Underground, Overground (12 page)

On 12 December 2010 the shuttle ceased operations, and Metropolitan trains began to terminate at both Amersham and Chesham. The chairman of the Chesham Society welcomed the ending of the shuttle. ‘I suppose you could say it's reinstating us to what we were originally. We are a main line, and a lot of people travel on it, so I think it's an excellent thing.'

Chesham's return to the main line coincided with the start of the replacement of the ‘A' stock Metropolitan carriages with the
new ‘S' stock. The ‘A' stock had been introduced at the time of the electrification beyond Rickmansworth. It is called ‘A' stock because it went up to Amersham. (The ‘S' in ‘S' stock stands for ‘sub-surface'.) At the time of writing some of the As are still running, and they are my favourite Underground cars. They are roomy and airy; the seats are transverse benches that you can stretch out and sleep on in the off-peak. The seating configuration is a reminder that the previous carriages were formed of compartments, and so the benches of the A stock – and the luggage racks and coat hooks that they feature – were a means of letting passengers down gently: a humane decompression after the glory years. The new ‘S' stocks – which will be coming to all the cut-and-cover lines – demonstrate that the memory of the glory days has faded to the point where there are only a few stubby transverse, two-person benches; the rest of the seats are longitudinal after the modern, space-saving fashion.

Marylebone is these days used for suburban railway services. Chiltern Railways, who operate the trains into the station, describe it as ‘civilised', and so it is. I often think I would like to
live
in Marylebone station, which is equipped with a fairly good pub, a W. H. Smith and a Marks & Spencer's food shop. The Grand Central Hotel is now the five-star Landmark London. I bought a glass of white wine there in 2004 (seven quid) and sat in the great marble and glass atrium listening to an Arab gentleman have a mobile phone conversation while toying with a card reading ‘To avoid inconveniencing other guests please refrain from using mobile phones in this area.' The station remains connected to the hotel by a glass canopy or
porte-cochère
that was much admired by John Betjeman, but you could stand all day under that canopy and not see anyone walk from station to hotel. Trains – at least, the sort that run into Marylebone – are not expensive enough for guests at the Landmark London. They come by taxi.

The District would go east from Whitechapel towards Upminster in the early twentieth century, in what would be the last major instance of cut-and-cover in London. But its first push was west of central London, where it both stimulated and took advantage of housing development. As mentioned, the operational base of this push was Earl's Court.

The first Earl's Court station (1871) was a wooden hut in the middle of a market garden. It served a District connection between West Brompton and the West London Line. It managed to burn down in 1875, and the Earl's Court of today dates from 1878. As David Leboff points out in
London Underground Stations
, it is the giant train shed with its iron and glass roof that gives the station its ‘main line railway feel'. Earl's Court also resembles a giant amusement arcade of the District, with the destinations – Richmond, Wimbledon or wherever – announced on the antiquated light-box indicators like the symbols on a fruit machine, in which case an indication of one of the infrequent Kensington (Olympia) trains has long been akin to three cherries coming up. These old indicators show the destination of the next train by the appearance of an illuminated arrow next to the station name. The arrow may indicate that a train is going to Wimbledon, but it gives no clue as to
when
. Now, however, the indicators are supplemented by dot matrix panels that not only say where but also when. Why aren't the old ones removed? Because they, like the whole station, are Grade II listed.

In the 1870s the District pushed west from Earl's Court, reaching Hammersmith in 1874 – much to the fury of the Metropolitan, which, as we have seen, had already arrived there by the Hammersmith & City. (But the Metropolitan would have its revenge, by in turn shadowing the District between Hammersmith and Richmond for a few years.) Riding the District west of Hammersmith, you immediately know something exciting
is coming up, because at Ravenscourt Park you are level with the rooftops. As you approach the Thames, you are riding with the ghost of the London & South Western Railway, which built many of the stations used by the District for its westerly push. The clue lies in the valanced – or serrated – white wooden station canopies, which give some of the stops a country branch air.

