No miracle has ever been more taken for granted than the London Underground. A mere 150 years ago it did not exist. Within 50 years the main arteries of the best known system in the world, to be immortalised in Harry Becks ingenious map of 1933, were throbbing with life. Londoners had embraced a revolutionary form of transport. Its impact was to be phenomenal. London’s transport system was transformed and the city’s consequent growth was explosive. There was nothing inevitable about this. No grand plan was ever made; government played the role of permissive onlooker; finance and potential profits were uncertain; the technology was untried or non-existent; and the travelling public greeted the idea with fear and trepidation. Yet, by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the vision of ‘descending into hell’ to get to work had become an established fact in the minds of Londoners.
By 1860 London had become the first World City. With a population of 2.8 million, London was the largest city in the world. It was the hub of an ever-expanding Empire and a Capital City that acted as a magnet for workers of all types. Around a quarter of a million additional people travelled into London to work every day. To this may be added many others who came to London as sightseers on excursions. To get around the city they had the choice of horse drawn omnibuses, their own private carriages or simply to walk. By such means no fewer than six million people attended the Great Exhibition during 1851. The mid century railway boom led to many new railway termini around the edges of the City – the limits of railway penetration into the City having been set by Parliament in 1846 – and, although much of the railway traffic was freight, still more people were enabled to travel up to London as rail passengers. The situation was becoming chaotic and it seemed that a point of complete gridlock was imminent. The size of the problem may be illustrated in that an estimated 6Mt of horse manure had to be disposed of in London each year by the middle of the century.
Casting around
The Victorians were far from blind to this problem. A multitude of solutions were put forward. Additional surface railways were ruled out not just by Parliamentary Committees but also by costings and common sense; much of the land was owned by the rich and privileged with very high ideas of compensation and if all the possible railways were to be built there would be little of London left as a city. Rival plans included sky walkways and different forms of underground transport. The vision that won the day was that of Charles Pearson. His plan was for a huge central station for the City with underground railways connecting the main-line termini that were developing at the edge of London. Pearson’s standpoint was that of a social reformer. He wanted to make it easier for the poor of London to move out of their slums and travel easily and cheaply into London from new towns planned for locations such as Hornsey or Tottenham. The 1854-5 Commons Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications took a favourable view of Pearson’s arguments and recommended the construction of an underground railway to connect the various termini with a central station at Farringdon.
Financing such a scheme proved problematic. Pearson’s laudable reforming zeal needed to be linked to the promise of financial return to potential investors. Victorian governments did not offer State subsidies. Fundamentally, many had doubts about the very concept of an underground railway. Nothing like this had ever been tried before. An article in The Times on 30th November 1861 suggested that Londoners would never choose "to be drawn amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London". As the engineering methods were untried or even unknown, it is unsurprising that there was a great fear of subsidence with the consequent danger of endless claims for compensation. Financial backing for the Metropolitan Railway Company was slow to materialise. While the Great Western Railway was prepared to invest GBP 175,000 the Great Northern was more reluctant. By 1858 the company was so desperate for funds that it spent GBP 1,000 in an effort to find more backers. Pearson was very actively involved in this process and through his position as solicitor to the City of London Corporation he was able to secure a deal whereby the Corporation allowed the Metropolitan to buy land in the Fleet Valley for GBP 179,000 and in return they invested GBP 200,000 in shares, which were later sold at a profit. This was a very unusual step for a pubic body to take in the 19th century but it gave the Metropolitan Railway a lifeline.
Rough beginnings
John Fowler (later Sir John) was appointed the engineer for the project. The whole length of the new line was to be cut and cover, except for a 700 yard (640m) long tunnel under the hill of Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell. In engineering terms the process was straightforward. The 2,000 or so railway navvies – who lived up to their reputation for drinking and brawling as well as suffering death from disease and accidents – worked in two shifts to dig a hole and construct a brick lining, install the railway and then cover with brick archways, with cast iron crossgirders being used in some places. At the west end of the line – from Paddington (Praed Street) to Kings Cross – the process was simplified by following the route of the New Road (now Marylebone Road and Euston Road) as this negated the need to knock down houses. At the eastern end, however, as the line went through the Fleet Valley, a measure of house clearance was required. The Metropolitan Railway claimed that this displaced only 307 people but opponents of the railway put the figure much higher – the highest being 12,000 people displaced. There was little effort to compensate these people who were among the labouring poor of the area. It was in the Fleet Valley that the most difficult engineering problem occurred when in 1862, after a heavy rain storm, the Fleet sewer collapsed, flooding the works. The sewer had to be rebuilt. Costs were mounting by this time and an extra GBP 300,000 had to be raised on the promise of a five per cent dividend.
