Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  Charles Dickens wrote about the coming of the L&B in Dombey and Son. He describes its effects on the ‘frowzy fields and cow-houses, and dunghills, dustheaps, and ditches and gardens and summer houses’ of 1830s’ Camden, which he called Staggs’s Gardens. (A ‘Stag’ was a railway speculator.)

  Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up … There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream … In short, the yet unfinished and unopened railway was in progress.

  He described this railway as ‘defiant of all obstacles’, but it pulled up sharply enough on the New Road, stopping short of the grand estates of the West End, whose landlords were not about to have their elegant streets and squares invaded by so many coke-dusted Gradgrinds from the north. So the Great Northern visited all its chaos and destruction on the people who were the traditional recipients of that kind of thing: the poor.

  The second ‘inter-city’ railway rolled into the suburban village of Paddington. The Great Western opened a Paddington station in 1838, a wooden terminus to the north of the present station, which would arrive in 1853. As with Euston, the site was bounded to the south by high-class property: a no-go zone for railways.

  Paddington was at the western end of the New Road, so there were two main-line stations on that road. Two more will be along shortly, and we might now imagine ominous tremors along its length as the road surface prepares to erupt, because Charles Pearson would come to the audacious conclusion that the answer to London’s problems lay beneath it.

  His interest in railways is not the quality that marks Pearson out. Everyone was interested in railways. Over a thousand miles of them opened between 1837 and 1845, most of what would become the national network. They caused a social, economic and psychological revolution that perhaps exceeded the one caused in our own day by the coming of the internet. (Imagine the Information Superhighway as an actual physical structure.) The disparate time zones of Britain were unified under ‘railway time’ – as Dickens famously observed in Dombey: ‘It was as if the sun itself had given in.’ In 1847 Punch magazine stated that ‘How many miles will become how many minutes’, and that was absolutely correct. (Passengers on the Underground do not know how many miles they’ve travelled, only how long it has taken.)

  In the face of the railways, a romantic fatalism developed. John Martin painted canvases of the Ancient World elided with industry, a genre called the ‘apocalyptic sublime’. His painting of The Last Judgement (1853) features a scene of Biblical angst taking place under a blood-red midnight sun. Approaching in the background is a train. Whether it is heading for heaven or hell at the parting of the ways is not clear, but it is coming on very purposefully indeed.

  Mere governments were certainly not going to stand in their way. You needed an Act of Parliament to build a railway, but that wasn’t very hard to obtain if you could give the appearance of adequately funded competence. There was some guiding legislation; Parliamentary committees would issue recommendations, but British governments would not fund, still less plan, railways. ‘Having observed this policy in action,’ notes the Oxford Companion to British Railway History, ‘countries on the European mainland adopted others of an entirely different kind.’ Why were Victorian governments so attached to laissez-faire? In his book on British railways Eleven Minutes Late (2009), Matthew Engel blames the French Revolution: that was what happened when the state got involved in the operation of society. Stephen Joseph, the director of the Campaign for Better Transport, says, ‘It may be because we never maintained a standing army. So there was no sense of the tactical importance of transport.’

  What marked Charles Pearson out was that he was not intimidated by railways. He saw the good and the bad in them, and how they could be used for humane purposes. For example, they might be used to cure a problem they had exacerbated, namely slum-living.

  Pearson’s London was what we now call central London, and much of it was slums. Today most of us wouldn’t say no to a pied à terre in Clerkenwell, but in 1850 it was a slum. Drury Lane? A slum. Seven Dials and Covent Garden? Holborn and Finsbury? Slums. The new railways were of no help to the residents of these places, and they had made life worse for the poor who happened to be in their way. In Landlords to London, Simon Jenkins observes: ‘By the end of the century, it is estimated that over 100,000 people had been uprooted from their homes by the coming of the railways … Railway building in London simply crowded neighbouring slum properties even more densely and forced up their rents.’

  Pearson saw an answer in ‘oscillation’. He noted that the poor were keen on Sunday railway excursions to the country, and commuting was getting under way; it is just that the poor couldn’t afford to take part. The merchants of the City were moving out to places such as Camberwell, Kensington, Islington, Mile End or salubrious and newly suburbanised Hackney. They might travel by coach and horses or by train. Thomas Briggs, a senior bank clerk in the City, lived in Hackney, and on 9 July 1864 he was returning there by train from Fenchurch Street after a Saturday spent at work when he was bludgeoned to death in a first-class carriage, probably by a young German tailor called Franz Müller. (Let’s hope it was Müller, because he was hanged for it.) And so Briggs was an all-round pioneer: an early commuter and the very first victim of a railway murder. For the slightly less well-off, moving to the slightly cheaper houses of, say, Fulham or Brixton, the new fleets of horse-drawn omnibuses would come into play, but there was a problem on the roads. Victorian Londoners did not speak of ‘traffic jams’ – that term came from America after the First World War. They spoke rather of traffic ‘locks’ or ‘blocks’, and their prevalence would be one reason why Pearson began to direct his thoughts underground.