The bridge over the Thames – Kew Railway Bridge – is between Gunnersbury and Kew Gardens. It was built by the London & South Western Railway, and it is the best of the two river crossings by the District because
you can see over the parapet
. Therefore you have a view, which you do not from the bridge carrying the other branch of the District over the Thames, which we will come to in a moment.

The terminal station, Richmond, is managed by South West Trains, heirs to the London & South Western Railway, and here the District fades into a railway maelstrom, since Richmond is not only on the Waterloo–Reading line but is also the westerly terminus of the London Overground.

The District next stretched out to Ealing Broadway (from where its trains briefly ran to Windsor). It reached Hounslow Barracks in 1884. In his autobiography,
My Early Life
(1930) Winston Churchill wrote: ‘I was able to live at home with my mother and go down to Hounslow barracks two or three times a week by the Underground Railway.' It was 1896, and he was a young cavalry officer. (The District service to Hounslow was withdrawn in 1964.)

Meanwhile, in 1880, the District was approaching its second railway crossing, by extending from the West Brompton stub to Fulham, Parsons Green and Putney Bridge. The station at Putney Bridge opened in time for the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race in March 1880. Fulham was semi-rural at this point. In Arnold Bennett's novel
A Man from the North
Richard Larch returns at about 8 p.m. one Saturday from a visit to his new friend Mr
Aked (and Mr Aked's pretty niece), who lives in Fulham. ‘It was necessary to wait for a train at Parson's Green Station. From the elevated platform fields were visible through a gently falling mist.' Save for the porter ‘leisurely lighting the station lamps', Richard is alone. Then, ‘A signal suddenly shone out in the distance; it might have been a lighthouse seen across unnumbered miles of calm ocean. Rain began to fall.'

The bridge carrying the District from Putney Bridge station to East Putney is not, infuriatingly, called Putney Bridge. That is a road bridge. We are concerned with the Fulham Railway Bridge, which was, rather impressively, built by the District itself, and not the London & South Western. So the District must take responsibility for the fact that the iron girders of the parapet block any view from the trains of a particularly beautiful part of the river. The modern-day managers of the line do seem to attach importance to views
of
the bridge, however, because when they repainted it in the mid-1990s, they called in the local residents, including a friend of mine, to ask their opinion about some colour swatches. A tasteful light green was eventually chosen. The first station on the south bank of the river is East Putney, managed by South West Trains, which reminds us that, having crossed the river, the District again became entwined with the London & South Western Railway. In fact, the District would go from East Putney to Wimbledon by piggybacking on a branch line of that railway, and sometimes overground trains still use the branch as a relief route between Wimbledon and Clapham Common. But they don't stop at the Underground stations.

In the 1880s the population of Greater London increased by 870,000; in the 1890s it would increase by nearly a million. Suburbs were growing fast, especially to the west, where they were
generated by the District Railway, and to the north-east, generated by the Great Eastern Railway. The money these new suburbanites earned in the City they spent in the West End, which was ceasing to be a territory of mansions, its streets empty ‘out of season'. It was becoming London's playground, a place associated with pleasure, with life itself. In 1900 the average age of death in the East End was thirty, in the West End fifty-five.

One lure was the music halls. By 1880 there were eighty large music halls or variety theatres in London, and most would soon boast of being ‘Illuminated throughout by electricity!' The majority were in the West End, especially in The Strand. In the 1890s Harry Castling sang ‘Let's All Go Down the Strand', adding, seemingly irrelevantly, ‘Have a banana!' In another music hall song Burlington Bertie ‘rose at 10.30, walked up the Strand with his gloves on his hand, and walked down again with them off'. Note that the
flâneur
in question rose well after the time of ‘the morning peak', and his peregrinations attest to the growing market for London leisure travel.

