The Subterranean Railway (3 page)

So a pattern familiar to today’s Londoners was set, providing the answer to that oft-asked question as to why only the northern half of the capital is well served by the underground network: more suburban lines were built on the surface in south London than in the north,
obviating the need for underground railways. It was not until the invention at the end of the nineteenth century of tube railways, which ran deep into the London clay, that the underground system was to reach across the Thames. And even then, as we shall see, the geological conditions favoured underground railways north of the river.

The first railway through north London was something of an oddity, as it followed an orbital rather than a radial route. Originally intended primarily for goods, the North London Railway opened in 1850 between Fenchurch Street and Islington and was extended, in the following year, to Hampstead Road (Chalk Farm), via Bow, from where a spur went deep into London’s Docklands. Within a few months, 7,500 people were using the quarter-hourly service every day, even though the line pootled aimlessly around north and east London before diving into the City. By linking lots of other railways, it demonstrated the enormous latent demand for rail services which was to be the spur for the creation of the Underground.

Of course there were also other social forces which created the conditions that enabled Pearson’s concept to come to fruition. The phenomenon of travelling long distances to work, mostly on foot, had begun: as early as 1836, 175,000 people crossed London and Blackfriars bridges daily, most paying tolls. While there were also poor districts in growing industrial areas such as Spitalfields and Shoreditch in the East End, the slums of central London remained the worst in the capital until the second half of the century. Censuses reveal that a modest-sized house in areas such as Seven Dials or the southern end of Baker Street might be crammed with thirty or forty people.

There was a growing clamour among the political classes to clear the slums and improve transport communications. The railways fulfilled, at least in part, both roles. Although railways would be banned by a Parliamentary commission from reaching the centre of London, they were driven through the poorest parts of the capital outside the central area with little regard for the local inhabitants, while the richer estate owners were able to ensure that their property was not breached.
In the middle years of the century the development of the railways transformed London. As Simon Jenkins puts it,

the coming of the railways to London from the mid-1830s onwards dealt the metropolis a bigger, and certainly more lasting, blow than anything since the Great Fire. Like the Great Fire, the railways shattered both the living and working arrangements of hundreds of thousands of Londoners. Like the Fire, they ate up vast quantities of labour, material and capital, and destroyed acres of the metropolis in the process. Most important of all, like the Fire, they spun the population of London ever further from the core, speeding the decay of the central districts, yet at the same time enabling Londoners to enjoy higher standards of space and cleanliness in their housing than in any other city in the world.
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While this process was initiated by the suburban railways, of which the London & Greenwich was the pioneer, the Underground was to play a major part, with whole sections of London owing their existence to its arrival. Gradually the elements which made a London underground railway feasible were coming together. The relative popularity of the London & Greenwich showed that railways could successfully be used for short journeys and it stimulated a host of other such projects; employment was increasingly rapidly, creating, as we have seen, the notion of commuting; the continued growth of the City was leading to more and more congestion; and it was apparent that the horse was both an inefficient and an expensive source of power. Soaring land values and the vested interests of the major estate owners made surface developments in the centre of London prohibitively expensive and prompted a plethora of schemes for creating railways underneath and through London.

Pearson, therefore, was promoting an idea whose time had come. He was a visionary and an idealist, who recognized that the railways were
the key to transforming the city and improving the lot of the masses. Pearson had two, somewhat conflicting, ideas: a huge central London station and an underground railway connecting the main line stations which were then emerging on the periphery of the capital. Pearson’s station would have been on the edge of the City, at Farringdon, and as well as serving the four corners of Britain, its aim – in line with his zeal for social reform – were to allow working people to live in decent conditions outside town. This would have been achieved by linking it with a new town at Hornsey or Tottenham where 10,000 cottages, each with its own garden, were to be built cheaply enough for artisans and clerks to rent. Train fares, too, would have been low enough to ensure that they could travel daily up to town for work. Pearson’s vision, therefore, was never simply about transport but had at its heart the aim of creating a better life for his fellow citizens.

Pearson had a long line of social campaigns behind him. He was born in the City, and came from comfortable middle-class stock – his father, Thomas, was an upholsterer and feather merchant – but throughout his career he took on radical causes. He became a solicitor in 1816 and was soon elected a councilman of the City of London, possibly helped by the fact that his wife Mary was the daughter of another member of the Corporation. He came to prominence by exposing the system of packing juries in trials for political offences, and his progressive views led him to take on an eclectic range of issues, from prison reform to the ban on Jews becoming brokers in the City and the removal from a monument of an inscription attributing the Great Fire to Catholics. Until his long campaign for the Underground, Pearson’s most celebrated battle on behalf of the common people had been when he tried to break the monopoly of the capital’s gas companies, each of which had carved itself out an area where it was the sole supplier. Pearson had wanted the mains and pipes to be owned by co-operatives of consumers, a remarkably far-sighted concept for the 1840s; but, after a pitched battle over the installation of a gas main between workmen employed by the Commercial Gas Company and a rival group enlisted by Pearson for
the Commissioner of Sewers, he was forced to withdraw, leaving the monopoly unchallenged. It was as City Solicitor, a position he held from 1839 until his death in 1862, that he was able to smooth the way for the creation of the world’s first underground railway. Pearson had first set out the idea of ‘trains in drains’ when standing unsuccessfully in a by-election in Lambeth, but the idea survived his failure, although it was shelved while the excesses of the railway mania of the mid 1840s ran their course.

