Underground, Overground (28 page)

The extension to the west is on the surface. The extension to the east – which is more interesting – comes above ground briefly at Stratford, then again at Leyton. After Leytonstone, it splits to go to either Snaresbrook or Wanstead. The latter branch is ‘in Tube', as were the two following stops, Redbridge and Gants Hill, and these three were among the last designs for the Underground by Charles Holden. At Gants Hill he really let rip. If you want to get an idea of what the Moscow Underground looks like, you can go to Moscow, or you can take the cheaper option – for a Londoner – of going to Gants Hill. When it was being built, there was a department in London Transport called London Transport International. (
Somewhat
hubristic, you might have thought, but this was a time when Pick and Ashfield were at the top of their game.) The department had just been advising the man Stalin had appointed to oversee the creation of a prestigious Moscow Metro, Nikita Khrushchev, and some of the principles recommended had rubbed off in the building of Gants Hill. The station is beautiful, with pale orange tiling, and clocks with the roundel in place of numbers, but it is beautiful in a Muscovite way by virtue of the wide lower concourse with barrel-vaulted ceiling. There is a feeling, as with the Moscow Metro (I am told), of palatial proportion and no expense spared.

I was once shown around Gants Hill by the London Transport Museum curator, Oliver Green, who told me that the only giveaway from a subterranean perspective that you were in Gants Hill, a humble suburb, and not a place of more metropolitan grandeur, was the fact that there were only two escalators debouching into the concourse, both at the same end. ‘Ideally,' said Oliver, ‘there'd have been two at each end.' That's how they'd have done it in Moscow, for maximisation of ‘passenger flow'.

Overall, the eastern end of the Central is a jumble of Victorian and 1940s' stylings. At Leytonstone the station was reconstructed to accommodate the arrival of the Central. Bending over backwards to find features of note in
London Underground Stations
, David Leboff comes up with ‘curved, glazed skylights located in the canopy soffits'. But the preceding station, Leyton, remains ‘largely as built' – in 1856, that is – hence ‘valanced canopies supported by delicate iron pillars and brackets'. The lines on this stretch have the prettiest, most country-branch-like names of any on the network: Buckhurst Hill, Theydon Bois … and some of them really do look the part. In the late Nineties, I was told by an Underground press officer that a man patrolled the eastern end of the Central with a hawk trained to kill pigeons. At Fairlop, incidentally, you wouldn't be surprised to see coal bunkers. But just in case you might forget you're on the London Underground, there's a ‘gap' at Hainault.

I have said that the Central reached Ongar, 25 miles from central London, but that's less impressive when you consider that this ultimate stretch of the eastward extension of the Central Line – a project taking place under the heading
New
Works, remember – should have been operated by alternately pulling and pushing steam trains. Yes, I'm afraid the electric trains of 1949 went only
as far as Epping. The single line beyond there would be taken over by the Underground from the London & North Eastern Railway, but it would be operated as a steam shuttle because there just weren't enough people at Ongar to justify electrification.

… Until 1957, that is, when the line was equipped with ‘light' electrification, which sounds pleasant enough but meant only sufficient power to propel trains of two or three carriages. Passengers on those trains looked out on pretty fields in which sheep grazed, the development of the countryside roundabout having been inhibited by the Green Belt supported by the very man (Pick) who had been one of the drivers of the New Works programme. John Betjeman enjoyed riding on the line and said that, when he retired, he'd like to be the station master at Blake Hall, which was the stop before Ongar until it (Blake Hall) was closed permanently in 1981, its passenger footfall being down to six a day, or twelve, depending on whether you're counting passengers or feet.

