How is that city to be regarded in the twenty-first century? A centre for the elite, and the suburbs for the … less elite? It is clear that suburban living has its appeal, hence the middle-class flight from the centre of London which only began to be reversed with the loft-living movement of the Eighties. But it is hard to find a defence of suburban living in literature. I wonder how many residents of suburban London – I’m one of them myself – feel a sense of alienation from the city in which they live owing to their apparently marginal status. It is said that Crossrail will bring 1.5 million people within a ‘one-hour commute’ of central London, which sounds like no fun at all.
Philip Ross is an author, a transport consultant and CEO of Unwork.com, which ‘challenges the way we work’. His research has discovered that the length of commute considered ideal by Londoners is ten minutes. Ross therefore proposes alternatives to the great respiration of London, by which we are sucked into the centre in the morning and exhaled in the evening. He favours ‘polycentric working’, so people are not tied to the central offices of their corporations, where, apparently, their desks are in use for less than half the day. Technology enables people to work remotely from their desks, why not also remotely from their offices? Philip Ross does not mean working from home. His research shows that people don’t want to do that. They go stir crazy. Rather, they might work in an annexe of the company’s main office, and that annexe might be in Finchley, or Wimbledon … or Surbiton. The biggest single starting point of commuters working in Canary Wharf is Surbiton. So why don’t they just stay in Surbiton? At least for some days of the week, or until midday, getting the work that can be done in Surbiton out of the way before coming into HQ for meetings and the face-to-face stuff. This way journeys would be staggered, which has long been the aim of the Underground. (Remember the command designed to stop everyone going home at the same time: ‘Play Between Six and Twelve.’) Staggering could also be promoted, Philip Hall cunningly suggests, by Tube customers receiving a top-up to their Oysters in return for not travelling in the peak times.
This polycentric approach would boost the suburbs. The annexe-office workers would buy their coffees and sandwiches, and perhaps much else, there rather than in the middle of town, and ideally from an independent retailer. It would help raise morale in the outlying places, and London might truly become the collection of villages it is often romantically said to be … and the Tubes might become tolerable.
The needle is likely to lurch further towards ‘intolerable’ when mobile phones become usable on the network. On the plus side, the new ‘S’ stock trains that will eventually be running on all the cut-and-cover lines will be air-conditioned. That is good news because the earth around the tunnels on all the Underground lines gets hotter every year. It is hard to make deep-level Tube trains air-conditioned, because there isn’t the space for the equipment, but there has been a general ‘cooling programme’ in place across the network since 2006. The new trains will also be fully ‘walk-through’, with no carriage end-doors. Travelling on them is like riding on a sinuous, moving corridor. It’s less claustrophobic than the old arrangement, but now you can no longer choose the carriage not occupied by the declaiming loony.
Will Underground trains be completely driverless? The new signalling being installed as part of the Upgrade will allow this, and the development, allowing a faster throughput of trains, might arise from, or be stopped by, a battle with the unions. Mike Brown, Managing Director of London Underground, envisages driverless trains within twenty years. There might be a ‘train captain’ on board, as on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), but this would be an unenviable role on our packed Tube: the train captain would be condemned to live in a permanent rush hour. Or the train might be completely unattended. Either way, lasar sensors detecting any movement on the tracks (but disregarding the movement of, say, pigeons or mice), and platform edge doors, as in the Jubilee Line extension stations, could make Tube suicide rarer. One benefit of driverless trains is that you can sit right at the front and have that privileged, hypnotic, driver’s-eye view of a ride through the tunnels. On the DLR, or on the driverless Line 14 on the Paris Metro, I always try to sit at the front. (It’s usually just a matter of elbowing aside some ten-year-old boys; I can then get on with pretending to drive the train.)
It’s likely that ticket offices will also be closed, as ticketless travel comes in. (The barriers will effectively pickpocket you, by debiting the bank card in your wallet rather than your proffered Oyster.) It is my understanding that the vast majority of the stations on the Underground, unlike those on the Paris Metro, will continue to be staffed because of safety worries formulated after the King’s Cross fire, but with the constant pressure for ‘productivity increases’, such speculation is dangerous. In fact, all speculation about the future of the Underground is dangerous …
One of the new ‘S’ Stock trains that will be coming to all the cut-and-cover lines. It is walk-through, a moving hotel corridor (there are no end-doors to the cars). It is also air-conditioned, but the residual seating points to an over-crowded future.
Before me is the edition of Modern Wonder comic for 20 August 1938. It shows a streamlined Tube train racing through a tunnel in cross-section: ‘There are four of these trains now in service on the Piccadilly Line.’ The strong implication is that they are the future of Tube travel. The trains were a subdivision of the famous ’38 stock, but the fashionable streamlinings brought a speed increase of precisely nothing (Tube trains didn’t go fast enough to feel the benefit) and some passengers – older ones especially – thought they looked ridiculous, just as I think cyclists wearing Lycra look ridiculous. Those trains had been taken out of service by the time the war started, and some of the carriages came to a bathetic end as air-raid shelters at Northfields and Cockfosters.
