Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  1. The worst-fooled man is the man who fools himself.

  2. Have one great object in life. Follow it persistently and determinedly. If you divide your energies you will not succeed.

  3. Do not look for what you do not wish to find.

  4. Have no regrets. Look to the future. The past is gone and cannot be brought back.

  YERKES’S BABIES: THE BAKERLOO, THE PICCADILLY, THE CHARING CROSS, EUSTON & HAMPSTEAD

  The Baker Street & Waterloo opened from Elephant & Castle to Baker Street in 1906, before progressing in 1907 to Edgware Road station (a different one from the Met’s), embracing Marylebone on the way. It would be at Paddington by 1913. Soon after opening, it was officially named what had hitherto been its nickname, the Bakerloo, and the Railway Magazine applied its favourite, indeed its only, epithet: it was a ‘gutter title’. But you’d have thought the provenance was sufficiently pukka, the name having been invented by no less a personage than Captain G. H. F. Nichols, who wrote a column in the Evening News under the byline ‘Quex’.

  The Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton (‘Piccadilly’ for short) opened in 1906 from Hammersmith to Finsbury Park. The Hampstead Tube opened in 1907 from Charing Cross to Camden Town, where it split to go either west to Golders Green or east to Archway, which was called Highgate, even though it is not in Highgate but at the foot of the hill on which Highgate stands. Hold on to your hat while we follow the history of that station’s name. In 1939 an element of honesty crept in when it was re-named Archway (Highgate), but then, in 1941, when a station further north called Highgate (also not in Highgate) opened, there was a reversion towards dis honesty when Archway (Highgate) became Highgate (Archway). In 1947, it became Archway.

  Between Hampstead and Golders Green another station had been completed, called North End or Bull & Bush. Well, it had been completed at platform level, but no surface building was ever built because, the surrounding country having been unfortunately (from Yerkes’s perspective) preserved for the nation, insufficient numbers of commuters would ever use it. Being 221 feet below the Heath, it is the deepest station on the underground. North End or Bull & Bush is also the only closed-down station never to have opened, and you’d think its poignant situation would put a brake on the revels in the Heathside pub called the Bull & Bush after which it was named. (If your train ever stops in the tunnel between Hampstead and Golders Green, you might make out the remnant of a southbound platform.)

  I suggest that these Yerkes Tubes are entangled in the minds of most modern Londoners. You are on a deep-level Tube in the centre of the town; the stations are more or less crowded; they are also, if you stop to think about it, attractive. The lines were very civilised in conception. In the early years the lights in the tunnels were kept on, so as to reassure passengers. (Today tunnel lights are not kept on, and if you travel in the cab of a Tube train, the stations seem so brilliantly illuminated by contrast that all the passengers seem to be poised on a stage.) Most of the stations have surface buildings. That may not seem like much of a boast, but most of the stations of the Paris Metro do not have surface buildings. There is just an elevator or a staircase set into the pavement, like a challenge presented by a conceptual artist, or like a dream. (This stems from the vanity of Paris. The city authorities considered the city too beautiful to be cluttered with subway station buildings, and it helped that the Metro is a cut-and-cover network, with no need of lift housings.)

  The architect of the stations on all the UERL Tube lines was Leslie Green (1875–1908), a delicate-looking man who did everything young, including dying. He’d set up in architectural practice at twenty-two; he became architect to the UERL at twenty-eight, and his early death probably came from overwork – so making him another of our Underground martyrs. He made the Yerkes Tubes assert themselves through four-square, classical buildings containing ticket offices, lifts and an arched mezzanine. These buildings are covered in glazed oxblood tiles that vie with the red of Routemaster buses for being the colour of London. It is not an attractive colour. It’s reminiscent of a bruise, or raw liver, or the face of a wino, but then London is not a pretty city. Being glazed, the tiles magnify the effect of rain and shine darkly on a rainy night, with the aid of large and rather funereal shaded lamps, which remind me of the shaded lamps that hang over snooker tables. They would come to be augmented by glass canopies of a midnight blue, on which was written the word UndergrounD, the ‘U’ and ‘D’ being exaggerated so as to suggest that the word is progressing from one tunnel to another, and my favourite Leslie Green stations are the ones that still parade this logo: for instance, Russell Square and Chalk Farm.

