In the 1870s the District pushed west from Earl’s Court, reaching Hammersmith in 1874 – much to the fury of the Metropolitan, which, as we have seen, had already arrived there by the Hammersmith & City. (But the Metropolitan would have its revenge, by in turn shadowing the District between Hammersmith and Richmond for a few years.) Riding the District west of Hammersmith, you immediately know something exciting is coming up, because at Ravenscourt Park you are level with the rooftops. As you approach the Thames, you are riding with the ghost of the London & South Western Railway, which built many of the stations used by the District for its westerly push. The clue lies in the valanced – or serrated – white wooden station canopies, which give some of the stops a country branch air.
The bridge over the Thames – Kew Railway Bridge – is between Gunnersbury and Kew Gardens. It was built by the London & South Western Railway, and it is the best of the two river crossings by the District because you can see over the parapet. Therefore you have a view, which you do not from the bridge carrying the other branch of the District over the Thames, which we will come to in a moment.
The terminal station, Richmond, is managed by South West Trains, heirs to the London & South Western Railway, and here the District fades into a railway maelstrom, since Richmond is not only on the Waterloo–Reading line but is also the westerly terminus of the London Overground.
The District next stretched out to Ealing Broadway (from where its trains briefly ran to Windsor). It reached Hounslow Barracks in 1884. In his autobiography, My Early Life (1930) Winston Churchill wrote: ‘I was able to live at home with my mother and go down to Hounslow barracks two or three times a week by the Underground Railway.’ It was 1896, and he was a young cavalry officer. (The District service to Hounslow was withdrawn in 1964.)
Meanwhile, in 1880, the District was approaching its second railway crossing, by extending from the West Brompton stub to Fulham, Parsons Green and Putney Bridge. The station at Putney Bridge opened in time for the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in March 1880. Fulham was semi-rural at this point. In Arnold Bennett’s novel A Man from the North Richard Larch returns at about 8 p.m. one Saturday from a visit to his new friend Mr Aked (and Mr Aked’s pretty niece), who lives in Fulham. ‘It was necessary to wait for a train at Parson’s Green Station. From the elevated platform fields were visible through a gently falling mist.’ Save for the porter ‘leisurely lighting the station lamps’, Richard is alone. Then, ‘A signal suddenly shone out in the distance; it might have been a lighthouse seen across unnumbered miles of calm ocean. Rain began to fall.’
The bridge carrying the District from Putney Bridge station to East Putney is not, infuriatingly, called Putney Bridge. That is a road bridge. We are concerned with the Fulham Railway Bridge, which was, rather impressively, built by the District itself, and not the London & South Western. So the District must take responsibility for the fact that the iron girders of the parapet block any view from the trains of a particularly beautiful part of the river. The modern-day managers of the line do seem to attach importance to views of the bridge, however, because when they repainted it in the mid-1990s, they called in the local residents, including a friend of mine, to ask their opinion about some colour swatches. A tasteful light green was eventually chosen. The first station on the south bank of the river is East Putney, managed by South West Trains, which reminds us that, having crossed the river, the District again became entwined with the London & South Western Railway. In fact, the District would go from East Putney to Wimbledon by piggybacking on a branch line of that railway, and sometimes overground trains still use the branch as a relief route between Wimbledon and Clapham Common. But they don’t stop at the Underground stations.
HIATUS
In the 1880s the population of Greater London increased by 870,000; in the 1890s it would increase by nearly a million. Suburbs were growing fast, especially to the west, where they were generated by the District Railway, and to the north-east, generated by the Great Eastern Railway. The money these new suburbanites earned in the City they spent in the West End, which was ceasing to be a territory of mansions, its streets empty ‘out of season’. It was becoming London’s playground, a place associated with pleasure, with life itself. In 1900 the average age of death in the East End was thirty, in the West End fifty-five.
One lure was the music halls. By 1880 there were eighty large music halls or variety theatres in London, and most would soon boast of being ‘Illuminated throughout by electricity!’ The majority were in the West End, especially in The Strand. In the 1890s Harry Castling sang ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand’, adding, seemingly irrelevantly, ‘Have a banana!’ In another music hall song Burlington Bertie ‘rose at 10.30, walked up the Strand with his gloves on his hand, and walked down again with them off’. Note that the flâneur in question rose well after the time of ‘the morning peak’, and his peregrinations attest to the growing market for London leisure travel.
Meanwhile the shops of the City were being eaten up by offices. You shopped in the West End. Regent Street – the centre of fashion – had been the resort of society in the early eighteenth century, but its shops catered to a more demotic market by the end of the nineteenth. The London Encyclopaedia (1983), edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, quotes one presumably venerable shopkeeper who in 1900 complained, ‘One has to do at least five times the volume of business to get the same returns.’ The last quarter of the century also saw the rise of the department store. The biggest shops were not at first very central: Harrods was at Knightsbridge, Whiteleys at Bayswater. But it wouldn’t be long before Selfridges landed on Oxford Street. By virtue of their size, these shops were the heralds of the twentieth century. They pioneered the large-scale use of glass, they required central heating, and they had electricity, which in Harrods (from 1898) was used to power London’s first escalator. Brandy was offered at the top, to calm shoppers down after the sheer exhilaration of the ride. Selfridges wouldn’t have an escalator until 1952, but then it was famous for its gilded electrical lifts (and lift girls).