I once interviewed a German businessman who tried to interest London Underground in technology that would project images onto tunnel walls so that, as the train moved, passengers would see a lateral film. The idea was that it might be used for advertising, or to show, say, the Yorkshire Dales on a sunny day, making for a less stressful ride. A friend of mine says that, in a future, more civilised London, there will be mattresses in the suicide pits – to provide a soft landing for those who survive the attempt. I’m sure Charles Pearson would have approved of that, while lamenting the necessity for the suicide pits in the first place. What would he have made of the way his creation has unfolded? You’d have to sit him down and give him a stiff drink before unveiling the whole story. The real ‘facer’ (a word he might have used to denote a shock) would be the realisation that, in creating the Metropolitan, he had created the modern Metro-polis. But I wonder what detail would have horrified him, or tickled his fancy the most? Here is the writer with whom we began, Arnold Bennett, in a work called How To Live on 24 Hours A Day: ‘There was a congestion of traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the congestion people actually began to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd’s Bush! And you say that isn’t picturesque!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This has not been an official history of the London Underground, but the press office of Transport for London has been most helpful, especially Ann Laker. Several senior Underground people have given me interviews, and Mike Ashworth has given me more than one. I should also mention that every time I have asked a question of a member of staff on the Undergound they have tried to help me without first asking ‘Who are you?’ and ‘Why do you want to know?’ (Perhaps they should be asking those questions, but I am glad they are not.)
I am grateful to Brian Hardy and Piers Connor of the London Underground Railway Society, and to John Scott-Morgan, railway author. Each of these men, it seems to me, knows everything about the Underground – or at least, they answered every question I put to them straight off the top of their heads. Piers Connor, incidentally, runs one of the most comprehensive and clearly written websites about the Underground in all its aspects, at
www.tubeprune.com. (The name stands for Tube Professionals’ Rumour Network.)
I would like to thank Niall Devitt, of the London Transport Museum, and Peter Saxton for invaluable assistance with the text, and Wendy Neville, also of the Museum, for letting me in free. On Underground electricity I am grateful to Eddie Wearing; on Underground gas lighting, Chris Sugg (see website on gas lighting www.williamsugghistory.co.uk); on Underground Steam, Oliver Densham of the Southwold Railway Trust; on general London history, Lisa Freedman and David Secombe (his elegant website is at thelondoncolumn.com); on Brunel’s tunnel, Robert Hulse, Director of the Brunel Museum.
PICTURE CREDITS
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations: © akg-images, p. 227; © Bloomberg via Getty Images, p. 278; © Bob Krist/CORBIS, p. 248; © David Secombe, p. 107; © Getty Images, p. 53; © Johnny Stiletto, p. 262; © TfL from the London Transport Museum, pp. 7, 8, 32, 74, 96, 140, 164, 185, 218.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (2000)
T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis, vols 1 and 2 (1974)
Jeremy Black, London: A History (2009)
Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999)
Ken Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map: A History (1994)
Oliver Green, Underground Art: London Transport Posters 1908 to the Present (2001)
Stephen Halliday, Underground to Everywhere: London’s Underground Railway in the Life of the Capital (2004)
Alan A. Jackson and Desmond F. Croome, Rails through the Clay: A History of London’s Tube Railways (1962; 2nd edn 1993)
Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London: The Story of a Capital and Its Growth (1975)
David Leboff, London Underground Stations (1994)
John Scott-Morgan, Red Panniers: Last Steam on the Underground (2010)
David Welsh, Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (2009)
Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built, and How It Changed the City Forever (2004)
DVD
John Betjeman, Metroland (1973)
INDEX
