstone's and a Santander bank), neatly obliterating any view of St Paul's from Ludgate Circus or Fleet Street. A thousand people had put their names to a petition against the bridge. To add insult to injury, it carried a small thicket of railway signals as well as regular steam trains. There is a Gustave Doré engraving of the street under
the bridge. In the jostling throng every Victorian artefact you would expect seemed present: horses, carts, carriages (including a hearse), top hats, slouch hats, canes. The only item missing is a steam engine – until you see one going over the bridge in the background. In
The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales
in 1869 a certain J. M. Wilson fumed: ‘That viaduct has utterly spoiled one of the finest street views in the metropolis, and is one of the most unsightly objects ever constructed, in any situation, anywhere in the world.' But
I
rather liked it. It was demolished in the late Eighties, and to my mind Ludgate Circus has always looked incomplete without it. But let us follow a London, Chatham & Dover train over that bridge in 1865. On reaching Ludgate Hill it descends into a tunnel and runs north through the new Snow Hill Tunnel to connect with the Metropolitan at Farringdon.