World’s first
The official opening of the Metropolitan Line was on 9 January 1863. Some 600 shareholders and guests joined the train at Paddington and spent two hours inspecting each station before arriving for a banquet at Farringdon Street at 3pm. Famously, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, refused the invitation on the grounds that he would wait until his death to go underground. On the following day 30,000 people travelled on the new line on 120 trains that were run in both directions.
While there were very positive comments on the innovative gas lighting in the carriages – where the lights were good enough to read newspapers – complaints began immediately about the atmosphere created by the steam engines that pulled the trains. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had claimed that, "the passage of a train through a tunnel creates such a commotion and change of air that I do not know of any difficulty in any tunnel that I am acquainted with." The passengers on the Metropolitan Line would not have agreed with him. Fowler himself attempted to design a better engine and Daniel Gooch, the Great Western Engineer, worked on the diversion of steam to cold water tanks and briefly coke, rather than coal, was tried – but soon found to be more toxic. The problem of the choking effects of the engines within even these shallow tunnels was never solved. If there was a delay or breakdown, the tunnels, trains and stations might fill with steam; three deaths were in some measure linked to the fumes; and local chemists made up a ‘Metropolitan Mixture’ for those who seemed to need it after a journey. The only cure would be electrification of the line.
The tunnels and stations of the Metropolitan are, of course, still in use, but the modern traveler might find few similarities. The track in each direction had three rails so that the wider gauge Great Western trains could use the system for through trains from Paddington, just as the Great Northern trains also used it but on standard 4ft 81/2inch gauge – which was also used by the Metropolitan’s own trains. Cheaper early morning trains with a fare of 2d (two Old Pence) were introduced from 1864 and over 300 workmen used them daily. The gradual movement away from the overcrowded slum areas was thus encouraged by the availability of cheap transport. The line was also heavily used for freight. A special spur was soon added to transport animal carcasses to Smithfield. (It is often forgotten that the Underground system continued to be used for freight until well after the Second World War).
Purely in terms of numbers, the Metropolitan was a success, with 11.8 million passengers in the first year at a daily average of 32,000. At the end of that year a dividend of 6.25 per cent was paid out to shareholders. This was sufficient encouragement to lead to the formation of other railway companies to join in on the act. Parliament was inundated with new schemes and a House of Lords Committee of 1863 called for "an inner circuit of railway that should abut, if not actually join, nearly all the principal railway termini of the Metropolis". The Metropolitan Line had already achieved the northern arc of this circle and the newly formed District Line began from 1868 to work on the southern section from South Kensington to Blackfriars, making use of the newly built Thames embankment as much as possible. Progress was slow. There were fewer opportunities to build on the routes of roads. More properties had to be purchased and demolished but this time they were in areas where the owners were more capable of resisting and demanding more compensation. The work was immensely disruptive and capital for the project hard to come by.
Uneasy bedfellows
Cooperation between the two companies, which might have seemed an obvious solution, became impossible because of the personal rivalry between James Forbes, who took over the management of the District Line and Edward Watkin, who held the same position in the Metropolitan Line. Neither man saw the completion of the Circle Line as a priority and both were more concerned with the development of their lines as surface lines to the outskirts of the expanding Metropolis. Such plans were of great importance in the development of suburban London but they meant that the Circle was not completed until 1884. Symbolic of the continuing disputes between the two companies was the extraordinary fact that Metropolitan trains ran clockwise around the outer track while District trains went anticlockwise on the inner track. This was the only line to effectively be planned through a Parliamentary Committee and it is perhaps unsurprising that it was not commercially viable until the other deep lines were added to the system and connected to it.
