Underground, Overground (13 page)

The traffic blocks of the mid-century had been alleviated for a while by the Underground railways, but in the late century the horse buses were passing through Piccadilly Circus at the rate of ten a minute, and it was more like eleven a minute at Bank.

Something had to be done. Again.

The deep-level Tubes required the invention of a tunnelling machine and a means of propelling trains through those tunnels that would not choke the passengers. The answer to the latter was electricity, and we have seen how electric traction had become established by the late nineteenth century. The answer to the first problem would be the tunnelling
shield
– that is, a way of allowing men to dig while protecting them from the earth above. The invention of the shield would be triggered by the challenge of digging tunnels under the River Thames, because you couldn't create
those
by cut-and-cover.

The first shield was developed by Marc Isambard Brunel. He preferred his second forename – who wouldn't? – but was known as Marc to distinguish himself from his more famous son, the above-mentioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc Brunel would use his tunnelling shield to build the Thames Tunnel, connecting the two banks of the booming docks. It would eventually be the centrepiece of a Tube line of sorts, before becoming
a differently branded railway altogether. A ride through the tunnel on that line today takes thirty seconds, and nothing can be seen of it, which is a shame because it took eighteen years to build and is considered beautiful.

Marc Brunel was a royalist refugee from revolutionary France. He specialised in ideas that were ahead of their time – of which he seems to have had about one a week – and he had a gift for making those around him seem churlish and reactionary in comparison to his own far-sightedness. In 1799 he designed a machine to make pulley blocks for the British Navy … who turned out not to be good payers. He then set up a boot-making factory in Battersea, in which scarred and mangled war veterans oversaw what has been called the first system of mass production in the world. It supplied the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Duke of Wellington considered Brunel's boots to have played a large part in the British victories. As Robert Hulse, director of the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe says, ‘It was a Frenchman who beat Napoleon', but demand for the boots fell sharply after the Battle of Waterloo, and Brunel was imprisoned for debt in 1821. (By the way, Brunel's army boots are not to be confused with Wellington boots.
Those
foppish articles came from the Duke of Wellington's boot-maker in St James's.) From prison Brunel corresponded with his friend Tsar Alexander I of Russia, for whom he'd been hoping to build a bridge over the River Neva in St Petersburg. The Russians would eventually decide to go under the river, but not before Brunel had shown the way, by building the first sub-aqueous tunnel in the world.

The Thames Tunnel Company raised money from investors who included the Duke of Wellington, and in 1825 Brunel began in typically novel and entertaining style by building a brick cylinder with walls 3 yards thick at Rotherhithe, on the south bank of the Thames. The idea was that it would sink into the ground under its own weight. It did sink – a few inches every day – and
Londoners with nothing much else ‘on' would come to watch it do so.

The earth was excavated from the sunken cylinder; the shield was inserted into it, and the tunnelling began, the target being Wapping, on the opposite bank. The shield was an iron honeycomb containing thirty-six cells within which men dug the wall of mud before them. It is said that Brunel got the idea for a tunnelling shield when he was at Chatham docks making his pulley blocks. There he observed the burrowing through wood of
Teredo navalis
, the ship worm. According to Robert Hulse, ‘It's half worm, half mollusc, and there are more dead men at the bottom of the sea as a result of those things than all the naval battles put together. They're the reason you had copper-bottomed ships.' The outer edges of the shield supported the tunnel as the men worked, and these edges were the equivalent of the shell of the ship worm. The men stabbing away at the mud with their shovels and picks were the equivalent of its teeth. Every few feet the shield was thrust forward by hydraulic jacks, and bricklayers (working
quickly
, mind you) lined the tunnel behind it, just as the
Teredo navalis
lined
its
tunnels with its own excreta. Unlike the circular shields that built the Tubes, Brunel's shield was rectangular and would make a vault shape when the top corners were rounded off. (Tubes are circular because that is the shape of the shields that built them. Brunel's rectangular shield allowed more room for men to dig. A circle is stronger than a vault, but a vault is more pleasing to the eye.)

