Bizarre London Read online

  The famously irrepressible Mayor of London Boris Johnson1 described the Tube with typical gusto on its 150th birthday as ‘the throbbing cardiovascular system of the greatest city on earth’. Elsewhere, its importance to London has been likened to the metal thread running through a banknote – always there, taken for granted, but essential to its value. But the world’s first and oldest underground railway has also attracted less favourable descriptions too, none of which will surprise regular commuters.

  Passengers felt ‘as if they had been chewing Lucifer matches’ according to the Yorkshire Herald, providing readers with an impression of what it was like to travel on one of the very first Underground trains 150 years ago.

  ‘A form of mild torture which no person would undergo if he could conveniently help it’ wrote The Times, reporting on the completion of the Circle Line in 1884.

  ‘Prisoners will be condemned to so many continuous round trips as they are now to so many weeks in jail.’ This was also a reference to the Circle Line, with the Pall Mall Gazette offering up a suggestion to help reduce prison overcrowding.

  ‘An experience of Hades’ said the editor of the Daily Express, whose son later went on to become chairman of London Transport.

  ‘The Sardine Box Railway’ reported the magazine Punch, commenting on the claustrophobically enclosed carriages on the City & South London Line. This opened in 1890, the world’s first electric underground railway, and ran from Stockwell to the City.

  ‘We have scarcely yet been educated up to that condition of social equality when lords and ladies will be content to ride side by side with Billingsgate fish fags and Smithfield butchers.’ This view was published in the Railway Times following the decision not to offer separate accommodation for first-, second- and third-class passengers.

  ‘Young girls and men are crowded in such a way that the question of decency even comes up.’ W. J. Kelley MP questioned the morality of the railway during a debate in the House of Commons in the mid-1930s.

  ‘Commuters face a daily trauma and are forced to travel in intolerable conditions’ concluded a 2004 Parliamentary report, which surprised no one at all who has ever been on a rush-hour train.

  ‘Why preserve these London Underground hell holes?’ screamed the Daily Telegraph in 2011, on hearing that a total of 72 stations on the network were listed as Grade II or II*. According to the paper, every effort should go not into preserving the system as an historical artefact but in making it as efficient as possible in terms of moving millions from A to B.

  Little wonder, then, that at the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863, the Prime Minister declined even to attempt a journey on it. Instead, Lord Palmerston, who to be fair was approaching his eightieth birthday, let it be known that he wished to spend as much time as possible above ground.

  Voices on the Underground

  Inspector Sands

  In fact, you never hear him speak, but any announcement referring to ‘Inspector Sands’ is a coded warning to station staff of an incident – possibly a fire or suspect package – somewhere in the station.

  Sonia

  The nickname given by male station staff to all female announcers on the network’s public address system, because ‘her voice gets sonia nerves’.

  Tim Bentinck

  David Archer from the famous BBC radio soap – more correctly the 12th Earl of Portland and 8th Count Bentinck und Waldeck-Limpurg – provides the voice behind the famous ‘Mind the Gap’ warnings at Piccadilly Line stations.

  Oswald Laurence

  Another actor provided the ‘Mind the Gap’ voice for the Northern Line. After more than forty years, Laurence’s recordings were phased out, but then brought back in to use (at Embankment Station in 2013) after reports that his widow had expressed her disappointment at never hearing his voice again.

  Other Underground Oddities

  Holborn Tramway Station

  London’s trams stopped running in the 1950s but this station beneath Kingsway was left intact. It is one of the last surviving relics of the Kingsway Tram Subway, a cut-and-cover tunnel designed to provide a link between north and south London trams networks without adding to traffic congestion at street level. Occasionally open to the public, the entrance can still be seen behind locked gates in the centre of Southampton Row.

  Camden Catacombs, London

  Hidden beneath Camden Lock’s famous market and what was once an old gin warehouse, this extensive web of vaults and subterranean passageways originally provided stabling, storage and tack space for scores of pit ponies serving the railway/canal interchange situated above. Mostly closed to the public, some sections can be seen while visiting the market.

