The Subterranean Railway

by Christian Wolmar

  That was all Ashfield and Pick needed to ensure that the Piccadilly extension could get under way. With the kind of panache that TV chefs demonstrate today when presenting ‘one I cooked earlier’, they put forward a ready-made scheme to stretch the Piccadilly line right out to Cockfosters, seven and a half miles beyond the Finsbury Park terminus, and, at the opposite end, four and a half miles out to Northfields, alongside the District’s tracks. The massive programme of work, finally agreed in 1930, also included several major station reconstructions.

  With a speed that seems almost miraculous today, the extensions were opened in stages during 1932–3 with the usual fanfare and distribution of free tickets. The Prince of Wales (later, briefly, Edward VIII) even drove one of the early trains, breaking a long run of royal absence from Underground openings. The Piccadilly became the Underground’s premier line, its new stations emblematic of the growing self-confidence of the organization, even though they were built at a time of slump and economic depression. They were the work of Charles Holden, an architect who had toured northern Europe with Pick in the summer of 1930 to look at the modern styles emerging abroad, which were clearly a powerful influence on his designs. While each station was different – unlike Leslie Green’s standard ruby-red design – they had a generic theme which made them recognizable. Notably, the most prominent feature of each station was a tall ticket hall, usually circular, and with a simple lining of red-brown bricks broken by sections of steel-framed cathedral glass. Everything was blended into a consistent style, from the design of the ticket offices and wooden telephone booth doors, to the smallest detail such as stair rails, clocks and signs. They were neither designed nor built on the cheap: bronze was used for the ticket office window frames and for handrails, while elegant lamps, mounted on columns with bowl-shaped reflectors, shone their light upwards to the ceiling, providing a comforting warm atmosphere.

  Holden’s modern, elegant stations gave the Underground a cachet which helped attract people to the burgeoning suburbs. Pick intended them to be ‘inviting doorways in an architectural setting that cannot be missed by the casual passer-by’.4 In essence, they were designed as a means of facilitating a smooth transfer from street to platform with as few obstructions as possible. Their ticket machines would be set slightly to the side, for convenient use by purchasers while not disturbing the passage of the season ticket holders bustling their way through. The stations were, indeed, cathedrals for the places in which they were situated, a magnet which helped to attract people to what were otherwise featureless, though comfortable, developments. Most stations had a few shops, but they were principally intended to be places where passengers did not linger. One exception was Enfield West, which had a buffet. It was well over two miles from Enfield town centre and the authors of the history of the Tube suggest that the provision of the café may have been ‘a douceur for those taken in by the station name’.5 Eventually, following protests from the local council, the station was renamed Oakwood.

  The remoteness of the areas where these tentacles of the Underground were stretching is demonstrated by the reaction of local residents. One old lady reported that ‘she had never ridden on a tram or a bus and when interviewed just before the opening of Southgate station, said that her last wish would be to see the great new architectural wonder before she was “taken”’.6 The Piccadilly’s extensions transformed the districts they served even more rapidly than older lines because the transport and economic pre-conditions happened to be just right. By the time they opened, the London Passenger Transport Board (which almost immediately became known as London Transport or LT) had been created and its control of buses and trams ensured the provision of a more coherent and comprehensive network of other transport services linking into the Underground stations. The LT’s dominance also allowed it to set fares which were not as expensive, per mile, as stations which were further away from central London, and this increased the competitive advantage of the more distant suburbs in relation to the ones closer to town. Given that land prices were somewhat cheaper in those areas, LT’s policy meant that these suburbs grew much more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. How much, ultimately, that benefited London and Londoners is debatable. It could be argued that this policy ensured even more urban sprawl and, moreover, the faster dispersal of the tightly knit communities characteristic of crowded inner-city life. Nevertheless, Charles Pearson would have been pleased.

