Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  The Circle generated urban myths: the man who died on it and then went round all day; the language school that conducted its classes on Circle trains, the collective daily fare being cheaper than office rental. In April 2010 the Independent reported:

  London is in talks with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research about the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Particle physicists believe the existing tunnel can be adapted to take a small-scale ‘atom smasher’ alongside the passenger line at a fraction of the cost of building a new tunnel elsewhere in Europe.

  (That was on 1 April, by the way.)

  Adding to the fun was the fact that the Circle had the worst train frequency of any line, the trouble being that it is not a line but a service, its trains being guests on the Metropolitan, District, Hammersmith & City – and often unwelcome guests, since if a Circle train went slow or broke down, it would block those other lines. There were not enough access points to get trains off the Circle, or indeed on. In the morning its trains would approach the Circle from various points of the compass so as to get an even spread for the commencement of operations. One Underground staffer described this arrangement to me as being ‘like the way the Red Arrows converge from different counties for an air display … only more boring’.

  In 2008, as part of the Tube Upgrade, London Underground called time on this ribaldry. The Circle Line was unpicked. It’s still yellow, it’s still called the Circle, but a tail has been tacked on, and this tail shadows the western bit of the Hammersmith & City Line. Circle trains come along it from Hammersmith to Edgware Road. There, after brooding for a while, they go clockwise around the circle, then anti-clockwise, then bugger off back to Hammersmith. A driver running late can now knock off duty at the Hammersmith depot rather than somewhere in the middle of the Circle. The result is a more frequent service between Edgware Road and Hammersmith, a better-regulated Circle Line (albeit with even fewer trains) and a lot more time for everyone at Edgware Road …

  Those who live or travel in the north-west corner of central London have always spent a lot of time at Edgware Road. The District Line terminates there. (In 1926 District trains began running from Kensington High Street to Edgware Road, like a green vine growing up the left-hand side of the Circle.) Edgware Road is also a duty change-over point for Hammersmith & City Line trains; and the service on that line is regulated with ‘pauses’ at Edgware Road. Even when the Circle was whole, I used often to be chucked off its trains at Edgware Road because something had gone wrong. Now – just to make this clear – it is impossible to negotiate the north-west ‘corner’ of the Circle without being chucked off at Edgware Road.

  Incidentally, the Edgware Road we are concerned with is not to be confused (although it frequently is) with Edgware Road station on the Bakerloo Line, which stands about 500 yards away, or with Edgware station on the Northern Line. Edgware Road (Bakerloo) is a much more straightforward station than its namesake. Its users tend not to have to spend large parts of their lives there – they just pass through. It is also warmer, because it is underground. Our Edgware Road is essentially two island platforms surrounded by sidings and set in a cutting that’s very good at funnelling icy winds.

  But it has its plus points. In the ticket hall stand pink steel tubs containing well-tended plants – a memorial to the six people killed in the station by one of the terrorist attacks on 7 July 2005. It was not the first bomb at Edgware Road, incidentally. Irish-American republicans (or possibly anarchists) placed one in the tunnel just west of the station in the early evening of 30 October 1883. It damaged a passing third-class carriage, and a couple of dozen working-class men were injured, along with two schoolboys who had come up for the day from Clacton-on-Sea. Later on the same evening, the same ‘ruffians’ or ‘revolutionists’ detonated a bomb on the District east of Westminster, but no trains were passing at the time.

  For years there was another, more eccentric, garden at Edgware Road. It was on the opposite side of the tracks from platform 1: an ornamental pond with an arrangement of garden gnomes around it. A couple of years ago I suddenly noticed that neither gnomes nor pond were there, so I stopped a platform guard at the station, and said, ‘Can you tell me about the gnomes?’ ‘What gnomes?’ he said, testily. He then evidently remembered, and said they’d been put there by a female member of staff, currently off duty. Every Christmas, he fondly recalled, she’d put tinsel on them. ‘But what’s happened to them?’ I impatiently demanded, and he became testy again: ‘Not a clue, mate.’ I next asked a booking hall attendant, and he said, ‘I don’t know about the gnomes, but you can’t see the pond because it’s winter.’ Do ponds necessarily disappear in winter? They do at Edgware Road.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND THE EXPANSION OF THE DISTRICT – AND A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