Electricity was smart. The mid-1880s had seen the development of the turbine: a new kind of steam-powered generator. It would eventually stop electricity from being an expensive luxury, but that process would be slow in London compared with American cities, partly because of its fractured local government. As late as 1910, only 7 per cent of Londoners had electric light in their homes. In Children of Light (2011) Gavin Weightman notes that Americans visiting London ‘were surprised to find the streets still lit with gas lamps’.
There was no overall power company for London, so all consumers of electricity had their own private generating stations. This lent exclusivity to its use, and one of the earliest important generating stations in London was the Grosvenor Gallery Power Station, which sounds as likely to have been written up in Tatler as Electrical News. The gallery was opened in 1885 by Sir Coutts Lindsay, debonair aristocrat and Crimean War hero. He and his wife, Caroline Fitzroy, were sympathetic to the outré painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their gallery would provide a showcase for their controversial works – and it would do so as the first London gallery to be lit by electricity.
Coutts Lindsay had power to spare, and was soon supplying 11,000 lamps by wires radiating over the roof-tops of the West End to other opulent premises: clubs, theatres, large houses. The wires being clearly visible, everyone could see who was in the select club. (While electric trams were prospering in America, and soon would do so in the north of England, they would always be kept out of central London because their overhead wires were considered an eyesore. And electric trains were only allowed if they were subterranean. But a provision of the Electric Lighting Act of 1882 allowed anyone to transmit their own power as long as they did not bury the cables under the road.) In 1887, in what seems an incredible conjunction, the Grosvenor Gallery Power Station became a sub-station of Deptford Power Station.
The Inner Circle – still the only system of rapid transport
in central London – involved no electricity, and by 1890 people were starting to notice. In 1896 Mark Twain wrote of the line that ‘It goes by no direct course but always away around’; it was ‘the invention of Satan himself’. In the same passage Twain also wrote:
Hacks [horse-drawn vehicles] are but little needed in American cities for any but strangers who cannot find their way by tram-lines. The citizen should be thankful for the high hack rates which have given him the trams; for by consequence he has the cheapest and swiftest city transportation that exists in the world. London travels by omnibus – pleasant, but as deadly slow as a European ‘lift’.
London might also have looked old-fashioned even if you’d just come back from the seaside. Magnus Volk’s electric railway began running at Brighton in 1883, and Blackpool had electric trams on the front from 1885. The electric tram would come to London in 1901, operated by London United Tramways and running west of Shepherd’s Bush.
Meanwhile horses, pulling hackneys, buses or horse-drawn trams (booming, but confined to the suburbs as their electrical brethren would be), had London to themselves. The buses took short-distance passengers from the Underground lines, especially from the District, as it approached the City, and the receipts of the new railway actually declined in the early 1890s over this stretch. This looks like a case of history going backwards, but, as Barker and Robbins write: ‘It was so much easier and more pleasant to jump on a passing omnibus in the Strand than to make one’s way down to a smoky tunnel under the Embankment.’ It was also cheaper, as a result of an omnibus price war between the London General Omnibus Company and the London Road Car Company.
The traffic blocks of the mid-century had been alleviated for a while by the Underground railways, but in the late century the horse buses were passing through Piccadilly Circus at the rate of ten a minute, and it was more like eleven a minute at Bank.
Something had to be done. Again.
CHAPTER FIVE
DEEPER
BRUNEL’S TUNNEL
The deep-level Tubes required the invention of a tunnelling machine and a means of propelling trains through those tunnels that would not choke the passengers. The answer to the latter was electricity, and we have seen how electric traction had become established by the late nineteenth century. The answer to the first problem would be the tunnelling shield – that is, a way of allowing men to dig while protecting them from the earth above. The invention of the shield would be triggered by the challenge of digging tunnels under the River Thames, because you couldn’t create those by cut-and-cover.
The first shield was developed by Marc Isambard Brunel. He preferred his second forename – who wouldn’t? – but was known as Marc to distinguish himself from his more famous son, the above-mentioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc Brunel would use his tunnelling shield to build the Thames Tunnel, connecting the two banks of the booming docks. It would eventually be the centrepiece of a Tube line of sorts, before becoming a differently branded railway altogether. A ride through the tunnel on that line today takes thirty seconds, and nothing can be seen of it, which is a shame because it took eighteen years to build and is considered beautiful.
