Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  In 2007, three years into Livingstone’s second term as mayor (this time he had been the official Labour candidate), Metronet found that it could not afford to meet its obligations under the PPP. It went into administration, and London Underground bought most of the debt, with assistance from the Department of Transport. In 2010 Tube Lines and London Underground were in dispute over funding, and this ended with London Underground buying out Tube Lines and the collapse of the PPP. The responsibility for the Upgrade has now been taken ‘in house’ – that is, London Underground itself commissions private companies to ‘deliver’ it, by means of ‘simple contracts for achievable jobs’.

  Livingstone had been right all along. But a prophet is without honour etc., and in 2008 he was swept from office on an anti-Labour tide. Will he go down as another of our Tube martyrs? He doesn’t seem the martyred type, but it is too early to say.

  THE UPGRADE

  We are stuck with that word ‘Upgrade’, although other, subsidiary designations have been used on the posters that have been half-boasting, half-apologising for it (because it does bring the dreaded ‘weekend closures’) in the decade since it began. Sometimes the posters have read ‘Transforming Your Tube’; the expression ‘PPP Upgrade’ is long gone and now not even to be mentioned. I like the ones that say, in Johnston typeface, ‘We have a plan’, concluding with that winking-eye, the diamond-shaped full stop. Apparently the Upgrade is referred to in-house at London Underground as ‘The New, New Works’, and being a traditionalist, I like that as well.

  The theme of the publicity is that the Tube is ‘at capacity’, with the latest, record-breaking figure being 1.1 billion passenger journeys a year. So the aim is to increase capacity by 30 per cent, by means of bigger stations, longer, more capacious trains and new signalling systems allowing a faster throughput of trains. Many aspects of this effort have already been touched on, to which I will add mention of the expansion of both Tottenham Court Road (the new station will be six times bigger than the old one) and Farringdon to accommodate Crossrail, and the redevelopment of King’s Cross St Pancras, where the circulating areas are now wonderfully airy spaces in white and dark blue.

  The scale of the changes continues to seem extravagant, even though the Upgrade was cut back after the collapse of the PPP. The aspect that has been curtailed is the aesthetic improvement of the stations. Fortunately, this programme has already touched most of the stations, and it extends well beyond the central area. In charge of the Customer Environment Design Team (as you might be able to tell from the nattiness of his suits) is Mike Ashworth, the man who made the connection between the ’38 trains and ‘women of a certain age’. He is from Rochdale; another ‘Man from the North’ who, like Frank Pick, became entranced by the Underground on boyhood visits to London: ‘We would visit relatives in Kensal Green, and I was more interested in the journey along the Bakerloo line than I was in the relatives. My parents were mortified when they discovered I’d started writing off to London Underground asking for leaflets.’

  His job title, ‘Design and Heritage Manager’, is attested to by the regard the new decor has for the old decor. For instance, at Bethnal Green he implemented a couple of years ago a ‘complete replication’ of its original New Works appearance, with concourse tiles of the colour known as ‘biscuit’, while the ones on the platforms are yellow, with orange and black trim – all as first prescribed by Charles Holden. When the wraps came off, a woman who had used the station all her life said to Mike, ‘Well, you’ve just cleaned it haven’t you?’ All the departures from the original colour scheme that had eroded the identity of a station since her girlhood had been instantly forgotten. Further along the easterly extension of the Central Line are the stations once served by overground steam trains. These had subsequently ‘gone everywhere’ in their colour scheme, and Ashworth and his team had proposed redecorating them in the colours of the Great Eastern Railway that had built them. ‘But that turned out to be two shades of brown.’ Instead, three shades of green were chosen for Woodford, Fairlop and Snaresbrook, in accordance with the colour scheme of the Great Eastern’s successor, the London & North Eastern Railway.

