East-West Read online

  This, I think, is the crucial thing to realize about the early history of the Underground, and its impact on London. The relationship between the city and the network was symbiotic. They grew together. In 1850, London was the biggest city in the world. It had a population of two and a half million. London had grown sharply to get to that point, and the pressures created by that growth were what had caused wild dreamers to begin to think of crazy solutions to its permanently jammed, reeking, barely functioning roads. (So very different from today.) The crazy solution they thought of was that of sticking trains in tunnels under the city. It is important to stress, as Christian Wolmar, Britain’s leading railway historian, does in his brilliant book The Underground Railroad, the earliness of this venture; its daring, which verged so closely on recklessness. The next city to put in an Underground railway was Paris, and that took nearly four decades more – thirty-seven years, with the Metro opening its first lines in 1900.2 By the standards of the technology-obsessed, innovation-crazed late nineteenth century – at least as interested in innovation as we are today, with technologies fully comparable to the Internet in their impact – thirty-seven years was an enormous gap in time, and testifies to just how far out, how advanced, the Underground idea was. Perhaps the closest contemporary analogy is to the Apollo landings, which were so far ahead of their time, and so risky, that forty-two years after man last walked on the moon, we are still nowhere near repeating the feat.

  Unlike the Apollo landings, however, the creation of the Underground was the opposite of a historical dead end. Instead, it was so successful that the already rapid expansion of the city sped up, and by 1910 London had a population of seven million – still the biggest city in the world, only much bigger. Instead of the scattered city of suburb-villages, it was well on the way to being the place it is today, where the suburb-villages are buried in one of the planet’s most formidable urban agglomerations. It was the Underground which enabled that degree of growth at that degree of speed.

  The process hasn’t stopped. The Underground is still shaping London’s geography – perhaps especially, now, its social geography. I’ve been living in the same house for fifteen years, and have noticed that in the last decade or so the area around us has filled up with people who work in the financial services industry, but I didn’t understand why until one day I had an appointment to meet someone at Canary Wharf. I used to work in Docklands, briefly and about twenty years ago (in a building which was subsequently blown up by the IRA). Back in those days, the commute, which featured a bus, an Underground train and the Docklands Light Railway, was grim. That time, I went there on the new (or, by then, newish) Jubilee Line and suddenly saw why there were now bankers all around where I lived: it took twenty minutes, door to door, and there I was on the huge concourse outside the enormous, capitalist-triumphalist, Norman Foster Underground station, the one with a shopping mall right there on the main concourse below ground. A belated lightbulb lit up. I realized that it was the Underground which was determining the identity of my neighbours, as surely as it has been doing for Londoners for the last 150 years.

  We should, I think, think more about this aspect of the Victorians: the scale of what they did. For instance, it’s possible to imagine a counter-factual version of London which doesn’t develop the Underground network. That’s a smaller city, and probably one which is both more compact and more spread out – with a denser middle, and then people commuting from further afield. This alterna-London has a fairly narrow historical window in which to develop an Underground network, because once the car becomes ubiquitous, the idea of the city changes to accommodate it. Everywhere else in the world waited until electrification before developing their Underground railway networks. That makes sense, really, because when you think about it, there was something crazily reckless about the idea of running nineteenth-century steam trains, fired by coal, through tunnels under the city. Not long after that, the car arrived, and began to shape the world in its image. London might well have gone from a patchy network of, say, trams, to a wholescale submission to the car, in the way that Birmingham did. Once a city has hit a certain size and density, it becomes very difficult to create an Underground network – Hong Kong’s unromantically named ‘mass transit’, which began being built in the late seventies, was one very successful example, but its creation was a huge struggle and might not have been possible in a democratic society, where the voices arranged against the cost and disruption would have been louder. And sometimes, darker forces are at work. Los Angeles is notoriously an example of a city in total submission to the car, without any useful form of metro network – and it didn’t get that way by accident. The motor industry fought for decades to prevent the creation of any public-transport alternatives to the car: the result is a city with petrol-based transport in its DNA.

