Underground railways were invented by a man born in the eighteenth century. Charles Pearson, who first set out the idea of running railways under cities, took his first breath in October 1793, at the height of the worst excesses of the French Revolution and more than two decades before Napoleon met his Waterloo.
As ever with history, there are various theories about who really was the first to conceive of an underground railway with the aim of alleviating the growing problems of congestion on London’s streets. But Pearson has by far the best claim. It was Pearson, the City of London solicitor, who first set out his notion in a pamphlet in 1845, suggesting a railway running down the Fleet valley to Farringdon that would be protected by a glass envelope making it ‘as lofty, light and dry… as the West End arcades’. The trains were to be drawn by atmospheric power so that smoke from steam engines would not cloud the glass. This, of course, was not the scheme that was eventually built, but Pearson’s concept was certainly the kernel of the idea that was to become the Metropolitan Railway two decades later along broadly the same route.
And it was Pearson who masterminded the financing of the Metropolitan which saved the scheme at the eleventh hour. Indeed, Pearson was a serial promoter of such undertakings, supporting several similar projects in the 1850s, and thanks to his perseverance eventually got his way. While the importance of Pearson’s role is open to debate, it is difficult to argue against the proposition that without him, London might not have pioneered a transport system that transformed urban living. One could go further. Without Pearson metro systems might never have been developed, because the advent of the motor car in the late nineteenth century, followed quickly by electric tramways and the motor bus, could have resulted in the bypassing of the underground railways as a solution to city traffic problems given the expense and disruption of their construction as happened in most cities in the US. Paris, after all, was not to get its first Métro line until 1900 and the New York system did not open until 1904. Both learned much from the mistakes and tribulations of London’s pioneers.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, London metamorphosed from a busy commercial centre into the world’s first megalopolis. It was not surprising, therefore, that it would be the first to have underground railways, but it is, perhaps, remarkable that it beat its French counterpart by thirty-seven years. Whereas previously London’s rural surroundings had never seemed very far away, now the sprawling slums were interspersed with elegant Georgian squares and swathes of little factories and warehouses which had sprung up in the capital as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. Greater London’s population in 1850 had grown to 2.5 million from just under 1 million in 1800. The Georgian enclaves which had sprouted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on fields, snapped up cheaply by eager speculative developers, had enabled the relatively well-off to enjoy a new type of suburban living, away from the throng of the city. These areas, such as Camberwell, Kennington, Islington and Mile End – all fashionable again now as they were built by what Simon Jenkins calls ‘men of taste and discrimination’ to high standards – were within a mere hour’s walk of the City in those days before traffic lights, congestion and pedestrian barriers.
Picture, for a moment, the London when Pearson’s idea for underground railways first emerged. As one historian, Hugh Douglas, eloquently put it, ‘towards the middle of the [nineteenth] century, London was dying – slowly, painfully and with a great deal of protest. No physician had to be called in to diagnose the trouble; it was all too apparent to those who lived there, for, wherever they went, they encountered the great thrombosis of traffic which clogged the highways that were the veins and arteries carrying the city’s blood.’ The cause of the clogging of the arteries was too much affluence and good living. London – indeed, the whole country – was prospering mightily. Britain was becoming the hub of an empire and her capital was emerging as the richest city in the world. With the huge increase in population, nearly a quarter of a million people were daily coming into the City to work.
The turmoil on the roads was, however, more like a Third World, than a Western, city today. There were wagons whose drivers walked beside the horses, blocking a large part of the roadway; and large advertising vans pulled by horses whose very purpose – to be seen by as many passers-by as possible – meant their progress was sloth-like. Costermongers with carts and animals being driven to market ensured that speeds in the central area rarely rose above walking pace. The bridges were particular bottlenecks and rain would add to the chaos by turning the roads into muddy quagmires.
More and more housing was needed as increasing numbers of jobs were created in the burgeoning factories and workshops, and, most important, in the offices of the City where the demand for clerks, before the days of typewriters, was almost unlimited. Demand for transport soared. No longer did people work within the district where they lived. The first commuters were hardy souls who had walked from areas of low rent to commercial districts, but as London spread, this was no longer possible. Successive new transport methods were introduced throughout the Victorian era in attempts to cope with the demand, starting in 1829 with the omnibus. George Shillibeer opened the first service using twenty-seater carriages from Paddington to the Bank of England, anticipating the same route that the first Underground railway would take thirty-four years later. Although Shillibeer’s pioneering status can be questioned, as his omnibus service was little more than a stagecoach which made a shorter journey with more stops, the introduction of his service was a momentous event in the history of London’s transport. However, it was not for the masses. The fare of one shilling to travel from Paddington to Bank was expensive and would have deterred all but the wealthiest of potential commuters – in contrast the workmen’s trains of the Metropolitan Railway would, three and a half decades later, offer a whole week’s travel for just one shilling.
Horses, which from 1870 also pulled trams along iron rails, remained the mainstay of much of the transport system until the turn of the century; oats and hay were as important a source of energy as coal. The rich had their own horses and carriages, a phenomenon which, rather like the growth of the private car a century later, was a major contributor to the congestion problem, but it was damned expensive as the horses required looking after, feeding and grooming. And what came out of the rear end of horses remained a major problem: ‘The best estimate is that by the 1830s, English towns had to cope with something like three million tons of droppings every year’ and three times that by the end of the Victorian era. And, contrary to those nostalgic pictures of old crones rushing after carriages to pick up fresh manure, the stuff was virtually worthless, barely five shillings a ton to the farmer. Therefore it was dumped in vast dung heaps in the poorer areas of town, contributing greatly to the squalor, stench and unhealthiness of Victorian London.
~~The Subterranean Railway -by- Christian Wolmar
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