Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  In 1908, as we have seen, Albert Stanley chaired the meeting at which the general managers of the lines agreed on a common map. The different lines acquired different colours but not, to modern eyes, always the ‘right’ ones. Yes, The Bakerloo was generally brown (although it had an interlude of being red), and the District was generally green. But up to the First World War and for some years afterwards the Central was almost always blue, for heaven’s sake.

  In the 1920s the man chiefly responsible for the Underground map was a certain F. H. Stingemore. Under him the background streets were comprehensively banished, stations became little circles, and exchange stations open circles. Good work, and had the pronunciation of Stingemore’s name been evident from its spelling, he might be better remembered today. But I doubt it, because it was Stingemore’s fate to be elbowed aside by a genius.

  In 1931 Harry Beck first presented his first draft for a new type of Tube map to the Underground Group. Beck was an engineering draughtsman who had recently been laid off from a temporary position by that same Underground Group. His idea was to simplify what he characterised as not a plate of spaghetti but worse, ‘vermicelli’. He proposed a map that stylised the system, so that all lines were shown as vertical, horizontal or diagonal, and the congested central area would be expanded for the sake of comprehensibility, as though, he later wrote, ‘I was using a convex lens or mirror.’ The idea was rejected.

  In 1932, by which time he was back working for the Underground Group (but still only as a temporary), he tried again, and this time he was told that three-quarters of a million would be printed as pocket maps in January 1933. On both his first and second drafts, interchange stations were depicted as diamonds, but whereas on his first draft other stations were shown as blobs (as had become traditional on Underground maps), his second draft replaced the blobs with little horizontal marks called ticks. If, as has been suggested, Beck’s map was influenced by electrical circuit diagrams, then the replacement of the blobs by the ticks was an important miniaturisation: a move, so to speak, from electricity to electronics. The ticks made an already clear map clearer still.

  Later in 1933, by which time the Underground Group had become the London Transport Passenger Board, a poster version of the map was printed. Beck received 5 guineas for the printing of the pocket map, 10 for the printing of the poster, and this is all he would ever be paid – the equivalent of about £400 in today’s money. Given the importance of the map in the corporate identity of the Underground, and its function as an alternative logo for the system, this does not seem enough.

  Harry Beck didn’t mind being paid so little, as long as he had control over the evolution of the map, and he maintained that he had been given that control, a point on which London Transport remained silent. The story of the next thirty years is well told in Mr Beck’s Underground Map (1994), by Ken Garland. London Transport officials would either suggest, or just unilaterally inflict, crass changes on the map, and Beck might give way initially before trying to reassert his principles of angularity and elegance. Among the brainwaves from LT were: put a medieval-looking ‘North’ arrow on the map; write out the word ‘station’ after every interchange station; double the thickness of all lines within the Circle Line; show the Metropolitan and the District in the same colour; airbrush the outer stations in an insipid blue-green.

  London Transport didn’t appreciate Beck, even though his map was always popular with the public, and he seems to have existed in a blind spot even for the aesthetic Frank Pick. The top men were wary of the stylisation, and if you’d helped create the network, as these men had done, you might not want to see your creation caricatured for the benefit of people willing to pay it only scant attention. Certainly the map can be misleading. On some of the early Beck maps the distance between Wimbledon and South Wimbledon on the Northern seemed to be about a third of the total width of London, when in fact they’re less than a mile apart. The rule about compressing the distance between the outer stations also dictated that roughly a centimetre separated the four final stations on the east of the Central Line – Epping to Ongar – whereas that stretch is actually half the length of the entire Bakerloo.

  Beck was described by one LT official as ‘rather fretful’, and you can see that from the photographs: a neat, balding, bespectacled man. He was obsessive about the map and slept with bits of paper under his pillow in case inspiration should strike about where to put Mornington Crescent. According to Ken Garland, Beck felt he’d ‘never done justice’ to Mornington Crescent. (While it is shown on the Tube maps as being a pimple on the Charing Cross side of the neck between Euston and Camden, it ought strictly speaking to be shown on the City side of the neck, even though City branch trains do not call at Mornington Crescent.)

