Day 9 - Tunnel Vision

Day 9 - London to Watford

I’ve been on my magical history tour for nine days, yet in one sense I'm only at the very start of the story of local public transport in Britain – as last night's visit to George Shillibeer's grave demonstrated.

Fortunately, I'm in London. The development of Britain’s capital city is so inextricably linked to the development of its public transport that one could not have happened without the other, so I’m foregoing my usual mile-eating pace to spend a day exploring some of London’s transport history. I’ve already travelled on a Routemaster, crossed Tower Bridge and visited Shillibeer’s grave. Frankly, I’m ready for more.

I make my way back to the Central Line, which at 46 miles from one end to the other is the longest Underground line in London. The Central also boasts the longest Underground journey without a change, with the 34-mile journey from West Ruislip to Epping taking some 90 minutes. And there's more. 

This line is also where you will find the shallowest Underground station on the whole network, at Redbridge whose platforms are only 26 feet below ground, while at Chancery Lane you will find the shortest escalators on the Underground system with only 50 short steps. That’s not the case at Greenford, however. Here you’ll find a full sized escalator, but one that uniquely carries passengers from street level up to the platforms, not down. The station is built on a viaduct and is the only one on London where you actually go up to go Underground. 

Incidentally, the Central Line is also where you’ll also find the tightest curve on the whole Underground system between Shepherds Bush and White City, but I think we've had enough claims to fame, don't you?

I set off back towards central London from Gant’s Hill, a perfectly ordinary little post-war station which few people outside of London have probably even heard of. It’s one of the later additions to the Central Line, a line (and I’m sorry but I’m off again) which traces its beginnings back to the opening of the Central London Railway in 1900. It was certainly not the first Underground railway but it proved astonishingly popular with the public due to its cheap flat fare of only 2d, a feature which soon led to the line being affectionately dubbed “The Twopenny Tube’.

Gants Hill Station

By the 1930’s plans were laid for a series of extensions but their completion was delayed by more pressing matters – in September 1939, the country found itself with a war to win. By this time, most of the building work at Gant’s Hill station was complete and the tunnels were ready for use, albeit without any track. 

The government thought these empty tunnels too good not to use, so instead of welcoming Underground trains the unopened station and its tunnels under the busy A12 welcomed the electrical engineering firm Plessey who from 1942 made temporary use of the station as a wartime ‘shadow factory’ – a small manufacturing base hidden from German view and safe from air raids. It spent the next few years as part of a huge underground factory stretching all the way from Leytonstone to Gant’s Hill where workers manufactured and assembled electrical components for aircraft. 

Other partially-complete stations on the Central Line were also pressed into service as workshops, bomb-proof stores or air raid shelters. One of those, at Bethnal Green, became the site of a tragedy which claimed the largest loss of civilian life in a non-military incident during the entire second world war.

Sheltering from the Blitz, Aldwych

Those who had lived through the Blitz of 1940 were accustomed to spending the night in air raid shelters, but many found the Anderson shelters in their back gardens damp and uncomfortable. The unfinished underground station at Bethnal Green, though, was a different proposition. It was light and roomy, there were regular sing-songs and hot tea was generally available. There was even a library. As the track had not yet been laid, there was room for 5000 bunks with a further 2000 people sitting on the ground. No wonder so many East Enders preferred to go down to the station.

There had been few raids in recent months, but the night of 3rd March 1943 was more tense than usual. The RAF had bombed Berlin heavily two nights earlier and local people were bracing themselves for reprisals. So when the air raid siren sounded that night, sending local people scurrying for the safety of Bethnal Green station, it was clear that there would be serious competition for space.

The local cinema was also closing just as the siren sounded and the streets were flooded with cinema-goers also looking for shelter. And just around the corner, three separate buses emptied their passengers onto the streets, adding to the crush of people looking to get away from the imminent fall of German bombs.

It could still have been a safe night underground had it not been for the panic which broke out at the sound of massive, unfamiliar-sounding explosions close by. Convinced that the German’s had unleashed some kind of new and terrible bomb against them, the well-ordered descent into Bethnal Green station suddenly became a rout.