  Altogether the stations offered a subdued welcome, as if to assert that the base note of London life is or ought to be a resigned melancholia. On a rainy evening they seem to proclaim: forget about today; go home to bed and try again tomorrow. The buildings had steel frames, and the roofs were flat, in case anybody wanted to buy the ‘air rights’ and put an office block on top. In most cases there have been no takers, although Leslie Green stations at Oxford Circus and Camden, for example, have buildings on top. The ticket halls were lined with wood panels and tiles of a relaxing mid-green, with Art Deco stylings that – in spite of the contrast mentioned above – offer an echo of Paris, where Art Nouveau had been rampant in the early twentieth century, and where Leslie Green had trained.

  In the absence of trees, gateposts, signal gantries or other signs of ‘home’ that a traveller on a main line would look for, each platform wall was given a unique design by means of coloured tiles. The names of the stations were often spelled out in these tiles, with charmingly over-exuberant punctuation, hence ‘: Tufnell: Park:’.

  Much of the special patterning was lost in the Seventies, but as part of the current Upgrade, the Yerkes (and other) stations have been restored with a fine feeling for history. So Warren Street is proudly announced as ‘EUSTON ROAD’, which it hasn’t been called since 1907. (But the modern name, written on the roundels, puts you right.) And I sail most days from Archway to Charing Cross through stations decorated in old-fashioned creams, blues and greens … although perhaps my favourite of the restored Yerkes/Green stations is Regent’s Park, on the Bakerloo, which is brown, cream, yellow and white – like a chocolate sundae.

  The trains on the Yerkes Tubes varied from line to line and were manufactured in various countries, but they were all flat-ended electrical multiple units, with mainly longitudinal seating. They had colourful liveries. On the Bakerloo they were scarlet and cream. It must have been like seeing a stick of rock shooting out of the tunnel at you.

  The carriages – or cars – had gated platforms at the end, where ‘gatemen’ stood and controlled the flow of passengers on and off the trains in the absence of automatic doors. (The Yerkes trains were always crowded in peak times, even though they came into the stations every ninety seconds or so.) When each gateman had secured his doors and gate, he rang a bell, then the conductor rang his bell as the signal for the driver to set off. ‘This tintinnabulation down the train was a joy to the ear’, write Jackson and Croome in Rails through the Clay. But passengers wrote letters to The Times about the way the gatemen would mangle the station names they shouted out: ‘Ampstid’ for ‘Hampstead’ and ‘Igit’ for ‘Highgate’. (Today the automated female announcer infuriates me by saying ‘High-gut’ and ‘Goodge Stree …’, with no terminal ‘t’.) The train staff were at least smartly dressed. They had better be, or they were sacked. They had to keep their double-breasted uniform coats buttoned right up at all times, and so it is just as well that besides passenger flow, there was also air flow, using stair and lift shafts and directed by electrical exhaust fans.

  The Yerkes Tubes were more uniform than disparate, and they would not develop their defining individual characteristics until they were extended. Then the Bakerloo would become notable for complications to the north, and entanglement with overground railways, which would serve to highlight the abruptness of its termination to the south:
there would never be any advance in that direction beyond Elephant & Castle. The Piccadilly would be not so much extended as over-extended. There are too many stops on it. As for the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead, even the 1907 operation was fraught, its trains ominously fitted with destination plates to show whether it was bound for Golders Green, Hampstead or Highgate. The stressful complications would soon be multiplied when it became conjoined with the City & South London, so making the Northern Line.

  In spite of being overcrowded in peak times, the cost of building these Tubes cancelled out any savings that occurred from the use of electricity in place of steam. Also, the lines all fell short of their expected passenger targets by about half, mainly because of competition from electric trams – up and running from 1901, as mentioned – and now also petrol-driven buses. In early 1906 Sir George Gibb, formerly General Manager of the North Eastern Railway, became chairman and managing director of the heavily indebted Underground Electric Railways of London. He and Yerkes’s banker, Sir Edgar Speyer – a man increasingly indignant at having funded a transport revolution for London with no assistance from the public purse – attempted out of desperation to sell UERL to the London County Council, but nothing came of the scheme.