  THE EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN

  We now turn with relief from the smoky tunnels to the open air, where the Met and the District found it much easier and cheaper to build railways by which passengers could be ensnared and brought into the vortex of the Circle. Before 1890 – before, that is, the opening of the first deep-level Tube – the District had reached what remain its westerly termini at Richmond, Wimbledon and Ealing Broadway. A couple of years later the Metropolitan had reached its own most northerly point, Verney Junction, which was as bucolic as it sounds. (Branches to Uxbridge and Watford would be completed a little later.)

  The projection north of the Metropolitan begins with the two Baker Street mouseholes previously mentioned. In 1868 those lines had reached as far as Swiss Cottage. By 1880 Harrow had been reached, and during the 1880s the push continued, to North Harrow, Pinner, Northwood … In 1892 the Met reached Aylesbury, 40 miles from London. What, the reader might ask, is a so called metropolitan railway doing wandering about in the Buckinghamshire countryside?

  I will answer with reference to Julian Barnes’s novel Metroland, published in 1980 but set in 1968. On page 35 the adolescent schoolboy narrator, Christopher, meets ‘an elegiac old fugger’ on an Underground train at Baker Street. The fugger is a student of Metropolitan history, and he lists the most northerly stations. ‘They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddeson, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.’ ‘If he went on like this,’ Christopher reflects, ‘I’d cry.’ The fugger then explains why the Met operated in such latitudes. ‘Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.’

  The fugger’s account is more or less correct, and this was all the grandiose vision of Sir Edward Watkin, who had promised the Met shareholders that their ‘great terminus’ (Baker Street) would be connected with ‘many important towns’.

  The leap to Verney Junction (which is not only 60 miles from Baker Street, but also a mere 8 miles from Oxford, for God’s sake) came about through the Met’s absorption of the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway. That never went to Buckingham, but it did go to Aylesbury. In fact, it went from there to Verney Junction.

  The Met received income from the transportation of manure between London and Verney Junction for the farms round about, thereby gaining some benefit from the horse bus boom that was otherwise entirely detrimental to its interests. It also built a hotel for excursionists at Verney Junction, which became the starting point of the most glamorous ride it would ever be possible to undertake on the Underground. From 1910, to drum up custom, the Metropolitan would operate a luxury Pullman service from Verney Junction to Aldgate. In other words, they attached to the train two special coaches (called Mayflower and Galatea), which exceeded in plushness the Metropolitan’s ordinary first-class compartments. They were essentially restaurants on wheels. There was also a bar in the carriage. When h
e became mayor of London, Boris Johnson banned drinking on the Underground, but what would he make of City gents being served whisky and water in crystal glasses in the tunnel approaching Baker Street? ‘The scheme of decoration of the cars is that of the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, with remarkably artistic effect’, observed the Railway Magazine in 1910. The window blinds were of green silk. Above each seat was ‘an ormolu luggage rack with finely chased ornamentation and panels of brass treillage’. Each of the eight glass-topped tables featured ‘a tiny portable electrolier of a very chaste design’.

  But the Met hadn’t gone to Verney Junction just to give a luxury ride into town for country gentlemen. A little way beyond Quainton Road on that projection the Met built a prong connecting to the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The Met’s chairman, Sir Edward Watkin, was also chairman of that company, which duplicated other railways’ routes in an inchoate way between Manchester and Grimsby, and generally stumbled about the north. Given that he was also chairman of the other railways – the Met, the South Eastern and the Chemin de Fer du Nord – over whose territory he wanted to approach Paris (where he apparently kept a mistress), you might say he was trying to build a railway in the image of himself. It has been said that he was ‘frustrated only by the political and financial problems bound up with constructing a channel tunnel’, and I like that word ‘only’. In fact, the preliminary borings undertaken in 1881 by his Submarine Railway Company (which can still be seen at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff, Folkestone) were pounced on by the press as likely to facilitate a continental invasion. So that element of the plan was scotched early on.

