The Subterranean Railway (8 page)

The Metropolitan had prepared itself for growth from the start. It had obtained powers for two extra tracks between King’s Cross and Farringdon, called, oddly, ‘the City Widened Lines’, and the completion of the Midland’s awesome station at St Pancras, together with a connection to the Metropolitan, necessitated their rapid construction to meet the demand. They were brought fully into use in 1868 and it is a testimony to the success of the Metropolitan’s original concept that the busiest part of the track had to be doubled within five years of the line opening.

Even before the completion of the City Widened Lines, the Metropolitan had begun its extension into the City, reaching Moorgate (with an intermediate station at Aldersgate Street, now Barbican) in 1865. There was, too, a connection from the south which added to what had become one of the world’s busiest railways. The London,
Chatham & Dover railway had crossed the River Thames at Blackfriars – where its coat of arms still adorns the bridge – in 1864, reaching Ludgate Hill and then connecting with the Metropolitan at the rebuilt and extended station of Farringdon Street two years later to form what remains today the only main line railway link through the heart of the capital. It was not a popular development since it wrecked one of London’s most famous views, the sight of St Paul’s sitting ever larger astride the rest of the City as one descends Fleet Street. An ugly bridge cut the sight of the cathedral in half, but surprisingly there were few objectors during the scheme’s long gestation period. It was only when the bridge was completed that the Victorian environmentalists suddenly woke up to what had been done. As one contemporary observer put it, ‘That viaduct has utterly spoiled one of the finest street views in the metropolis, and is one of the most unsightly objects ever constructed, in any such situation, anywhere in the world.’
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The viaduct was demolished in the early 1990s, as part of the work to lower the line and in order to build what is now City Thameslink station. The view of the cathedral from Fleet Street has thankfully been restored.

With half a dozen main line railways – both the South Eastern and the London & South Western also sent in trains – now connected to the Metropolitan, the journey possibilities were almost endless. They were further increased in 1871 when a connection was built from Snow Hill Junction to Smithfield to provide a triangular junction which enabled the Chatham’s trains to reach Moorgate Street. Had there been trainspotters in the 1860s, the Metropolitan would have been their paradise. All kinds of services, pulled by a variety of locomotives, many with hastily conceived adaptations to try to reduce their emissions during their journey through the tunnels, were to be found using the railway. The Great Northern, for example, began working freight trains from King’s Cross to Herne Hill while the Chatham ran a circuitous passenger service starting at Victoria and running out to Brixton, back into town via Ludgate Hill, on to the
Metropolitan through King’s Cross, and out to terminate at Wood Green – a wonderful tour of much of south and north Victorian London all in one train journey.
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There was fierce competition over this cross-London route. The Chatham’s chairman for the last thirty years of the nineteenth century was James Staats Forbes, an emollient fellow who specialized in rescuing railways in financial trouble. His much more vituperative rival on the South Eastern, Edward Watkin, was another formidable railway entrepreneur and when, as we see in the next chapter, they controlled respectively the District and the Metropolitan, their refusal to cooperate with each other hampered the development of the Underground and delayed the completion of the Circle line.