  As well as an underground canal basin large enough for narrow boats to turn round, the complex includes a vast hall that housed steam-powered winding gear to winch trains up the hill from Euston Station. As such, it provides a fascinating glimpse of changing transport technologies in the metropolis – from horses through canals to rail.

  Nursemaid’s Tunnel

  One you won’t find on any map, this small foot-tunnel runs from Park Square Gardens, NW1, beneath the Euston Road to Crescent Gardens, W1. Both are privately owned parks, meaning that the tunnel linking Camden and Westminster is restricted to residents and other key-holders only, although the public is occasionally allowed a peek during the annual London Open Gardens Weekend.

  Tower Subway, London

  A rare, privately owned tunnel beneath the Thames, this was completed in 1868 but is still in use today. The entrance on the north bank is a small cylindrical building just west of the Tower of London, and originally cable cars were run from here to Southwark and back again. Unfortunately, these were so slow that passengers preferred to walk through the tunnel and were charged a ha’penny to do so.

  When Tower Bridge opened in 1894, people could cross at no cost, and the operators rapidly lost their custom. The tunnel was subsequently sold to the London Hydraulic Power Company, and until the 1970s it formed part of an incredible 200-mile network of tunnels, pipes and ducts that channelled hydraulic power around London to raise theatre curtains, cranes, hotel lifts and so on. Today, more mundanely, it is used to run fibre-optic cables under the Thames and is closed to the public.

  Admiralty Citadel, London

  The big, ivy-covered building at the end of the Mall is essentially a massive wartime pillbox whose blast-proof walls have proved too strong and too costly to demolish. What Churchill called in his war memoirs ‘that vast monstrosity which weighs upon Horse Guards Parade’ conceals several layers of top-secret, subterranean offices that are still thought to be in use.

  It is also rumoured to be linked by tunnel to Buckingham Palace, providing a useful refuge should things turn nasty and the Royal Family need to flee, but naturally this has not been confirmed. (For years, it was said the tunnel could be glimpsed through a vent in the Gents’ loos at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, but again there is no proof of this.)

  Thames Water Ring Main

  Diving deeper underground than most of the Tube, almost twice as long as the Channel Tunnel, and easily wide enough to drive a train through, this pumps 300 million gallons a day of fresh water around London. It cost more than £250 million when it was completed in the mid-1990s and, in theory, could fill an Olympic swimming pool in under two minutes.

  The Greenwich Foot Tunnel

  Linking London’s newest royal borough to the Isle of Dogs and the docks, this is reached via wood-panelled Edwardian lifts descending from two splendid, glass-domed entrance pavilions. At the northern end, it narrows sharply as a result of emergency repairs to wartime bomb damage, and while it officially forms part of the National Cycle Network, cyclists are forbidden to ride through the tunnel.

  Mail Rail

  From 1927 to 2003, the Post Office had its own railway network running through nearly seven miles of private tunnels with eight stations taking it from Paddington to Whitechapel. Some fifty driverless electric trains co
nnected the major sorting offices and transported up to 30,000 items daily, with a train running every five minutes during peak times. After a brief appearance as the Italian ‘Poste Vaticane’ in the Bruce Willis film Hudson Hawk, it was offered for sale following the closure – but with no takers so far.

  The Eisenhower Centre

  Situated on Chenies Street just off Tottenham Court Road, the exceptionally ugly, windowless silo is the above-ground portion of one of the London’s eight Deep Level Shelters. These were excavated in the early 1940s beneath the stations at Chancery Lane, Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell, Goodge Street, Camden Town and Belsize Park.

  Each comprises twin tunnels more than 16 ft in diameter and an astonishing 1,200 ft long, with room for 8,000 people to shelter during an air raid. Four were set aside for civilian use, with four more designed as secret military command centres, including this one, which was reserved for the American Allied commander’s personal use. All eight still exist and are occasionally offered for sale, but with a clause in the lease permitting the government to reoccupy the tunnels in the event of another war.