  Interior of either Galatea or Mayflower, two luxury coaches (named after winners of the America’s Cup yachting race) available on the Metropolitan from 1910. The ambience was eighteenth century, and the routine was to order a whisky and water after a hard day in the City (or possibly before).

  But in 1897 Watkin did create his trunk line. You can tell it was a marginal latecomer by its name: Great Central Railway. It was basically the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway with a changed name and connection to London. It came down from the north to Quainton Road, where it ran over and then (after Harrow) parallel to the Metropolitan’s line to Finchley Road. Instead of diving underground with the Met at that point, it went into a new cut-and-cover tunnel of its own, running beneath Lord’s Cricket Ground.

  It emerged from its tunnel – to a rather muted fanfare – at Marylebone station, which opened in 1899. Marylebone station – the only one in London not used by Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson – is small because it was built on the cheap, tunnelling to the site having proved very expensive. John Betjeman compared it to a branch public library, and it is upstaged by the Grand Central Hotel to the north of it, which was built and operated by a separate company. Not only was Marylebone small but it was also sleepy, because there was never much demand for the Great Central Railway. Its rivals, the Great Northern and the Midland, would do everything they could to stifle its services, and its trains often ran empty. At first, Marylebone had no connection to an Underground line (not even the one owned by the man who built it: the Metropolitan), but in 1907 the Bakerloo Line would open a Tube station underneath Marylebone called Great Central. In 1917 this became Marylebone Tube station, and it’s one of my favourites, with pale blue tiles, like an old municipal swimming pool. Watkin attended the opening of Marylebone station in a bath chair, having recently suffered a stroke. He would die two years later, in 1901. His vision was only half-fulfilled, but his railway remained romantic and different until recent times.

  BY THE WAY: THE FATE OF THE GRAND VISION

  The 1920s saw the creation of Metroland, the most important social consequence of the Metropolitan’s expansion north, and we will be visiting Metroland shortly. But in 1933 the railway, which had tried to become a main line, would suffer the indignity of amalgamation into public ownership as part of London Transport.

  In 1936 London Transport ceased operating passenger services beyond Aylesbury, but it contracted the London & North Eastern Railway to operate freight to Verney Junction until 1947, and things remained quite heroic on the north of the curtailed ‘Extension’ for some years afterwards. Until 1961 the line was electrified only as far as Rickmansworth, where steam locomotives were attached or detached in place of electric ones. In the same year the stations north of Amersham were given over to British Rail. But the Metropolitan Line of today still has more stations outside the M25 than any other line. It has four: Chesham, Amersham, Chalfont and Chorleywood. Its nearest rival in this respect, the Central Line, only has one: Epping, and whereas that is in Zone 6, Amersham and Chesham are in Zone 9, a fantastical concept created especially for them. And until December 2010 the northern stretch of the ‘Extension’ featured a charming side-show: the Chesham Shuttle.

  When the Met first reached Chesham, in 1889, the townsfolk thought the growth of their town would be inexorable as a result. Their industries, all beginning with ‘B’ (boots, beer, brushes), would boom. The connection was inaugurated with a party on 15 May 1889. When Sir Edward Watkin arrived to take part, the town band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’; the bells of St Mary’s Church in Chesham pealed joyfully; a seven-course luncheon was served in the goods station. The cry went up, ‘At last, we are on the main line!’ And so they were – for three years, until the Met decided to carry on to Amersham, leaving Chesham high and dry on a branch. This relegation was not really the cause of the decline of brush-making, which was the town’s main industry. That was down to the introduction of nylon bristles. But the people of Chesham moaned about the shuttle: the waiting room at Chalfont & Latimer was too hot, or too cold; there were leaves on the line. And sometimes the drivers of steam locos (until 1961) would forget to couple up to the carriages, pulling away from Chesham with no train behind. But the drivers liked the shuttle. ‘It’s a lovely turn to work’, one of them once told me. ‘There are hardly any signals.’ Classical music was played over the intercom in the pleasingly solid and simple, green and white waiting room at Chalfont, while its counterpart at Chesham was bedecked with Station Garden of the Year winners’ certificates. (Essentially, Chesham has won the Station Garden of the Year competition every single year since its inception.) The line in-between supplies views of farmhouses, deer, sheep, gently rolling hills and the River Chess, and it is almost as strange to see these things from an Underground train as it would be to see the African savannah.