  We should at this point take note of the London County Council (or LCC), which was the democratically elected successor to the Metropolitan Board of Works (which had been a body of appointees) and the forerunner of the Greater London Council. In the two decades after its foundation in 1889 the LCC was run by a progressive grouping and, transport-wise, the Council could be seen as a moral corrective to the UERL. It had disapproved of the financial machinations of Yerkes; it wanted London transport to be run for the benefit of Londoners rather than shareholders, and it operated the largest of the London tram networks, over a Polo-mint shaped territory in central London (since trams were banned from the City and the West End).

  Electric trams – those ungainly, boat-like things that so aggrieved the motorist, because they ran down the middle of the roads, and passengers would have to step into the roads to get on to them – were for the working classes, and the LCC saw them as a means of extracting the poor from the remaining rookeries of central London. Trams were cheaper than Tubes and buses; the seats were hard; there were ‘No Spitting’ signs everywhere; the ‘top deck of the tram’ was notorious as a venue for naughtiness. They carried adverts for the News of the World, Bisto or beer (‘Drink Worthington Ales’), and their termini were often pubs. A style guide of the 1930s for journalists on the Daily Express tried to bring trams upmarket by insisting they be called ‘tramcars’. They were transport for the masses in the literal sense that, between the time of their electrification and the early 1920s when buses became more comfortable and commodious, trams carried more passengers than the buses and the Underground combined.

  Whereas the Underground generated private owner occupation in the suburbs, the LCC would build subsidised council housing in the 1920s, sometimes following the arrival of the Underground (as at Morden), sometimes not (as at the Downham estate at Catford). But there would eventually be a convergence. The UERL would become London Transport, which would take over the trams of the LCC. The LCC would initiate the campaign for the Green Belt, which the men at the top of London Transport would support. And public transport in London would eventually fall into municipal ownership, albeit under the GLC rather than the LCC.

  After their approach to the LCC, Gibb and Speyer moved their fire-fighting to a different front, by re-negotiating with shareholders the imminently due redemption of £7 million pounds’ worth of fantastical ‘profit-sharing notes’ that Yerkes had issued in 1903 against subsequent profits that never materialised. The notes were converted into long-term debt, and the company was saved from bankruptcy. The next task would be to make Tube-use part of the culture of London, and in this connection we will be meeting the double act of Stanley and Pick. But before I introduce our bill-toppers, here is a brief preliminary entertainment …

  BY THE WAY: THE ALDWYCH SHUTTLE

  The shuttle services of the Underground have their cult followings, their runtish condition attracting the sympathy vote. We have ridden the Chesham Shuttle at the far end of the Met, and we will be riding the Epping–Ongar at the eastern end of the Central. But the machinations of Yerkes also created the only shuttle to operate in central London. I refer to the Aldwych Shuttle, which briefly gave rise to the glamorous ‘Theatre Express’.

  The Great Northern & Strand Tube, it will be recalled, was the decongestant for Finsbury Park favoured by the Great Northern main-line railway company. It was originally going to terminate to the south at Holborn, but the LCC was engaged in a programme of slum clearance in order to create the above-mentioned rather blank and pompous thoroughfare called Kingsway and its companion-piece to the south, the Aldwych, which links the Strand to Fleet Street. So the plans for the Tube line changed. It would now encompass Kingsway by terminating south of the new street, somewhere in the vicinity of the Aldwych. When the plan for the line was taken over by Yerkes, he decided to combine it with the proposed Brompton & Piccadilly Circus Railway, by extending the latter from Piccadilly Circus to Holborn. The proposed Aldwych extension was thus left dangling, but the tunnel between Holborn and the Aldwych was dug nonetheless because it was felt that the theatres and new offices around Aldwych would be worth serving, even if the line towards it would be merely a spur to begin with.

  Holborn station, incidentally, did not get the Leslie Green treatment because it was to be situated on Kingsway, and the LCC required it to fit in with the look of the new street. Therefore the station is clad in grey Portland stone. The station at Aldwych, which would initially be called Strand, was given a full coating of oxblood tiles. It was situated on the south side of the Strand, on the site of the Strand Theatre, and that was a bad omen. Here was a line meant to serve the theatres of the Strand, yet one of those would have to close to make way for it. The theatre closed on 13 May 1905 for building to begin, interrupting the run of a play called Miss Wingrove, written by a man with the titillatory name of W. H. Risque. Imagine the irritation of Mr Risque on learning that his play was coming off because the theatre was to be turned into a Tube station. His irritation would surely have been doubled had he known that the only reason the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton had pounced on that particular site was that it had offered the correct alignment for an extension of the spur line to Waterloo – permission for which would soon be rejected by Parliament.