  SEWERS – THE LOAD THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

  Before sewers, cities had cesspits, tens of thousands of them, and the unpleasant task of emptying these could make rich men of so-called rakers and gong-farmers. In the fourteenth century, these chaps could charge up to £2 a job, at a time when a peasant would be doing well to earn just two pence a day.

  The price reflected not just the unpleasantness of the task but also the danger, one raker at the time drowning ‘monstrously in his own excrement’, while two more succumbed to toxic fumes while trying to retrieve a barrel of booze that had somehow slipped down the flue.

  Determined to improve things, Henry III built the first public loos since Roman times, but they were expensive – in 1383 the one at London Bridge cost £11 – and Londoners objected to footing the bill. They preferred to carry on as they were, and by 1388 a new law was brought in specifically outlawing any act likely to ‘corrupt or pollute ditches, rivers and the air of London’.

  It took until 1531 for Henry VIII to create official Commissioners of Sewers, but it was only when a way was found to make poo pay that anyone took a real interest in the stuff. The war with Spain from 1585 to 1604 boosted the demand for gunpowder, and when it was discovered that useful nitrates could be extracted from excrement, ‘salt-petremen’ were empowered by the government to enter any house and remove any waste they thought they could sell on.

  Efficient sewers were still a good way off, though, and nearly everything unpleasant continued to be flushed into the Thames. By the start of the nineteenth century, a million Londoners were still relying on an estimated 200,000 cesspits, and it took several major outbreaks of cholera – just one of which killed more than 10,000 people – before it was finally decided to do something sensible about London’s big problem.

  Briefly there was talk of piping much of the effluent out to market gardeners in Hammersmith, and plans to dry the remainder so it could be sold to farmers. But in 1859 it was finally accepted there would be a cost to the clean-up rather than a profit, and the engineering genius Sir Joseph Bazalgette was brought in to create the massive sewer system on which London still relies.

  Bazalgette’s masterplan was based on a network of six vast ‘interceptory’ sewers, each one egg-shaped in cross section, so that water lower down would move faster and self-clean the pipes. As this suggests, Bazalgette seemed to have thought of everything, even employing special Staffordshire Blue bricks (formulated to withstand the effects of a constant flow of sewage) and a new Portland cement that actually hardened over time.

  In all, he built more than 100 miles of these broad sewers, enough to drain 450 miles of main sewers and 13,000 miles of local ones. In so doing, his project consumed nearly 320 million bricks, 880,000 cubic yards of concrete, and required the excavation of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth – but it was as simple as it was elegant and, most of all, it worked.

  Powered almost entirely by gravity, the network successfully removed millions of tons of waste out to treatment plants at Beckton and Plumstead, and finally solved a problem that was – quite literally – as old as London itself. Admittedly, it had cost more than £4 million and took nearly seventeen years to complete, but to do the same today would cost billions – and the chances are we’d get it wrong.

  ____________

  1 For more from him, see Chapter 18.

  6

  Monumental London

  ‘If you’re curious, London’s an amazing place.’

  David Bailey

  Lifting the Lid on Nelson’s Column

  Strictly speaking it should be called ‘The Nelson Column’, and allowing for inflation it cost just over £4 million in today’s terms. A quarter of the cost was met by the Russian Tsar, the largest single contributor.

  The pre-eminent English hero died in 1805, but it took another thirty-two years even to form a committee to consider how to commemorate his life and outstanding achievements. Eventually, a competition was held, and it was won by William Railton who proposed building a massive Corinthian column weighing more than 2,500 tons. The result was controversial, however, so the competition had to be re-run with Railton being again declared the winner and awarded £200 for his idea.

  The runner-up was Edward Hodges Bailey. As a consolation prize, he was asked to sculpt the figure of Lord Nelson, facing south towards the Channel.

