The Subterranean Railway (13 page)

Not surprisingly, with the combination of the pioneering method and the difficult geological conditions – the solid London clay often giving way to gravel and sand – there were frequent floodings and, as with so many of these great Victorian enterprises, the money put up by the investors – who were never to receive any return on their investment – soon ran out. Work had started in 1825 but was halted several times due to flooding – which at one point nearly drowned Isambard and killed six other men – and lack of funds. The government bailed out the project, originally costed at £179,000 (the best estimate is that in today’s money this represents around a hundred times more, say £18m), with a loan of a quarter of a million pounds and the tunnel eventually opened in March 1843, nearly two decades after the start of construction having cost over twice the original estimate.

While the tunnel was an engineering triumph, the first in the world to be built under water, financially it proved to be a disaster. Although 2 million people, many of them sightseers rather than those needing to get across the Thames for business or commercial purposes, paid the penny toll in the first year, the receipts of just under £9,000 were nothing like sufficient to service the debt, let alone repay the loan. The biggest mistake had been the decision not to incur the extra
cost of building a road access to the tunnel, which meant that the carriages, which were to have been charged sixpence, could not use it. For a time, thanks to a series of ‘Fancy Fair’ promotions and the encouragement of stallholders to sell food and souvenirs, the owners managed to turn the tunnel into an major attraction for both tourists and leisure-seeking Londoners and briefly it became London’s most successful gift shop. One plucky trader, who hailed from Leipzig, even advertised that he was German-speaking (Britain was on friendly terms with Prussia at the time) by putting up a sign saying
Hier spricht man Deutsch
. Ultimately, though, there was a limit to how attractive the stallholders could make a narrow, though elegantly built, tunnel. By the 1860s, Brunel’s wonderful construction had degenerated into a low-life den, inhabited by drunks, the homeless and prostitutes. The solution, for the poor shareholders, was to sell the tunnel for use as a railway line to the East London Railway at a loss. The East London paid £200,000, not enough to cover the debt which had, by then, risen to nearly double the original sum.

This was another hapless enterprise. Having installed the railway, the company started operating services in 1869 between New Cross and Wapping. North of the river, this was extended first to Shoreditch and then, in 1876, to Liverpool Street via Whitechapel and Bishopsgate junction; but the enterprise was doomed financially since the connections with the rest of the railway network were poor and (just like today) few people wanted to travel to the obscure parts of town it served, especially on a route that was effectively a slow dogleg. Moreover, the one useful destination, Liverpool Street, could only be used by a very limited number of East London trains because the Great Eastern jealously guarded its grand fiefdom.

Inevitably, the East London fell into financial difficulties and Watkin was ready to pounce. The line was taken over by a consortium of six railways, with Watkin becoming first the receiver, in 1878, and then chairman. While there was some modest improvement in the line’s fortunes, particularly for freight avoiding the already overcrowded
route through London on the Metropolitan, none of the grand plans for the East London was ever realized until the twenty-first century. There had been suggestions that New Cross could become the ‘Willesden of the South’, a major junction linking several routes, but that was never a realistic concept. Watkin had hoped the East London would be part of his scheme to connect the north-west of England with the south coast and Paris through the Channel Tunnel; but instead, from 1884, Brunel’s beautiful tunnel ended up being used only by a few underground trains connecting into the Circle. In yet another illustration of the petty rivalry between the Metropolitan and the District, the trains belonging to the latter went into New Cross Gate while the Metropolitan’s stock used New Cross, a few hundred yards down the road, because it was owned by the South Eastern, another company chaired by Watkin.

Forbes had ambitions for the District to make other incursions into east London, but these had to wait until 1902, two years before his death, when the long-mooted Whitechapel and Bow section finally opened. It was the last shallow underground railway built in London, as the first two miles out of Whitechapel ran under the Mile End and Bow roads, after which the line continued on the surface, joining existing railways to go all the way to Upminster, thereby opening up large swathes of the Essex countryside.