The Tubes would be dug through impermeable London clay, an ideal medium for tunnelling, but there was as much gravel as clay under the Thames, and the workings kept being breached by toxic river water. In 1826 Marc fell ill through overwork so Isambard took over, and he was given three assistants. One died more or less immediately; another fell ill and would be left blind in one eye. The first major flood of the workings occurred in May
1827, and Marc Brunel wrote, ‘We have been honoured with a visitation of Father Thames', a generous observation given what Father Thames was full of. (The tunnel was dug before the making of the Bazalgette sewers, by which the effluent of London was diverted from the river.) Work restarted early in 1828, but then there was another flood, in which Isambard was swept to the top of the shaft by the surge of water, and a further six men died. In August 1828 the money ran out. With the tunnel about 600 feet long, digging stopped and Isambard went off to build the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

In 1834 Marc Brunel raised enough money to restart digging. This included one of those rare Victorian government grants for an infrastructure project: a £250,000 loan from the Treasury, equivalent to about £250 million today. After further floods and a few fires caused by methane and hydrogen sulphide gas, the tunnel was completed in March 1843, and the major civil engineering feat of its time was opened as … a walkway and tourist attraction. The tourists descended by stairs. There was no money left to create the sloping roadways at either end that would have allowed horse-drawn wagons to use the tunnel, and the Treasury didn't want to know. According to Robert Hulse, the depressing rationale was as follows: ‘The main thing was to finish the tunnel.
Not
to have finished it would have been a national embarrassment, but it didn't matter so much what it was used for once it
was
finished.' So a bazaar was opened in the Tunnel, selling tat, and not even useful tat: coffee cans, snuff boxes, commemorative pictures of the tunnel. There were also prostitutes.

I learned about the Brunel tunnel while standing in the Rotherhithe shaft – or
caisson
– during London Open House Weekend. The shaft is now fitted with a concrete floor built above the level of the beginning of the tunnel. The
caisson
is 50 feet in diameter, 40 feet deep, entirely roofed over. It stands just outside the Brunel Museum and is its proud Exhibit A. The
original staircase has been demolished, but on what the Brunel Museum exuberantly calls ‘high days and holidays' the shaft is opened to visitors, who climb through a kind of trapdoor near the top before descending on a scaffolding staircase to hear a talk by Mr Hulse. Everyone entering the
caisson
was warned to turn back if they were prone to feeling claustrophobic, which only spurred me on. I am prone to claustrophobia, but I wanted to test myself, as did plenty of Victorian men, who would descend the staircase to the bottom of the shaft in a normal and serene manner. They would then clamp their hands on their top hats and leg it from one end of the tunnel to the other, before languidly climbing out of the shaft at the other end, congratulating themselves on having traversed the tunnel before it collapsed or the air ran out.

Actually, the tunnel itself was not as claustrophobic as those that would be dug by the successors to Brunel's shield; and it was much more graceful than those utilitarian drainpipes the Tube lines. Its vault is divided into two elegant arches, themselves divided by an equally elegant series of
transverse
arches. It's very fine, but would it ever be useful? The answer is yes – eventually.

In 1865 an outfit called the East London Railway Company bought the Brunel tunnel for £800,000, and in 1869 they opened a railway through it. The purchase was made on behalf of several railway companies, who would run both passenger and freight trains over the line, and would come to include the Metropolitan and the District.

The line using the tunnel ran at first from New Cross to Wapping. In 1876 it was extended to Shoreditch, then Liverpool Street, the base of the Great Eastern Railway. Between Wapping and Shoreditch, stations were opened at Shadwell and
Whitechapel. In 1884 spurs were built to Aldgate and Tower Hill, tapping into the new Inner Circle, that laborious joint venture of the Metropolitan and the District. It was, as we have seen, the prospect of connecting to the East London Railway via these spurs that motivated the Metropolitan and the District to finish the Inner Circle. A connection to the East London Railway alleviated the sheer boredom of completing the Circle, and it would give them access to … well, to east London. It would also provide them with a river crossing.

