The Americans who built the Tube

On the strange romance of the Underground

There is something strangely romantic about the London Underground, from its distinctive iconography to the evocative sound of zone 5 stations in Metroland.

There is also something very wholesome about Tube nerds, so novelist Andrew Martin, whose non-fiction Underground Overground came out in 2013, is a man after my own heart. His book is both a history of the capital’s subterranean train network, and a paean to the many enthusiasts who take joy in it. (To those who want to go into deep nerdiness, he also wrote a book about its seat covers). 

The Tube is central to London identity but while our underground is the oldest in the world, it was in many ways heavily influenced by the New York public transport system, and Americans played a huge part in creating it. 

But the godfather of the Tube was an early Victorian Liberal politician, do-gooder and ‘gadfly’, Charles Pearson, whose whole idea the underground railways was. Pearson was a political radical who campaigned for the right of Jews to hold office and the abolition of capital punishment. He also successfully helped to change the inscription on the Monument in 1830, having previously blamed the Great Fire of London on Catholics.

Pearson was motivated by a desire to solve a problem that very much resonates today, namely that housing costs in London made life too expensive for workers. As the city grew in population, hundreds of thousands of people had to walk upwards of ten miles into town, or pay the exorbitant rents in the City, often living in deeply unsanitary conditions.

After being made a Solicitor of the Corporation of London in 1839, Pearson had begun to campaign for a railway under the city. He had philanthropic goals but, like many of the great railway innovators, he also planned to make money for his investors. This didn’t always turn out to be the case, as it goes.

Trains had come to the capital in 1837 with the London and Birmingham railways at Euston, complete with its iconic arch (sadly destroyed in 1961, although perhaps to be resurrected one day). Paddington followed the following year.

These were entirely privately funded, unlike on the continent, one theory – suggested by Matthew Engel – being that, because Britain barely had a standing army, the British had no sense of the tactical importance of transport (compare how roads were often spurred by military needs in France and the United States).

London was growing rapidly, doubling in population from 1845 to 1900, and the city increasingly suffered from traffic ‘locks’ or ‘blocks’, as Victorians called them – ‘jams’ was an Americanism that came in after the First World War.  

This was only partly relieved by the creation of bus routes, the first of which was established in 1829 on the New Road (now Euston Road) with a standard single fare costing 6d, the same as three pints of beer. By 1840 these omnibuses were already being described as a nuisance.

Population growth was placing huge strain on housing conditions, and Pearson believed in ‘oscillation’, that poor people should be able to move further out so as to enjoy more space and a healthier lifestyle. He told a parliamentary committee in 1846 that ‘a poor man is chained to the spot. He has not leisure to walk and he has not money to ride to a distance from his work’.

When in 1848 a Royal Commission on Metropolitan Railway Termini was set up, Pearson told them: ‘The passion for a country residence is increasing to an extent that it would be impossible to persons who do not mix much with the poor to know. You cannot find a place where they do not get a broken teapot in which to stuff, as soon as the spring comes, some flowers or something to give them an idea of the green fields and the country’. He hoped that his line would connect Farringdon, then being cleared of its ancient slums, with new cottages for artisans and clerks six miles north of London.

In retrospect, it seems like such a madcap, ambitious project, yet the Victorians had no concept of cheems. As Martin points out: ‘In the nineteenth century about fifty railway tunnels of more than a mile in length were constructed, compared to three in the twentieth century.’

There were many obstacles, both physical and political, with objections from many powerful groups to any new railways inside the centre of London. By 1859 it looked like the whole venture was going to be wound up, but Pearson campaigned away, writing a pamphlet which persuaded the Corporation of London to invest a further £200,000.

The Metropolitan Line was supposed to be open in time to take people from Euston Road to the Second Great Exhibition of 1862, not the last time that a transport network would be spurred by a great event; the Jubilee extension was built with half an eye on the Millennium Dome, and the updating of the Overground was linked to the 2012 Olympics. As it turned out, this first underground was a year late, but when the new Metropolitan Railway opened between Bishops Road (now Paddington) and Farringdon on 10 January 1863, some 30,000 people travelled on the first day.

It was a huge success, but as with so many infrastructure projects, it was widely condemned before and during its construction, and applauded afterwards. The Times had dismissed it as ‘utopian’ and criticised the project by saying it would never pay: ‘a subterranean railway suggestive of dark, noisome tunnels, buried many fathoms deep beyond the reach of light or life.’ But after it opened the same paper called the new Metropolitan railway ‘the greatest engineering triumph of its day… ingenious contrivances for obtaining light and ventilation were particularly commended.’

Two decades later, however, the Times described the journey from King’s Cross to Baker Street as ‘a mild form of torture which no person would undergo if he could help it’, starting a long tradition of newspapermen complaining about their journeys; the Northern was christened ‘the Misery Line’ by a journalist in the 1980s.