Somewhere near the bottom of the stairs and almost on the platform, a woman carrying a baby and a large bag is thought to have stumbled in the dark and fallen. A man then immediately fell over her, and someone else over him, and then others over them, but still people poured down. With no handrails in the middle of the stairs, no white paint on the edge of the wet, slippery steps, no light and no police around to control the crowd, around 300 people soon became wedged in the narrow stairway. By the time they had been pulled free, some 27 men, 84 women and 62 children had been crushed to death with a further 60 needing hospital treatment. 

Workers belatedly fitting handrails at Bethnal Green

A government enquiry was convened, but the calamity was kept quiet until the end of the war due to fears it would sap morale and offer useful propaganda to the enemy. But before it was covered up, the enquiry did discover that the local council had been asked to provide safety barriers on these stairs several months before but had not yet done so due to a shortage of money. New handrails were belatedly installed a few months later.

Local people went home to mourn, yet the real tragedy was that there was no air raid that night after all. The deafening roar that people thought was a terrible new German bomb was, in fact, the sound of a new, top secret anti-aircraft gun being tested nearby.

A small commemorative plaque was eventually erected at Bethnal Green station yet many felt this was not sufficient. There are plans for more visible memorial to the 173 people who needlessly lost their lives seeking shelter in the Underground (Editor - this was erected in 2017). 

Mind you, traveling by Underground is not without its risks even today. In 2000, a team of scientists from University College, London’s Department of Forensics were given the opportunity to practice their skills on a row of seats from a Central Line tube train. What they found on seats which were apparently regularly cleaned both surprised and appalled them.

On the surface of the seats they found evidence of four types of hair – human hair, obviously, but also mouse, rat and dog hair. They also identified 7 types of insect - mostly fleas, and mostly still alive - as well as vomit originating from at least nine different people. Not to mention the human urine from at least 4 separate people, or the human excrement. Or the rodent excrement. 

All of this was on the surface, remember. When they went inside the seats the surprises continued. They found remains of no less than six mice, two large rats and a fungus that had never been previously recorded. No wonder some people reckon it is healthier to smoke five cigarettes than to travel on the London Underground for an hour a day.

Braving this apparent soup of infection, I make my first call of the day to King's Cross railway station so that I could leave my bag at the Left Luggage office. At one time, left luggage offices were generally tucked away, often around the back of a station where they were overseen by an irascible ex-porter in a waistcoat and cap who would scribble your name onto a khaki label with the stub of a pencil, sprinkle fag ash on it from the smoldering butt permanently wedged in the corner of his mouth and charge you fourpence for the privilege. 

Then in the 1980's self-service metal boxes became common, huge lockers of the kind you normally see in gyms and sports centres and which somehow never seemed quite big enough.

Then we had the London bombings and that was the end of Left Luggage.

Fortunately, Left Luggage has returned. The irascible custodian is gone and in his place is a hi-tech x-ray machines of the sort you normally see at airports. This might help to explain the cost – a hefty £8 for 24 hours – which seems a little steep.

Having had my underpants and pyjamas carefully x-rayed and critically appraised by the staff, my bag disappears into storage and I head back underground for The Angel underground station and a ride on what used to be the longest escalator in the world – and which is now simply the longest in Britain, providing you ignore the escalators at the Tyne Pedestrian Tunnel, of course, which technically are three feet longer but only have a vertical rise of 85 feet instead of The Angel’s 90 feet. Whatever.

The Angel... it's a long way down

A ride on the escalator at The Angel underground station is a journey of heroic proportions. It’s difficult to appreciate quite how long it is until you’ve checked your watch after what seems like ten minutes, looked away, checked out a few of the adverts on the tunnel walls and examined your watch again another three times, and then discover you are still only half way up.

This provides one with abundant time to consider the history of this distinctly odd form of public transport, the only one as far as I can tell to be descended (if you forgive the pun) from a fairground ride. Although patents for all manner of moving staircases had been lodged by entrepreneurial Americans since 1859, the first to be built was at Coney Island, New York where Jesse W. Reno installed his ‘inclined elevator’ in 1896. This was little more than a belt set to a 25 degree incline which had iron slats attached to give people something to catch their feet on. It must have been terrifying, but then Coney Island was New York’s seaside playground and had fun fairs and Big Dipper’s a-plenty, so this novel machine was probably viewed as just another white-knuckle ride. Later, this same machine was erected on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge for a month-long trial though little came of this. Reno eventually retired from escalator inventing and sold his patents to the Otis Elevator Company.

