London Underground's Strangest Tales

by Iain Spragg

  Most platforms at the deepest stations on the Tube were designed with pits beneath the track to help drain away unexpected water but they now serve as unintentional but hugely welcome life-savers when passengers jump – or indeed fall – in front of a speeding train.

  Now officially known as ‘anti-suicide pits’, but colloquially called ‘dead man’s trenches’, the metre-deep drainage pits allow trains to drive over the stricken passenger without always causing fatality or serious injury. According to a study by doctors at the Royal London Hospital in 1999, the mortality rate on the tracks at stations with the old pits was half that of those without them.

  ‘Being hit by a train is an important cause of death from trauma in London,’ explained Tim Coats, a senior lecturer in accident and emergency medicine at the hospital (deploying what some might view as a novel use of the word ‘important’). ‘The mechanics of the interaction of the human body with the train are poorly studied and so present rolling stock and stations are not designed to maximise survival.’

  It is impossible to calculate exactly how many lives have been saved by the pits since the Tube was opened in the nineteenth century but were it not for their existence, many more people would surely have met with a grisly end on the Underground.

  CLEANERS WITH A HEAD FOR HEIGHTS

  1999

  Westminster Station on the Circle and District Line is one of the busiest on the network and its platforms are frequently crammed with tourists desperate for that all-important holiday snap of the Houses of Parliament or politicians eager to demonstrate a vote-winning common touch.

  The sub-surface platforms were opened in 1868 by the Metropolitan District Railway but it wasn’t until 1999 that the deep-level section of the station was unveiled as part of the Jubilee Line extension, a masterpiece of modern architecture featuring wall-to-wall stainless-steel tubes and concrete supports.

  It’s what you’d call seriously eye-catching and the awards duly poured in, winning the Royal Fine Art Commission Millennium Building of the Year gong in 2000, the Civic Trust award for design in 2000 and 2002 and the RIBA Award for Architecture in 2001.

  Praise indeed, but what the architects didn’t take into account as they were hunched over their drawing boards was exactly how Transport for London would go about actually cleaning the bloody thing!

  The problem is, those steel arches are so high there’s not a feather duster in the world long enough to reach all the lofty nooks and crevices. TfL has been forced to take drastic measures to tackle the dust – employing a four-man team of abseilers to come in and clean the station.

  ‘To reach many parts of the station like the sides of the escalators, pipes and high-up empty spaces, specially qualified cleaners must abseil when the station is closed to passengers,’ explained TfL.

  The climbers are deployed annually for an 8-to-10-week stint to get the job done and are also responsible for changing all the light bulbs to ensure the tourists and politicians are not left fumbling in the dark.

  THE PRIME MINISTER’S TRAVEL CONUNDRUM

  1999

  When the first section of the Metropolitan Line was opened to the public in 1863, there was quite a commotion. The construction of the four-mile line between Farringdon and Paddington had already piqued people’s interest in the new subterranean form of transport and by nine o’clock on the morning of 10 January, the Metropolitan Line was bursting at the seams with curious commuters.

  The Spectator magazine reported that Londoners would rather ride the new trains than the ‘horrible sarcophagi known as omnibuses’ while The Times took a dimmer view, dismissing the Tube as ‘an insult to common sense to suppose that people would ever prefer to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London.’

  Opinion may have been divided but the sheer numbers spoke for themselves and 30,000 took a ride on the Underground that first day. The prime minister of the day, Lord Palmerston, was not among them however, having turned down an invitation to make the inaugural journey.

  The 78-year-old Liberal politician was definitely not an Underground fan and refused to attend the grand opening, arguing he intended to spend whatever time he had left in his life above rather than beneath ground.

  It was advice Tony Blair probably wished he had followed when he unwisely decided to take the Tube in 1999, a PR gambit that backfired so spectacularly that for once even the Prime Minister’s famous smile failed him.

  Tony was travelling on the Jubilee Line extension to see how the Millennium Dome was coming along, accompanied of course by a horde of reporters and photographers, when he spotted a commuter minding her own business and tried to start up an impromptu conversation to prove what a thoroughly down-to-earth chap he was.

  The poor passenger – Georgina Leketi-Solomon – was appalled at the flagrant breach of Tube etiquette and ignored all of Tony’s saccharin advances, staring straight ahead listening to her Walkman (which, for the younger reader, was a two-ton portable music playing device used in the dark days before iPods).

  The Prime Minister went redder than his party conference tie as the photographers caught his obvious discomfort while Georgina bolted for the door at the next station.

  ‘I did realise it was him but it all seemed a bit overwhelming at quarter past nine in the morning,’ she said later. ‘It’s not exactly what you expect on the way to work. I’m always the same in the mornings, I put my Walkman on and turn off. All my friends have been teasing me, telling me I shouldn’t talk to strange men.’

  Or vote for them.

  MADELEINE GETS UP COMMUTERS’ NOSES

  2001

  Let’s face it, the Underground isn’t always the most pleasant experience when it comes to aromas. There’s always at least one passenger with dubious personal hygiene for every carriage and as people cram into every available space during the hot summer months, the Tube frequently makes a mockery of those adverts for deodorants promising 24-hour protection.

