Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  But let us go back to our wartime ride through the shelter stations.

  We might see a bride and groom on a platform. In 1940 Peggy and Jack Birmingham dashed into Edgware Road Bakerloo station when the sirens wailed, minutes after they’d been married. Their guests came with them, and the party continued on the platform. For their wedding night the station manager, a Mr Palmer, offered Mr and Mrs Birmingham the privacy of a lift with the doors jammed shut.

  We might notice George Orwell on the platform. Fag in mouth (because smoking was permitted on the shelter platforms), he is gently prising a scrubbing brush out of the grasp of a two-year-old girl shelterer who had been scrubbing the filthy platform with it and then sucking the bristles. Orwell recounted this in his ‘London Letter’ to the Partisan Review dated 24 July 1944. It was one of many ‘disgusting scenes’ he had observed in the station shelters, where ‘sordid piles of bedding cluttered up the passageways at night’. Orwell hated the Tube, but the sheltering phenomenon did seem to make snobs of even liberal writers, including Vera Brittain, who in England’s Hour (1941) wrote: ‘Soon, I reflect, London’s poorer population, like melancholy troglodytes, will spend its whole life in the Underground, emerging only for half an hour after the morning “All Clear” to purchase its loaves and its fish-and-chips.’ The saving grace of the Underground had been that the people you met upon it were transient; now it meant tawdry stasis. We saw off Hitler, but the Underground had been allied to a kind of defeat. Pick was dead, and it had lost its inter-war sheen of success.

  It would be a long time before it came back.

  AFTER

  In the later stages of the war, with the arrival of US soldiers, the system became unprecedentedly packed: a cartoon by W. A. Sillince, a Punch regular, shows civilians fighting to board a crowded Tube train. It’s called ‘The Home Front’.

  London Transport did manage to ‘carry on’ during the war, and was not judged in need of high-priority first aid afterwards, the ‘big’ railways being in a worse state. So far, this had been a story of geographical expansion, but in the late Forties and Fifties that stopped. Yes, the New Works extensions of the Central would be completed in 1949 (whereas those for the north of the Northern would be curtailed); yes, the Metropolitan would be electrified beyond Rickmansworth in 1961. But essentially we are looking at twenty years of austerity and under-investment, a climate that would eventually produce one rather etiolated, pale blue flower: the Victoria Line. In the process our story ceases to be about railways, and becomes a matter of mutating bureaucracies: the politicisation of the Underground.

  In January 1948 London Transport was nationalised by the Labour government of Clement Attlee. A body called the London Transport Executive would be overseen by the British Transport Commission, which had also taken over the overground railway companies, which might otherwise have gone bankrupt. Lord Ashfield was not on the Executive; instead, he was on the Commission, but not for long. He died on 4 November 1948. There is a blue plaque on what had been his house at 43 South Street Mayfair, a fittingly dashing address. Ashfield had pioneered the harmonisation of transport with social needs, and it is a tribute to him that the first logo of British Railways (created in 1948) was essentially a London Transport bull’s-eye, albeit with a lion on top.

  The government now had London Transport at its disposal but did little more than keep a tight rein on the policy and expenditure of the Executive. Yet the Executive was not entirely cowed, and from the early 1950s it was campaigning for a new Tube line connecting north-east London, and its great bulge of railway-made suburbs, with Victoria via the West End. Here was another attempt to ease that old bugbear, the Finsbury Park logjam, but this time with the aim of bringing passengers into what had long been the growth area of central London, the West End, rather than the City. An early working title for the line was KingVic, a Bakerloo-type concatenation, indicating a connection between King’s Cross and Victoria, but carrying an unfortunate implication of cross-dressing. (‘ViKing’ was also bandied about.)

  Never mind Kingvic, the Fifties and early Sixties were the era when the car was beginning to be king. It was also an era of Conservative governments, who were more likely to favour private transport than Labour ones. But there were two isolated instances of pro-rail thinking at this time. The first was the modernisation plan for British Railways, which was published in 1955 and enabled by rising prosperity. But it only diverted investment that might have gone to the Underground into the national network. The second came in the form of a paper presented to the Royal Statistical Society by two Oxford academics in 1962, and making an argument for building what was now being called the Victoria Line. The paper acknowledged that the fares earned by a Tube line would not repay the capital cost of building the line. It argued for the line not in nebulous terms of social benefits but in terms of the specific transport benefits to be gained elsewhere. Other Tube lines would operate more quickly and comfortably if relieved of overcrowding by the Victoria, and the argument – very characteristic of its time – was made that motorists would benefit, as a result of a decrease in congestion on the roads. Furthermore, the boom of the 1950s was fading; Britain had lower growth than its competitors and higher unemployment. As before, the lever marked ‘economic boost’ was reached for, an action that by now might have been described as Keynesian. London would have its new Tube line, funded by government loan and a fares increase, but it would be built on the cheap.

