Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  His first major commission was to design the stations on the Morden extension of the Northern Line. Pick wanted something more modern for this than the countrified stations on the northern extension of the same line. Whereas they were designed to fit in, Holden’s stations to the south were designed to stand out. They are geometrically simple in grey Portland stone, with wide central windows into which is incorporated a stained-glass roundel. Further roundels were mounted on masts, like cherries on cocktail sticks, and overall the stations betokened a great confidence in the Underground’s identity. The same theme would be pursued later in new station entrances for Knightsbridge and Leicester Square, and the latter (the entrance on the eastern side of Charing Cross Road) seems, in its purity, an antidote to the garish clutter of that part of the West End.

  In 1928 Holden re-designed Piccadilly Circus station as part of the refurbishment of the central stations on that line. In fact, he created the Piccadilly Circus station we now know, with the subterranean concourse mimicking the Circus above, that focal point of the Empire. Whereas the Morden line stations may have seemed forbidding in their grey plainness, Piccadilly Circus is mellow and refulgent in luxurious marble and glass. There are retail booths around the perimeter of the circle, and in Designed for London: 150 Years of Transport Design (1995) Oliver Green describes the intended effect as that of ‘a shopping street at night’. When rising up from the platforms today, on the escalators fitted in the Holden refurbishment, the traveller still feels himself to be at the centre of … something. Perhaps it is still the centre of the world, because there are always plenty of foreign visitors there, and there’s always a concentration of them queuing at the Travel Information Centre to ask (and all these questions have been asked): ‘How Do We Take the Tube to Piccadilly Circus?’ or ‘Can I Get a By-Pass?’ or ‘How do we get to Russell Crowe station?’ or ‘Do you sell Octopus cards?’ (The last question is not as risible as it sounds, since the travel card of Hong Kong is called an Octopus.)

  But if Piccadilly Circus really is still internationally significant, then the World Time Clock, which purports to show the time anywhere by some not immediately clear method involving a moving pointer and a flattened globe, would always be working. But it is not. In fact, it is always not working. So perhaps the effect of Piccadilly Circus is simply to transport that passenger back to the glamorous London invoked on the Underground posters of the inter-war years, where men in spats (Lord Ashfield loved to wear them) and cloche-hatted ladies ‘touched the riches of the West End’ – that is, went shopping before repairing to an Art Deco cocktail lounge.

  Holden next designed what has been described as ‘London’s first skyscraper’ – the headquarters of the Underground Group. 55 Broadway is a cruciform building in Portland stone, rising a dozen storeys high above St James’s Park station. Just as one reads ‘Morden’ as ‘modern’ because of Holden’s pioneering stations, so one reads ’55’ here as ‘SS’, or at least I do, because 55 Broadway reflects the Machine Age ethos behind the great liners being built at the time and, standing as it does on an acute corner, it seems to have a prow. Pick, who took up residence in a room on the seventh floor – north-facing for the steady light – had actually been consulted on the fixtures and fittings of the Queen Mary, and the interior of 55 is plushly carpeted and wood-panelled, as I would imagine the passenger quarters of a liner to be. Whenever Underground employees arrange to meet me there, they say, ‘I’ll meet you at 55 Broadway’ in terms of reverence, never referring to it merely as ‘the office’.

  It was decorated with sculptures by such eminences of the day as Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein, who had long been fingered as a rum cove by the British press for his many mistresses, his shabby sweaters, his preference for sculpting primitive-looking nude figures (some of his sculptures were destined to feature in a sort of peep show in Blackpool) and for generally being a Bohemian with a capital ‘B’. In 1929 his first adornment of 55 Broadway was unveiled. The sculpture, Night, showed an enfeebled-looking man lying in the lap of a monumental female figure – a stylised version of Christ and Mary in the Pietà configuration, perhaps, but it provoked what the Manchester Guardian described as ‘storms of criticism rising at times into terms of full-blooded abuse’. When a second Epstein sculpture called Day was revealed in July of 1929, the Manchester Guardian described the composition thus: ‘A large father figure with a fierce face, flat and hard and round like the sun at noon, holds and presents a male child standing between his knees, while the child stretches up his arms towards the neck of the father, his face turning upwards in a gesture of reluctance to face his task.’ The writer approved, concluding, ‘Do we know that Epstein is bringing new beauty to our generation?’ The answer was obviously ‘No’, because Day aroused fury in the press, and a jar of liquid tar was aimed at it. The trouble, in short, was that the child’s member was too long.