  But all Beck’s ideas for his map were better than other people’s ideas, and in 1960 he had an attractive shade of lilac in reserve for the Victoria Line, which was about to be constructed, and which he planned to represent as an elegant horizontal, reclining regally across the centre of London. But the Victoria Line would be kinked, and coloured a chilly and weak blue, because in 1960 Beck lost control of the map.

  In that year a certain Harold F. Hutchison, Publicity Officer at London Transport, produced a version that might have been designed to give Beck a nervous breakdown, which it very nearly did. Hutchison put some station names in capitals and some in lower case, whereas Beck had always been required to capitalise them all, and write out the names in full. Hutchison wrote some names in full, some not: hence ‘Edgware Road’ and yet ‘Bow Rd’. Most heinously of all, the word ‘Aldgate’ was split into ‘Ald’ and ‘gate’, cleaved in two by the Circle Line. Also Hutchison jettisoned the small curves by which Beck had softened his verticals, horizontals and diagonals at their intersecting points, so that his looks as if it was drawn on an Etch-a-Sketch. It was still a Beck map – just a very bad one. All the more galling, then, that Hutchison had the nerve to put ‘Designed by Harold F. Hutchison’ in the bottom left-hand corner. Beck’s distressed letters to Hutchison are quoted in Ken Garland’s book: ‘In 1937, in return for my signature on a copyright form, I was given an undertaking that all future design work on the underground diagram would be given to me to do or edit, and that my name would always appear on it.’ Hutchison replied with the deadest of dead bats. ‘Thank you for your letter … I am not aware of any undertaking by my predecessors, but I shall be very happy to use your work again whenever a job arrives which would suit you.’

  Beck remained embittered towards LT at his death in 1974. You might say he was another Tube martyr. In 1994 a reproduction of the first printed version of Beck’s map was put up at Finchley Central station, with some details of his life, and the inscription ‘A design classic – one man’s vision.’ Beck had lived in Finchley, and the plaque had been suggested by a letter to LT from Mrs Jean de Vries, who had friends who were friends of Harry Beck. A couple of years after the gratifying but unheralded appearance of the plaque, she thought it would be nice to have a proper, formal unveiling, and LT seemed keen on the idea. Further letters were exchanged, and suddenly they were less keen. No ‘resources’ were available for an unveiling, she was eventually told.

  I met Mrs de Vries shortly after she had received this depressing communication. Over tea and cakes in her Finchley home she told me she had first met Beck in 1945, when she was fourteen. ‘He looked old-fashioned even for the time. He was a typical English gentleman, always in tweeds – and always with a pen in his top pocket.’ Also present at the tea was Joan Baker, Harry Beck’s niece. She recalled: ‘Whenever you went round to see Harry and his wife, Nora, Harry would be working on the map, which would be spread out on the floor. He’d be very polite. You could ask him any questions you liked about the map, but what you didn’t have to do was stand on it.’ When the discussion turned to why LT had gone cool on the idea of an unveiling, the cakes began to be passed with more urgency – agitation, almost. The suspicion was that lack of resources was a polite smoke
screen, the true reason being that Mrs de Vries had proposed inviting Ken Garland, author of the above-mentioned Mr Beck’s Underground Map. Mr Garland was also present at the tea party. He could not say for certain if he was persona non grata; nobody could. His book certainly makes Beck out to have been badly treated. Then again, the Beck plaque was put up, and it is still there today, on the southbound platform, and when I cycled to Finchley Central station recently, and asked if I could go through the barrier without paying, since I only wanted to look at the Beck memorial, the gateman smiled in approval and nodded me through. There is also a permanent exhibition devoted to Harry Beck in the London Transport Museum, and after years of the map appearing unsigned, his name has been restored: ‘This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck.’