Anyway, the Epping–Ongar had always been marginal. Even when it was part of the LNER its short trains had been emphatically ‘Third Class Only'. By the early 1990s the shuttle was being used by about eighty people a day, and it was said – to me, by a man slightly inebriated in a pub in Leytonstone – that the line was only kept open so that, in the event of a nuclear attack, members of the Cabinet could be evacuated by rail to the nuclear bunker at Doddinghurst. The argument against this theory is that any government entrusting its fate to the Central Line would have to have been pretty naive. The argument in favour is that the Ministry of Defence did de-commission the bunker at about the same time that London Underground closed the Epping–Ongar line, which happened in 1994. In 1998 the line was sold to a private company who intended to operate a peak-hour commuter service, and did so for a while. (The nuclear bunker, meanwhile, was bought by a local farmer, who advertised it widely as
‘The Secret Nuclear Bunker!') The line has since changed hands several times, and is now to re-open as a preserved railway (a railway for leisure only), running vintage diesels and electrics, but with the aim of restoring steam.

Experts on the Underground abandon their normally pedagogic kindliness when it comes to rolling stock. It's for your own good, they'll tell you: the subject is too complicated. Stock may be designated by a date, or sometimes a letter. Today those who name stock are sometimes good enough to make the letter stand for something, as in ‘S stock', to denote the sub-surface stock being introduced on the cut-and-cover lines, but in the past a letter might just represent a point reached in a wayward alphabetical progress, and some idea of the number of stocks that have existed is given by the fact that on the District Line alone, ‘N stock' had been reached by 1935.

Even though the so-called Standard Stock built between 1923 and 1934 brought a measure of uniformity to the deep-level Tube stocks, it was not quite a single train type. In fact, a man who knows about these things once infuriatingly reflected in my presence, ‘Each year brought new variations. In fact, the whole thing about the Standard Stock was that it was
not
standard.' But Standard Stock trains, as mentioned earlier, were the first to
look
like Tube trains. They dispensed with the end platforms and had automated air doors set into the carriage sides. The gatemen were thus out of a job, but guards survived, mainly to operate the doors and – it seemed – to prevent people from boarding via the guard's own door. (I would become tense, on trains with guards, as I watched another tourist lumbering up to the guard's door, knowing he'd just turned away three others in quick succession. This fourth idiot was really going to be in for it.) The days of the guards
were numbered after the introduction of O.P.O. – that is ‘one-person-operated' – trains on the Victoria Line from 1967, and the last of the breed were seen – usually looking suitably glum – on the 1959 stock on the Northern Line, until it was replaced, in a neat inversion, by the 1995 stock, which did not require guards.

It would be fair to say that seats have become smaller – and an Underground manager once told me that the ideal train would have no seats, and the whole platform-side of it would roll up and down like a venetian blind. It would be a cattle truck, in other words. It would also be fair to say that the only type of stock to have been universally loved is the 1938 Tube stock, introduced as part of the New Works programme. This stock was used on the Northern, Piccadilly and Bakerloo, on which latter line they lasted in regular service until the mid-1980s, although five 1938 stock trains also returned for a brief encore on the Northern Line in 1986–7. Whenever a picture of a 1938 stock train is shown at the meetings of the London Underground Railway Society, the ferociously technical analysis breaks down for a moment and someone utters, ‘Ah … lovely little trains!' It is also the stock favoured by Tube modellers, as we shall see.

The 1938s were the first type of Electrical Multiple Units to have the motors secreted entirely below the carriage bodies, thus leaving more space for passenger seats. But that wasn't the reason people loved the '38s. No, they loved them because they were red. The cars were cherry-red with grey roofs which seemed to have eaves, making the trains reminiscent of a cosy little bungalow on the move. The interiors were of louche dark red, green and cream, and every carriage looked like the smoking carriage – an invitation to decadence. In short, the 1938 stock was the Routemaster of the Underground. Not that their colour (formally known as ‘Train Red') was the same red as the Routemaster (Pantone 485), which is in turn not the same red as the pillar boxes and old telephone booths, which shared a colour
originally, and exuberantly, designated Vermillion Giant. There is no ‘London red', although the architect Jean Nouvel tried to imply there was when he created a temporary pavilion outside the Serpentine Gallery in 2008, the main point of which was its vibrant redness. It's just that London takes to redness in general, probably as an antidote to the greyness of the city.