  Some version of that could have happened to London, if it hadn’t been not just for the technical abilities of the Victorian engineers, but also for Victorian morale. That’s my term for it, anyway: for their ability to embark on projects which, as the word suggests, projected – projected their energies and ambitions over space and, even more importantly, over time. Their pomposities and deludednesses and hypocrisies and class-race-gender derangements are easy to see and to deplore at this distance, but their great strength, that ability to look forward into the future and aim their wills forward to shape it, is something we can learn from still. The thought that we can collectively act to shape the future for the better – without that, we would be lacking many things, and one of those things would be the Underground, and, as a corollary, London in its current form. It is salutary (in the dictionary sense of good for the health) and chastening (in the dictionary sense of making you feel a little bit told-off) to think about how much of the basic things that make London function as a city were built by the Victorians. My house was built by them – in fact, the whole street I live in; that’s not true for all Londoners, but it is true that our sewage and water come through pipes the Victorians built, and the network of underground pipes which makes London possible, bringing power and heat and light, water and gas and electricity, is still fundamentally Victorian. (Brixton’s Electric Avenue, about a mile from where I live, isn’t just the subject of a great Eddy Grant song: it was also first electrified street in the city, first plugged in and switched on in 1880.) It goes almost without saying that the Victorians built my local Underground station, Clapham Common, which opened in 1900. To an extent so great that it’s hard to fully take in, we are still living in a city that the Victorians made. What, I wonder, are we doing now, which will be as essential, as useful and taken for granted any and every single day, as the things they made? What might we be able to dream up, and then to do, that would match the impact of the shabby, creaking, patchwork, Underground?

  3

  In 1974, Jonathan Raban published his first book, a study of the psychological texture of urban life with the memorable title Soft City. All city dwellers have a soft city, a version of the place they live imprinted inside them. We adopt the city where we live, and the city adopts us. That gives the city a presence inside us, a role in our inner landscape, and that role if anything grows deeper over time, as we accumulate more and more memories and experiences. This soft city is where we live, as much as the actual physical place.

  The soft city can be a story, a version of events with a beginning and middle and end. In the case of the Underground, however, I don’t think that’s how it works. I’ve been living in London for more than twenty-five years, and I have by default, or osmosis, become a Londoner. I have no real memory of how that happened. For the first few years I really disliked the place, and lived here only because it was where I had to be for work. The city crept up on me. I could make a story of that, I suppose, but I can’t see a way of making a story out of my relationship with the Underground. That’s because it isn’t a story with a beginning, middle and end, but a series of fragments. This, I think, applies to all Underground users. Commuting to
work in the morning is a completely different experience from catching a train across town to go and see an art exhibition; coming home from the West End after going to a movie or theatre or restaurant is a different experience from travelling to a football match at a weekend, or heading out on a first date, or going to a hospital appointment that you’re dreading. A teenager going to Westfield on their own for the first time is having a wholly different experience from a knackered commuter heading home after work.

  It’s not just that the network is full of different people using it at different times of the day for different purposes – that’s only to be expected. What makes it difficult to tell the story of the soft Underground – the version of the network which all its users carry in their own personal version of the soft city – is that we experience it, ourselves, in so many different states of being. My very first day at work in the city, my first day as a Londoner, I took the Underground – indeed, the District Line, from Parson’s Green, before changing to take the Circle from Earl’s Court to Euston Square. (The featureless office block above the station there was at that point the headquarters of MI5.) I don’t remember anything about that trip except my own feelings of excitement and trepidation and a strong sense that a new part of my life was about to start. That’s one Underground experience, one part of the soft city; what does it have to do with the version of me a few years later, rumbling home from a night out at the pub, half-cut? Or the version of me who used to spend Saturdays going to deliberately out-of-the-way football matches: Wimbledon at Plough Lane, Leyton Orient at Leyton (actually, now that I think about it, I only ever went to Orient for midweek evening games, for reasons I now can’t even vaguely recall), or Millwall at New Cross (they were playing Tottenham, and the fans’ chant was ‘Gascoigne takes it up the arsehole, Gascoigne takes it up the arsehole, Gascoigne takes it up the arsehole, because he’s just a Northern cunt’, to the tune of ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord’.) I took the Piccadilly Line to Hammersmith to visit my wife when she was sick in Charing Cross Hospital, and I took the Northern Line to Tooting to visit my mother when she was in St George’s Hospital, where she eventually died. Some of those journeys are scarred into my memory, but they are juxtaposed with plenty of other Underground travel which I don’t remember at all, which I did on a kind of autopilot – get on train, thinking about something else, travel, get off train, thinking about something else, and arrive at B, barely able to remember how I got there from A. What do all these different experiences of the Underground have to do with each other? What’s the story told by this version of the soft city? I would argue that there isn’t one – there is no master-narrative here, no overarching plot line connecting all the different meanings that the Underground has across a user’s lifetime. You can’t sum it up, and you can’t make a story out of it either: it’s a series of fragments.

  Here is one of my fragments. There’s a word I haven’t used once so far in this book, a word which doesn’t exactly sum up my relationship with the Underground, but which does compress into itself quite a bit of the story – my story, anyway. It’s a word which crops up often in more or less every piece of writing about the Underground. I wonder if you can guess what the word is? Here it comes: Tube.