  If I may, I will add a personal footnote. As a journalist writing regularly about public transport, I scored two campaigning victories. The first was that I secured the removal of some plastic potted plants from the roof of the Burger King in Victoria Station. Their placement was consummately inept in that they: (a) made the Burger King look even viler than necessary; and (b) blocked the names of the stations appearing towards the bottom of the indicator boards. I admit that my ‘campaign’ – which involved one phone call to a press officer – was triggered by a letter from a reader, and that was also the case with my second victory.

  On a version of the Tube map appearing in 1998 the Central Line was shown as going over the Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith & City at Liverpool Street, whereas it was traditional to show the Tube lines as going under the cut-and-cover ones (which reflects the true situation), and they were so shown in all other instances of the conjunction on that same map. I asked a Mr Lee Ginger, London Transport’s Creative Service Manager, whether there was any good reason for the anomaly. ‘No,’ he said, disarmingly. ‘It’s a quirk. We’ll change it next time we re-do the map.’ And the Central Line has been back where it belongs ever since.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NEW WORKS

  THE NEW WORKS PROGRAMME

  In June 1935 the New Works programme was announced. The most ambitious aspects involved extensions to the Northern and Central Lines. The first of these was called the Northern Heights programme, and this can be divided into what did happen as planned, and what didn’t. What did happen was that in 1940 the Northern Line was extended, at first beneath and then along the lines of the London & North Eastern Railway from Archway to High Barnet, with a spur westerly over the Dollis Brook Viaduct (the highest point on the network, and therefore an opportunity for vertigo on the so-called Underground) to Mill Hill East.

  What didn’t happen was a series of other electrifications of other lines belonging to the London & North Eastern Railway, which would have further embellished – or complicated – the north of the Northern Line. The LNER line running south from Highgate via the pretty stations of Crouch End and Stroud Green to Finsbury Park was to have been electrified. This would have been a momentous connection, opening up the city to north Londoners, because in 1939 the plan for Finsbury Park overground station, as noted earlier, was to make it the northernmost point of the Big Tube. The overground line leading north from Highgate to Alexandra Palace via Cranley Gardens and Muswell Hill stations was also to be electrified; further electrifications would have created a connection between Mill Hill East and Edgware with a station on the way called, not – as would have been gratifyingly logical – Mill Hill West, but Mill Hill The Hale. A final electrification would have created a line probing north from Edgware to Bushey Heath.

  This work was interrupted by the war, and there was no money to complete it afterwards. The success of the new High Barnet branch killed the prospective electrification of the Alexandra Palace branch, which continued to be operated by steam trains until 1954. The idea of an extension from Edgware to Bushey was killed by the coming of the Green Belt. Not only did Crouch End and Muswell Hill not get their electrified railways, they also lost their steam services, as those dwindled in the 1950s, and those places are now inhabited by a breed of bus users, doomed constantly to calculate how much more their already valuable houses would be worth if they were on the Underground. Just to rub it in, the signs of the abandoned electrification – remnants of power rails and conducting cables – are still mouldering in the shrubbery of what is now called the Parkland Walk, a nature reserve that follows the route of the old LNER tracks between Finsbury Park and Highgate. More than a hundred species of wild flower have been found along its length, if that’s any compensation. Above Highgate Tube station, you can see the old Highgate London & North Eastern Railway station, looking both ghostly and very abandoned, but also strangely modern, since it had been prepared for the electrification that never came.

  As for those people living west of Mill Hill East Northern Line station, they are permanently in mourning for Mill Hill The Hale, the station so rudely snatched away from them (even if its name is a bit of a mouthful).