  It was a problem giving the management bods at London Underground particularly sleepless nights back in 2001 until one ingenious soul hit upon the idea of unleashing a perfumed dubbed ‘Madeleine’ on unsuspecting commuters in the hope of masking the worst whiffs.

  Everyone thought it was a great idea and in April the platforms at St James’s Park, Euston and Piccadilly were coated with a special residue designed to release what they hoped was a pleasant smell as passengers walked on them.

  ‘We carry more than three million passengers a day and the atmosphere down in our stations can become an interesting collection of odours reflecting all aspects of London life,’ said customer services director Mike Brown. ‘Some are nice, some not so nice. That’s why we are trialling Madeleine to see if a refresher will make a positive difference. If it’s a hit, it could become a permanent item.’

  The intrepid reporters of the BBC were duly despatched down the Tube on the first day of the trial to canvas opinion and the reaction, in truth, was mixed. ‘I think the smell is good,’ admitted one commuter. ‘I think it will have a universal appeal to both men and women as it is not too florally.’ Another passenger was not so enthusiastic. ‘It smells like flowers or pollen,’ he said. ‘But I think the best idea to get rid of the smells is to deodorise the people instead.’

  An initial score draw perhaps, but defeat was just around the corner as complaints began to flood in that the smell was making people feel sick. Rather than risk what could turn into a messy bout of subterranean nausea, the idea was quietly shelved.

  A clear case of London Underground spectacularly failing to come up smelling of roses.

  MUSIC TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE COMMUTER

  2001

  Music may indeed soothe the savage beast (or, more accurately, breast) but commuters on the Tube can be an irritable bunch at the best of times and sometimes not even the melodic strains of Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets of London’ or ‘Going Underground’ by The Jam drifting across the platform are enough to becalm a throng of disgruntled p
assengers.

  Not that the network’s buskers don’t do their level best to cheer them up, and ever since 2001 the city’s street musicians have been feverishly strumming their guitars with the full approval of the suits at Transport for London.

  Before then busking on the Tube was illegal and anyone found performing on the system was quickly moved on, fined and potentially imprisoned in a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between the musicians and Underground staff. In 2001, however, TfL decided to call a truce and award licences to approved buskers.

  The initiative needed a celebrity for the big launch. Sadly Elton John and David Bowie were busy so classical musician Julian Lloyd Webber, Andrew’s younger brother, was asked to bring his cello along to Westminster Station and perform a few numbers.

  ‘I am delighted to be able to launch the Underground system as a brand-new platform for the performing arts in this country,’ Julian said as someone dropped 10p in his cello case. ‘I hope that this will inspire all sorts of musicians from all walks of life to bring their music, whether it be classical, musicals, pop, folk, reggae, jazz and the like, to a wider audience.

  ‘I have been in London all my life so the Tube is part of my everyday life. What I do not like is those guys who come with a pre-recorded tape to play to. I think it is good that there should be some quality control. The last thing that you want if you have got a headache or a hangover is someone who cannot play.’

  Around 250 buskers now perform on the Underground every day on instruments as diverse as violins, steel drums, harmonicas and accordions. Which all still sound absolutely awful if you do happen to be nursing a particularly nasty hangover.

  The burning question for most buskers, however, has to be which song is the most profitable? After all, parting passengers from their money is the name of the game and in 2005 music bible Q conducted a survey to try and find the elusive answer.

  The magazine despatched a busker by the name of Diamond Dave below the streets of the capital with a playlist; after a few hours’ strumming away, he returned to the surface with the results of the Underground jury.

  It transpired the least lucrative song was ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ by the Manic Street Preachers, yielding a measly 32p. Surprisingly, Queen’s classic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ fared little better with an 86p return, while the Kinks’ apt ‘Waterloo Sunset’ earned Dave £1.50 and an out-of-date travelcard.

  At the other end of the scale, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by some band called the Beatles was rewarded with £2.46 in commuter contributions while a rendition of Elvis Costello’s ‘Oliver’s Army’ was apparently worth a healthy £3.82.

  But the clear winner in terms of cash was ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, which persuaded passengers to cough up a grand total of £7.45, proof positive that hailing from Manchester is no barrier to success in the capital.

  THE BABY THAT WAS REALLY A MONKEY

  2001

  The Underground has inspired countless novelists but one of the strangest tomes written about the network is Christopher Ross’s Tunnel Visions, published in 2001, a fascinating and funny first-hand account of his surreal experiences working as a Tube station assistant at Oxford Circus.

  A former lawyer, oriental carpet smuggler, camel cowboy and Japanese soap actor, Ross took the job expecting a sedate, uneventful life beneath the streets of the capital but quickly discovered there was rarely a dull moment when working on the Underground.

  His most bizarre stories include the idiotic passenger at Green Park who was told it would be quicker to walk to Oxford Circus than to wait for the next train and promptly set off down the tunnel, somehow avoiding electrocuting himself on the live rail, and the incredibly ugly baby on a carriage that turned out to be a monkey.