In many respects, poor Pearson can be seen as a serial but heroic British failure. He stood in several other by-elections for Parliament apart from Lambeth, always being roundly defeated, and many of his schemes and ideas never caught on, but his tenacity, perhaps prompted by these setbacks, brought the scheme for an underground railway to fruition.

Given this patchy record it is not surprising that Pearson’s contemporaries were sceptical about his early dreams of a rail line under the streets and that it took two decades for the railway to be built. Vague ideas for underground railways had been mooted as early as the 1830s, but, in truth, they were fanciful because the tunnelling technology was not really yet available. Of course, tunnels had been dug under hills and cuttings had been hewn through the countryside to create large embankments for railways, but these were in open country, not underneath the most expensive properties in Britain where the slightest subsidence would lead to exorbitant compensation claims. Victorian entrepreneurs were notably more prepared to take risks than today’s engineering companies, but not so gung-ho that they would consider such a foolhardy enterprise. Moreover, as we shall see, the method of powering the underground trains was to be a troublesome issue as electricity was the only effective means and the technology to harness it would not be available for another three decades.

Nor in these early days of the railway age were the political climate and administrative infrastructure conducive to building underground lines, which were fraught with risk while seeming to offer little
potential for making money. The motivation of the railway developers was always dominated by the need to make a profit. There was little consideration of the public good in these schemes, even if they happened to be of great benefit to society. As one historian puts it, ‘the paramount consideration therefore in the minds of the projectors and managers of Britain’s nineteenth century railway system when making decisions was a simple one: what balance could be expected between the direct private costs and private benefits of the investment? … The Victorian railway entrepreneur was guided by experience and commonsense, raised to a very high order, not by systems analysis.’
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Considerations other than short-term profit occasionally came into play, such as building a line to stop a rival company establishing a route or to cream off business from an existing railway, but developers, unlike Pearson, were not inclined to consider the social benefits.

Inevitably, therefore, many railway companies got it wrong (although today’s major project developers are not much better at getting their sums right, despite the panoply of analytical tools at their disposal). After the early railways, which tended to be profitable, they built many which never made an adequate return for investors – but most of them, particularly in urban areas like London, were of great social benefit. To the entrepreneurs and their shareholders, this was no use as they had no mechanism of capturing and profiting from that benefit. So the railways were not popular, and were often portrayed in the press as rapacious and irresponsible monsters wrecking the bucolic bliss of the countryside and forcing themselves on the unwilling inhabitants of towns and cities. As one historian puts it, the railways were cast ‘in the role of a mindless juggernaut, grinding private rights into the ground in the blind quest for profit’.
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They had to be controlled, and in London, without a city-wide government, it was Parliament’s job to take a strategic view, despite the politicians’
laissez-faire
instincts. From 1846 onwards, there was a series of inquiries, roughly one every decade, by Royal Commissions and select committees of Parliament into the various plans of the railway entrepreneurs. Their decisions
largely shaped the rail map of the capital as it exists today and, indeed, the findings of the first one, the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini of 1846, led directly to the development of the Metropolitan line. The establishment was a response to the fact that at the height of the railway mania of the mid 1840s, no fewer than nineteen urban lines and termini were projected and it was clear that this potential wholesale demolition, and the chaotic traffic conditions it would engender, could not be countenanced, even by the Victorians obsessed with keeping government out of business.

The Commission took evidence from a diverse range of people and interests – valuers, parish bodies, the Corporation of London, even Her Majesty’s Woods and Forests, and, of course, railway developers with their retinue of traffic managers, solicitors, engineers and land agents. The key issue for the Commission was the location of the London stations. Should they be on the edge of the current conurbation or should the railways be allowed to make incursions right into the centre, creating a much more convenient service? The commissioners had to balance two conflicting needs: on the one hand, ‘if they allowed the wholesale invasion of central London presently intended, they would fill in an area already crowded beyond endurance’; on the other, if they left the termini too far out they would block up the thoroughfares with ‘leviathan waggons and vans sometimes creeping about the streets, having a few articles at the bottoms of the waggons [while] at other times with loads overhanging on each side the foot-pavement of the narrow streets and lanes through which they pass’.
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In the event, the commissioners found that the advantage of ‘bringing the railway stations further into the city appear to us exaggerated’.
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They were, of course, wrong: think how wonderful it would be to have a series of city centre railways, bringing people right into the heart of London without the need to transfer onto buses or the Underground. It was, though, an impossible dream. Even if the railway companies had been given permission to build deep into the City, the economics would have proved an insuperable
barrier. The nearer the railways ventured into town, the more they had to pay for the land and the more likely they were to come up against the powerful interests of the great landowners of London. As John Moxon, chairman of the London & Croydon Railway, said: ‘Every railway we apprehend in its first mile costs more than in any other part of the line’.
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The early London termini were, therefore, crude sheds, one-storey brick houses containing little more than a ticket office. It was only when the railway companies wanted to demonstrate their power that they began building palaces like St Pancras and Euston, or elegant sheds like King’s Cross.

So the railway developers were defeated – the commissioners rejected seventeen of the nineteen proposed schemes before them, and gave only conditional assent to the other two, both extensions south of the river. Moreover, the Commission recommended a no-go area for the railways, extending from Park Lane in the west to Bishopsgate in the east and from the New Road (now Marylebone and Euston roads) in the north to the Borough in the south. The ban held, with the small exception of the incursion of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway over the Thames (see
Chapter 3
), until the building of Victoria station in 1858, and the line of terminals stretching today from Marylebone to King’s Cross shows how the Commission’s findings determined the future shape of railways in London.