  We now return to the Central, last seen in the early 1920s, by which time it had reached Ealing Broadway to the west, Liverpool Street to the east. During the 1940s, as part of the New Works programme, it was extended easterly to Stratford, from where it would run – as in the Northern Heights plan – over lines yielded up by the London & North Eastern Railway, these ones stretching out to Ongar. It would also extend westerly from North Acton over tracks of the Great Western Railway to West Ruislip.

  The extension to the west is on the surface. The extension to the east – which is more interesting – comes above ground briefly at Stratford, then again at Leyton. After Leytonstone, it splits to go to either Snaresbrook or Wanstead. The latter branch is ‘in Tube’, as were the two following stops, Redbridge and Gants Hill, and these three were among the last designs for the Underground by Charles Holden. At Gants Hill he really let rip. If you want to get an idea of what the Moscow Underground looks like, you can go to Moscow, or you can take the cheaper option – for a Londoner – of going to Gants Hill. When it was being built, there was a department in London Transport called London Transport International. (Somewhat hubristic, you might have thought, but this was a time when Pick and Ashfield were at the top of their game.) The department had just been advising the man Stalin had appointed to oversee the creation of a prestigious Moscow Metro, Nikita Khrushchev, and some of the principles recommended had rubbed off in the building of Gants Hill. The station is beautiful, with pale orange tiling, and clocks with the roundel in place of numbers, but it is beautiful in a Muscovite way by virtue of the wide lower concourse with barrel-vaulted ceiling. There is a feeling, as with the Moscow Metro (I am told), of palatial proportion and no expense spared.

  I was once shown around Gants Hill by the London Transport Museum curator, Oliver Green, who told me that the only giveaway from a subterranean perspective that you were in Gants Hill, a humble suburb, and not a place of more metropolitan grandeur, was the fact that there were only two escalators debouching into the concourse, both at the same end. ‘Ideally,’ said Oliver, ‘there’d have been two at each end.’ That’s how they’d have done it in Moscow, for maximisation of ‘passenger flow’.

  Overall, the eastern end of the Central is a jumble of Victorian and 1940s’ stylings. At Leytonstone the station was reconstructed to accommodate the arrival of the Central. Bending over backwards to find features of note in London Underground Stations, David Leboff comes up with ‘curved, glazed skylights located in the canopy soffits’. But the preceding station, Leyton, remains ‘largely as built’ – in 1856, that is – hence ‘valanced canopies supported by delicate iron pillars and brackets’. The lines on this stretch have the prettiest, most country-branch-like names of any on the network: Buckhurst Hill, Theydon Bois … and some of them really do look the part. In the late Nineties, I was told by an Underground press officer that a man patrolled the eastern end of the Central with a hawk trained to kill pigeons. At Fairlop, incidentally, you wouldn’t be surprised to see coal bunk
ers. But just in case you might forget you’re on the London Underground, there’s a ‘gap’ at Hainault.

  BY THE WAY: EPPING–ONGAR

  I have said that the Central reached Ongar, 25 miles from central London, but that’s less impressive when you consider that this ultimate stretch of the eastward extension of the Central Line – a project taking place under the heading New Works, remember – should have been operated by alternately pulling and pushing steam trains. Yes, I’m afraid the electric trains of 1949 went only as far as Epping. The single line beyond there would be taken over by the Underground from the London & North Eastern Railway, but it would be operated as a steam shuttle because there just weren’t enough people at Ongar to justify electrification.

  … Until 1957, that is, when the line was equipped with ‘light’ electrification, which sounds pleasant enough but meant only sufficient power to propel trains of two or three carriages. Passengers on those trains looked out on pretty fields in which sheep grazed, the development of the countryside roundabout having been inhibited by the Green Belt supported by the very man (Pick) who had been one of the drivers of the New Works programme. John Betjeman enjoyed riding on the line and said that, when he retired, he’d like to be the station master at Blake Hall, which was the stop before Ongar until it (Blake Hall) was closed permanently in 1981, its passenger footfall being down to six a day, or twelve, depending on whether you’re counting passengers or feet.