  The first stone wasn’t laid until 1840, when the ceremonials were conducted by Charles Davison Scott, son of Nelson’s secretary John Scott.

  The column was still unfinished four years later, however, as the money had run out. Forced to take over the project, the government insisted that 30 ft be trimmed off the column to save money.

  The 18 ft-1 in. figure of Nelson nevertheless weighed in at a hefty 18 tons, and was expertly carved from a huge piece of Craigleith sandstone donated by the Duke of Buccleuch. It was described by one envious Frenchman as ‘hideous . . . like a rat impailed on a stick’, but actually Bailey’s carving is so detailed that the word ‘NILE’ can still be read on one of his medals. Curiously, he left off the eye-patch we all know and love, although the Admiral is at least shown with one arm missing.

  The lions at the base were not completed until 1867, more than sixty years after Nelson’s death, and Sir Edwin Landseer was awarded the commission only because the now relatively unknown John Graham Lough turned the job down.

  Finally completed, in 1896 the figure at the top was struck by a bolt of lightning, knocking a lump of stone from its shoulder and prompting concerns that the Admiral’s one remaining (left) arm might drop off. To prevent this from happening, a bronze ‘bandage’ was put in place.

  In 1925, a Scottish confidence trickster cheekily ‘sold’ the monument to an American for £6,000. He is also thought to have secured £1,000 from someone keen to acquire the tower known as Big Ben.

  Adolf Hitler also liked the column, in particular for what it represented, and reportedly planned to take it back to Berlin following the successful invasion of Britain. (The Nazis wanted Cleopatra’s Needle, too, although the reasons for this are not known.)

  WELLINGTON FINALLY MEETS HIS WATERLOO

  The Duke of Wellington is the only non-Royal to have two statues in London showing him mounted on a horse, but in fact there should have been three. The third and largest was so large – more than 30 ft tall – that its construction required more than 40 tons of captured French cannon to be melted down to provide the bronze.

  Unfortunately, it was so ugly that, on seeing it, a Frenchman is said to have proclaimed ‘Nous somme vengés . . .’ – we are avenged.1 Londoners, too, were quick to demand the eyesore be got rid of, and Queen Victoria apparently agreed – not least because Wellington was shown seated on the wrong horse – but insisted that the removal be delayed until Wellington had died. The figure is now positioned in Surrey.

  Monuments That Ar
en’t Quite What They Seem

  One of London’s most famous monuments – Eros in Piccadilly Circus – actually depicts Anteros, the Greek god of requited love, although most tourists assume it is the Roman god Cupid.

  The statue of Oliver Cromwell outside Westminster Hall shows him wearing his spurs upside-down, although it is not known whether this is an error on the part of the artist or a calculated insult.

  If the paws on the Trafalgar Square lions look a little odd, it is because sculptor Edwin Landseer modelled them on those of a domestic cat after the lion’s corpse he had been working from finally began to fester and had to be abandoned.

  G. F. Handel had such weird ears – at least according to Louis-François Roubillac – that when carving the composer’s likeness for Westminster Abbey, the Frenchman found it more acceptable to copy those of a young woman he knew.

  St Pancras New Church on the Euston Road was inspired by two highly influential buildings in Athens – the Erechtheum and the Tower of the Winds. Unfortunately, the Greek Revival caryatids placed outside it were sculpted to the wrong scale so that the young ladies had later to have several inches removed from above their waists in order to fit the finished building.

  The statue outside St Thomas’s Hospital of Britain’s most famous nurse, Florence Nightingale, is a fibreglass copy of the original, which was stolen in 1970 and never recovered.

  Also lost are the original genitalia of the South Bank Lion outside County Hall. The lion originally stood on top of a brewery further along the bank, presumably too high to cause offence, but the ensemble was considered a tad lewd when he was installed on a lower plinth and steps were taken to emasculate the poor beast.