The tunnelling shield – usually known as the Greathead shield although first developed by the Brunels for their tunnel under the Thames which was opened in 1843 – combined with the soft and undisturbed clay deep under London to allow for the building of the first lines that can rightly be called ‘The Tube’. The shield had a 12ft (3.7m) diameter; it was moved using 210t thrust hydraulic jacks to move it forward; and it was used in conjunction with mechanical diggers called ‘the Thompson’ which cut with saw edged buckets. The shield was followed up by prefabricated cast iron segments to form the tunnel walls. This was much easier than building a brick arch. With this system the first deep tunnel for the London Underground was completed from Stockwell to the City – now part of the Northern Line – to be opened as the City and South London Railway in 1890.
Obviously, there could be no question of using steam trains through these deep tube tunnels. The initial intention was to use cable traction. In 1888, however, the first experiments in electric traction were being made, in Berlin by Werner von Siemens, in Ireland on the Bessbrook and Newry Railway and in Brighton on Magnus Volks seafront railway, which is still in use. Electrification was started in 1889 using two electric lines of direct current, which was the system that was adopted eventually by the whole of the network. As previous history might suggest, it took the District and Metropolitan 15 years to convert from steam to electric and only after further acrimonious disputes. Electric engines were used at first to pull the trains but these proved problematic – especially as some of them were so heavy that they caused shaking at surface level – and they were eventually replaced with the now familiar powered coaches, known as electrical multiple units. All electrification was completed by the First World War.
The success of the City and South London Railway stimulated a boom in tube construction. The Waterloo and City Railway (soon labelled and still known as ‘The Drain’) was opened in 1898; the Central London Railway – the middle section of the Central Line- opened in 1900; and the Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Hampstead Tube (now Northern Line) all opened between 1906 and 1907. The new lines, particularly the Central Line, tended to follow the route of roads as it was cheaper to do so. This gave some of the lines sharp curves, particularly noticeable for Regent Street on the original Bakerloo Line. The ‘padded cells’ of the City and South London Railway (there were only tiny windows at the tops of the carriages) were soon replaced with carriages that were light and comfortable and not so different from modern trains. Journeys were relatively cheap. The Central Line was known as the ‘twopenny tube’ and this became the standard fare for some time. For reasons of simplicity, the different classes in carriages disappeared and experiments with separate coaches for women did not last. Lifts were installed to take passengers to the platforms. The first escalator was not installed until 1911, but they soon became a feature of the system.
The ambitions of a remarkable American, Charles Tyson Yerkes, lay behind the final spurt in tube building. It is difficult to characterise Yerkes. He has been dubbed ‘the Dodgy American’ and his career hardly bears close scrutiny if a typical turn of the century businessman or entrepreneur is being sought. His Chicago background – where he had modernised and expanded the tram system – showed him to have a cut-throat and cavalier attitude to business. His own guiding principle in business had been, "Buy up old junk, fix it up a little and unload it on other fellows." Having fled from Chicago in 1900, Yerkes sought new opportunities in London – a city that seemed ripe for further underground development. By 1900 there were already schemes for further tube lines.
Parliamentary approval had been given. Finance was the problem. The Baker Street and Waterloo Line was the most ambitious, at three miles long and with stations at Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. Whitaker Wright’s London & Globe Finance Corporation was founded in 1897 to raise the capital for the project. The work was started but the money ran out before 1900. Wright was found guilty of fraud and committed suicide in 1904. Yerkes saw his chance, acquired the line in 1902 and added it to other holdings he had to form the Underground Electric Railways Company of London Ltd. It was this company that was to become London Transport in 1933 and by 1914 only the Metropolitan Line remained independent from the UERL.
Having gained control of the rights to build the new lines – such as what was soon called the Bakerloo line (to the dismay of The Times) – Yerkes set about finding the money. The principal source turned out to be the USA where Yerkes seemed to have little difficulty in convincing investors that the plans for new Tube lines in London were sure winners. Money was also raised across Europe. Yerkes sold promises of high yields in the future and raised the huge sum of GBP 18M to build the new lines. He also managed, by fair means and foul, to hold off challenges from other American investors, including J.P. Morgan. Yerkes died in 1905 having set in motion the construction of three major tube lines. He died before the financial losses became apparent to the shareholders.
At the end of its first fifty years London’s underground railway had become an established and irreplaceable part of the transport system. It had already taken on many of the characteristics that are still recognisable today. From chaos came creation: a new heart for London. The Underground was the only practical solution to keep the great city on the move. Its full impact on the city was yet to be revealed. Londoners not only came to rely on their Underground but the people had also formed a great emotional attachment