  THE VICTORIA LINE (OR THE RAILWAY IN A BATHROOM)

  The line opened between Walthamstow and Highbury on 1 September 1968; it was then extended to Warren Street, then Victoria, at which suitably regal moment the Queen declared it open. The Victoria was the first line to use automatic ticket barriers. (They were fed by tickets of yellow card with oxidised backs that made them seem sinister, as though they were half-coated in lead.) Accordingly, on 7 March 1969 the Queen bought a 5d. ticket in order to access the platform and ‘drive’ the train from Green Park to Oxford Circus. The word ‘drive’ has inverted commas because: (a) Her Majesty had assistance in the cab; and (b) Victoria Line trains were powered and signalled automatically. The drivers just opened the doors – this being the first line without guards – and pressed the start button, and it was rumoured early on that they were waxworks. Since any passing idiot could press that start button, or since it might be pressed by accident, the train cabs did not have side-doors, which might have allowed unauthorised ingress from the platform; instead, the driver entered the cab from the door dividing it from the front carriage – the ‘J’ door – and the train wouldn’t start until he had performed certain rituals in the cab, including opening and closing the side-window.

  In The Victoria Line: A Short History (1968) M. A. C. Horne writes: ‘At 3pm, the public gained access to London’s latest tube. They liked it, and have flocked to it ever since.’ They certainly have flocked to it. In its first year it carried a third more passengers than had been expected. Victoria was, and is, the busiest station on the network, and Oxford Circus and King’s Cross were not – and are not – far behind. In recent years Victoria Line staff have periodically had to stop access to the Victoria Line ticket hall, since it becomes too packed; hence the current expansion of the station, which is one of the biggest projects of the Tube Upgrade. Access to Oxford Circus is also often restricted. The staff make desperate pleas over the tannoy for order and patience which echo out into Oxford Street so that the uninvolved passer-by feels he is intruding on private grief, as when a domestic argument is overheard.

  For most of my time in London the Victoria Line has been the most efficient way of crossing London, with its stations sufficiently far apart for its frequent trains to reach 50 miles an hour, and numerous connections. In fact, Pimlico looks oddly bereft on the line diagrams, since it is the only station without a connection to either national rail or another Tube line. In about 1989 someone tipped me off that the best way of accessing the West End from north London, is to change onto the southbound Vi
ctoria Line from the southbound Northern Line (Bank branch) at Euston. It’s a very quick change. The two platforms are adjacent, since they occupy a single wide-bore tunnel that used to accommodate both the southbound and northbound lines of the Northern Line City branch. (The northbound one was diverted to make way for the Victoria.)

  But did passengers like the line?

  On its opening, the Observer called it ‘extraordinarily bleak’, and the line has all the charm of a Sixties’ tower block. It would have seemed lonely: the absence of guards; fewer ticket staff because of the barriers; and the first ‘passenger information points’ allowing passengers to speak to the control room at Euston rather than a platform guard (all these novelties determined in part by the fact that this was a time of labour shortage). There was a new, clinical style of lighting – fluorescent tube – and the too narrow passageways were lined with drab, grey and pale blue, 6-inch square tiles. They’re bathroom tiles, basically.

  The stations featured tile panels in the platform seat recesses, and these were decorated with images of local significance, but the designers seem to have been hard-pressed to find any. The one at Warren Street shows a maze – a type of warren, you see. The one at Stockwell shows a swan, the name of a nearby pub, evidently. The one at Euston shows the Euston Arch, which had just been knocked down.

  Also there is a shortage of natural light, since the line is entirely underground. So is the Waterloo & City, but whereas that’s only a mile or so of unnaturalness, the Victoria is 13½ miles of it. Because the Victoria was fitted in below existing stations (requiring, incidentally, the complete reconstruction of Oxford Circus), there are few surface buildings, and certainly few of any note, and it has been suggested that the most beautiful above-ground manifestation of the line is the little neo-classical structure by Quinlan Terry that surmounts a ventilation shaft in Gibson Square, Islington.

  M. A. C. Horne writes that the automatic barriers ‘faded away gradually’. It was too expensive to roll them out system-wide, but the barriers would be back. At the time of writing the line is losing its position at the top of the class, owing to the introduction – again as part of the Upgrade – of the new trains, which are afflicted with teething troubles. The Evening Standard enjoys pointing out that they are ‘twenty-three times less reliable’ than their predecessors. But the line will settle back into its efficient, if unlovable, groove.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE MODERN TUBE (OR LIVINGSTONE’S WARS)

  ENTER LIVINGSTONE

  In 1962 the British Transport Commission was replaced by a London Transport Board, answerable directly to the government. A further politicisation of the Tube occurred in 1970, when London Transport became the responsibility of the Greater London Council, which had been created in 1965. The transfer was made by Harold Wilson’s dynamic transport minister, Barbara Castle. At last the municipalisation advocated by Herbert Morrison had occurred. Transport in London – along with the police – became the main business of London politicians. It also became their battleground. Transport policy in the metropolis became, as Christian Wolmar has observed, a ‘blame game’. One side attacked the policies of the other, and the side that was supposed to be running the London Underground frequently attacked its executives, which was a bit like blaming themselves, because they had set the policy, and they had the power to appoint or remove those executives. One way or another, the good name of the London Underground tended to be dragged through the dirt.