Jesse Reno, escalator inventer

But not before he claimed the title of “Installer of the World’s First Escalator in an Underground Station”, which he achieved after installing a single spiral - yes, spiral! - escalator at Holloway Road underground station in 1906. This was a contraption so radical in its design that it never actually saw public use and it lay abandoned and forgotten about in the station’s second lift shaft until it was eventually rediscovered and ‘excavated’ in 1990 by the London Transport Museum. What’s left of it now resides, in various bits, in the Museum stores in Acton.

The Angel’s epic escalator – and we are finally at the top now so we can at last appreciate just how flipping high this thing is – is also famous for being one of the few escalators in the world to be used for an Olympic winter sport. Some bright spark, who to this day has remained carefully anonymous, decided it would be a bit of a hoot to make a decent of the up escalator on downhill skis, having first taken the precaution of strapping a video camera to his head. The resulting footage, which he uploaded to YouTube, makes the phrase ‘white knuckle ride’ seem somehow entirely inadequate. 

Needless to say, when Transport for London saw the footage they were less than impressed, and were especially unhappy about the skier’s film receiving hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic hits on the internet. Labeling it a ‘reckless stunt’, they urged the British Transport Police to throw the book at anyone trying anything similar in the future. For their part, the police invited the skier to get in touch with them so that they could “…discuss the potential dangers of his stunt.” Yeh, right.

The Rootmaster... as puns go, it's a good 'un

From the Angel, I begin making my way into the East End in search of a spot of lunch. I’m heading for the yard of former Truman’s Brewery to a vegan restaurant which has taken up residence in a converted Routemaster bus. It's called, predictably enough, the Root Master. It's kitchens take up the whole of the lower deck, with a hatchway out onto a covered outdoor eating area, while the top deck is laid out as a dining room and is bright and airy. It's elegant and simple and the foods pretty good, too. Designer Douglas Scott certainly knew what he was doing when he designed the Routemaster and the comment that there is more than a whiff of a gentleman’s club in his interior finishes is never more true than up here.

Suitably lunched, I set off for Whitechapel and the newly-reopened East London line, which used to be a little-used part of the Underground network connecting Shoreditch with New Cross, two places that no one seemed terribly keen to travel between. The only reason I am doing so now is to pass through the Rotherhithe Tunnel which has the distinction of being the first tunnel ever to be built under a river. It was an outstanding engineering achievement - in fact, the construction techniques devised by its makers are essentially the same as those used in tunneling today - though the tunnel itself was a commercial disaster.

Running from Wapping on the north bank of the Thames to Rotherhithe on the south, the 1,300ft long brick-lined tunnel was constructed by Marc Brunel, the French entrepreneurial father of that great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc had seen how the railway engineer Richard Trevithick had been stopped in his tracks by difficult ground conditions when he had tried to build a tunnel under the river in 1808, but he had a few ideas which he thought might guarantee him more success. 

Marc began his tunnel in January 1825 by first digging a deep brick-lined shaft on the south bank of the Thames. Instead of digging all the way down to the bottom and then lining the shaft with brick, and hoping that it didn’t collapse in on them while they were doing so, Brunel simply built a sturdy brick cylinder above ground then gradually dug out the earth from underneath it to sink it gradually into the ground. Simple.

Rotherhithe Tunnel

Brunel and his engineer Thomas Cochrane had also devised a 'tunneling shield' behind which the actual digging of the tunnel could take place. The was divided into 36 ‘cells’ each containing one man, and was pushed firmly onto the face of the tunnel. Each man would remove a couple of boards supporting the face of tunnel and dig out soil and mud to a proscribed depth, then replace the boards on the new face they had created. This ensured that the working face, which was always vulnerable to collapse, was almost always supported by timber and the excavation was not concentrated at any one point. The shield was then pushed a little further into the tunnel and the digging continued, with bricklayers coming in behind to apply a brick lining to the work they’d already completed. It was a simple but effective way of constructing a tunnel and is essentially the same process that is used today. 