  The gradual climb out of the Depression also provided the ideal economic conditions for the rapid growth of the suburbs. The stock market crash, and the low returns on government securities, meant the building societies were awash with cash and eager to lend to house purchasers. The pool of unemployed workers who had moved to London to seek work meant labour costs were low, and building materials were also cheap. All this ensured that the supply of houses grew rapidly, with the private housing boom peaking in 1934. The houses were cheap. House prices were at their lowest-ever levels, an average of just £500 with some smaller ones costing less than £400. Pick’s insistence that the line stretched as far out as possible paid rapid dividends. At Arnos Grove the Piccadilly reached undeveloped areas whose transformation into suburbs, thanks to the fast twenty-four trains per hour service to central London, was incredibly rapid. As a history of the line puts it, ‘After a slow start, the builders were hard at work on landed estates and parkland, laying out roads and building houses on every acre of spare land north of Arnos Grove, around Southgate station and east, south and west of Oakwood.’7

  To the west, too, there were massive developments because of the fortuitous timing, in terms of the economic cycle, of the completion of a new section of the Piccadilly line which had been extended to supplement existing services on various sections of the District and Metropolitan. Rayners Lane saw the construction of hundreds of new houses on both sides of the line, which included a particularly large estate called Harrow Garden Village, developed by the Metropolitan’s related but legally separate company, Metropolitan Country Estates, where in 1932 houses could be bought for between £895 and £1,350. Other stations such as Ruislip, Ruislip Manor, Eastcote, Hillingdon and Ickenham would all see enormous growth stimulated by the Metroland developments (see Chapter 12). And housing meant ticket sales. Rayners Lane, which had been a sleepy Metropolitan station with just sixty daily users in 1930, became a big interchange with 11,000 people using it every day a mere seven years later.

  By then, several central London stations had been transformed from modest little entrances, often with poor transfer arrangements between lines, to magnificent modern interchanges. The most ambitious was at Piccadilly Circus, where the Piccadilly and the Bakerloo intersect. Opened in 1928, this was designed by Holden, who created a huge circular tiled hall underneath the roundabout. In the centre were two banks of escalators leading to and from the lines, all lit by the characteristic uplighters which created the welcoming glow that became a feature of the Underground system and its publicity material. Although there was a commercial element, with shop displays around the outer perimeter of what Holden called his ‘ambulatory’, the main theme was London as the centre of the world, an appropriate sentiment given that the British Empire was still at its height. On the wall above the top of the escalators were oil paintings featuring a map of the world, with side panels showing the objectives of Underground travelling: business and commerce, outdoor pleasure, shopping, and amusements of the town. Later, a world clock map was installed, showing the time at various places around the world. The self-confidence and panache of the whole station is still largely noticeable today, even though the uplighters have been removed and the numbers using the station, night and day, are so enormous that there is little chance of getting a perspective on Holden’s great work. Not surprisingly, the station attracted widespread international recognition, and the Moscow Metro, built in the early 1930s as much to celebrate Soviet achievements as to provide the city with a transport system, incorporated many of the design features such as
escalators with uplighters. Indeed, the design of the whole Moscow network, with a circle line and radial routes deep into the suburbs, owes a lot to the London Underground, which its designers spent many years studying. As O.S. Nock notes, ‘the fact that the Moscow plan, conceived as a single entity, so closely resembled the complex that had been built up in London in nearly 70 years of unconnected private enterprise, many vicissitudes of fortune, and drastic changes of managerial policy is remarkable’.8 In fact, by then the London system had gradually been melded together by twenty years of Lord Ashfield’s guiding hand.

  The Piccadilly was the first to benefit from the unified approach of London Transport. The next few years were to be the heyday of the network, a time when the London Underground was fêted around the world as the ideal transport organization. Before celebrating that period, a brief digression back to the Metropolitan, the line that was never part of the Combine and which did the most in stimulating the development of a whole section of London, even giving it a name: Metroland.

  TWELVE

  METROLAND, THE

  SUBURBAN PARADOX

  Throughout the Edwardian and post-war period, one subterranean railway remained separate from the rest of the Underground – the Metropolitan. Indeed, it survived as a separate company until the creation of London Transport, despite various attempts by Ashfield to bring it within the Combine. The railway was able to remain independent after the war, despite perennial problems with its finances, because it had a great advantage over its rivals: the ability to exploit its land resources around its stations. The company also had an extensive ready-made railway and though it added a few minor extensions in the inter-war years, its survival depended on making good use of the huge stretches of line built deep into the countryside by Sir Edward Watkin.

