Fiona Rule - London’s Labyrinth: The World Beneath the City’s Streets

LONDONS LABYRINTH

THE WORLD BENEATH THE CITYS STREETS

LONDONS LABYRINTH

THE WORLD BENEATH THE CITYS STREETS

FIONA RULE

First published 2012

ISBN 9780711035447

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Fiona Rule 2012

Published by Ian Allan Publishing
An imprint of Ian Allan Publishing Ltd, Hersham, Surrey KT12 4RG

Printed in England by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD.

Visit the Ian Allan website at www.ianallanpublishing.com

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For Mum the person with whom I first ventured into
Londons Labyrinth, via the Piccadilly Line.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the immensely knowledgeable and helpful staff at the London Transport Museum, the National Archives, the Westminster Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives for their assistance with my research.

I am also indebted to Celia Harrison, Jack Hawkins and Akile Osman at London Underground for their generous assistance and would like to express my gratitude for the help that the late Suki Harrison gave me by putting me in touch with these knowledgeable people.

Finally, many thanks to my agent, Sheila Ableman, for her advice and guidance, Nick Grant and Paul Woods at Ian Allan Publishing, for their faith in me as a writer and, last but not least, my husband Robert for his constant support.

INTRODUCTION

M y journey into Londons underground labyrinth began on a warm July afternoon, in the leafy communal gardens that lay behind the redbrick walls of a mansion block in west London. A residents party was in full swing and, as the wine flowed and tempting smells wafted from the barbecue, I struck up a conversation with a fellow partygoer. I told her about my fascination with London, and how Id always been especially interested in the city hidden beneath our feet. Theres all sorts of things down there, I enthused. Old tunnels, bunkers, disused Tube stations...

My daughter works for London Underground, she told me. She might be able to show you around some of those abandoned stations. So began my exploration of the secrets of subterranean London.

Londons underground railway is indeed a labyrinth. Although hundreds of its winding tunnels are seen by thousands of travellers every day, there are many more that lie dark and deserted beneath the city streets, hidden from view behind anonymous doors, ignored by hordes of commuters who pass them every day. But, for anyone interested in the history of the city, these blank doors are the gateway into a wonderland.

On a quiet street off Piccadilly, a graffiti-covered entrance leads to a tiny stairwell that descends into total blackness. This is what remains of Down Street Tube station, an abandoned stop on the Piccadilly Line. Never having been used very much, the station closed its doors in 1932 only to find an unlikely purpose as a secret government bunker known as the Burrow, during World War 2.

Soon after the grave declaration of war was made, Down Streets abandoned platforms were hurriedly bricked up and the station became the makeshift headquarters of the Emergency Railway Committee, whose unenviable task was to keep London moving throughout the duration of the conflict. Their subterranean headquarters served them so well that Winston Churchill and his cabinet used some of the rooms from time to time. As Hitlers bombs began to rain down on the city, soberly dressed civil servants, cabinet members, secretaries and telephonists slipped quietly through the stations side door and made the way down to their top-secret workplace. Here they would stay for hours, or sometimes days, at a time, concealed from the view of passengers on the trains rushing past the platforms edge.

Today, the Down Street war bunker is long deserted but its shell still remains, along with a few clues to its incongruous former use. In a narrow, claustrophobic corridor an old telephone switchboard stands in the darkness, covered with 60 years of dust and grime. Other, smaller rooms in the complex are still fitted with washing facilities, for staff forced to sleep there when the Blitz was at its most ferocious.

My exploration of the underground railways hidden places revealed the many diverse stories the Tube network has to tell. At Aldgate, I was shown the shadowy remains of the original station, just visible in the fading light before blackness engulfs the tunnel. At Moorgate, the tiny blind tunnel that a packed Northern Line train ploughed into at full speed, one terrible day in 1975, was grimly indicated. The front carriage of the doomed train slammed into the tunnel wall with such force that the two carriages immediately behind it were forced up and under each other, trapping the people inside in a tangled forest of warped metal and shattered glass. The scene that met the men and women who came to rescue them must have been hellish.

I found my excursions underground fascinating, sometimes unnerving but always intriguing. The stories I uncovered inspired me to journey deeper into the subterranean city, to explore all the facets of this complex labyrinth. What I found was a hidden network as essential to the life of London as anything above ground. From the miles of electrical and telecom cabling secreted beneath the pavements to the sewers that carry the citys waste, what goes on beneath London is essential to the citys existence.

Underground London is largely Victorian. Britains emergence as a 19th-century superpower prompted its capital to grow at an alarmingly fast rate. Suddenly, the above-ground infrastructure that had worked for centuries became woefully insufficient. Faced with such a challenge, Victorian engineers found the answer lay beneath their feet. Thus the underground labyrinth began to evolve, in order to enable London to survive.

The fetid miasmas created by the Great Stink of 1858 prompted the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to originate one of Londons first underground innovations a network of subterranean pipes that carried away the citys rotting detritus. This visionary project saved countless Londoners from the horrors of the deadly water-borne disease that had ravaged the city for generations.

The first forays beneath the streets were dirty and massively disruptive, as teams of burly navvies dug colossal trenches into which pipes and tunnels were laid. As Londoners picked their way through the towering piles of earth that lined the streets, a man named James Greathead was busy putting the finishing touches to his tunnelling shield a monstrously large circular device that worked on similar lines to a giant pastry cutter, slicing through the sticky subterranean clay and avoiding the need to start digging above ground. The Greathead Shield, as it became known, took the subterranean city into a new era where no project was deemed impossible. Soon, the labyrinth beneath the streets began to stretch away from the city centre, toward the new housing estates that lay on its perimeter, providing the residents with water, light and transport with all workings hidden from view.