As well as being, a couple of days ago, the seventieth anniversary of 'Operation Chastise', the Lancasters of 617 squadron's epic raid on the dams in Nazi Germany's Ruhr district, the Möhne, the Eder and the Sorpe, this year marks the 150th anniverary of the beginnings of the London Underground; the Tube. (I have already written about the Dambusters' raid here; I do not propose to add to it.)
As the oldest metro* system in the world, predating the Paris and New York metro systems by some 40 years and the Moscow metro by around 70 years, the London Underground railway was a typical response by the entrepreneurial Victorians to the twins probelms of a lack of effective transport into the heart of the capital and the city's rapid increases in population.
Even by the 1850's, London was still largely confined to the square mile that nowadays comprises the financial heart of London, the City of London. Much of the surrounding environs which now comprise row upon row of terraced houses and the semi-detached dwellings of the 1930's were simply fields and open countryside; the great explosion of building did not start until the 1880's and 90s, a response to a doubling of the population in the preceding 50 years, from 3,000,000 to 6,000,000.
Although the growth of the 'overground' railways had led to increased mobility in the UK, such railways and their stations were always situated on the edge of major conurbations and London was no exception. Liverpool Street station which now serves the City of London from East Anglia and Essex was only built in the 1870s. Main lines from the south, terminating at Waterloo and Victoria, from the west, Paddington and from the north, Kings Cross/St Pancras and Euston which existed in the 1850s were a considerable distance, measured in miles, from the financial centre and the only routes into the City were by horse-drawn cabs or omnibuses; this led to a chronic overcrowding on the streets leading into the City of London and in the narrow streets of the City itself. Perhaps, worst of all, this lack of transport led to severe overcrowding in the slum dwellings within reach of the City, such places as Clerkenwell and Whitechapel.
No doubt inspired by Bazelgette and his plans for the London sewage system, (see here), Charles Pearson, the official City of London solicitor and campaingning social reformer, and for three years from 1847 an MP for Lambeth, campaigned tirelessly for many years to obtain approval to construct an underground railway from the outlying overground railway stations to the very borders of the City. In 1863, the world's first subterranean railway line was opened between Paddington and Farringdon, in the heart of Clerkenwell; a stone's throw from St Paul's Cathedral and the City beyond.**
The first underground lines were formed by a process known as 'cut and cover'. This entailed digging a very deep trench along the main routes and then covering them with a 'brick-lined' domed roof to support the roadway above. Much of the early 'tube' network was built in this way which accounts for the shallowness of much of the circle line which travels in the eponymous circle from Paddigton, through King Cross, Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England), the Tower of London, along the Thames Embankment and so through Chelsea and onto South Kensington before returning to Paddington.***
The first day of operations saw an estmated 38,000 people travelling on the gas lit carriages drawn by a specially designed steam tender. In the wake of such succcess, many companies were formed to take advantage of the ready supply of customers for an underground railway linking outlying regions of the London suburbs with the centre of town. By 1890, the first true tunnels had been excavated, deep underground, which obviated the need to get permission from property owners or to cause the kind of traffic disruption and chaos occasioned by the 'cut and cover' method, and under the Thames from the City to the leafy suburb of Stockwell, south of the river; the beginnings of the 'Northen Line' which now extends from Barnet in the north to Morden in the south, a distance of some 12 or 13 miles.
By the time of the nineteen thirties, the tube extended as far away to Buckinghamshire in the west to Essex in the east and was no longer merely a transport system for just Londoners. While much of the track in the outlying areas of Buckinghamshire and Essex lies above ground, there was no need to build tunnels and only about 45% of the network lies below ground, one can go from Amersham in the west to Epping and Upminster in the east and Wimbledon in the south to Harrow in the north without having to leave the network.
The network has continued to be expanded by the Victoria line (Brixton in the south west to Walthamstow in the north-east) and by the Jubilee line and its subsequent extension to service the O2 arena and exhibition centres. Together with the 'Docklands Light Railway, Thameslink and proposed 'Crossrail services, London has one of the finest intergated transport systems of any major city, for all we Londoners may moan about it. Despite the fact that for many years, even up to comparartively recent times, safety equipment was decidedly 'low-tech', there have been few accidents on the 'Tube'. In the span of my memory only the 1975 'Moorgate' disaster****, the1987 Kings Cross fire***** and the 2005 '7/7' bombings spring to mind. Given that the trains hurtle through the tunnels at 60mph and, during rush hours, passengers are crammed into the eight carriages so tightly as to make breathing, unless done in unison, very difficult, I am not a little suprised that one can feel as confident as one does, riding the tube between 50 and nearly 200 feet below ground.******
Like the Paris Métro, the underground in London has preserved many of its tradional sights and typefaces. The iconic signs for the stations stems from the 1930's and Art Deco; the distinctive tiling of the stations from the very earliest days of the network when few could read or write and stations were recognised by their distinctive tiling pattern; the glorious, most adept 'tube map' which hasn't fundamentally changed since it was designed in 1931 by Harry Beck. Eschewing relative distance and all but the broadest and most superficial of topography and geography, Beck designed a map which is both informative and crystal clear; few, if any tourists, who visit London in their millions each year become confused or lost providing that they have a copy of Beck's map. It is interesting that the Paris Métro map which I remember from my first visit to that city in the 1960's was a very confusing arrangement; it was so hard to decipher. It is good, I think, that it is closer to Beck's design now!
Sadly, Pearson did not live to see the culimination of his campaigning; he died on 14 September 1862, just 4 months prior to the opening of that first subterranean railway line and the dawn of the Tube.
* From the original French comany which ran the Paris underground railway, 'La Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris', shortened to 'Le Métropolitain' and, subsequently, further shortened to 'Le Métro'; only the London Underground railway is called 'The Tube', although its first operator was also known as 'The Metropolitan'
** It was some years before I learnt that the line I rode for nigh on twenty years each day (from Kings Cross to Farringdon) composed part of that very first 'tube' line .
*** The shallow and often exposed parts of the line form a plot device in Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery, 'The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans' when a body is found by the tracks outside Aldgate station.
**** When a train failed to stop at Moorgate station and ended up running through the buffers and the 'sand trap' and into the terminus wall at full speed killing 43 people and injuring 74. Unfortunately, the 'clearance between the roof of the carriages and the tunnel ceiling allowed the carriages to buckle upwards which led to a greater loss of life than might have been expected. Following this acccident, automatic braking was introduded on trains whenever they entered a station; formerly they had relied on the driver.
***** The fire, deemed to have been caused by a still burning cigarette or match discarded onto a wooden tread escalator by an unknown passenger led to 31 deaths and many more injured. The 1984 fire at Oxford Circus which led to the complete banning of smoking anywhere on the London Underground was probably caused by a cigarette igniting flammable material in a storeroom used by contractors. No-one died as a result.
****** Outside of a genuine accident or disaster, probably the scariest thing is to be led out of a halted train and along the tracks to the next station by the dim illumination of the small lights placed at intervals along the tunnel. Fortunaely, this has only happened to me once in 40 years of near daily travel on the network.
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