Marc Brunel was a royalist refugee from revolutionary France. He specialised in ideas that were ahead of their time – of which he seems to have had about one a week – and he had a gift for making those around him seem churlish and reactionary in comparison to his own far-sightedness. In 1799 he designed a machine to make pulley blocks for the British Navy … who turned out not to be good payers. He then set up a boot-making factory in Battersea, in which scarred and mangled war veterans oversaw what has been called the first system of mass production in the world. It supplied the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Duke of Wellington considered Brunel’s boots to have played a large part in the British victories. As Robert Hulse, director of the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe says, ‘It was a Frenchman who beat Napoleon’, but demand for the boots fell sharply after the Battle of Waterloo, and Brunel was imprisoned for debt in 1821. (By the way, Brunel’s army boots are not to be confused with Wellington boots. Those foppish articles came from the Duke of Wellington’s boot-maker in St James’s.) From prison Brunel corresponded with his friend Tsar Alexander I of Russia, for whom he’d been hoping to build a bridge over the River Neva in St Petersburg. The Russians would eventually decide to go under the river, but not before Brunel had shown the way, by building the first sub-aqueous tunnel in the world.
The Thames Tunnel Company raised money from investors who included the Duke of Wellington, and in 1825 Brunel began in typically novel and entertaining style by building a brick cylinder with walls 3 yards thick at Rotherhithe, on the south bank of the Thames. The idea was that it would sink into the ground under its own weight. It did sink – a few inches every day – and Londoners with nothing much else ‘on’ would come to watch it do so.
The earth was excavated from the sunken cylinder; the shield was inserted into it, and the tunnelling began, the target being Wapping, on the opposite bank. The shield was an iron honeycomb containing thirty-six cells within which men dug the wall of mud before them. It is said that Brunel got the idea for a tunnelling shield when he was at Chatham docks making his pulley blocks. There he observed the burrowing through wood of Teredo navalis, the ship worm. According to Robert Hulse, ‘It’s half worm, half mollusc, and there are more dead men at the bottom of the sea as a result of those things than all the naval battles put together. They’re the reason you had copper-bottomed ships.’ The outer edges of the shield supported the tunnel as the men worked, and these edges were the equivalent of the shell of the ship worm. The men stabbing away at the mud with their shovels and picks were the equivalent of its teeth. Every few feet the shield was thrust forward by hydraulic jacks, and bricklayers (working quickly, mind you) lined the tunnel behind it, just as the Teredo navalis lined its tunnels with its own excreta. Unlike the circular shields that built the Tubes, Brunel’s shield was rectangular and would make a vault shape when the top corners were rounded off. (Tubes are circular because that is the shape of the shields that built them. Brunel’s rectangular shield allowed more room for men to dig. A circle is stronger than a vault, but a vault is more pleasing to the eye.)
The Tubes would be dug through impermeable London clay, an ideal medium for tunnelling, but there was as much gravel as clay under the Thames, and the workings kept being breached by toxic river water. In 1826 Marc fell ill through overwork so Isambard took over, and he was given three assistants. One died more or less immediately; another fell ill and would be left blind in one eye. The first major flood of the workings occurred in May 1827, and Marc Brunel wrote, ‘We have been honoured with a visitation of Father Thames’, a generous observation given what Father Thames was full of. (The tunnel was dug before the making of the Bazalgette sewers, by which the effluent of London was diverted from the river.) Work restarted early in 1828, but then there was another flood, in which Isambard was swept to the top of the shaft by the surge of water, and a further six men died. In August 1828 the money ran out. With the tunnel about 600 feet long, digging stopped and Isambard went off to build the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
In 1834 Marc Brunel raised enough money to restart digging. This included one of those rare Victorian government grants for an infrastructure project: a £250,000 loan from the Treasury, equivalent to about £250 million today. After further floods and a few fires caused by methane and hydrogen sulphide gas, the tunnel was completed in March 1843, and the major civil engineering feat of its time was opened as … a walkway and tourist attraction. The tourists descended by stairs. There was no money left to create the sloping roadways at either end that would have allowed horse-drawn wagons to use the tunnel, and the Treasury didn’t want to know. According to Robert Hulse, the depressing rationale was as follows: ‘The main thing was to finish the tunnel. Not to have finished it would have been a national embarrassment, but it didn’t matter so much what it was used for once it was finis
hed.’ So a bazaar was opened in the Tunnel, selling tat, and not even useful tat: coffee cans, snuff boxes, commemorative pictures of the tunnel. There were also prostitutes.
I learned about the Brunel tunnel while standing in the Rotherhithe shaft – or caisson – during London Open House Weekend. The shaft is now fitted with a concrete floor built above the level of the beginning of the tunnel. The caisson is 50 feet in diameter, 40 feet deep, entirely roofed over. It stands just outside the Brunel Museum and is its proud Exhibit A. The original staircase has been demolished, but on what the Brunel Museum exuberantly calls ‘high days and holidays’ the shaft is opened to visitors, who climb through a kind of trapdoor near the top before descending on a scaffolding staircase to hear a talk by Mr Hulse. Everyone entering the caisson was warned to turn back if they were prone to feeling claustrophobic, which only spurred me on. I am prone to claustrophobia, but I wanted to test myself, as did plenty of Victorian men, who would descend the staircase to the bottom of the shaft in a normal and serene manner. They would then clamp their hands on their top hats and leg it from one end of the tunnel to the other, before languidly climbing out of the shaft at the other end, congratulating themselves on having traversed the tunnel before it collapsed or the air ran out.
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