The excavation of the tunnel also relied on compressed air to help keep the working face from flooding, but the effects of carrying out hard physical work in a compressed air environment were not understood by the Victorians and many of the workforce became sick, including Brunel himself.

And however clever and effective the shield was, the work was still painfully slow, with only 8 feet or so of tunnel being completed during an average week. To compound matters, in May 1827 the tunnel flooded. By this time, Isambard had been forced to take over as chief engineer due to his father’s failing health and he eventually dealt with the flood by using a diving bell to repair the leak in the bottom of the river. Having drained the tunnel, he proudly hosted a celebratory banquet inside it. This were premature, however, as the tunnel flooded again the following January, an even bigger set back as by this time the scheme had run out of funds. The Rotherhithe Tunnel project was therefore abandoned and the partially-completed tunnel lay filled with water for seven years before Marc Brunel could raise sufficient funds to complete it.

Despite three further floods, the tunnel continued its slow and painful progress under the Thames until finally in 1842, after 17 years work and to everyone’s relief, it was completed. Yet after all that endeavour, the elegant colonnaded and gas-lit tunnel was not a financial success. Originally,Brunel had intended to allow horses and wagons to use the tunnel to guarantee a sizeable income from tolls but these plans were scrapped when the money ran out before ramps from the surface to the tunnel entrance could be built. The completed tunnel was therefore purely a pedestrian tunnel and of somewhat limited use.

It was certainly an attraction, though, at least at first. The tunnel received tens of thousands of visitors during its first few weeks, but then custom gradually dropped off and it became more of a curiosity than a practical transport link. The excitement of promenading under the river soon palled and the shops and stalls that had lined its colonnades closed for lack of trade. Brunel's tunnel then began to acquire a reputation as a place where London’s ‘Ladies of the Night’ would ply their trade in its copious shadows.

Brunel’s tunnel was eventually given the chance of a new life when it was acquired by the East London Railway Company in 1865 and adapted for trains. It was used for services out of Liverpool Street station though it was seldom a busy or profitable line. It was eventually absorbed into the London Underground system. 

Then during the 1990’s the almost forgotten tunnel was once again the centre of controversy when it closed for long-term maintenance and the contractors disclosed that they intended to ‘shotcrete’ the inside of the tunnel to seal it against leaks. This meant spraying quick-drying concrete over its interior to cure the leaks, completely obscuring Brunel’s elegant brickwork. Local people, architectural historians and railway buffs were outraged. Eventually the matter was resolved with an agreement that a short section at one end of the tunnel would remained untreated while the rest of the tunnel would get a more sympathetic treatment.

I make for Whitechapel Overground station and the short trip under the river through Brunel’s recently-reopened tunnel. Of course, you don’t get much of an impression of them as you travel through railway tunnels, but standing on the platform at Rotherhithe you can gaze back along its illuminated course and ponder at the sheer effort required for a bunch of navvies to push a tunnel through London’s clay and gravel from one side of the river to the other. There’s a plaque erected by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers on the wall as you clamber up from the platform, but not much else to mark this important engineering achievement. The significance of Brunel’s Rotherhithe Tunnel seems largely unrecognized, which I think is a shame. 

I emerge blinking into the sunlight and start looking for a bus back across the river. I find myself once again blundering around aimlessly in search of a bus that was going to somewhere I recognized. Eventually, I catch a bus to Canada Water, a glassy Docklands sort of place which, joy of joys. appears to have its own bus station. Here I find a bus which will take me back to Tower Bridge where I once again clamber aboard a Routemaster for my onward journey into Central London.

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden

I’ve more or less run out of time by now, so I reluctantly skip the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. This is probably my most favourite place in London, so it's a painful decision. This superb little museum documents the close inter-dependence of London and its transport system, and has wartime buses to climb on, Underground trains to drive, engines to clamber over, and a full-scale reconstruction of George Shillibeer’s first horse bus. There’s a poignant memorial plaque from a long-demolished bus depot recording the names of men who died on the night the depot was bombed by German planes, exhibitions of the museum’s fabulous collection of Underground posters, and there’s a host of things to get your hands on. Even if you not particularly interested in transport, it’s a fascinating museum and definitely somewhere to take the kids.