  But Mike Ashworth admits that, ‘If people can go from A to B without trouble, they don’t pay much attention to the look of the station.’ Or if they do, they might disapprove, suspecting that money spent on what may seem mere cosmetic changes is money wasted. Hence this letter, which appeared in the Evening Standard in March 2011:

  It seems billions can be spent on public transport without any discernible improvement in the service. The Tubes I have used have got no more reliable in the past two years, but the Victorian wall tiles have been replaced. I don’t mind if stations look 120 years old. It adds character.

  By way of reply, Mike Ashworth hit me with some of the jargon: ‘The customer-facing ambience is important for pragmatic and operational reasons. If customers enter a thoughtful and well-organised environment, they have the impression of an organisation that knows what it’s doing.’ ‘So they move quicker?’ I suggested. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  Doubtless the Tube will be ‘beyond capacity’ again in thirty years’ time. The restored stations should still look handsome, given good maintenance. It would be a shame if there were too many people in the way for the ordinary Tube rider to appreciate them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LONDONERS AND THE TUBE

  RITES OF PASSAGE: THE NOTCHES ON THE TRAVELCARD

  In The Subterranean Railway Christian Wolmar writes: ‘There is a paradox about the Underground. The miraculous system created by the pioneers is largely disliked and reviled by today’s regular users.’ He cites overcrowding as one reason for this. The Underground also reminds Londoners of going to work, and whereas the commuting life once generated semi-affectionate satire – think of Tony Hancock in The Rebel, taking his seat on his morning train and sighing, ‘Journey number 6,833’ – even that has now gone. The novelty has worn off.

  But since Londoners are locked into Tube use, they accumulate experiences, and they share those experiences. When I was writing my column, a man called Mr Cross, from east London, wrote to me on the subject of the Tube user’s rites of passage, the ‘notches on the Travelcard’, as he put it, that signify the seasoned passenger. Mr Cross wrote that he had witnessed a ‘one under’ (a suicide); he had been led along the tracks (with the current switched off) from a train broken down in a tunnel; he had, from sheer high spirits when younger, run down the up escalator; he had left an umbrella on a train.

  What Mr Cross had never done was pull the passenger safety alarm until, that is, the week before, and this was the reason for his writing. He had been on a Northern Line train at Camden, due to head south on the City branch. A drunk boarded the train and began abusing passengers. ‘Eventually,’ wrote Mr Cross, ‘the drunk recorded his disapproval of the company he was keeping by being comprehensively incontinent on his seat just as the train entered King’s Cross station.’ Unable to bear the thought of any other passenger taking that seat, Mr Cross pulled the passenger alarm. A station attendant appeared (‘It was like rubbing a lamp’), closely followed by a British Transport Policeman. The drunk was led away; everyone was turned out of the car, and its doors were locked. Mr Cross settled into the car next to the one that had been sealed, only to be joined by another abusive drunk at Angel. This character roared expletives at everyone present, and then used the communicating doors to enter the car that had been sealed at King’s Cross. ‘It was with a deep sense of satisfaction’, wrote Mr Cross, ‘that I watched him squelch down in the seat recently vacated by his colleague.’

  I would add to Mr Cross’s Travelcard notches the first time an attractive stranger speaks to you on the Tube. I don’t know whether to lament or boast about the fact that this happened to me only a few weeks ago. Her opening gambit (she was drunk, of course) was: ‘You seem to be older than me.’

  ‘For Valentine’s Day,’ an editor once instructed me, ‘I want you to write abou
t love on the Underground’, but I couldn’t dig up much. I read in Underground News that on 30 April 1986 at Bank station a woman hit her eighty-year-old husband with a handbag, which sent him tumbling down an escalator. Just before Christmas in 1989, an Underground labourer who had consumed ten pints of bitter had an unorthodox interaction with a cat on a Tube train. Then he fell into a stupor, and his first remark on being awakened by an appalled fellow passenger was, ‘What cat?’ He was later fined £500. For many years the dating agency Dateline placed posters throughout the Underground that showed a man and a woman crossing on adjoining escalators. ‘A hidden glance, a forgotten smile’, ran the copy. ‘Have you ever looked and wondered what might have been?’ That drove me mad, because if you’d forgotten the smile then you wouldn’t wonder what might have happened as a result of it. Even so, when the fashion designer Bella Freud (who launched one of her collections on a Tube train) said, ‘There’s a strange tension on the Tube, a moodiness, a sexiness’, I think she was right.