  Holden had commissioned Epstein, who was an old ally of his. But it was Frank Pick who had commissioned Holden, and so he offered his resignation. His future with the Underground Group – genuinely in the balance – was saved when Epstein took out his chisel and shortened the infant’s member by 1½ inches, and I like to think that if he hadn’t shortened the member, the Piccadilly Line might never have been lengthened, so important was Pick in that process.

  It was the stations along that extension that would receive what are considered the masterpieces of Holden. He and Pick had made an architectural tour of northern Europe, and been impressed by the human-scale modernism of Dutch public buildings in particular. The Piccadilly stations used brick rather than Portland stone. There is Sudbury Town, a brick box with windows almost as tall as the building. There is the above-mentioned Arnos Grove, which is like a drum (and possibly modelled on Stockholm public library), and there is Southgate, which is quite clearly a flying saucer. My favourite is Boston Manor, which has a rectangular tower into which is slotted a slim, illuminated column, like a card being offered from a pack. All the stations acted as beacons at night, which seems poignantly over-ambitious. After all, how many people want to make towards a suburban Tube station at night? I once suggested to an architect that Holden’s Tube stations were too superior to their surroundings, to the extent that they constituted an implied reproof. ‘By that token,’ he said dismissively, ‘you could say that St Mark’s was an implied reproof to Venice.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  1933 AND ALL THAT

  THE LONDON PASSENGER TRANSPORT BOARD

  The Underground Group was involved in the important business of government-sanctioned suburb-making, and yet it wasn’t a public agency. It didn’t even control all the public transport in London. It ran all the Underground lines except the Metropolitan, the Big Tube and the Waterloo & City. It ran some tram companies, but the LCC ran the trams of ‘central’ London (the very centre being off-limits to trams), and there were other municipal and private tram operators. The Underground Group ran most of the buses via the London General Omnibus Company, but its bus services were undercut by the independent bus operators – ‘pirates’ – who would swerve about the streets picking off bus queues.

  There was a need for integration. Ashfield and Pick would have been only too delighted for the Underground Group to become a private monopoly, but the dapper and tactically shrewd Labour MP and London County Councillor Herbert Morrison (grandfather of the dapper and tactically shrewd Peter Mandelson) had campaigned throughout the 1920s for the municipalisation of transport in London. In 1929, when Morrison became Transport Minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour administration, he modified his position. Transport in London would be run by a public corporation: a state-owned body with a commercial remit. It would run all the Underground railways, including the Met (but excluding the perennial stop-out the Waterloo & City); it would run all the buses and all the trams, but not the suburban overground railways.

  Morrison worked on, and won over, Ashfield and Pick, and Ashfield sold the idea to Underground Group share
holders, who would receive stock in the new undertaking and a cash payment. Why did they cave in? Winston Churchill had called Morrison, the autodidact son of an alcoholic police constable, ‘the New Man’; he was dangerous. Socialism might arrive in his wake, bringing outright nationalisation and worse compensation terms.

  In the wake of the 1929 economic crash Labour lost the 1931 election, but Morrison’s bill was taken up by the incoming National Government, with the further modification that the managing board would be selected by an independent committee rather than by the government. In The Subterranean Railway Christian Wolmar writes:

  … despite being separated from government in this way, London Transport would be able to benefit from the favourable borrowing terms which only state bodies, with their hundred per cent guarantee of solvency, can enjoy. London Transport was, therefore, one of the first big quangos – quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations – long before the term was invented.

  The London Passenger Transport Board (London Transport for short) came into being on 1 July 1933. Ashfield was Chairman, Pick Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive.