  The Holborn–Strand link was opened in November 1907, about a year after the rest of the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton had opened. Two-car trains shuttled back and forth in the two tunnels. Whether there were any passengers on those trains is another matter. Aldwych was well served by buses and trams, and the new offices filled up only slowly. If you wanted to go further north than Holborn on the spur, you had to change at Holborn, and people couldn’t be bothered. However, a through northbound service to Finsbury Park did operate in the late evenings between 1907 and 1910, and this was the ‘Theatre Express’. It was meant to serve theatre-goers who lived on the main line stops beyond Finsbury Park – say, Enfield. They would change from Underground to main line at Finsbury Park and arrive home at about midnight, looking glamorous in their evening wear and happily clutching their theatre programmes. But there weren’t enough culture vultures in places like Enfield to justify the service.

  In 1915 Strand station was renamed Aldwych as a result of a pointless little pas de deux, by which Charing Cross station on the Hampstead railway was renamed Strand (before reverting to Charing Cross in 1973). In 1918 the shuttle trains were running from the western shuttle platform at Holborn to the eastern one at Aldwych. The station was fading away. In the First World War, National Gallery treasures were stored on the disused platform. In the Thirties the shuttle was down to a one-car service. In 1939 Geoffrey Household set the opening chase sequence in his novel Rogue Male – which is a series of chase sequences – in Ald
wych. The unnamed hero is being pursued by the agents of a fascist power:

  The working at Aldwych is very simple. Just before the shuttle is due, the lift comes down. The departing passengers get into the train; the arriving passengers get into the lift. When the lift goes up and the train leaves, Aldwych station is as deserted as an ancient mine. You can hear the drip of water and the beat of your heart.

  The service was suspended altogether in the Second World War, when part of the line became a bomb shelter, and the station was used again for art storage. The Elgin Marbles were transferred from the British Museum to Aldwych, where they, along with hundreds of Londoners, sheltered from the bombs.

  After the war the shuttle resumed, but the disused platforms gained an identity crisis, being used for mock-ups of stations on the Victoria Line, the Jubilee Line and the extension to Heathrow of the Piccadilly. Also films were shot on the branch: Conspirator (1949), A Run for Your Money (1949), The Clouded Yellow (1950), The Gentle Gunman (1952). The middle two are good, the other two abysmal. Death Line (also abysmal) was filmed there in 1972. Meanwhile, the station awaited its shot at the big time. Plans for the link through to Waterloo were revived and died. What became the Jubilee Line was originally going to pass through Aldwych on its way east, but it would terminate at Charing Cross instead (although not for long).

  Aldwych station was closed in September 1994, and the Photo-Me booth that had been inside the station was dragged outside, to stand before the shuttered façade so that at least some public service survived on the site. It was very sad, but then again I’ve been to some excellent parties in the closed-down station. In April 1997 I found myself descending in the gated lift at Aldwych with a vodka and ginger beer in my hand and Janet Street-Porter standing next to me. This was a ‘happening’, organised by an art group called Artangel. A distorted disembodied voice repeatedly told us to stand clear of the doors, to have our tickets ready for inspection. A man on a gantry in the ventilation shaft played blues on a saxophone while a woman in a white dress paced up and down in front of him. I learned that a Prodigy video had just been shot in the station, and ‘part of an episode of Bramwell MD’, whatever that is. A few months later, Artangel organised another moody installation in Aldwych that was dreamed up – possibly literally – by the art critic John Berger, who in his youth had used the shuttle to get to Holborn Art College (now Central St Martins School of Art). Berger had since abandoned Holborn and rain in favour of the Haute Savoie and blue skies, and the event was supposed to elide – by visual and aural effects – the experience of Tube travel with the experience of being in a certain cave in Chauvet, France, where 70,000-year-old paintings had recently been discovered.