  As we have seen, developments of estates around new Underground stations started as early as the 1880s with the Bedford Park Estate in Turnham Green, and construction of Hampstead Garden Suburb started soon after the arrival of the Hampstead line in 1907. Metroland was to further that concept, but on a much greater scale.

  The remote sections of the Metropolitan built by Watkin in the 1880s were really a railway in search of a purpose. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, the Metropolitan was heavily reliant on its goods and parcels traffic which, at its height in 1904, represented a fifth of the line’s income, £153,000 out of £796,000. A nationwide parcels service from forty stations was actually advertised on posters right up until the 1930s. But this traffic was diminishing with the arrival of motor transport and clearly passenger usage had to be encouraged. The Metropolitan never realized Watkin’s aspirations by becoming a major main-line railway, and to generate the suburban traffic that was essential to its economic viability large amounts of housing had to be built along its route.

  There had been a handful of developments stimulated by the Metropolitan before the Great War, both on its own land and by other landowners who had sold to builders. For example, as soon as the line to Rickmansworth had opened in 1887, the Eastbury estate at one of the intermediate stations, Northwood, had been sold as fifty-three building plots for development, starting the town on its route to becoming an upper-middle-class residential area. The Watford Observer1 waxed lyrical with the usual bucolic colour blended with commercial realism:

  A rare opportunity for small capitalists and speculators. Yet only a few minutes away is a charming landscape … tiny hills and hollows … pools of water, brambly wildernesses, where in spring nightingales sing and the air is sweet with the scent of violets, primroses and hawthorn, and in autumn the district is rich with crimson and gold leaves and hedges. This is the haunt of the nightingale. Let us hope that the delighted visitor will listen and let ’em alone.

  Fat chance.

  When the Uxbridge extension opened in 1904, Ruislip quickly expanded. King’s College, Cambridge, the principal landowners, sold land near the High Street for luxury development while the local council, Ruislip-Northwood, became the first in the country to produce a town plan. This was a response to what the local councillors considered a worrying trend since the arrival of the Metropolitan. The British Freehold Land Company, which bought large areas of land and then sold off the plots, was offering them locally for a mere £3 deposit and ten shillings weekly. The company tried to attract the sort of lowly clerks who had just enough money to aspire to home ownership, with advertising such as ‘Try to own a suburban home; it will make you a better citizen and help your family. The suburbs have fresh air, sunlight, roomy houses, green lawns and social advantages.’ This was advertising copy that could have been written by Charles Pearson half a century before.

  In fact, though, many of the purchasers could not afford to complete their homes. It was not at all what the good burghers wanted for Ruislip, especially as the buyers were expected to find their own builder and architect and often they dispensed with the latter to save money, which resulted in a collection of ramshackle and partly built houses that was little better than a shanty town. Instead, the council set down rules in its town plan, ensuring that the houses would be brick-built with access to proper services and linked by well-surfaced roads. A local company called Ruislip Manor Limited was formed and its vision was much more in keeping with that of the council. Its prospectus boasted that the company ‘aims at introducing all classes into the community’, but, of course, ‘it is not intended to indiscriminately mix all classes and sizes of housing together’. Perish the thought. Ruislip Council had grand ideas for a garden city on the lines of Hampstead Garden Suburb or Letchworth but these were stymied by the advent of the First World War.

  However, none of these developments were on the Metropolitan’s own land and its extensive holdings were to be the real catalyst to the creation of Metroland. The company had been very fortunate – or possibly far-sighted – when in two Acts of Parliament during the mid 1880s it had separated off the finances of its land bank, accumulated as a result of deals with landowners. Normally, railway companies were precluded from developing surplus land they acquired and were required to dispose of it. However, the Metropolitan uniquely had the right to grant building leases and to sell ground rents, a concession the company had won during the early days of the Metropolitan in its negotiations with the City of London. The Metropolitan’s holdings, acquired during the construction of the line deep out into the countryside, were substantial. Several landowners, rather than simply selling a strip for the railway under compulsory purchase powers, had come to a voluntary agreement to sell their whole holding, an easier transaction for both parties. Other chunks of land had been acquired for the path of the railway but had become redundant when opposition forced a change of route.