  THE NEW ROAD (AND THE NEW TRAFFIC)

  The New Road – and we might now imagine a more violent quaking along its length, as its moment of truth approaches – had been built in 1757. In 1857 it was decided it was no longer new, and it was renamed, along most of its length, the Euston Road, while the stretches to the west and east became Marylebone Road and Pentonville Road.

  It ran from Paddington to the City, which may sound familiar. Crossrail, the underground express line that is supposed to be opening in 2017, will also connect those two places. The definitive London commute is from west London to the City in the east, and in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) George Orwell invoked ‘the strap-hanging army that swings eastward in the morning, westward at night, in the carriages of the Underground’. The other important west–east route was along Oxford Street, but that was packed with expensive property, and the original purpose of the New Road was to allow cattle to be driven from the fields west of London to Smithfield Market on the western edge of the City without going along Oxford Street, which was becoming known for its smart shops. (Cattle had been herded along Oxford Street, creating the unwelcome possibility of a bull entering retail premises – a china shop, for example.) In The Bus We Loved (2005) Travis Elborough describes the New Road as ‘London’s first by-pass … a kind of perimeter fence, a here be yokels boundary line between the burgeoning town and the country’. Elborough was interested in the New Road because in 1829 it became what is taken to be London’s first bus route. A bluff coachmaker and ex-naval man called George Shillibeer operated the service. It ran from the Yorkshire Stingo Tavern to the Bank of England from 4 July 1829. (‘Stingo’ means strong beer; the tavern was located in dusty Chapel Street, off the Marylebone Road, not far from where the Edgware Road Metropolitan station would be built thirty years later.)

  Shillibeer’s bus was a sort of unprecedented barn on wheels. It was not a Hackney carriage, and it was not a stagecoach. Hackney carriages were the forerunners of taxis. They were for individual travel. Short stages – meaning short-hop stagecoaches, as opposed
to the inter-city ones that Dick Turpin robbed – carried about a dozen passengers, half of them sitting on the roof, whereas omnibus passengers numbered twenty, and were all inside. Short stages you had to book in advance, whereas the omnibus was a turn-up-and-go service. You loitered along the route and waited for the bus to come along. You climbed up from the back end and paid the fare to the conductor. Free periodicals were available inside, so the Metro newspaper available on the Underground today is not the brash innovation you might think.

  The omnibus arose from the demands of a rising population – the rising population of France in the first instance, since that’s where the concept came from, and Shillibeer had been involved in making the early French vehicles. It was an idea whose time had come. Even so, Shillibeer’s bus was banished to the margins of London, as main-line trains and trams would be. Hackneys and some short stages were allowed to run in ‘the Stones’, as the central London parishes were known. The omnibus was not allowed to run there, but the New Road was just beyond the limits of the Stones. A single fare was a shilling. That was cheaper than a Hackney or a short stage, but still expensive. A pint of beer at the time cost 2d., and you would soon be able to travel back and forth for a whole week on the Metropolitan Line for a shilling.

  George Shillibeer, who introduced the bus (below) to London. It was obviously a good idea, because he was soon overwhelmed with competition and put out of business.

  In 1832 omnibuses were allowed into the central streets, and by the end of that year 800 were operating in London. In 1834 Shillibeer was driven off the New Road by the competition and set up a bus service from Greenwich to the West End – just in time to be put out of business by the above-mentioned London & Greenwich Railway. He did time in the Fleet Prison for debt; he then applied to the Treasury for the post of Inspector of Omnibus Duties, a position for which you’d have thought he was well qualified, having invented omnibuses. But he was turned down, and so became an undertaker. It is possible that Shillibeer’s bathetic end is the reason that buses did not become universally known as ‘Shillibeers’. Some operators had called their buses Shillibeers. Shillibeer himself had wanted to call his own buses ‘Economists’, but that lacked a certain sparkle, even by the standards of 1829. Omnibuses, by the way, are so called because of a shop in Nantes, France, where, in 1828, an early bus stopped alongside a shop owned by a Monsieur Omnes. What he sold is not recorded, but whatever it was, he sold it under the slogan ‘Omnes Omnibus’, meaning ‘all for all’.

  The standard single fare settled at 6d. – three pints of beer. The later omnibuses were drawn by two horses, whereas Shillibeer’s original had used three. Omnibuses were usually crowded, and in January 1836 The Times published a list of rules that would make them more bearable; this is quoted in Volume 1 of A History of London Transport (1963), by T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins.

  Omnibus Law, rule number one: Keep your feet off the seats.

  Rule two: Do not impose on the conductor the necessity of finding you change. He is not a banker.

  …

  Rule number 5: Sit with your limbs straight, and do not with your legs describe an angle of 45, thereby occupying the room of two people.

  By the 1840s, there was the ‘omnibus nuisance’ on the central streets of London.

  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 PLAN A AND PEARSON’S PLAN B

  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.