Meanwhile the shops of the City were being eaten up by offices. You shopped in the West End. Regent Street – the centre of fashion – had been the resort of society in the early eighteenth century, but its shops catered to a more demotic market by the end of the nineteenth.
The London Encyclopaedia
(1983), edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, quotes one presumably venerable shopkeeper who in 1900 complained, ‘One has to do at least five times the volume of business to get the same returns.' The last quarter of the century also saw the rise of the department store. The biggest shops were not at first very central: Harrods was at Knightsbridge, Whiteleys at Bayswater. But it wouldn't be long before Selfridges landed on Oxford Street. By virtue of their size, these shops were the heralds of the twentieth century. They pioneered the large-scale use of glass, they required central heating, and they had electricity, which in
Harrods (from 1898) was used to power London's first escalator. Brandy was offered at the top, to calm shoppers down after the sheer exhilaration of the ride. Selfridges wouldn't have an escalator until 1952, but then
it
was famous for its gilded electrical lifts (and lift girls).

Electricity was smart. The mid-1880s had seen the development of the turbine: a new kind of steam-powered generator. It would eventually stop electricity from being an expensive luxury, but that process would be slow in London compared with American cities, partly because of its fractured local government. As late as 1910, only 7 per cent of Londoners had electric light in their homes. In
Children of Light
(2011) Gavin Weightman notes that Americans visiting London ‘were surprised to find the streets still lit with gas lamps'.

There was no overall power company for London, so all consumers of electricity had their own private generating stations. This lent exclusivity to its use, and one of the earliest important generating stations in London was the Grosvenor Gallery Power Station, which sounds as likely to have been written up in
Tatler
as
Electrical News
. The gallery was opened in 1885 by Sir Coutts Lindsay, debonair aristocrat and Crimean War hero. He and his wife, Caroline Fitzroy, were sympathetic to the outré painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their gallery would provide a showcase for their controversial works – and it would do so as the first London gallery to be lit by electricity.

Coutts Lindsay had power to spare, and was soon supplying 11,000 lamps by wires radiating over the roof-tops of the West End to other opulent premises: clubs, theatres, large houses. The wires being clearly visible, everyone could see who was in the select club. (While electric trams were prospering in America, and soon would do so in the north of England, they would always be kept out of central London because their overhead wires were considered an eyesore. And electric
trains
were only allowed if
they were subterranean. But a provision of the Electric Lighting Act of 1882 allowed anyone to transmit their own power as long as they did
not
bury the cables under the road.) In 1887, in what seems an incredible conjunction, the Grosvenor Gallery Power Station became a sub-station of Deptford Power Station.

The Inner Circle – still the only system of rapid transport in central London – involved no electricity, and by 1890 people were starting to notice. In 1896 Mark Twain wrote of the line that ‘It goes by no direct course but always away around'; it was ‘the invention of Satan himself'. In the same passage Twain also wrote:

Hacks [horse-drawn vehicles] are but little needed in American cities for any but strangers who cannot find their way by tram-lines. The citizen should be thankful for the high hack rates which have given him the trams; for by consequence he has the cheapest and swiftest city transportation that exists in the world. London travels by omnibus – pleasant, but as deadly slow as a European ‘lift'.

London might also have looked old-fashioned even if you'd just come back from the seaside. Magnus Volk's electric railway began running at Brighton in 1883, and Blackpool had electric trams on the front from 1885. The electric tram would come to London in 1901, operated by London United Tramways and running west of Shepherd's Bush.

Meanwhile horses, pulling hackneys, buses or horse-drawn trams (booming, but confined to the suburbs as their electrical brethren would be), had London to themselves. The buses took short-distance passengers from the Underground lines, especially from the District, as it approached the City, and the receipts of the new railway actually declined in the early 1890s over this stretch. This looks like a case of history going backwards, but,
as Barker and Robbins write: ‘It was so much easier and more pleasant to jump on a passing omnibus in the Strand than to make one's way down to a smoky tunnel under the Embankment.' It was also cheaper, as a result of an omnibus price war between the London General Omnibus Company and the London Road Car Company.