  On 12 December 2010 the shuttle ceased operations, and Metropolitan trains began to terminate at both Amersham and Chesham. The chairman of the Chesham Society welcomed the ending of the shuttle. ‘I suppose you could say it’s reinstating us to what we were originally. We are a main line, and a lot of people travel on it, so I think it’s an excellent thing.’

  Chesham’s return to the main line coincided with the start of the replacement of the ‘A’ stock Metropolitan carriages with the new ‘S’ stock. The ‘A’ stock had been introduced at the time of the electrification beyond Rickmansworth. It is called ‘A’ stock because it went up to Amersham. (The ‘S’ in ‘S’ stock stands for ‘sub-surface’.) At the time of writing some of the As are still running, and they are my favourite Underground cars. They are roomy and airy; the seats are transverse benches that you can stretch out and sleep on in the off-peak. The seating configuration is a reminder that the previous carriages were formed of compartments, and so the benches of the A stock – and the luggage racks and coat hooks that they feature – were a means of letting passengers down gently: a humane decompression after the glory years. The new ‘S’ stocks – which will be coming to all the cut-and-cover lines – demonstrate that the memory of the glory days has faded to the point where there are only a few stubby transverse, two-person benches; the rest of the seats are longitudinal after the modern, space-saving fashion.

  Marylebone is these days used for suburban railway services. Chiltern Railways, who operate the trains into the station
, describe it as ‘civilised’, and so it is. I often think I would like to live in Marylebone station, which is equipped with a fairly good pub, a W. H. Smith and a Marks & Spencer’s food shop. The Grand Central Hotel is now the five-star Landmark London. I bought a glass of white wine there in 2004 (seven quid) and sat in the great marble and glass atrium listening to an Arab gentleman have a mobile phone conversation while toying with a card reading ‘To avoid inconveniencing other guests please refrain from using mobile phones in this area.’ The station remains connected to the hotel by a glass canopy or porte-cochère that was much admired by John Betjeman, but you could stand all day under that canopy and not see anyone walk from station to hotel. Trains – at least, the sort that run into Marylebone – are not expensive enough for guests at the Landmark London. They come by taxi.

  THE EXPANSION OF THE DISTRICT

  The District would go east from Whitechapel towards Upminster in the early twentieth century, in what would be the last major instance of cut-and-cover in London. But its first push was west of central London, where it both stimulated and took advantage of housing development. As mentioned, the operational base of this push was Earl’s Court.

  The first Earl’s Court station (1871) was a wooden hut in the middle of a market garden. It served a District connection between West Brompton and the West London Line. It managed to burn down in 1875, and the Earl’s Court of today dates from 1878. As David Leboff points out in London Underground Stations, it is the giant train shed with its iron and glass roof that gives the station its ‘main line railway feel’. Earl’s Court also resembles a giant amusement arcade of the District, with the destinations – Richmond, Wimbledon or wherever – announced on the antiquated light-box indicators like the symbols on a fruit machine, in which case an indication of one of the infrequent Kensington (Olympia) trains has long been akin to three cherries coming up. These old indicators show the destination of the next train by the appearance of an illuminated arrow next to the station name. The arrow may indicate that a train is going to Wimbledon, but it gives no clue as to when. Now, however, the indicators are supplemented by dot matrix panels that not only say where but also when. Why aren’t the old ones removed? Because they, like the whole station, are Grade II listed.