Underground, Overground (9 page)

Engraving by Gustave Doré of the viaduct that used to run over Ludgate Hill. In conjunction with the Snow Hill Tunnel, this route – a spin-off from the Metropolitan Railway – allowed trains to run from the north to the south of England via central London. The viaduct was hated when it was built in the mid 1860's, since it blocked views of St Paul's from the west. But the author of this book, who recalls the viaduct from its last years (the late 1980s), liked it.

Even though the Met was supposed to be concentrating on building the ‘Inner Circle', it had now made itself into a gateway between north and south London. It envisaged profitable demand for use of this gateway by ‘guest' railways. The portal offered trains from the north a chance to run through to the south of England or into the heart of the City at Moorgate Street. Trains from the south could run into Ludgate Hill, thus gaining the western part of the City, or head through to the north of England. What trains from the south could
not
do – at first – was branch right to access the Met station at Moorgate Street.

Being accessible from the north, Moorgate Street was an attractive prospect for the Midland Railway, whose terminus at St Pancras opened alongside King's Cross in 1868. The Midland plugged itself into the Met by means of a tunnel under St Pancras. The tunnel started to the north of the station, and involved the excavation of St Pancras churchyard. There were reports of thigh bones and skulls being tossed about as work progressed. A respected architect called Arthur Blomfield was called in to
bring some decorum to the site, and his apprentice was Thomas Hardy. In
St Pancras Station
(2007) Simon Bradley writes: ‘Hardy's biographers speculate how far this gruesome business may have deepened the writer's tendency to see the skull beneath the skin of life.'

In order to accommodate its paying guests, the Metropolitan doubled the two tracks running between King's Cross and Moorgate Street, these two extra lines running in parallel tunnels or cuttings and coming together at its stations on that stretch. These are the Widened Lines. Just north of Farringdon station, and to the east of Ray Street, there is a wide cutting bounded by another of those brick walls nicely calculated to be just too high for you to see over. So prop your bike against it, and stand on the down-pointing pedal crank. You are looking at the Ray Street Gridiron, a spectacular bridge in a cutting that carries the Metropolitan, the supposed Underground,
over
the Widened Lines (now Thameslink).

In 1871 a junction was created from the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel towards the Widened Lines, intersecting with them as they run beneath the meat market at Smithfield, which was new at the time. By this means, trains from the south
were
able to reach Moorgate Street. In 1874 a station was also created at the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel: Snow Hill station. It was underneath the new Holborn Viaduct. It was the companion to a station built during the same year at the end of a 300-yard cut-and-cover branch line running from Ludgate Hill to a station giving access to the
roadway
of Holborn Viaduct. This upper station was called, logically enough, Holborn Viaduct. In 1912 its downtrodden companion was renamed, rather demeaningly, Holborn Viaduct Low Level. The upper station was destroyed in the Blitz. The shell of the lower station can still be seen at the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel from a Thameslink train.

Anyone standing on the platforms of the Metropolitan at King's Cross, Farringdon, Aldersgate Street or Moorgate would have been diverted by the site of a variety of ‘guests'. The Great Northern and the Midland ran commuters into Moorgate and operated services of passengers or goods to the south of England. In the late nineteenth century a service ran from Liverpool to Paris via the Widened Lines and a steamer from Folkestone. (Depart Liverpool 8 a.m.; arrive Paris 10.50 p.m.) But there wasn't much call for that sort of thing. London was too beguiling. People didn't want to travel through it without getting off.

There were goods sidings under Smithfield Market, and condensing steam engines – and later diesels – pulled wagons full of frozen meat from Paddington to there until July 1962. Those sidings now form a subterranean car park between what remains of the market and St Bart's Hospital. Walk down the winding ramp, and as you descend you will see that the walls become arcaded, like the station walls of the old parent company; they become excitingly Metropolitanised.

From the
south
, the main users were the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern Railway, whose chairmen were respectively James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin, two perennial adversaries whose names are going to crop up in the Circle trauma.

The operations of the Widened Lines, as viewed from the Met platforms, must have seemed archaic after 1905, when the Metropolitan began to be electrified: all those filthy guest engines trying their best – sort of – to stifle their emissions, and passenger carriages still lit by oil. (Steam would survive on the Widened Lines until 1962.) In 1916 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed to passenger trains, so those from the south terminated at Holborn Viaduct, and those from the north could only go as far as Moorgate.

In 1971 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed entirely. In 1988 it was re-opened for the purpose of running trains from Bedford
to Brighton. In 1990 City Thameslink station was opened, a sprawling underground complex taking the place of Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill stations. ‘It's very
Blade Runner
,' a PR for the station told me shortly after the opening. She also said that Thameslink trains were deliberately garish, so as to lure drivers stuck on the M1, which runs alongside the line around Radlett. But I don't think the overcrowded Thameslink service could handle any more passengers today. As for garishness, what I like about the Widened Lines in their previous incarnation is the absence of that quality. Surely it was never summer on the Widened Lines. It was dark mornings and dark evenings; damp worsted, bowler hats, tightly furled umbrellas, smoke fumes and steam, cigarettes and a stiff whisky in the Holborn Viaduct Hotel – and more of those every day for the bowler-hatted commuter who has reached the limit of his promotion, a man who might, in his cups, lament: ‘The City has not widened sufficiently for
my
liking.'