  That, for me, was once a very charged word, because I wasn’t fully clear what it meant. Growing up abroad, I had heard that in London they had something called the Underground, and I knew what it was, more or less. But there was also this other thing, more modern-sounding and cooler-sounding, called the Tube. Except, was it really another thing, or a different name for the same thing? I remember wondering about this, and at the same time feeling, strongly feeling, that it would be too embarrassing to ask – this was just something you were supposed to know. Childhood is full of these gaps, the things you don’t know which you know that you should – or you suspect that you should, and also you suspect that you’re missing out by not knowing, but at the same time it’s too exposing to just come out and ask. So that was Phase One: not knowing exactly what the Tube was.

  The next phase was when I did come to know what the Tube was. I did this by coming to London often enough, and by hanging out with Londoners enough, to learn that they use Tube and Underground interchangeably. The Tube isn’t even slang, it’s just the other term by which people know the Underground network. The name is quasi-official, and crops up even in ads and notifications and posters used by Transport for London, the body that runs it. So the verdict was now in: Tube = Underground.

  Then I became a Londoner myself, and all of a sudden I was the person talking about the Tube, and using it in the super-casual way we do. Let’s get there by Tube, it’ll be quicker by Tube, the bloody Tube was running late, I hate the Tube in rush hour, how far is it from the Tube? And there, if you’d asked me, I would have said this journey ends, because I’d gone native, was using the terms Tube and Underground interchangeably, and there was nowhere else for the story to go.

  Now, however, and thanks to researching this book, I know better. That’s because among students and aficionados of the Underground, as well as among its staff, there is indeed a distinction, quite an important one, between the Underground and the Tube. It’s a distinction I first came across in the writing of Christian Wolmar, and it is based on the fact that the first Underground lines were not tubes; that’s because they were not, in the strict sense, tunnels. A tunnel is a hole that goes into the ground at one end, goes along for a bit, and then comes out at the other end – yes? But that’s not how the first Underground lines were made. They were made using the ‘cut and cover’ method: not a tunnel, but a hole dug straight down into the ground, laid with tracks and brick walls, and then covered back up. All the first lines were ‘cut and cover’ lines: the Metropolitan, beginning in 1863, then the District, which opened in 1868, then the Circle, which opened in 1884. The ‘cut and cover’ lines are not deep: barely thirty feet below ground, and with many sections in which the line is still open to the sky, as indeed are quite a few of the stations. On these lines you can – in recognition of the fact that even in the tunnel sections you aren’t that far underground – often get a mobile-phone signal. (When you do have one, it’s fun to look up Google Maps from below the earth.) Those of us who don’t love the sensation of being deep underground prefer the ‘sub-surface’ lines, as TfL calls the lines built by the cut-and-cover method: the District, the Circle and the Metropolitan. These do have stretches of genuine tunnel in them, the longest being between Notting Hill and High Street Kensington, 400-plus yards, with a vent open to the air near Camden Hill Square; but that’s nothing like the extended immersion in under-London provided by the Tube lines.

  The Tube was made using a fundamentally different digging technique, one pioneered by the father-and-son team of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel,3 and then perfected by Marc’s student James Greathead. It features a shield, a huge frame, on which the twelve ‘navigators’ who dug the tunnels stood: the frame advanced gradually through the earth while the men dug, and then other navigators bricked up the tunnel walls and roof behind them as they went. The first of these tunnels ran from Rotherhithe to Wapping, and today is part of the East London overground line, though its initial purpose was for horse and foot traffic only. (It’s one of the network’s many historical quirks that the first tunnel under the Thames is technically part of the overground.) Construction, which began in 1825 and took two decades, ran wildly over budget, with immense difficulties and several deaths. The technology and the new techniques learned were more important than the tunnel itself turned out to be. This was the birth of the Tube: the deep tunnels which were dug using the shield technique, and which run through the clay subsoil underneath London, are in the strict sense the Tube. The Underground includes the Tube, but the Tube does not include the Underground. This means that, now that I’ve become an Underground nerd, I’ve gone back to using the word Underground and Tube separately, because the distinction is so useful. My ten-year-old self, witho
ut knowing it, was on to something: the Underground and the Tube are not the same thing.

  In my view, the main reason why the distinction is useful is because the experience of using the Tube lines is, for people who don’t love the sensation of being deep underground, more challenging than it is on the sub-surface lines. I can testify to this from frequent personal experience, because the Underground station nearest me is Clapham Common. That means that the line I use most often is a Tube line, the Northern, oldest of all of them: it began life as the City and South London Line, on which work began in 1886. The Northern Line is sometimes called the ‘Misery Line’, though it could equally fairly be described as one of the wonders of the world, given that it for years was the world’s longest train tunnel, disappearing into the earth at Morden and then not popping up above ground again until Finchley, seventeen and a half miles later.