My day draws to an end and I’m looking forward to a journey on the Metropolitan Line, the world’s first underground railway. But as I make my way back to Kings Cross to reclaim my rucksac, things start to go wrong. First, an Underground train breaks down at Liverpool Street Station resulting in huge delays on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan Lines. Then there is a train breakdown on the Jubilee Line at Waterloo bringing that line to a standstill. Then there are no less than two separate signal failures at different stations on the District Line which brings that to a virtual standstill, too. And all this during the rush hour.

The irony, of course, is that Underground railways were originally conceived as a way of tackling congestion. We think of traffic jams as a distinctly 20^th century phenomenon yet the Victorians were struggling with the same problems of too much traffic and too little space as far back as the 1850’s. 

London at that time was at the heart of a growing and successful empire, with an expanding economy and a growing demand for absolutely everything. Its population had grown from less than a million in 1800 to more than 2.5m in 1850, yet more and more of the City’s workers’ housing – slums, for the most part – were being replaced by commercial premises. This pushed workers out to the fringes of the city and further from their place of work. The poorest would have to walk miles to and from work each day, although those of greater means might take the increasingly familiar horse bus. 

London street c. 1850

However, the city’s vast fleet of horse buses also contributed to its increasing traffic problem created by thousands of carriers carts, carriages, goods wagons, hackney cabs and costermongers carts which daily struggled for space on the highway. In the narrow streets of the old city, traffic regularly ground to a standstill and far from being paved with gold the streets of London were usually ankle deep in manure.

By now the railways had arrived, but that wasn’t much help. Few of the railway companies had seen any point in building suburban railway stations; companies like the Great Northern, for example, had designs on connecting the metropolis with the far corners of the country and gave scant attention to ordinary folk living just outside of the city. Only the London and Greenwich, the very first railway company to build a line right into London, had spotted the potential of this vast population on its doorstep. They were the first to build stations specifically serving the densely-populated areas of Southwark, Debtford and Greenwich and their commercial success is one reason why today so few Underground lines venture south of the river. There was little need for an Undergound when the above-ground London and Greenwich - built on a vast viaduct of almost 900 brick arches to avoid having to cross South London’s busy streets - had already cornered the market.

Whether railways would have provided a real solution to the congestion is debatable. London’s burgeoning economy sent land values in central London through the roof, which not only forced out the city’s growing army of workers but also meant that a railway would be too expensive to build, even if the notoriously conservative Commissioners of the City of London were to allow such a thing, which they wouldn’t. That's why none of London’s main line railway stations are anywhere near the City but are ranged around the outskirts of the old city of London instead. 

Enter, at this point, the august figure of Charles Pearson, the son of a London feather merchant (yes, really) who eventually rose to become Solicitor to the City of London. It was he who first promoted the idea of ‘trains in drains’ during a failed bid to be elected MP for Lambeth. He’d already suggested the building of an ariel railway running down the Fleet Valley to Farringdon encased in glass and using atmospheric pressure for propulsion, but unsurprisingly this failed to attract commercial interest. However, by 1858 his troubled boss the Mayor of London had finally accepted that traffic congestion was harming business and Pearson persuaded him that an underground railway between Paddington and Farringdon Street was the only effective solution. 

The cut-and-cover process

Construction of the world's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, began in Spring 1860 using the simple expedient of digging up the road, building a brick-lined tunnel in the hole and shoveling all the earth back, a technique called ‘cut and cover’. Sticking mostly to the roads meant that the line would follow recognisable and well-established routes, and compensation costs for people whose houses had to be demolished to make way for the railway would be reduced – though the fact that the Metropolitan was going through relatively poor areas meant that claims were never going to be substantial anyway. 

There were exceptions, though. When the Metropolitan was extended through the relatively wealthy area of Bayswater, not only was the company compelled to buy a pair of attractive terraced homes which stood across the route of the line, they also had to construct a pair of mock Georgian frontages to plug the now gaping hole in an otherwise elegant terrace. These still stand today as numbers 22 and 23 Leinster Gardens and are not only a curiosity for tourists but also as an infernal nuisance to inexperienced messengers, postmen and delivery men deliberately sent there by their mischievous colleagues as a practical joke. 