  A commuter travelling with a domesticated fox on a dog’s lead and the sad story of the suicide who took the advice of his Nike shirt and just did it also feature to make a compelling, if at times disturbing read.

  ‘Tunnel Visions is a delightful mixture of lived experience in the surreal world of London’s Underground and the more elevated ideas, thoughts and imaginings that experience provokes,’ reads the book’s Amazon review. ‘Oxford Circus Station, complete with its weeping wall, its streakers, buskers, onanists and cupboard containing one employee whose ideal working day was to sleep soundly 100 feet below ground, is a Plato’s Cave of reflection and human comedy. Christopher Ross, a still point in the whirling stream of the bizarre and otherworldly life below ground, has written a profoundly funny book.’

  Ross spent 16 months in the employ of Transport for London and, when it comes to the Tube, Tunnel Visions proves that fact really is stranger than fiction.

  VASECTOMY BRINGS CIRCLE LINE TO A STANDSTILL

  2003

  The number of different reasons for delays to trains on the Underground are almost as plentiful as passengers who use the network, but few have been quite as bizarre as the cause of the disruption to the service in 2003 just outside Aldgate Station.

  The train in question was being driven by a trainee under the watchful eye of an instructor and a senior driver but when the two older men began discussing (in graphic detail) a recent vasectomy one of them had undergone, things started to go very wrong.

  The squeamish young trainee begged his colleagues to change the subject of conversation but they ignored his desperate request and, moments later, he was overwhelmed by their unsettling medical conversation and fainted.

  Unfortunately, when he lost consciousness he fell out of the window of the moving cab, hit the tracks and sustained head and chest injuries that hospitalised him.

  Mercifully the train was only travelling at 15mph at the time and the trainee made a full recovery, but both the Hammersmith & City and Circle Lines were brought to a complete standstill as his ashen-faced colleagues slammed on the brakes and waited for the paramedics to arrive.

  Transport for London initially blamed the delays on a defective train but details of how a vasectomy had actually ruined the journey of thousands of unsuspecting commuters soon emerged. The sniggers could be heard up and down the network for days but it did at least make a refreshing change from a points failure or leaves on the line.

  POST OFFICE GOES UNDERGROUND

  2003

  The Underground may be synonymous with sub-surface transport in the capital but it is in fact not the only subterranean system down there. For 75 years, the Post Office operated its own railway underneath the city to ensure Londoners received their utility bills and junk mail every morning

  Dubbed ‘Mail Rail’, the network ran for six and a half miles from Whitechapel to Paddington, serving the main sorting offices along the route, and for nearly eight decades the train took the strain, conveying millions of letters and parcels beneath London and avoiding clogging the roads with Post Office vans.

  The idea first began to germinate in 1908 when a team of Post Office engineers paid a visit to the Chicago Freight subway system and all agreed subterranean transport was a jolly good plan. The team continued their research with a trip to Germany to analyse another sub-surface network and they returned to Blighty convinced Mail Rail was the future.

  As the Post Office didn’t have a track record in digging tunnels they approached the Underground Electric Railways Company of London for advice and expertise, and the Tube bigwigs agreed to help with the ambitious work.

  The network finally opened in December 1927 just in time for the Christmas rush and at its peak it was running 19 hours a day, 286 days a year, carrying an astonishing 4 million letters daily on fully automated, driverless trains on a mere 2ft-gauge track.

  Mail Rail had a good innings but by the early twenty-first century it was beginning to struggle to make ends meet. When Royal Mail revealed the system had become five times more expensive than using London’s roads, the writing was on the wall, and in May 2003 the network was reluctantly mothballed.

  ‘My last shift is on Friday and then my colleagues on nights will close it down on Saturday
morning,’ Mail Rail’s Amanda Smith said in the final week before closure. ‘I doubt we’ll give the railway a send-off this week as we’ll be too upset to do anything.

  ‘I’m based at the Mount Pleasant sorting office in Farringdon, where the station is about 70 feet below ground. Coming out of the lift onto the platform, it looks not dissimilar to the London Underground. The station is a miniature version of the Tube at platform level although the trains themselves are nothing like Tube trains. There’s no driver, for one thing.

  ‘We used to have big Christmas parties down here for kids from the local children’s home with the platform decorated like Santa’s Grotto and this secret train for delivering presents.

  ‘There’s a passenger carriage that only comes out for special occasions and I cadged a lift on it one day. We rode from here to Paddington and it was quite a bumpy ride. We were all packed in tight – we had to sit two to a row – but at least that stopped us rolling about too much. In between stations it was often pitch-black, so it was like London’s biggest ghost ride.’

  In theory Mail Rail could be resurrected at any time but the explosion in new-fangled hi-tech forms of communication make a Lazarus-like reanimation unlikely.

  Members of the public are not allowed to venture down the tunnels and see the remnants of Mail Rail for themselves but for those whose interest has been piqued, the network does make a cameo in Bruce Willis’s 1991 action comedy Hudson Hawk, masquerading as a private railway beneath the Vatican City.

  The film failed to deliver at the box office, an accusation that certainly could not be levelled at the Post Office’s ground-breaking service.