  It was deemed a successful organisation at the time and is fondly remembered as the very apex of British public service, partly because it continued the boldly expansionist policy and brilliant iconography of the Underground Group. Persistently high unemployment ensured that it would continue to receive ‘cheap money’, and in 1935 Ashfield and Pick took advantage to fund another programme of expansion, the Stalinist-sounding New Works Programme, to which we will turn after two brief diversions.

  BY THE WAY: THE LOST PROPERTY OFFICE

  The Lost Property Office was opened in 1933, an integrated operation for an integrated network. There used to be two ‘shop windows’ for the office at the north end of Baker Street. One said ‘Lost Property’, the other ‘Enquiries’. ‘Enquiries’ has now become a Boots. In the remaining window, the last time I looked, some vinyl records were displayed: ‘Have I the Right?’, by the Honeycombs, ‘Hello Dolly’, by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, ‘Downtown’, by Petula Clark. There was also a primitive early mobile phone and a top hat. What was this clutter meant to suggest? Probably nothing more than the fact that this place houses things from the past, things that people used to have.

  Until the late Nineties the reception was all dark wooden panels; now it’s more like Barclays Bank. The ‘losers’, as they are somewhat pejoratively known, are reunited with their lost property, or it might be sent out by post. The charge for restitution varies from £1 to £20, depending on the value of the item. In deserving cases, the fee may be waived. In 2011 about 200,000 objects came into the office, a record number. Couriers constantly circulate the Tube stations and bus garages to collect the stuff. Items left in taxis are also brought in, but they are viewed first by the police, which seems to me an implied insult to tube and bus users, as though a higher class of lost property – semi-automatic pistols or ministers’ red boxes – is likely to be left in taxis.

  The Lost Property Office, opened in 1933. Nothing is thrown away. But uncollected items – including, on the author’s latest visit, a box of 144 condoms and a giant fluorescent orange synthetic maggot – are sold off, given to charity, recycled, or retained ‘to illustrate the work of the office’. About 22 per cent of lost items are returned to their owners.

  Then again, the main part of the office is below ground, as though in solidarity with the Tubes. The lost property comes rumbling down a chute throughout the day, like prizes in a game show you wouldn’t particularly want to win. Meanwhile, the staff of about forty are engaged in logging the items. On a recent visit, I looked over one clerk’s shoulder as he entered the details of a suit. ‘Type: casual. Colour: grey. Style: …’, and here he hesitated for a while before selecting ‘Other’. On the wall behind him, the office’s mission statement was spelled out. ‘Vision’, it read, ‘To reunite property with its rightful owner.’ And it is very hard to argue with that. About 22 per cent of items are returned, but the figure is nearer to 40 per cent in the case of high-value items.

  When I ventured beyond the receiving office into the subterranean antechambers and corridors in which most of the lost property is stored, I was immediately confronted by a giant orange maggot made of synthetic fur. On a shelf alongside it was a barrister’s wig, two books – The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook 1997 and The Complete Book of Dreams – and a traffic lollipop reading ‘Stop: Children Crossing’. ‘These items are “Miscellaneous”,’ a staff member told me, and they certainly were. Items uncollected after three months used to be sold off at Greasby’s auctioneers in Tooting, which sounds just the kind of place that would sell off lost property. Now it’s either sold off commercially to fund the office (‘we are not in the business of making a profit,’ I was assured) or given to a variety of charities or recycled. ‘Nothing is chucked away.’

  Some low-value items are kept, ‘but only to illustrate the work of the office or as a snapshot of London at a particular time, not for the gratification of the staff’. One ante-room has a cockney theme, which is only fitting, given that this is a kind of plughole for the swirling debris of London lives. A photo on the wall is captioned: ‘Arsenal’s Peter Storey beats David Harvey of Leeds United from the penalty spot, Highbury, 11th September 1971’; there is also a West Ham shirt, a picture of Tommy Cooper, a placard reading ‘Jack the Ripper Pub’ and a box of ‘Durex: 144 Ultra-fine Condoms’. Indicating this, my companion on the visit said, ‘I bet losing that spoiled his weekend.’

