The London Underground at 150 — or is it 170?
The London Underground at 150 — or is it 170?
There’s a lot of interest at the moment around the London Underground, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary on Thursday 10 January, 2013 (or is it Wednesday?*). The first passenger trains of the Metropolitan Railway ran on 10 January, 1863, between Paddington Station and Farringdon Street, along what is now part of the Circle Line (although, pedantically, it’s really still part of the Metropolitan Line because, as any Tube enthusiast will tell you, the Circle doesn’t have any of its own track).
But actually, the oldest part of the underground network is 20 years older than even that ‘original’ line — Sir Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel was built in the 1840s, originally as a foot passageway. It wasn’t until 1869 that the builders of the East London Railway bought the tunnel and refitted it for rail use. It’s not something that seems to be widely known, although TfL does acknowledge the fact on its abandoned page for the East London Line.
So this is as good a point as any to re-post something I wrote a long time ago, as part of my dissertation for a diploma in journalism at City University. My project looked at the controversy over the redevelopment of the East London Line and how the project might look when it was completed. This was back in 2003, and the line with which we ended up looks quite different to what was presented to me at the time. In fact, the biggest change is that it ceased to be part of the Underground at all and became the backbone (if such a metaphor is appropriate for one side of a very irregular polygon) of the new London Overground.
Which means that, technically, the Thames Tunnel has once again ceased to be part of the Underground, though for my purposes I’m still going to claim it as part of the Tube network. The introductory piece follows — bear in mind that I wrote it in 2003 and haven’t changed anything, so much of it is outdated. Incidentally, it has nothing to do with the New Statesman — the brief for the project was to write and present it as though it were going into a major publication, and that one seemed to fit. Click here to view it as a PDF.
No Londoner would argue that public transport in the capital is adequate. Despite the success of the congestion charge since February the buses are still stuck in traffic jams, and far below, the trains are stuck in their tunnels awaiting signal upgrades and track refurbishment. The solution seems, as always, to be investment. Since the late 1990s, when capital expenditure on infrastructure was split from day-to-day running costs in the Tube’s annual budget we have been able to watch just how public money is being spent on the public works projects we hear about so often.
Since the completion of the Jubilee Line Extension in 2000 there have been five rail projects dangling in front of Londoners’ eyes. The most talked-about, and most expensive is Crossrail, the underground link from Paddington through the West End and the City to Essex, which would allow railway trains to travel across the city. Then there is the Thameslink 2000 project, which promised to upgrade the ailing and overused Thameslink service that runs north to south across the capital. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link promises to cut journey times from London to the Continent by thirty minutes, and — uniquely among current major transport projects — is running under budget and to time. The Hackney-SouthWest line, also known as Crossrail 2, is the current incarnation of long-discussed plans — some of which date back to before the Second World War — to bring the Underground to densely populated areas of the city that currently have no easy Tube access.
Finally, the East London Line extension plans to extend a nine-station line that runs through parts of East London and Docklands, to form an orbital railway connecting with the existing overground South, West and North London railways. The line would be a boon for commuters who work in outlying areas, who could avoid having to travel into central London and back out again just to get somewhere that may be just down the road. At the moment, the East London Line runs through some of London’s most deprived boroughs. Tellingly, it doesn’t actually connect them to anywhere else. The extension, shown in the map opposite, would connect the line, north and south, to existing railways, over which trains could run to a far greater array of destinations than is currently possible.
The oldest part of the London Underground actually predates the rest of the network by almost 20 years. Sir Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, which runs between Wapping and Rotherhithe, was built in 1843 as a passenger tunnel, and bought out 26 years later by the builders of the East London Railway, who converted it for use by passenger and goods trains. In the meantime, in 1862, the Underground as we know it had come into being with the construction of the Metropolitan Railway. The plans to extend the line centre upon an even older structure — the 1839 Braithwaite viaduct. This remnant of an earlier railway, when the East London Railway continued on into Liverpool Street from the south, will be demolished under current plans for the railway. Campaigners say it’s a historic building and it would be “an outrage” to demolish it. Moreover, they say, the whole plan as it stands, is “just a shady property deal masquerading as a railway”.
London Underground hopes to have the line built within six years. They first need to reassure the people of the East End that their vital local heritage and amenities are not going to be bulldozed to make way for big businesses.
*TfL itself seems to be celebrating the anniversary on Wednesday 9 January, the date of the limited official opening, but a day before passenger services started which has caused some consternation. The estimable Christian Wolmar and Diamond Geezer both take up the story.