  The first development by the Metropolitan itself, through its Surplus Lands Committee, was started at Cecil Park, Pinner, in 1900. The advertising copy was in the tone that was to become all too familiar over the next four decades as the flat and open lands of Middlesex were turned into the most developed of London’s quadrants. The Committee’s sales brochure read: ‘Unique and tasteful, thoroughly well-built houses and also plots of land for a sale for the erection of houses of good class.’ The brochure went on to extol the virtues of home ownership, arguing that it allayed the ‘uneasy feeling’ of tenants who might be given a notice to quit at any time: ‘the owner occupier has the gratification of knowing that so long as the property belongs to him, all the improvements he may make to the house and garden are for his own benefit and that of his family – not for the landlord.’ Indeed, owner occupation was pretty novel, with barely 10 per cent of the population living in such homes. One could argue, therefore, that these railways were changing the very way people lived by making them into owner occupiers, something they could never afford in central London. It was, in effect, the start of the ‘property-owning democracy’, the term coined by Sir Anthony Eden in the 1950s.

  The name ‘Metroland’ was used initially as the title of a booklet first published in 1915 by t
he Metropolitan Railway to extol the virtues of taking a train out to the countryside for long healthy walks and cycle rides. But the real growth of Metroland itself was to come after the First World War, when the booklet’s main focus became the marketing of property. It contained dozens of pages of advertising, interspersed with flowery editorial, which enabled the booklet to be sold for a mere twopence.

  As well as rural suburban splendour – an oxymoron, of course, but one which clearly did not deter the purchasers – the very idea of modernity was being sold. The 1920 edition, for example, instructed readers to

  stake your claim at Edgware [on the soon to be built Hampstead extension, intriguingly, rather than on the Metropolitan]. Omar Khay-yam’s recipe for turning the wilderness into paradise hardly fits an English climate, but provision has been made at Edgware of an alternative recipe which at least will convert pleasant, undulating fields into happy homes. The loaf of bread, the jug of wine and the book of verse may be got there cheaply and easily, and … a shelter which comprises all major labour-saving and sanitary conveniences. We moderns ask much more before we are content than the ancients, and Edgware is designed to give us that much more.

  The Metroland booklets are replete with pictures and full colour drawings of what must have seemed another world to inner London residents: waterfalls, lakes, cows in fields and even farmers next to horse-drawn ploughs. Apart from the drawing on the front of the 1923 edition, there are barely any pictures of trains or stations. Rather, the covers display quaint rural scenes which would have not been out of place in William Morris’s idyll. The world of Metroland is not cluttered with people: its suburban streets are empty, and its houses seem to sit alone, in their full grandeur, separate from any of their neighbours. There are, it seems, more farm animals than human beings in the wilds of Middlesex and Hertfordshire. The greater part of the books, apart from the advertisements, was taken up by ‘a comprehensive description of the charming countryside served by the metropolitan railway’. Such places as Rickmansworth, Harrow, Uxbridge, Wembley Park, Ruislip, Amersham and Harrow on the Hill were invested with as much history as the anonymous authors could find by dredging up name origins and minor historical events that might give character to what were mostly villages with little claim to fame. In fact, possibly conscious of much of the area’s banality and featurelessness, there is a slight air of defensiveness about some of the copy: ‘Metroland is one of the most beautiful areas in the home counties; its share of the Buckinghamshire Chilterns is as picturesque and diversified as anything that Kent, Surrey or Sussex have to show.’ The rural way of life described in Metroland pamphlets was perfectly accurate – in 1924 the Metropolitan railway was delivering eighty-seven milk churns per day from Harrow on the Hill station into London.