  At the same time, the population of central London was falling, offices rather than houses having risen up on the bomb sites – and the population of the suburbs was continuing to rise. The Tube was therefore ever more associated with the grim business of getting to and from work; it was no longer the Londoner’s ally in pleasure-seeking, or its avuncular cultural guide, as in the days of Frank Pick and ‘It’s a Bank Holiday, Go Out!’ If the Londoner did go out on a Bank Holiday (and he might just stay in and watch television, thank you very much), there was a good chance he’d do so as a proud first-time car owner.

  Rising car ownership helped to keep Underground use static or in slow decline from the mid-Fifties to the early Eighties, and the Tube train was compared with the greater comfort if not necessarily speed, of the family motor. The Tube was a second-class form of transport, commonly to be spoken of in intemperate terms.

  Municipalisation was financially beneficial to the Underground, since its debts had been written off by the government so as to sweeten the deal for the GLC. And in 1971, when the Jubilee Line was authorised under the working title ‘Fleet Line’, the government agreed to provide three-quarters of the capital cost, the GLC providing the rest. The Jubilee was not at first very much of a new line. It would open in 1979 between Stanmore and Charing Cross, but most of that distance (Baker Street to Stanmore) was accounted for by its having taken over the Stanmore branch of the Bakerloo. (Where the Jubilee Line is concerned, the big news was its glamorous appendage, namely its Extension, which opened in 1999.)

  The Seventies was a bleak decade for the Underground, what with the high cost of oil (affecting electricity generation), inflation, high wage settlements, ticket price rises and an overall decline in the population of London. The spirit of Thatcherism was on the rise, and from 1977 a Conservative head of the GLC, a bow-tied egomaniac called Horace Cutler, castigated London Transport as over-unionised, inefficient and lacking in direction. In 1981 Labour took control of the GLC, and an assault from the right upon the London Transport Board was now succeeded by an assault from the left.

  The assailant was Ken Livingstone, who has done more for public transport in London than anyone since Frank Pick, or at any rate since that earlier embodiment of municipalisation, Herbert Morrison. Like Morrison, Livingstone was born into a working-class family in Lambeth. His father was a merchant seaman, his rather beautiful mother a music-hall performer, an acrobatic dancer who performed in music halls – also in circuses, where she would balance on elephants. When Livingstone took power at the GLC in 1981, a journalist wrote that Herbert Morrison ‘would be turning in his grave’. By then Morrison was being looked back on as the embodiment of Old Labour pragmatism, but in his time he, like Livingstone, had been the frightening ‘New Man’.

  Livingstone the firebrand is slowly becoming the patrician elder statesman. Such contradictions are his stock in trade. Livingstone is the phlegmatic controversialist, the self-deprecating self-publicist. When he first came to prominence, this former lab technician and breeder of newts and other amphibians was depicted as an ascetic loner and nerd. It later became apparent that he liked a glass of wine, that he was quite the ladies’ man and that he appreciated good food. The earliest pictures of the boy Livingstone in Citizen Ken (1984) by John Carvel show him riding bikes, but he was never a transport romantic. Unlike Frank Pick, he does not combine an aesthetic appreciation of transport with his desire to use it for the social good. For Livingstone, transport is all about the social good – and the aggrandisation of Ken Livingstone, of course. (So he would phase out the beautiful Routemaster bus in favour of the sinister but supposedly more user-friendly ‘Bendy Bus’ in 2005, which may in turn have been a factor in his defeat by Boris Johnson in the mayoral election of 2008. Johnson is a transport romantic, albeit with a romanticism not confined to public transport – the last time I looked, he was the motoring correspondent of GQ magazine – and he has commissioned a new Routemaster for the twenty-first century. But he is not steeped in transport, as Livingstone is.)

  London politics is very largely concerned with public transport, so any aspirant in that arena had better become interested in it, and Livingstone has been engaged right from the start of his career.

  In the early Seventies the Conservative administration of the GLC campaigned for four orbital motorways to be built in London: the London ringways. The scheme was at first supported by the Labour grouping on the council, but in 1973 Labour won the GLC election on a platform that included opposition to the ringways, which
were already partially built: hence, for example, the lovely Westway. Stephen Joseph, the director of the Campaign for Better Transport, told me, ‘I say that’s a turning point. If London had had the ringways, it would have looked much more like Los Angeles than it does now.’ That vision had real momentum behind it in the early Sixties. In her novel The Heart of London (1961) Monica Dickens paints a portrait of a community called Cottingham Park – actually Notting Hill – that is becoming excited about rumours of a ‘Transurban Expressway’. One character asks, ‘Don’t you think it’s time somebody did something about getting traffic in and out of London?’ and the new road is seen by some as likely to bring an end to the shabby parochialism of the area. The building of the ringways would have been the fulfilment of the vision of the Buchanan Report, which was published in 1963 and set out a plan for the civilised accommodation of cars in city centres by means of flyovers, underpasses and pedestrianised zones. According to Stephen Joseph, the Barbican gives us a taste of it. ‘That was the look: walkways with cars underneath. The lower level is for the cars, the upper level is the pedestrian.’