  You’re entitled to carve a notch the first time you see a celebrity on the Underground. My wife saw Tony Blair on a Tube train just before the election of 1996: ‘He was reading about himself in the Observer.’ I have never seen a senior Conservative on the Tube. I do not read much into this, but they are reputed not to be familiar with public transport. I grew up on the story of the newly installed Conservative Transport minister who was being shown about the Tube by Underground officials. On boarding one train, he says, ‘I’m rather thirsty. Which one’s the dining car?’ In May 2010 a Mark Redhead wrote to the Guardian telling this story, describing it as ‘almost certainly true’ and naming Nicholas Ridley (Transport Secretary 1983–6) as the minister in question, but I didn’t believe Mr Redhead. I saw Anthony Hopkins asleep on the Piccadilly Line at Russell Square. I’ve seen Jonathan Miller twice on the Northern Line, and I saw Julian Barnes reading the TLS on an escalator at Euston.

  Noticing a pigeon boarding a Tube train can also be a punctuation point in one’s life. They do this commonly, especially on the cut-and-cover lines. They let the passengers off first, then hop onto the trains, alighting one or more stops later, and the question is: do they know where they’re going? Because pigeons do have highly developed navigational skills. They certainly look as though they know what they’re doing, but then they always do; I mean … can a pigeon look confused? In 1995 this question of Tube travelling by pigeons was debated in the letter columns of New Scientist until a man from the RSPB authoritatively pronounced, ‘A pigeon’s only incentive to step on a train is to look for food.’ He meant any food that might be on the train, not at the next stop along the line.

  Then there is the first time you are pickpocketed on a Tube train. This has yet to happen to me, but I am regularly warned against pickpockets by more or less deafening announcements. (There is also the more general announcement. ‘This is a message from the British Transport Police. Thieves will lose no opportunity to steal your personal belongings’, which reminds me of Peter Cook playing a thick policeman in a sketch, and declaring, ‘We believe this robbery to be the work of thieves.’) Pickpocketing accounts for half of all Underground crime, and the leading pickpocket in London, so to speak, is Keith ‘The Thief’ Charmley, a stage pickpocket, who used to be a Tube train driver. He told me that, when riding on the Tube, he will often see ‘blokes who look like they’re at it. The dipper might be scratching his eyelid to show the stall that he’s just eyeballed the mark.’ To translate: the dipper is the pickpocket; the stall is his accomplice – a person who might collide with the victim, or ‘mark’, distracting him at the crucial moment. Keith worked on the Metropolitan Line and became fascinated by a certain bin at Whitechapel station where local pickpockets used to leave ‘skinned’ (empty) wallets. He told me that if you see a man scrunching pieces of paper into a ball, and throwing them on the track – a common sight, he insists – then that might be a pickpocket, destroying the evidence.

  THE MORBID INTEREST

  There is an overlap between the notches of Mr Cross and the folklore of the Underground that expresses a truth about our relationship with the Underground, namely that it’s all right to take an interest in it as long as it’s a morbid interest.

  Was a man with a wooden leg, Bumper Harris, employed to demonstrate that first escalator at Earl’s Court in October 1911, the idea – perhaps – being to show that, if he could use an escalator, then how much more easily could a person with the full complement of legs? Of our leading Tube authorities, Jackson and Croome assert it as bald fact, Christian Wolmar describes it as ‘a myth’; Stephen Halliday describes it as ‘a semi-myth’. Underground News, the journal of the London Underground Railway Society, believes in Bumper Harris and has asserted that he was an Underground employee who had lost his leg on the job, and that he eventually retired to Gloucestershire, where – a clinching detail, surely – ‘he made violins and cider’.

