Roads were sliced open; tenements were flattened; the River Fleet was held in check. One commentator noted that it was like operating on a human body, for below London lay ?the veins and arteries? of pipes. The driving visionary was Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London and sometime radical MP for Lambeth. In the 1850s, seeing how London?s streets were also being jammed with railway passengers arriving from all over the country, he campaigned for a line between Paddington and the City. In 1854, the idea finally got parliamentary assent. Pearson died in 1862, one year before his dream was thrown open to the public on January 9 1863. By the end of the first year of operation, there were nine million passengers.
It took a while, but other British cities followed. Liverpool got a series of underground stations linked to the surface lines, with a tunnel beneath the Mersey, in 1886; those tunnels are now part of the modern Merseyrail system. In Hungary in 1896, Budapest opened its own underground network. In the same year, Glasgow swiftly followed with a circular tunnel system that swooped under the Clyde twice. As a child in the Seventies visiting Scottish relatives, I recall the unmodernised, ancient-seeming island platforms, and the little trains painted bright red. The later, more modern trains were tangerine, and the Glasgow loop system became known as the ?Clockwork Orange?.
The Paris M?tro started taking passengers in 1901 and swiftly expanded, its map swirling madly in all directions, the history and soul of the nation marked down in those romantic station names, from Austerlitz (named after the battle) to Alexandre Dumas (one of several authors thus commemorated). In Russia, the grandiose proportions and over-decorated chintzy chandeliers of the Moscow metro were first built in the Thirties, at the height of Stalin?s genocidal rule. These glitzy stations were said to be intended as ?palaces for the people?.
Back in London, and after the pioneering sub-surface lines built beneath the roads, there came the Tubes ? the first deep line was the City and South London (now the Northern Line), opened in 1890, with electric locomotives. These tunnels, sometimes hundreds of feet beneath the surface, remain unique. As a Victorian commentator cheerfully noted, it was now possible for people to travel ?below the level of graveyards?. Tube publicity always sought to veer away from such morbid notions: one Twenties poster carried a beautiful painting of a glowing Tube station entrance on a dark wet night. The tagline was: ?Where it is warm and bright.?
To this day, an underground railway is a city?s badge of status, and every system has its own distinct atmosphere. Washington DC, for instance, has a sober, cool, refined network with wide, airy passages and well-lit platforms. Toronto is similarly calm and reserved ? even, dare it be said, a trifle flavourless. But some undergrounds will always inspire anxiety. New York?s aggressively utilitarian subway ? no fancy station names, and dim stations barely decorated in any way ? has spawned urban legends of homeless people forming communities in disused tunnels. These tales can also be found in Paris and London; there are even stories of children born underground, growing up albino and speaking in guttural tongues.
Not that long ago, the Paris M?tro was held up as an example of elegance and sophisticated efficiency. Now it is grubby and dangerous and can feel sinister. In his highbrow thriller Foucault?s Pendulum, Umberto Eco speculated that the M?tro was built according to a Knights Templar design, the weaving tunnels actually forming a map to a deeper, darker secret to do with untapped mystical forces.
On the other hand, London?s Tube ? formerly decaying, peeling, raucous and filthy ? seems to have found new, more beautiful, sometimes exquisite life in recent years. There is the restored Victorian splendour of the Circle Line ? fantasias of pale yellow brickwork and green-painted wrought iron. There is the dripping gothic thrill of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel?s twin tunnels under the river at Wapping. Gants Hill, in the east, is a sly Forties austerity satire on Moscow?s absurd grandeur. Uxbridge is a fascinating Thirties experiment in brutalist concrete ? as well as being immortalised in Radio 4?s I?m Sorry I Haven?t a Clue?s Uxbridge English Dictionary. Clue fans might also want to visit the show?s ultimate shrine: Mornington Crescent, south of Camden Town, once the hangout of scary drunks and addicts, but now a charmingly restored example of the finest Edwardiana.
Meanwhile, modern Canary Wharf has the breathtaking operatic scale of a Bond villain?s lair. Perhaps thus inspired, the most recent 007 adventure Skyfall featured the villain using the Tube system as a means to try to kill Bond. It could have been worse. In the 1967 Hammer film Quatermass and the Pit, a new Tube extension to ?Hobb?s Lane? uncovers a long-buried spaceship and ancient visions of the Devil himself.
And naturally there are plenty of ghost stories even today: the baleful presence felt by drivers in the darkness on the Kennington loop; the spectre on the stairs at Russell Square. There is even said to be a glowing-eyed vampire lurking in a disused tunnel near Whitechapel ? this notion thanks to the poet/novelist Iain Sinclair.
In real life, that faintly pleasurable unease will never quite go away. When you stand at the end of the platform and stare into the fathomless darkness of the Tube tunnel, waiting to feel the stale air of an oncoming train, there is always a slight sense of the macabre. Of all the ways to travel, there is something counter-intuitive about plunging into the depths. But the fascination and the allure is enduring, too. Why else should crowds of children spend hours in the London Transport Museum, poring over those first ever Harry Beck-designed Tube maps from the Thirties, or gawping at the original Victorian windowless Tube carriages, dubbed ?padded cells?? And what visitor to the capital has not laughingly intoned, in fruity received pronunciation, the instruction: ?Mind the Gap?? The underground has a way of getting under everyone?s skin.
For details of the London Underground?s 150th anniversary celebrations, visit www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/tube150
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