Underground, Overground

by Andrew Martin

  About a mile away, and also on the Northern Line, is another station that is part of the folklore, and one with a jollier, if still bathetic, resonance: Mornington Crescent. It too is under-used and once was closed down, between 1992 and 1995, but the closure only enhanced its status as the joker in the pack. Mornington Crescent exists in a kind of ellipsis. It’s not on Mornington Crescent; it’s only near that charming if shambolic street. (The painter Frank Auerbach referred admiringly to its ‘seedy curve’; there used to be a Hotel Splendid on Mornington Crescent, only the ‘-did’ had fallen off, coming to a rest at an angle in the balcony below.) Mornington Crescent station is on … well, Camden High Street, Eversholt Street and Hampstead Road, since it occupies a corner site. The station is separated from Mornington Crescent by what used to be the Carreras cigarette factory (now thoroughly rehabilitated as the home of the British Heart Foundation), which sits on Hampstead Road and no other, and whose workers used to supply most of the station’s customers. Essentially, Mornington Crescent station is called Mornington Crescent because to have called it Hampstead Road would have risked confusion with Hampstead station.

  There isn’t much around Mornington Crescent, and the station was Monday–Friday only for a long time before its temporary closure. I recall from my early days in London that it did its best business on Wednesday nights, when trainloads of Draculas rolled up there: Goth Night at the Camden Palais. The actual closure was triggered by ‘seepage on the staircase’, and the station was re-opened, extensively and handsomely refurbished, after it was decided the seepage could be ‘managed’.

  Mornington Crescent was declared re-opened by some or all of the regulars from the Radio 4 ‘antidote to panel games’, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, and there is today a plaque commemorating the life of one of those regulars, Willie Rushton, alongside the notice warning you that the staircase has eighty-six steps. That the Clue men should have called their best and strangest game Mornington Crescent is entirely fitting in view of the station’s anomalous status. The many listeners writing in to say they are baffled by the rules are referred to N. F. Stovold’s Mornington Crescent: Rules and Origins, which they are also told is, and always has been, out of print.

  PROPER FANS

  These people prove their fandom by expenditure of time and money. They might join the London Underground Railway Society, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2011 but didn’t go out of its way to court journalistic interest. The members have been turned over as ‘trainspotters’ too often. There are monthly meetings, at which learned speakers give lectures on the Underground, and there is a journal, Underground News, containing news of more or less everything that happened on the network in the previous month – ‘A smell of burning from an escalator at Wood Green kept the station closed until 6.50 on Bank Holiday Monday’ – along with essays, clearly and very elegantly written but with daunting levels of detail (‘District Electric Trains, Part 13, Segregation and Disappointment’); members correspond with one another, bandying incredible arcania: ‘In Underground News No. 581, there is a query whether trains reversing at Loughton depart westbound empty while platform resurfacing is under way. The short answer is “apparently not” but some explanation might be of interest.’ Some 500 words follow.

  The style is old-fashioned, the voice passive, and a phlegmatic dry humour is the hallmark of the journal. The July 2010 number reported that four model owls were installed near the stairs at Wembley Park station to deter pigeons. ‘It was thought this was due to staff complaints and illness from the resulting “crappage”. Sadly, it hasn’t worked as the pigeons they are supposed to scare off now perch next to them. The next move is to place the owls on springs so they move in the wind, thereby scaring the pigeons.’

  Membership – about a thousand – has remained steady in recent years, which is an achievement when other railway societies are dying off. The Society is independent of London Underground, but a third of the members are LU staff.

  … Or these proper fans might join Subterranea Britannica, which has a website at subbrit.org.uk. The organisation is devoted to, in alphabetical order and among many other underground phenomena: air-raid shelters, coal-mines, dungeons, grottoes, ossuaries, priest holes and … underground railways. An official of the society, a town planner in the surface world, once attempted to explain to me the appeal of underground travel: ‘There’s just something nice about the idea that you can move without being seen – that you can go down there and come up here. I grew up in a stately home,’ he continued without a trace of boastfulness, ‘and there actually was a secret passage. I think that’s what started me off. But I also read a lot of Rupert books, and he’s always finding trapdoors in lawns that lead to interesting places.’