The South Eastern had built a spur above the rooftops of Southwark to connect with the Chatham line over the Blackfriars railway bridge and in 1878 the railway ran its own series of strange services, linking Woolwich and Greenwich with Muswell Hill and Enfield, via Ludgate Hill and King’s Cross. Shared lines, however, did not mean shared services. These trains called at all stations but because of the Forbes–Watkin rivalry, South Eastern tickets were not accepted at the Chatham stations of Ludgate Hill and Snow Hill. And as the railway historian O.S. Nock puts it, ‘woe betide the passenger with a London, Chatham & Dover Railway ticket for Wood Green (Great Northern Railway) who attempted to make use of a South Eastern train that turned up at Ludgate Hill while he was waiting’.
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At the height of this crazy competition, the Chatham was running eighty trains per day in each direction between Ludgate Hill and Moorgate Street alone, but these services were legendary for their lateness and, as Nock says, ‘one can well imagine that the service extended far into the night before the last ones struggled home’.
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This was an old disease of the railways, the tendency to build and operate them for their own sake rather than to meet any real demand. The Metropolitan, which had largely avoided this trap, having created and fed an important market, was happy to make money out of this
profligacy, routing the majority of these services on the City Widened Lines and thus reserving its original tracks for itself. Most of these cross-London passenger services were withdrawn in the early years of the twentieth century when the motor bus began to provide a more flexible and less circuitous option for people making occasional journeys across the City. Goods trains continued, however, to be heavy users of the line. The vital link through the Snow Hill tunnel fell into disuse in the 1960s but was reopened, at the prompting of the Greater London Council, in 1988 and is now used by the very heavily loaded Thameslink trains. Indeed, the serious overcrowding on today’s Thameslink trains suggests that the opportunities created by the Victorian pioneers in building railways through the centre of London were not sufficiently exploited by their successors. While roundabout journeys from Victoria to Wood Green may not have made much sense commercially, there were plenty of other potential cross-London services which did. The problem was the lack of coordination between the railways and the absence of any state intervention in trying to plan a network of services, a recurring theme throughout the early history of London’s railways, including the Underground.

Indeed, the competition and rivalry between the various companies meant that the infrastructure they created was not always used to best effect. Nowhere was this more true than for the Circle line (see next chapter), which was run by two separate and rival companies. The rivalry and lack of coordination explains, too, why London was never traversed by a main line train company. There were minor exceptions, such as the Chatham’s incursion across the river to Farringdon, and, on the edges of central London, the East and West London lines, both principally used for freight but with a few sporadic passenger services.

For its part, the Metropolitan saw itself partly as a main line railway and had designs on extending far out of London into the relatively uncharted north-western suburbs and their hinterland, which would see the company reach as far as Amersham, Aylesbury, and the strange outpost of Verney Junction in the middle of the Buckinghamshire
countryside some fifty miles from the capital. In a way this was more a story of the Underground extending overground, since all the lines emanating outwards were built on land that was cheap enough not to require tunnels, once they had left the confines of central London. The key was Baker Street, from where its first extension, a line to Swiss Cottage, was completed in April 1868.
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It was London’s second underground line, not the section of today’s Jubilee, which is a deep tube line, but the sub-surface tunnels which are now used by Metropolitan line trains. The original idea had been to run through to Finchley Road, but as usual money was short, and eventually a single-track railway was built to Swiss Cottage with intermediate stops at Marlborough Road and St John’s Wood. The latter was very near Lord’s cricket ground, perceived already as such a vital market that it had its own temporary ticket office within the ground on match days. At first this extension seemed an insignificant little branch line, especially as the junction at Baker Street proved difficult to operate and through services from Moorgate were replaced the following year by a shuttle along the new line. Financially, the line was hopeless because it did not reach Finchley Road, which would have offered a bigger catchment area, and nor had a projected branch to Hampstead been built. Nevertheless, this little branch, owned initially by a seperate company, was to be the start of a major extension of the Metropolitan that would stimulate the growth of a whole quadrant of London.

