Read Underground, Overground Online
Authors: Andrew Martin
Underground, Overground
UNDERGROUND OVERGROUND
ALSO BY ANDREW MARTIN
NOVELS
Bilton
The Bobby Dazzlers
The Jim Stringer Series:
The Necropolis Railway
The Blackpool Highflyer
The Lost Luggage Porter
Murder at Deviation Junction
Death on a Branch Line
The Last Train to Scarborough
The Somme Stations
The Baghdad Railway Club (forthcoming)
NON-FICTION
Funny You Should Say That: Amusing Remarks from Cicero to The Simpsons (editor)
How To Get Things Really Flat: A Man's Guide to Ironing, Dusting and other Household Arts
Ghoul Britannia: Notes From a Haunted Isle
A PASSENGER'S HISTORY OF THE TUBE
ANDREW MARTIN
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3
A
Exmouth House
Pine Street
London
ECIR OJH
Copyright © Andrew Martin, 2012
âThe Burial of the Dead' taken from
The Waste Land
© Estate of T.S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
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ISBN 978 1 84668 477 7
eISBN 978 1 84765 807 4
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On London Underground, there are the cut-and-cover lines running just below the surface, and the Tubes properly so-called, which are on average about 40 feet down. But âTube' is now used as shorthand for the whole network, not least by London Underground itself, as in âUpgrading Your Tube'; and it is used to mean the whole network in the title of this book. It tends to be older Londoners who hold on to the distinction. A friend of mine was visiting his mother who lives about 500 yards from Parsons Green station on the District, which is a cut-and-cover line. At the end of the evening she said, âHow are you getting back?' He said, âOh, on the Tube', and she looked at him absolutely blankly. â
What
Tube?' she said. âThere
is
no Tube here.' To her and to all other sticklers for the distinction I apologise, and I offer in mitigation the fact that my title
does
take note of the paradox that seems to embody the overall perversity of the Underground: 55 per cent of it is on the surface.
PREFACE:
âDad, I'm off to London'
INTRODUCTION:
Transport for London ⦠and vice versa 1
CHAPTER ONE: THE WORLD OF CHARLES PEARSON
The New Road (and the new traffic)
Pearson's Plan A and Pearson's Plan B
CHAPTER TWO: THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY
The line is built â and opened
CHAPTER THREE: THE METROPOLITAN AND ITS ASSOCIATES
The Hammersmith & City and the âExtension Railway'
The Metropolitan District: the rather uninteresting railway
How not to draw a perfect Circle
By the way: the Circle re-opened
The expansion of the Metropolitan
By the way: the fate of the grand vision
By the way: the East London Line
The first Tube: the City & South London Railway
The Drain (the Waterloo & City Railway)
A red carpet (the Central London Railway)
The Big Tube (the Great Northern & City Railway)
Charles Tyson Yerkes: a good deal of a dreamer
By the way: the Chelsea Monster
Yerkes's babies: the Bakerloo, the Piccadilly, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead
By the way: the Aldwych shuttle
CHAPTER EIGHT: EVERYWHERE IN TRAINS
Persuading people to make journeys it had not occurred to them to make: the Underground poster
The end of walking (and the expansion of London)
CHAPTER NINE: NORTHERN AND PICCADILLY
Another monster: the Northern Line
The Piccadilly Line (or the Pick-adilly Line)
CHAPTER TEN: 1933 AND ALL THAT
The London Passenger Transport Board
By the way: the Lost Property Office
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE WAR AND AFTER
The Victoria Line (or the railway in a bathroom)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MODERN TUBE (OR LIVINGSTONE'S WARS)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: LONDONERS AND THE TUBE
Rites of passage: the notches on the Travelcard
REFACE
âDAD, I'M OFF TO LONDON'
I have always been keen on the London Underground, even though I was born in Yorkshire. I was like Richard Larch in
A Man from the North
(1898), by Arnold Bennett: âThere grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that pertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination.'
My father worked on British Rail, and I had free first-class train travel on the national rail network in the form of a Privilege Pass. I also had free travel on the London Underground, which seemed almost indecent, given that my dad did not work for the Underground and that I came from 250 miles north of London. If at all bored in York, I'd say, âDad, I'm off to London', and I'd collect up my Priv Pass and a handful of the privilege Underground tickets that were usually lying about the house. (Whereas normal Underground tickets in the Seventies were made of green card, the privilege tickets were green and white card â special, you see.) âWell, don't lose your Pass, or I'll get sacked,' my dad would say.
London wore me out. But then I had a very exhausting method of traversing the city, which involved pinballing about from one public street map to another. In theory you could work out your route by pressing buttons that illuminated little light bulbs, but the âYou Are Here' part had always been carefully vandalised, and without that you might have been anywhere. So I'd take the Tube, because the Tube map I could understand. But precisely because it is schematic rather than geographically accurate, with the central area magnified for clarity â so that the distance between Archway and Highgate on the Northern Line, which is about a mile, is shown as being less than the distance between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square on the Piccadilly Line, which is about 800 feet â I would take journeys I didn't need to take, for example
from
Piccadilly Circus to Leicester Square, which is the shortest trip possible on the Underground. âWhen in doubt take the Underground', urged an early Underground poster showing a bewildered little bowler-hatted man with an illuminated âUnderground' sign behind him. That little man was me.
The Underground was my ally in London. I was the son of a railwayman, and what was the Underground but an incredibly high concentration of railways? Also it offered a key to the city ⦠so maybe I
wouldn't
get off at Leicester Square. I might stay on all the way to Manor House, where I would step out and have a walk around, always keeping Manor House station in sight, just as Doctor Who keeps the Tardis in sprinting range when he lands on a new and possibly dangerous planet. I would travel to a place on the slightest of motivations, to find things out. Was there a Manor House at Manor House? (No, only a pub called The Manor House.) Was there a hill at Gants Hill? No; that would be almost as naive as expecting a hill at
Dollis
Hill. (There isn't even an apostrophe at Gants Hill, a deficiency it shares with Parsons Green but not
Earl's Court. But by way of compensation, there is a beautiful Underground station.)
In my boyhood, the system was not what it had been in the triumphalist inter-way heyday, and nor was it like the spruce, sparkling (if badly overcrowded), upgraded Underground of today. In the Seventies the system was run-down and demoralised. Road transport was the future; the Underground was being âmanaged for decline', and the system was filthier even than the streets above. You were not to lean against the station walls, or that was your rally jacket ruined. In most of the stations about a quarter of the tiles would be broken. Sometimes the station name was meant to be spelled out by tiles, and Londoners' toleration of the position at, say, Covent Garden â rendered for years as something like âCOVâT GâDEN' â implied an impressive broad-mindedness on their part.