In the west, however, the District had advanced much earlier in the same way that the Metropolitan did in the north-west: stage by stage helped by occasional takeovers of existing or proposed railways. But unlike the Metropolitan, the District was not encumbered by aspirations to be a main line railway. There was, however, one almost equally ambitious scheme that was briefly put forward by the District: a huge outer circle whose route was set out by John Fowler. Starting at Clapham Junction, it would have described a fantastic ellipse around what were then the limits of the Metropolis, taking in such diverse places as Battersea, Chelsea, Kensington, Kilburn, Camden, Finsbury Park, Stamford Hill, Bethnal Green, Limehouse and New Cross where
it would have used existing lines to regain Clapham. This was not merely a fanciful idea, as the concept of an outer Circle had even found favour with the 1863 Parliamentary Select Committee which had recommended the completion of the (inner) Circle line, but in truth the plan was always unrealistic. Despite the success of the North London railway, which happened to link many places that had little alternative transport, people did not want to travel in huge circular routes around the capital and the number seeking to make trips between outlying districts and suburbs will always be much fewer than those seeking to go in and out of the centre.
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Moreover, the scheme trod on too many toes of the existing railway owners, who feared, probably wrongly, that it would take much of their business away.

This ambitious but doomed plan should not be confused with the services that were called the outer Circle, which started running in 1872. This started at Broad Street, the North London terminus sited, until its demolition in 1986, next to Liverpool Street station (completed in 1874), and ran along the North London to Willesden Junction, down the West London and through on the District to Mansion House. There was, too, a middle Circle service which ran from Moorgate to Mansion House, but taking the long way round by using the Hammersmith & City branch, the West London and the District. In effect, these types of service were designed to get people from one side of town to the other by train, a kind of journey which was only made easy once the tube railways started to be built from 1890 onwards.

Its grandiose ambitions stymied, the District was intent on spreading westwards as fast as possible. Most of the area west of Kensington was open land, scattered with a few villages which then, as now, were prosperous and, mostly, eager to be connected with through trains to London. The scarcity of passengers on the District’s central London section between Mansion House and South Kensington meant that rapid extensions were vital for the company’s finances – but only possible if the company could raise the capital to build them. Forbes
looked towards Hammersmith, Kew and Richmond as potentially lucrative markets.

The District’s first western extension, opened in 1874, took the railway to Hammersmith. This was a controversial destination for a company laden with debt, given that it seemed to be deliberately trying to take passengers away from the Metropolitan’s branch, to Hammersmith opened in 1864. Watkin, of course, was furious. As Hugh Douglas neatly put it, ‘this tapping of the Metropolitan market was a further thorn to scratch the sensitive skin of Sir Edward Watkin and his shareholders’.
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But Hammersmith was rightly seen by the District as a better prospect than the intermediate parts of west London, especially as it was a good interchange point for places further afield such as Richmond and Ealing. What infuriated Watkin even more was that not only did the District’s services offer a more direct connection with central London, but the new station was exploiting patronage which had been stimulated by the arrival of the Metropolitan a decade earlier. In that time, Hammersmith had changed from providing strawberries and spinach to Londoners into an expanding suburb that was rapidly attracting development and, therefore, was becoming a more mature market for the railways. Certainly, Hammersmith became the area west of London best served by the Underground, a position it still enjoys now, but local passengers had to suffer the inconvenience of the two stations being separated by the busy Hammersmith Broadway, a situation that pertains with passengers transferring between the two still having to brave a perilous road crossing.