By 1876, an expensive eleven years after it had opened Moorgate Street, the Met had crawled under the City streets to Aldgate, via Bishopsgate (which would be renamed Liverpool Street in 1909, after the overground station to which it was adjacent), en route to meet the District Railway at Tower Hill. We have been concentrating on the City because that was the initial target for builders of both overground and underground railways, who were like artists going over and over the same piece of canvas. But we now look at the Met's
westerly
gropings. These began from the new, south-westerly pointing annexe at Paddington – Paddington (Praed Street). From there the Met marched on Bayswater (now Queensway), Notting Hill Gate, High Street Kensington and Gloucester Road before effecting its rendezvous with the District at South Kensington in December 1868.

In building this stretch, the Metropolitan intersected at right angles the broadly west–east pattern of the streets, rather than running along beneath the road, as it had done under the Euston Road. This meant the purchase of many properties, and to save money some stretches were more cut than cover. Railway canyons were thereby created in the streets, and one such canyon abuts Leinster Gardens, Queensway W2. This is a street of elegant stucco terraced houses, two of which (numbers 23 and 24) straddled the mouth of the canyon. They wouldn't have been pleasant to live in, so they were knocked down and replaced with fake houses, about 5 feet thick, with painted-on black windows. The impulse was partly aesthetic – to maintain the harmony of the street – and partly practical: the engines would be able to release steam and smoke behind the façade, like a man putting his hand over his mouth when he coughs.

So began 150 years of practical jokes, with coal merchants sending young apprentices to deliver coal to the façades, or letters addressed to Mr N. O. Body, 24 Leinster Gardens. (There is no letterbox.) In the late Nineties I visited Leinster Gardens for my ‘Tube Talk' column. The dummies are sandwiched between two hotels, the Henry VIII and the Blakemore. I walked into the Blakemore and volunteered my sympathy to the duty manager for the way he must be constantly pestered with questions about the pretend houses next door. ‘Ah yes,' he said, and smiled vaguely for a while before adding, ‘What do you mean?' I then went into the Henry VIII and had the same conversation with the duty manager there. Within ten minutes, staff members from each hotel were standing in front of numbers 23 and 24 and saying to each other, ‘But we thought they were part of
your
hotel.' Only the maintenance man at the Henry VIII knew the score, and he took me to room 501, on the top floor of the hotel, and then along a narrow balcony enabling us to look down on the narrow façades, which taper to a thickness of about 2 feet at the top, and
down on the trains (District and Circle today) rumbling along between arcaded walls with girders across. No guest, of course, has ever remarked on the strangeness of the view.

London Underground is responsible for maintaining the façades, which are regularly repainted, the grey-black of the stone ‘windows' capturing perfectly the effect of closed net curtains. On the ground floor the paint conceals two genuine panes of glass, and, squinting through these, I saw a tiny booth-like room containing a chair and a clock stopped at ten to ten. I asked what this was for, and a spokesman said he'd come back to me, which he eventually did.

‘Nobody knows,' he said.

It is time to meet the Met's partner in the arranged marriage of the Inner Circle: the Metropolitan District Railway – the District for short. It made its début on Christmas Eve 1868 (South Kensington to Westminster).

In his book
London's Historic Railway Stations
(1971) John Betjeman speaks of ‘the rather uninteresting District Railway, which brought Ealing, Richmond and Wimbledon to London'. Certainly it rates the fewest index entries of any line in David Welsh's book
Underground Writing
(2009), a survey of literature about the system. Under ‘popular culture', the Wikipedia entry on the line has ‘Sheffield band Milburn wrote a song called “The District Line”, which refers to London', and, as if
that
weren't enough, ‘Canadian guitarist Pat Travers wrote a song called “Life in London”, which mentions the District Line.' Also cited is the fictional Underground station in
EastEnders
, Walford East. That's meant to be on the District, a fictional counterpart to Bromley-by-Bow. It is odd that the District should thus be
associated with east London because its early expansion beyond central London was all to the more prosperous west, with Earl's Court the hub of tentacles reaching into Fulham, Putney, Wimbledon, Kensington, Kew and Richmond.

The District seems complacently salubrious. It is green on the Tube map, an inoffensive colour. It has not one but two bridge crossings of the Thames, which seems greedy when you think that no other line has even one. It is generally associated with pleasure. Its earliest maps – and it was a pioneer of Underground maps – boasted of the proximity of the Royal Albert Hall to South Kensington station (although it's not
that
near). Its first push into west London coincided with the passing of the Bank Holiday Act of 1871, which made Boxing Day, Easter Monday, Whit Monday and August Monday days off. The District went to Putney to take advantage of Boat Race traffic, and it would capitalise on the shows and exhibitions held at Earl's Court and Olympia. Earl's Court was at first an outdoor complex incorporating an arena, and from 1887 it was the London home of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. On the opening day in May 28,000 people came to see this spectacle. ‘The Underground Railway was besieged and taken by force', wrote the
Daily Telegraph
. (In his book
Buffalo Bill's British Wild West
(2001) Alan Gallop features a picture of some of Bill's buffaloes grazing at Earl's Court under the caption ‘Give me a home where the buffaloes roam …') In 1894 a Ferris wheel was erected there. I have a painting showing the District station, Baron's Court, at twilight with the big wheel illuminated in the background. It was painted by Alan Wright on 16 June 1906.

(Frivolity is often the motive behind the building of railways. The Metropolitan itself was supposed to be open in time to funnel people from the Euston Road railway termini towards the Second Great Exhibition of 1862. It was a year late. And while the Jubilee Line Extension was not built to serve the Millennium
Dome, it was finished quickly in 1999 in order to take people to the Millennial Party that was held there; and the prospect of the Olympics has spurred the development of railways in east London.)