Work on the Metropolitan proceeded quickly. The company used a site off the Fulham Road called Stamford Bridge to dump its unwanted spoil from the tunneling. Forty years later, this became the home of Chelsea Football Club, a choice perhaps influenced by the Metropolitan’s spoil heaps which could be conveniently formed into banking for terraces.

The completed railway opened to the public on 3 January 1863 and was a popular and commercial success despite the choking fumes of the steam engines in their confined tunnels and stations. Though the railway always tried to play it down – at one point even pretending that the smoky, sulphurous atmosphere was actually beneficial to asthmatics - the so-called ‘choke damp’ caused by the engines was a constant problem and lead to health problems among both staff and passengers, and numerous deaths. Ventilation vents were eventually built and a fleet of condensing steam engines were ordered all of which helped, but the problem was never properly resolved until the Metropolitan was electrified in the early 20^th century.

Yet despite its unpleasantness, the Metropolitan Railway was wholeheartedly embraced by the public. It was popular, efficient, frequent and offered cheap early morning trains for workers. It was also largely accident-free which is little short of miraculous when you think about the combination of close confinement, steam under high pressure, fire, fast moving heavy steel and almost complete darkness. 

But it wasn’t just the major railway companies who had grand designs. Sir George Watkins, chairman of the Metropolitan Railway, had designs of his own. He was determined to push his railway out of London to the north and west, ultimately to Northampton and Birmingham. He never quite got there, but he did push his line some fifty miles out of London into the countryside - and the push began at Baker Street. The problem he had to overcome, however, was that there were too few passengers on what was essentially a rural line and that was costing him money.

Private developers had already spotted an opportunity, though. Several had begun building estates of neat and attractive homes close to the Metropolitan, boasting that they offered families the opportunity to live in delightful rural surroundings only a short train ride from the centre of London. It had already been observed that the arrival of the Underground would invariably stimulate housing development close by, but Watkins found himself with a huge and profitable advantage – his company owned vast tracts of prime building land. As the line pushed deeper into the countryside, Watkins bought the strips of land he needed from estate owners all along the route but some, rather than selling just a strip, had chosen to sell him their whole estates. So by 1890 Watkins was sitting on a vast land bank and he began to cash in.

Cecil Park, Pinner

The railway’s first housing development was at Cecil Park in Pinner and others quickly followed - at Kingsbury, Neasden, Wembley Park, Harrow Garden Village. This whole area would eventually become known as Metroland and as these suburban estates grew so villages further up the line also began to be developed. Some were private developments, but others were built by the Metropolitan’s own property company. And sure enough, passenger numbers multiplied, ensuring that the Metropolitan was probably the most profitable line below London. 

I board my Metropolitan Line train at Baker Street, which has been sensitively restored to something like its original form. I'm staying in Watford tonight and my journey their seems much like any ordinary railway journey. Much of it is above ground, and fairly quick as it has fewer stops than other Underground lines. And by the time we fork off the Amersham line towards Watford, you even now get a sense of the countryside being close by.

I soon find myself at Watford Underground Station, an attractive little terminus which is neither underground nor, it seems, anywhere near Watford. This is perhaps one of the reasons why this line doesn’t appear to be terribly well used. I find I have a walk of about a mile before I am anywhere near the centre of town, so I shoulder my pack and trudge into the dusk along a pleasant tree-lined avenue of 1920’s houses before doing battle with the mighty Rickmansworth Road, a dual carriageway so fearsome that it seems entirely filled with motorists whose sole aim is to do me to death. I escape, just.

I begin picking my way through car parks, along grey, unloved little terraces, past massage parlours and pizza takeaways. Watford in the gathering gloom is dampening the spirits and it's a relief to close my hotel door behind me. 

Or perhaps it is just me? After all, I’m tired and grimy and quite possibly highly infectious due to long hours sitting on the Underground. Frankly, I’ve had enough of London now. It’s time to shower the city out of my hair and put on a pair of clean uncontaminated pants. London is behind me and I’m eager to get on with my journey. 

And I still have a very long way to go.

NEXT: Watford – Northampton - where I find myself taking a slightly confusing ride on the Magic Roundabout, accompany the mighty A5 on its headlong journey to the North West, and reflect on some the things you can do on a bus that you can't do in a car.

www.facebook.com/abusthroughbritain

Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google