  There is also the ‘secret tunnel’ genre. Does a secret passageway link Buckingham Palace to the Victoria Line in order to facilitate the emergency evacuation of the Queen? I once phoned the Palace to ask whether such a tunnel existed. ‘No,’ said a woman, who sounded very like the Queen, ‘it does not.’ ‘Are you sure?’ I said, and she put the phone down.(There used to be a not-so-secret tunnel allowing MPs to access the District Line platforms at Westminster station.)

  There are the books full of Underground ghost stories. An invisible runner pounds along the platforms at Elephant & Castle; children scream in the basement of what used to be the surface building of Hyde Park Corner, and which became Pizza on the Park. (They continued to scream it was said, even while the Four Seasons and Margheritas were being rolled out.) William Terris, an actor murdered in 1897, manifests in Covent Garden station. The best one I know of was sent to me in a letter a few years ago. Late one night a Piccadilly Line driver was running his empty train into the depot at Northfields when he heard a knock on his cab’s connecting door into the carriage. He turned and opened the door, saw no one there but noticed that all the connecting doors of the carriages were open, as though someone had walked along the length of the train. The driver refused to continue, so another man was brought in to close the doors and take the train into the depot. Shortly after he started the train he heard a knock … and all the doors were open again.

  Francis Bacon on the Piccadilly Line. The Tube is a relatively upmarket way to travel, and the rich and famous are frequently to be seen upon it. The author has logged sightings of, amongst others, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Miller, and somebody who might have been Anthony Hopkins. He (the author) once asked a man had written books about the New York Subway whether Woody Allen used the Subway. ‘Of course, he does’, came the reply. ‘He’s not a schmuck.’

  There is a great fascination with the closed-down stations, which are sometimes called ‘ghost stations’. A businessman, the somehow fittingly named Ajit Chambers, has set up the Old London Underground Company to provide ‘tourist adventures’ in the abandoned stations and to offer them as venues for parties and corporate events. Mr Chambers believes the appeal of the closed-down stations lies in their ‘ghostliness’. It’s an association clinched at the old British Museum station on the Central, which was supposed to be haunted by one or more Ancient Egyptians whose mummified remains were in the British Museum – a ‘farcical suggestion’, according to London’s Disused Underground Stations (2001), by J. E. Connor. Just before the closure of the station in 1933 (when the Central Line platforms at nearby Holborn were opened), a newspaper offered a reward to anyone who would spend a night there, and I do not believe there were any takers.

  In the archive of Theobald’s Road Library, I once came across a photograph of two Edwardian shops on Kentish Town Road. The first was called Henderson’s Hygienic British Bakery, the window advertising Hovis Rusks (‘As supplied to His Majesty The King’) and ‘Artistic High Class Wedding Cakes’. The shop next door was ‘H. Ritchie, Beef and Pork Butcher’, and there was a notice in the win
dow: ‘These premises have been acquired for the building of the Tube Railway.’ In fact, the Tube railway – Yerkes’s Hampstead Railway – would do for both shops, and I wonder: was it worth it? Because the station built on the site was South Kentish Town, which I cycle past half a dozen times a week, and which was opened in 1907 and closed in 1924. You see, it was too close to Kentish Town station. In his short story ‘South Kentish Town’ (1951) John Betjeman described the station as being ‘like a comma in the wrong place in a sentence or an uncalled-for remark in the middle of an interesting story’. In his own story a Pooterish chap called Basil Green is so engrossed in the Evening Standard that when the doors of his train accidentally open at South Kentish Town he gets off and spends a hairy night on the dark platform. Today retail has reasserted itself, since the Leslie Green surface building houses a Cash Converter (and also the enticing-sounding Omega Massage Parlour). The manager of the Cash Converter told me he doesn’t often think about the closed-down station below, except that ‘Sometimes the blokes from the Underground come round. They open a trapdoor in the floor, and they go down and kill all the rats.’