The Metropolitan began operating services to New Cross station at the southern end of the East London, where the line met the South Eastern main-line railway, one of several railways besides the Metropolitan of which Watkin was Chairman. The District sent
its
trains into another spur at the same end, where there was a second main-line station, 600 yards from the first and operated by the London Brighton & South Coast Railway but also called New Cross. (Today confusion is lessened somewhat, by the addition of ‘Gate' to the name of the latter station.)

The question of which New Cross was which, didn't much trouble residents of central London, few of whom saw any need to visit either one, but the East London – electrified in 1913, its stations exotically demarcated with green diamonds – did become quite important for freight, which was carried along the line by the London & North Eastern Railway from 1923. Coal was taken from the north of England to the south via the line, which would also be used to carry military hardware through London en route to the south coast for the D-Day landings, a tunnel being more discreet than a bridge. Otherwise, the East London embarked on its fate as a marginal appendage to the Underground, and I use that word in its loosest sense because the East London is partly on the surface, partly cut-and-cover and partly, in effect (the Brunel tunnel) a deep-level Tube.

In 1933 the East London Railway came under the control of
London Transport, and from then until 1968 it was the same colour as the Metropolitan – purple – on the Underground map. In 1970 it was named on the maps as ‘Metropolitan Line – East London Section', and was shown as Metropolitan purple with a white stripe down the middle. It may have looked pretty, but the line in question was tied to the dying ‘inner docks'.

In the early 1980s it was allowed to stand on its own two feet as a fully grown, if short and obscure, Tube line: the East London Line. It was connected to Shadwell on the Docklands Light Railway in 1987, but this didn't take it into the mainstream or alter the fact that it was the only Underground line not to penetrate Zone 1. It remained a special, remedial case.

In 1995 the line was closed because the tunnel was leaking, but two hours before work started, English Heritage listed the tunnel Grade II, and negotiations began on how best to conduct the repairs. The line remained closed during these negotiations, which lasted for a year, whereas (as a friend of mine who lived on the line indignantly pointed out) the Congress of Vienna, which completely reorganised Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, took nine months. It was agreed that the dimensions of the tunnel would be preserved and some of the original brickwork would be left exposed at the Rotherhithe end. The work lasted a further year, and the rail replacement bus service became so well established that on its last day bus-spotters came from all over London to say a sad farewell.

I visited the line shortly after it re-opened, noting that the refurbishment had done nothing to eliminate the brackish stink of the Thames at Wapping or the constant sound of rushing water. Standing in that station is like being in the cistern of a great toilet, and you rather dread the flush. There are other anxieties in this, the oldest ‘Tube' station. The lady in the ticket office told me that one of her colleagues who worked ‘lates' repeatedly heard footsteps approaching the top of the staircase which winds
up the original shaft, at which point the footsteps would cease. Because she might be working ‘lates' herself one day, I didn't tell her that ten men had died during the building of the tunnel.

The East London Line gained a connection to the Jubilee Line Extension when a new station was added at Canada Water in 1999, but its big break came in 2010, when it was incorporated into the London Overground, a network that rehabilitates some dowdy and obscure suburban lines (most particularly the old North London Railway) to create an orbital railway for the capital. (The Overground has been given a seat at the Underground table. It has the roundel, the Johnston typeface, and it is on the Tube map. The conceptualisation is brilliantly simple, and both the engineering and the aesthetic standards of the revitalised line – once famous for connecting at the slowest possible speed all the most obscure parts of London – are first-class.) In its new capacity the East London even got to keep its Tube Line colour – orange – which it had been given in the early Eighties, since that is also the colour of London Overground. New lift shafts and a modernistic gantry incorporating some sort of high-tech control panel stand within the shaft, creating a clash of genres: Bond film goes Steampunk. From the platforms at Wapping or Rotherhithe you can see the tunnel fleetingly illuminated as the trains approach; it looks so incredibly Victorian that you expect to see Jack the Ripper loitering between the arches.