  For thirty-six years the Lost Property office was managed by Maureen Beaumont, and when I went there to interview her, back in the late Nineties, she told me people didn’t seem embarrassed about what they’d lost. She’d known men collect stashes of porn, or blow-up dolls. ‘And we had an American woman in here the other day, shouting about how she’d lost her vibrator.’ She was telling me about some of the items that had come in during the previous days – a park bench, 2½ hundredweight of currants and sultanas – when one of her assistants came up to her carrying a polythene bag. ‘Bit curious,’ he said, passing it over. Inside were bones, possibly human. I asked if this could be the start of a murder inquiry, and Maureen sighed and said, ‘Yes – I’ll get the police to take a look.’ But she wasn’t in the least surprised.

  I asked the current manager, Paul Cowan, whether he recalled the incident of the bones. ‘Before my time,’ he said, before adding rather beadily, ‘you know there are a great many urban myths surrounding this office, don’t you?’ He relented somewhat, adding, ‘We did have a person’s ashes handed in.’ These arrived at the office in 1999. The label said, ‘W. Maile 5/10/98.’ In 2007 there was an appeal for information on a television documentary about the Tube, and a member of the public began investigating. After genealogical research, he tracked down a Molly Schofield of Preston, Lancashire. The ashes were the remains of her father, William Maile, a veteran of the Normandy landings, who had been cremated in Preston in 1998 at the age of ninety-one. Molly had spent happy times visiting London with him, and she decided to scatter his ashes under Westminster Bridge. She put the urn in a bag and put it on a luggage rack on a train that came into Euston – where the bag was stolen. It was then abandoned on a Tube line. The last that was heard from Molly Schofield, she was planning a return trip to London with her father. ‘But I won’t put the ashes on the luggage rack this time.’

  When the office first opened, the most frequently lost items were umbrellas. Every white-collar professional carried one, but despite, or because of, that they were easily forgotten about. (The broadcaster Robin Day once said he lost an average of one umbrella a day.) In the 1930s, a quarter of a million umbrellas a year came into the office. Now it’s more like 10,000.

  A top ten of lost items in 2011 read:

  1. Books

  2. Bags

  3. Clothes

  4. Valuables (anything expensive – including wallets, cash, laptops, cameras, jewellery)

  5. Telephones
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  6. Keys

  7. Ops (i.e., ‘opticals’ – glasses)

  8. Umbrellas

  9. Jewellery

  10. Pairs of gloves.

  THE MAP

  On the Embankment, on the outer wall of Temple station, there is a map of the Underground marked,‘This is an original London Passenger Transport Board map from 1932. It has been preserved for your interest.’ But having once stood alongside it for half an hour on a fine summer’s evening, I reckon about half the people who walk up to the map don’t register the inscription and take it to be a depiction of the modern Tube. You can tell they’re using it to plan their routes, even though the Bank branch of the Northern is still billed as the City & South London, and the Central Line is purple. Perhaps some of them walk straight up to the Temple ticket office and ask for a ticket to Southend, having read the little note on the map to the effect that District Line trains run regularly to that resort. (The service – beginning on the District before proceeding seawards by main-line tracks – ran from 1910 to 1939.) But to those of us familiar with the modern, straight-line Underground map – introduced a year after the Temple map, in 1933 – it’s as though a disastrous sagging and melting of the lines has occurred.

  The early Tube maps are, as David Leboff and Tim Demuth write in No Need To Ask! Early Maps of London’s Underground Railways (1999), ‘accidentally charming’. The first ones tended to show the lines superimposed on the streets. This implies modesty on the part of the lines: they were an adjunct to the streets, not an alternative to them. Then again, the individual lines showed little modesty in the face of their competitors. The maps of the Metropolitan would grudgingly show the District as a faint, threadbare thing, and vice versa. At the turn of the twentieth century, private companies might produce their own Tube maps, to advertise their businesses. For example, in 1900 the Public Benefit Boot Company produced its own map showing ‘New Electric Railways’, ‘District Railways’ (i.e., Met and District), a fairly arbitrary selection of ‘Other Railways’ and ‘London Trams’. The map carried the giant-size suffix: ‘Public Benefit Boot Company, 125 Edgware Road, W. For Good Boots.’ The company premises were shown on the map by large red crosses that made them seem much more significant than mere Underground stations.