  The proper fans might also expend time – about twenty hours – trying to visit every Tube station as quickly as possible. Plenty of people have visited every Tube station. I myself have visited almost every Tube station. I had a friend who had visited every one and had the photographs to prove it: ‘Here’s me at Willesden Green’ etc. John Betjeman visited every Tube station as an adolescent, in company with a man called Ronald Wright, who went on to become a monk. But to visit every station in record time – which people have been attempting since at least 1960 – requires real fortitude. You must get up before dawn; you must drink and eat almost nothing during the attempt, so niggardly is the Underground with toilet provision. You must know your Tube system. In the years when Olympia on the District line was open for exhibitions only, you had to choose an exhibition day.

  A man called Robert Robinson – not the late quizmaster – dominated this field in the Eighties and Nineties. He has made almost fifty attempts on this record, often with a friend called ‘Mr McLaughlin of East Wokingham’. In 1994 the two established a time of 18 hours, 18 minutes and 9 seconds, which was not beaten until 2000, and it was Mr Robinson who beat it. ‘You’ve got to be able to interpret the signals,’ he told me. ‘For example, if there’s a red light at Hyde Park, it probably just means a train is being held because it’s early, but a red light at Knightsbridge … chances are there’s a problem.’

  The rules are arcane. You must arrive at and depart from each station on a train. You can travel between the end points of lines on foot or by bus. It has been ruled that you cannot do so on a Spacehopper. You must keep a log of times, train numbers and carriage numbers, and these must accord with the detailed records of train movements that London Underground keeps for six weeks. The start- and end-points are up to you. In 2004 Geoff Marshall and Neil Blake set the record by starting at Amersham on the Met at 5.29 a.m. and finishing at Upminster on the District at 12.05, a slower time than Mr Robinson’s, but the Jubilee Line Extension had been built since then. Every time the network is modified, the challenge is ‘re-set’ – for example, when Heathrow Terminal 5 station was opened in 2008. A recent holder of the record was Marc Gawley of Manchester, and it was no coincidence that he was a marathon runner. When I asked Mr Robinson why he’d made his own attempts, he said, ‘It gets to be a bug. And I suppose I’m a nutter.’

  … Or the proper fan might make a model of the Underground. Probably the leading Underground modeller is John Polley, who used to be a Tube train driver. The layout that he tours around model railway exhibitions is called Abbey Road. It’s not named after the Beatles album, or the street in St John’s Wood that inspired that name. It’s just that, as he says, ‘Abbey Road sounds like the name of a Tube station.’ John has a gift for such names, and he is working on a new layout to be called ‘something like Bishop’s Park’. The Abbey Road layout shows an above-ground suburban station on a Tube line, and surrounding premises. For the buildings John uses plastic sheeting employed in the window banners of a particular ladies’ clothing chain. ‘It used to be called Evans Outsizes because it’s for the larger lady, but now it’s just Evans. I think it’s a politically correct thing.’ I asked John if the sales assistants in those shops thought he was odd, walking in and askin
g for bits of plastic. ‘What you’ve got to remember,’ he said, ‘is that they get a lot of cross-dressers going in there, so I’m not that weird in comparison.’ Not many people model Underground trains: ‘It’s a niche thing’, and it always has been.

  Among John’s peers are men who have built and exhibited layouts called London Road, Willesden Green, Dora Park (named in honour of the maker’s wife) and Scrub’s Lane.

  You can’t just walk into a model shop and buy little Tube trains, although you could for a brief period in the Fifties, when Eveready made a model Underground train, to advertise the battery that powered it. So Underground modellers work from ‘scratch’ – that is, they make their own stuff, or adapt. John runs a business whereby he imports from China brass static models of Underground trains; he then fits a motor and bogies, and a great deal of fine detailing. He does the ’38 stock, of course; also the ’59 stock. In 1999 John was exhibiting an Underground layout called Mill Ridge (another completely plausible name) at Chesham when he noticed a man looking on with acute interest. This was the late Mark Adlington, a former bus conductor who spent most of his time caring for his wheelchair-bound mother and so seldom left his home. At Chesham Mark asked John if he had time to come and see his own model. When, a few hours later, John was shown into a modest bedroom, he ‘felt like Howard Carter when he opened Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922’. The room contained a model of an entire wing of 55 Broadway in card and plastic, and brilliantly detailed models of Pick- and Holden-era Tube stations, trains and buses, all done from memory, the detail extending to the tax discs on the buses. Before his death Mark asked John if he could find a home for his models, and they are now part of the collection of the London Transport Museum, to which we now turn our own steps, it being a likely destination of the Proper Fan with money to spend.