Another significant, but ultimately less important incursion had been made westwards by the Hammersmith & City line. This, too, was a separate railway created with backing from both the Metropolitan and the Great Western Railway, a surprising liaison given their disputes during the early days of the Metropolitan. In fact, the Hammersmith & City opened in June 1864, less than a year after the damaging argument between the two railways that had led to the Great Western withdrawing its rolling stock. The line was a rather tortuous one: starting from the Great Western line at Green Lane (now Westbourne Park), a mile out of Paddington, it took in the fields of Porto Bello (as
they were then called) and Notting Barn farms, via Latimer Road and Shepherds Bush, to reach its terminus near Hammersmith Broadway. The line was designed to serve the newly growing residential areas of Shepherd’s Bush which, according to Roy Porter, ‘became plastered with two and three storey houses and small shops, bought by traders and clerks with building society mortgages’
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and Hammersmith, a village which had long been known for its spinach and strawberries, but now had begun to assume its present-day reputation as a transport interchange, a place to pass through. The railway also served Ladbroke Grove, where the once elegant terraces had deteriorated quite quickly through multiple occupation by less well-off people and were now quickly being infilled by smaller dwellings aimed at the burgeoning middle classes, and as Porter points out, the ‘planting of stations in the open fields (Latimer Road, Goldhawk Road) encourag[ed] speculators to buy up smallholdings’. This was the first example of a pattern that was to be repeated throughout the development of the Underground: its arrival would prompt a rapid change in the character of an area and make many developers their fortune. Indeed, there was a bit of judicious profiteering by a couple of the Hammersmith & City directors, Charles Blake and John Parson, who had bought land on the path of the line and made a fortune by reselling it back to the company, a not infrequent type of scam during the development of the railways.

The Hammersmith & City had the added advantage of connecting with the West London railway, a sad little line which was testimony to the lesson that enterprise was not a sufficient precondition for commercial success. It had been built in 1844 as the only section of the grand-sounding Birmingham, Bristol & Thames Junction railway ever built and was spectacularly unsuccessful. It ran along the main Great Western line at Willesden, down to the Kensington canal basin, by the site of the Olympia exhibition hall, where its terminus survives as a station. It only carried passengers for six months and then became the butt of jokes in the satirical magazine
Punch
, to such an extent that it
was called
Punch
’s railway. The magazine cruelly wrote: ‘Omnibuses have been put on to meet the trains but the meetings have been so strictly private, no one having been present [save] the driver of the ’bus and the guard of the train.’
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The line, however, which had fallen into disuse, was revived by its connection with the Metropolitan and some trains ran directly from Farringdon through to Kensington (Addison Road, as it was often known) station. However, the station was a mile from the centre of Kensington, which meant few passengers used it and therefore most trains remained on the Hammersmith branch.

Present-day users of the Underground would find some of the early service patterns on the Metropolitan reassuringly familiar and others totally improbable. Mayhew describes the schedule of ten trains that left Farringdon in the hour after noon on the Saturday in May 1865 when he visited: four to Hammersmith, three Metropolitan (to Bishop’s Road, Paddington), two to Kensington and one Great Northern train. Three of them depart in the first five minutes, showing how closely together the services could operate. In fact, Mayhew had chosen a relatively quiet period as the average hourly total was around twenty per hour. By the time of Mayhew’s trip along the line, a staggering 352 trains were scheduled to depart from Farringdon every weekday and 200 on Sundays, demonstrating that leisure was already a strong market. The weekday services, which departed between 5.15 a.m. and midnight, consisted of 116 Metropolitan trains to Bishop’s Road, 110 to Hammersmith, sixty-two Great Western trains to Kensington, ten to Windsor and thirty Great Northern services while the rest were empty stock and locomotives.

Such a cascade of trains may have been a bit excessive but it did not matter. Spurred by the requirements of capitalism to make a return for their shareholders, these Victorian railway pioneers did not hesitate in sweating the assets they had so painstakingly built up by persuading investors to stump up the risk capital. Labour costs were low and coal was cheap, so running a few extra little-used trains to create a full timetable was not an expensive business.

Twenty years after the Metropolitan opened, a system of lines had built up using the underground section as the key link through London. Some might say this account is a bit selective because the early history of the Underground is so difficult to separate out from that of London’s suburban railways, as witnessed by the bizarre array of services offered by the various rail companies south of the river. But over the following twenty years, the whole pattern of the Underground map would change with two major developments which led to its current shape: the completion of the Circle and the development of the deep tunnel network, the real Tube, the greatest part of which was constructed within an astonishing seventeen-year period.