Indeed, the way developers and the railway went hand in hand was well demonstrated three years later when the District reached Richmond partly using London & South Western tracks. This extension stimulated the development next to Turnham Green, one of the intermediate stations, of the first garden suburb, Bedford Park. The inspiration for Bedford Park, which pre-dated the more famous garden city at Letchworth in Hertfordshire by a quarter of a century, came
from the Arts and Craft Movement, the group of artists who argued that attractive objects, and indeed surroundings, should be the right of everyone, rather than simply the affluent, and who thus encouraged the appreciation of beauty in revolt against the dominant materialist and, as they perceived them, vulgar Victorian values. However, Bedford Park was developed by a rather dubious and financially stretched builder, Jonathan Carr, a cloth merchant, whose aims were an amalgam of materialism and idealism, and while initially some small houses were built, the latter ones were large and intended for the better-off City gentlemen who could afford the high rental of £40 per year for the advantage of being able to reach their offices within half an hour of getting on the train. In defence of Carr, the design of the estate by its first architect, Norman Shaw, was notable, mostly in Queen Anne style with the long rows of houses being individualized through the use of gables, tall prominent chimneys and large windows. There was a church and a mock-Tudor pub, surrounded by carefully preserved mature trees, to add to the attractiveness and the village feel which was so strong that for a time the estate had its own newspaper. Nor was it Carr’s fault that Bedford Park was to prove the precursor for countless far less attractive suburban developments both in Britain and abroad.

The opening of the District to Hammersmith had also led to numerous housing developments near intermediate stations such as West Kensington, which spurred the District to build yet more extensions. The District’s need to extend deep into rural areas was the result of the massive debts incurred by the construction of its first, very expensive, section of line. Indeed, the District was so focused on growing westwards that it was hardly surprising that progress with the Circle was so slow. The extensions, after all, were likely to be lucrative and Mansion House was a useful terminus with access to the City. So why bother with the troublesome project of completing the loop?

The District duly reached Ealing, a long-term target, in 1879, with intermediate stops at Chiswick Park, Acton Town and Ealing
Common.
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Trains were scheduled to take forty-eight minutes to reach Mansion House from the new terminus at Ealing, little different from the timetable of their electric successors today. From 1883, there was also a service right out to Windsor from Mansion House, using the Great Western Railway’s line. This service, though, was little used, perhaps because the District’s four-wheel rolling stock was too crude to give a good ride on the long non-stop stretch from Ealing to Slough; or perhaps, simply, because Windsor was just too far out and too affluent to encourage regular commuting.

The effect on land prices resulting from the arrival of the railway began to be noticed and now landowners in Isleworth and Hounslow sought to see their areas connected with the District. A new company, the Hounslow & Metropolitan, was formed to build a line from Hounslow Barracks (near the present Hounslow West station) to a junction with the District’s Ealing branch; the line opened in stages until its completion in 1886 and was operated by the District. Here, though, more than ten miles from the centre of London, the development pickings were not as easy and the line attracted little new housing along its path until after the First World War.

In the South, by extending the stub of a line to West Brompton towards the Thames and Putney, the target of the District seems to have been leisure traffic. This was extended to the station now called Putney Bridge where people could take steamboat trips and watch the Oxford and Cambridge University boat race, then a huge national event. Indeed, the opening in March 1880 was chosen deliberately to be in time for that year’s race. This extension did not attract as much development as the Ealing line and consequently there was less first-class traffic, a key determinant of profitability for the railway, because the areas served were not as fashionable and rents tended to be lower.

The District’s management had ambitions to head further south over the river to Wimbledon, taking the line across the Common; but, although Parliamentary powers for this had been obtained in 1881, the railway was prevented from building the line – which was a joint effort
with the London & South Western – by its usual financial difficulties. This saved the Common as, following complaints from the residents, a less damaging route was eventually agreed upon and opened in 1889. Visions of reaching Kingston had to be shelved and eventually abandoned due to lack of money. Coincidentally, the running time of the District trains to Mansion House from Wimbledon was exactly the same as from Ealing, forty-eight minutes. Apart from an extension to South Harrow and then Uxbridge (the latter actually eventually passed to the Metropolitan), and a loop to South Acton, all completed in the first decade of the new century, this was the end of the District’s expansion westwards.