  The London Transport Museum was established, from disparate collections, at Covent Garden in 1980. Its role, says Mike Walton, Head of Trading at the Museum, is ‘to preserve, interpret, educate’. The role of the adjacent shop is to make money. Three hundred thousand people visit the Museum annually, three times more than when it was established, and the sales at the shop are up ‘hugely’ since then. In the shop, postcards and posters are the big sellers. And the image ‘that really punches above its weight’ is Harry Beck’s Tube map. You can buy a bag made out of Tube or bus seat moquette, or commission a sofa made in that moquette, so you can be sitting watching television on the same stuff you rode home from work on … except that historical moquettes are what interest most people. ‘Ah,’ I said to Mr Walton, ‘then we must be talking about the green and red of the 1938 stock.’ ‘That appeals to the older generation,’ he said, deflatingly, ‘but the biggest seller is the mainly orange and black one, designed by Misha Black, that went onto the District trains from 1978, and the Jubilee from 1983. It was also on most London buses from the late Seventies to the early Eighties. That’s the “old” moquette to the younger generation.’ Mike Walton suggests, ‘The Underground branding is iconic: the roundel, the typeface, the map. It is the language of the city, whether for Londoners or visitors.’

  The proper fans are certainly not confined to this country. I told Mr Walton that a friend of mine had been out with a Swedish girl, and she’d said there were two extraordinary things about London. One: the houses had drainpipes on the outside (which they apparently don’t in Sweden, because the water will freeze). Two: the smell of the Underground. She thought they should bottle it and sell it.

  Underground News regularly publishes photographs taken by its readers of the Tube roundel as it has been employed around the world. (And I’m sure all users have applied for permission, because the roundel is a registered trademark.) A recent number showed a photograph of a health centre in Vancouver with ‘Care-station’ written on the blue bar; and a jeans shop in Hazeyview, South Africa, with ‘Blue Junction’ written in the bar. A deli in New York called The London Underground Gourmet features the roundel prominently on its menus. The fare is named after Tube stops, so a ‘Wood Green’ is a salad containing eggplant (or aubergine), zucchini (courgette), red peppers and mushrooms, served with mixed salad. A ‘Queensway’ features smoked turkey and brie and salad. Another salad is called ‘Parsons Green’. There is also a sandwich called a ‘Nottingham’, which might cause the experienced Tube user to raise an eyebrow. Not that it doesn’t sound absolutely delicious, comprising fresh mozzarella with grilled red peppers, pesto sauce and, of course, salad … but when I visited New York, I wondered whether there might have been some confusion with Notting Hill. I spoke to the manager of the deli, a man called John, who said it had been named by its owner, Amy, after she’d returned from an enjoyable trip to London. John said, ‘We get two or three English people in here every day, and they all think it’s cute that that the food is named after Underground stations.’

  ‘But what about the Nottingham?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean?’ said John. ‘Well,’ I persisted sadistically, ‘Nottingham is not an Underground station.’ John paused thoughtfully for a while: ‘Well I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a great sandwich.’

  The difference between a foreigner and a Londoner is that a foreigner isn’t stuck with the system. He doesn’t regard the dot matrix message, ‘High Barnet … 8 mins’ as another nail in his coffin. Why do Londoners want to buy into the iconography of a system that can cause them so much grief? An assistant in the Museum shop once told me, ‘Let’s face it, when your train’s late you’ve got the hump. But when you stand back and look at the system it’s something incredible isn’t it?’ And there does seem to be this duality. The Museum shop really began to take off in 1990, when the centenary of the City & South London – nascent Bank branch of the Northern Line – was being celebrated. The Northern Line was then being denigrated every week in the Evening Standard, but that didn’t stop sales of the associated memorabilia. I am reminded of a trenchant sentiment from Parallel Lines (2004), by Ian Marchant. He wrote that in Britain there are two railways: the railway of reality and the railway of romance. The former, he said, was ‘largely shit’. That is not usually true of the Underground, but even if it were, it might not matter, because the iconography trumps the service provision.