The '38s were not the first Underground trains to be red.
Most
Underground trains before them had been red, or reddish. The Standard stock had been red, for example. The appeal of the '38s lay in the fact that they were the
last
trains to be red, and the new Tube trains that succeeded them over the next forty years would be grey – the colour of the aluminium from which they were made, steel being in short supply after the war. Aluminium also had the virtue of being lighter than steel, and it was ‘Space Age'. The first aluminium Tube carriage, romantically named R49NDM23231, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and the first aluminium trains ran on the District in the following year. The last all-grey trains – London Underground prefers to say ‘silver' – ran, also on the District, until February 2008. The novelty had worn off, and it was increasingly apparent that the tags of the graffiti artists did not do so. They left a ghostly trace when cleaned off. If only you could paint over them … and so red has crept back, together with white and blue. Patriotic, I suppose.

But why can't we still have warm red and green interiors? A couple of years ago I interviewed Mike Ashworth, Design and Heritage Manager of Transport for London. I told him how much I liked the mellow interiors of the '38s. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘tungsten lighting … beloved of women of a certain age.' I indignantly pointed out that
I
was not a woman of a certain age, and demanded to know why train interiors can't be cosy again. He conceded that there had been a reaction against the grey and pale blue that had predominated on the post-war Underground trains and stations, and bolder shades were making a return. He
cited a seat moquette of mid-blue with an element of red that he himself had designed for the new Victoria Line trains. It is called Christian Barman, after the colleague and biographer of Frank Pick (a posthumous compliment of sorts, I suppose, to be sat on by millions of Londoners). But he added that ‘a thirty-point colour contrast' was required by disability discrimination legislation – and that wouldn't be possible with moody hues I favoured. Also: ‘The modern trains are so crowded that dark colours throughout would make them intolerably claustrophobic. Even you wouldn't like them,' he said, ‘believe me.'

There was warmth, humour and glamour in Frank Pick's underground publicity, but there was also a mechanistic aspect to the Underground, whose tunnels operated as giant pistons pushing the ‘commuters' – the term was common by 1940 – inwards in the morning and outwards in the evening. In the stations and on the trains human beings were marshalled – streamlined – according to the new discipline: ‘passenger flow'. It was the science of station design, exit placement, signage, train dispatching and announcements, and it is well expressed in the name, and concept, of the ticket booth called a passimeter.

Passengers were meant to flow past a passimeter on either side, as when the water of a fast-flowing river meets a rock. They usually had the choice of two queues, which must have been agonising because of course the one you pick is always the slowest. The queues were slowed down by the turnstiles that frequently operated in conjunction with the ticket booths, but these would give way to automatic ticket gates, first introduced on the Victoria Line from 1969, and refined in the 1980s. Automatic gates would speed flow, as did the growing prevalence of automatic ticket-dispensing machines, which had first been introduced in
the 1930s, and the wrong placement of which in Holden stations caused Frank Pick to expend a lot of green ink.

But the raw material that the Underground had to work on – Londoners themselves – was possibly not of the best. In 1905 Charles Yerkes had said:

Londoners are the worst people to get a move on I ever knew. To see them board and get off a train one thinks they had a thousand years to do it in; still they are doing better, and in the end I shall work them down to an allowance of thirty seconds.

In 1919 ‘hustlers' were employed on the District platforms at Victoria to co-ordinate the boarding of busy trains. After thirty seconds the hustler sounded a siren that dispatched the train no matter what the state of play on the platform. Unlike in Tokyo, there have never been platform guards whose job it was actually to push people onto crowded trains, but there is a cartoon from the 1930s in which a guard does push a fat bowler-hatted commuter through the end door of a crowded train, only to cause another one to pop out through the middle door.

It is unlikely that Londoners have sped up very much since Yerkes's day. There aren't many more trains per hour at peak times than there were then, so they haven't had to. Also, those trains are more crowded than ever, a situation that can be mitigated by ‘letting them off first', but that practice is not universally observed. A poster of 1918 by George Morrow commanded, ‘Passengers Off The Car First, Please', with the addition of the patronising rationale: ‘First – when one gets out another can get in. Second – Those that would get in before block the way of those that would get out. So to secure room and save seconds there can be no other rule.'