55 Broadway 188–9, 269
1938 stock 211–12, 269, 270, 279
1959 stock 211, 269
1995 stock 211
A
Abbey Road 268
Abbey Wood 274
Ackroyd, Peter 21, 29–30, 106
Acton Town 182
Adlington, Mark 269
advertising 40–1, 117, 143, 279–80
posters 161–5
air-raid shelters 105, 224–33
Aldersgate 33
see also Barbican
Aldersgate Street 52
Aldgate 57, 66, 73, 91, 134, 201
Aldwych (station) 151, 152–4
Aldwych (street) 150
Aldwych Shuttle 150–4
Alexander I 87
Alexandra Palace 122, 206
aluminium 212
Amersham 76, 77, 268
Archway xii, 133, 144, 175, 181, 205
Archway Road 243
armrests 114, 117
Arnos Grove 183, 184, 186, 189
Arsenal 117
Artangel 153
Arts on the Underground 163
Ashfield, Lord 155, 167, 177, 178, 188, 207, 234
London Transport 193
roundel 159
Underground Group 155–8, 191, 192
Ashworth, Mike 212–13, 255–6
Auerbach, Frank 264
Automatic Train Operation 115
Aylesbury 72
Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway 72
B
Baker, Joan 202–3
Baker Street
Bakerloo Line 38, 143
bar 39
Betjeman 172
Jubilee Line 38, 240, 247
Metropolitan Line 5, 8, 36–7, 38, 72, 168, 173
Baker Street & Waterloo Railway 130, 131, 143–4, 157–8
Bakerloo Line 126, 130, 143–4, 157–8
armrests 114
baby’s birth 156
Baker Street 38
colour 199
and Crossrail 275
doors 103
Edgware Road 69
extension 147–8, 167–8
floodgates 31
Marylebone 75
Stanmore branch 173, 174, 240, 247
stations 6, 146–7
trains 147, 211
tunnelling 131
Waterloo 220, 221
Balham 229
Bank
Central Line 116
‘Mind the Gap’ announcement 116, 220, 221
Northern Line 105, 179, 181
St Mary Woolnoth 106, 108
Second World War 229
Waterloo & City Railway 105, 109–12
Bank Holiday Act 1871 60
Barbican (estate) 243
Barbican (station) 33, 52
Barker, T. C. 20–1, 85, 101, 127, 128, 132
Barlow, Peter William 95
Barlow, William Henry 95
Barman, Christian 157, 160–1, 179, 186, 213
Barnes, Julian 72, 259
Barnett, Henrietta 176
Baron’s Court 60
bars 39, 40
Battersea 274
Battersea Power Station 141
Bayswater 36, 57, 114
see also Queensway
Bayswater, Paddington & Holborn Bridge Railway 26
Beaumont, Maureen 196
Beck, Harry 66, 199–203, 270
Behave Yourself (Roberts) 214–15
Bell, John 44
Belsize Park 220, 230
Bendy Bus 242
Bennett, Arnold xi, 30, 80–1, 166, 172, 280
Berger, John 153–4
Bethnal Green 229–30, 255
Betjeman, John 267
Aldersgate station 33
Central Line 119
City & South London 104
commuters 167
District Line 59
Epping-Ongar line 209
Marylebone station 75, 78
Metroland 169, 170–2, 174
South Kentish Town 264
Betjeman (Wilson) 170
Betjeman Country (Delaney) 172–3
Beyer, Peacock & Co. 42
Big Tube 105, 120–5, 130, 158, 159, 182, 191, 206
Birmingham, Peggy and Jack 232
Bishop’s Road 37
Bishopsgate 57
see also Liverpool Street
Black, Jeremy 166
Black, Misha 270
Blackfriars 61, 111
Blackpool 84
Blair, Tony 249, 251, 252, 259
Blake, Neil 268
Blake Hall 209
Blakemore Hotel 58
Bleeding London (Nicholson) 165
Blomfield, Arthur 54–5
Boat Race 60, 80
bombs
air-raid shelters 224–33
Edgware Road 69
Bond Street 117, 274
Borough 104
Boston Manor 189
Bradley, Simon 55
Bramwell MD 153
Brent Cross 178
bridges 52, 54, 55, 60, 80, 81
Briggs, Thomas 16–17
British Gas 249
British Museum 152, 263
British Rail 76, 113, 123
British Railways 234
British Transport Commission 233–4, 239
Brittain, Vera 232–3
Bromley 244
Bromley-by-Bow 59, 244
Brompton & Piccadilly Circus Railway 150
see also Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway
Brompton Road 183
Brown, Mike 277
Bru
ce-Partington Plans, The (Conan Doyle) 63
Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 42, 86, 88, 89
Brunel, Marc 86–90, 95
Buchanan Report 242–3
Buckhurst Hill 208
Buckingham Palace 261
Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West (Gallop) 60
Bull & Bush 144, 176
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 97
Burnt Oak 178
Bus We Loved, The (Elborough) 17–18, 157
buses
East London Line 92
Gladstone 34
horse-drawn 20–1, 84–5
Livingstone 252
London Transport 192
petrol-driven 148, 149
Pick 223
Routemaster 242
Shillibeer 18–20, 102
UERL 158, 191
Bushey Heath 206
C
cable railways 94, 99
Calson Old Face 161
Camden 146, 175, 177, 178, 274
Camden Town 144, 230, 274
Canada Water 93, 250
Canary Wharf (complex) 249, 251
Canary Wharf (station) 250, 251
Canning Town 250
Cannon Street 48
car ownership 240
carriages
1938 stock 211
Big Tube 122
Central Line 114, 116, 117
City & South London Railway 99, 102–3, 104
Metropolitan Railway 38, 51, 77–8
Waterloo & City Railway 112
Yerkes Tubes 147