  CONCLUSION

  MODERN WONDERS

  While my father was working on British Rail in the 1970s, we had a neighbour who was a travelling salesman – a man who practically lived in his car and loved his car. He believed that trains were uneconomic, inefficient and somehow (even though we’d invented trains) anti-British. He said that, if he were running the country, he’d scrap the railway lines and replace them with fleets of buses running along an improved network of roads. ‘And would they be long buses with comfortable seats?’ my father asked. ‘They would,’ he said; ‘they’d be longer and wider than normal buses and much more comfortable – also faster.’ ‘And would they run in quick succession?’ inquired my father. ‘Yes,’ said our neighbour, ‘they’d follow each other almost continuously.’ ‘Then that would be called a train,’ said my father, scoring a rhetorical coup only slightly tarnished by his constant re-telling of the story over subsequent years.

  My father retained his commitment to rail travel in the years when the motor car was in the ascendant. Today the motor car is not taken seriously as a solution to the problems of mass transport, and the transport planners of south-east England – and the mayor of London himself, judging by his Transport Plan – think in terms of trains and underground trains in particular with all the burrowing fervour (if less of the social idealism) of Charles Pearson himself. Or you might say the planners are echoing the words of that head of the post-war railway executive John Elliot, who on 1 June 1958 said, ‘We must get people underground … Our policy is to get more and more people underground.’

  The Underground itself will not be much increased, although it seems as though the Northern Line will be extended from Kennington to Battersea. Another course, so to speak, will be added to the dog’s dinner …
because the Northern Line is already over-complicated. (Then again, TfL is also considering prising it apart at Camden, allowing a simplified, and therefore more frequent, service to the trains north of there, which would require the complete rebuilding of Camden Town station – and therefore of much of Camden Town itself – in order to allow changing en masse between the branches.)

  The Big Dig, however (it’s only a matter of time before it’s called that), will be Crossrail: 73 miles from Heathrow and Maidenhead in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. Crossrail, its spokespeople want to make clear, is definitely not ‘a Tube’. They don’t think the term does justice to a line with full-size trains, only 13 of whose 73 miles will be ‘in tunnel’. But those 13 miles go through central London, and where the Underground interchanges with Crossrail, its own stations will be boosted and glamorised, especially at Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road. The tunnelling shields for Crossrail will incorporate a canteen and toilets, and there is to be a tunnelling academy at Ilford, to train the thousands of employees in mole-like arts. That other half-underground line, Thameslink, is to have a capacity increase; and Crossrail will probably be followed by Crossrail 2 (a tunnel from Chelsea to Hackney), just as High Speed 1, through Kent (which starts and ends in a tunnel), will be followed by High Speed 2, heading north (which will also start in a tunnel).

  Crossrail (Crossrail 1, that is – let’s keep our feet on the ground) will apparently alleviate congestion on the Central, Jubilee, Bakerloo and District Lines by ‘between 20 and 60 per cent’, which is just as well. The Tube Upgrade, which will be completed about when Crossrail opens in 2018, will provide a 30 per cent increase in capacity to a system that is unfortunately 50 per cent over capacity. And the population of London is expected to rise by nearly 20 per cent by 2030. The Tube, in other words, will continue to be crowded … at which point I take off my London bowler hat and put on my northern flat cap, and say that the only answer is to make the whole of the neglected rest of the country into a giant Enterprise Zone. Get everyone who hasn’t got a good excuse for being in London out of it. The Tube made the city too big, and it remains too big. In these moods I look at London through my northern filter. In London people will think nothing of going (by Tube) from Finchley to Wimbledon, a journey that might easily take two hours, in which time you could travel so much more bracingly from London to York, but Londoners are blinded to the comparison because their journey is ‘all within the same city’.