If it’s red, it’s Green

As I’ve mentioned before, the London Underground has always had a strong sense of design. In fact, it pretty well introduced the concept of corporate identity to the city. However, one of the most distinctive early shapers of this corporate identity is perhaps the least known. Take a look at this station:

This is the abandoned Piccadilly Line stop at York Road (just a short distance from King’s Cross if you want to look it out for yourself). But the architectural style will be familiar to anyone who’s spent any time in London, for there are simply dozens of buildings like these dotted along the Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Northern Lines. Many of them are still in use, some have been converted to other purposes and some, like our friend York Road and the old entrance at Euston, are simply abandoned. This is the house style devised by Leslie Green for the stations of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London Limited.

The UERL, as it is commonly known, was the result of American transport tycoon Charles Yerkes buying out several Underground railway schemes that had run into financial difficulty, the railways that would eventually become the Bakerloo, Piccadilly, District and Northern lines (albeit only the Charing Cross branch of the latter). Whatever you might think of Yerkes as a person- certainly he served some time in the US for dodgy dealings – it can’t be denied that he knew a little something about corporate identity.

Therefore, Yerkes hired the young Leslie Green in 1903 to create a unified style for the above-ground buildings of the UERL. Green was not very well-known at the time, although he had had a number of commissions in Central London. The brief was that the stations he designed had to be adaptable to any location,  cheap to build and – this factor was very important given that construction of the lines were well underway – quick to erect.

Green devised a building style not dissimilar to that used on American skyscrapers. The stations would be built around a sturdy frame of steel girders, with the walls effectively “hanging” from this (I know, architecture students, it’s more complex than that) and a flat roof. The distinctive oxblood tiles were a time- and cost-cutting measure – architectural fanciness, very much the style in the early twentieth century, could be cast into the tiles which could be stuck on to the frontage like Lego bricks (or Bayko – anyone remember Bayko?).

The skyscraper-style construction wasn’t just modernist whimsy on Green’s part – Yerkes was savvy enough to figure out that his stations would be occupying prime sites in the city, and so they should be built in such a way that extra storeys of flats or offices could be plonked on top. For all Yerkes was a visionary, his vision, like that of Zephram Cochrane, was inspired by the profit motive.

Despite the similarities between the buildings, Green was able to incorporate various differences from station to station. Compare the compact front of Aldwych to the sharp curves of Chalk Farm, for instance. For Holborn, he even abandoned the oxblood tiles altogether in favour of granite. There are plenty of less obvious detail differences if you’re prepared to examine closely.

Inside, where refurbishment hasn’t obliterated the original decor, you’ll notice that the platform-level tiling can be quite colourful, forming interesting patterns that differ between stations. The detail differences in this case served a very practical purpose, in that the Underground was an inexpensive form of transport and, in those early days, it was assumed that a large proportion of those using the trains would be illiterate. Having different patterns would allow such folk to recognise their stops with ease.

Tragically, Green died at thirty-three. However, no less than twenty-nine of his  stations survive in recognisable condition, the great majority still in everyday use and all unmistakable. In terms of an architectural legacy, that’s hard to beat.

Foulwell and Kingston-Upon-Railway

The suburbs are weird, aren’t they? I mean, by their very nature. Central London has long been a well-defined place. City walls, city gates, parish boundaries, main roads and the river have meant that for centuries the different places in London have been pretty clearly delineated. Granted, there’s the occasional dispute about, e.g., where the West End ends, and there are new places like Fitzrovia and Chinatown to contend with, but by and large you know where you are.

The suburbs, though, are different. You can’t really have suburbs until you have decent transport, so the area we now tend to think of as “suburbia” didn’t really exist until the 19th century. And I know I go on about the railways in London quite a lot, but the fact is that they were absolutely instrumental to the formation of Greater London.

For instance, take where I live – Colliers Wood. Where is Colliers Wood? It’s at the southern end of the Northern Line (incidentally, it’s a geographical irony that the Northern Line goes further south than any other Tube line). When was it founded? Well, basically, Colliers Wood-the-place didn’t exist until 1926, when the Tube station was opened. The area wasn’t exactly desolate and uninhabited, but this place as a whole was known as Merton. Colliers Wood was a local landmark that hadn’t existed for about fifty years when the Tube came along. Had the Underground station been named something different, I might well consider myself a resident of Merton Abbey, or Haydons Road, or Tooting-on-Tube.

The last may seem like a flight of fancy, but know this – there nearly was a suburb with an equally stupid name. When the London and Southampton Railway opened their station a little way south of the busy market town of Kingston, they planned to call it Kingston-upon-Railway. Because it sort-of served Kingston, but not quite. Good sense eventually prevailed, and it was renamed in 1869. The original Surbiton was a small village, also not-quite-served by the new station. However, the station and its railway line were very convenient for commuters, and so a town grew up around the station. The station was called Surbiton, so, inevitably, was the town around it. What if the station had been called something else? Would we even have a Surbiton today? Would we think of Kingston-upon-Railway as the main town, and Kingston-upon-Thames be relegated to the status of “Old Kingston” or some such?

I suspect a few of the suburbs, such as Hampton Wick, wouldn’t really be anything more than a theoretical concept were it not for their railway stations. Hampton Wick has little by way of a focal point other than its station. Certain other suburbs, lacking notability, were absorbed by others as the commuter towns expanded – Lonesome being a case in point, once a village in its own right and now just a part of Streatham.

And this brings me on to the strange case of Fulwell. Fulwell is one of those places that always feels as if it’s on the verge of vanishing, as I had cause to reflect when I went there for a party on Saturday. It’s quite old, its name may have derived from “foul well” (so good work on getting that renamed, I suppose). It doesn’t really have a high street to speak of – a few shops, but nothing to distinguish it from the outlying parts of Twickenham or Teddington, on whose borders it lies. Its major landmark is the bus garage, pictured above right, but that’s more of an obstacle than a focal point. There is a railway station, sure, but it’s an unmanned two-platform branch line affair in a back street. I’m not clear exactly where it begins and ends. I reckon that, were the station to be renamed, the town would cease to exist altogether, torn between Teddington and Twickenham. It’s usually at this point that a bunch of angry residents of the area post a huge rant in the comments section about how I’m wrong and stupid, so scroll down to skip straight to that.

Yet right next to Fulwell, but a short walk from the station, you have Hampton Hill – nothing but a high street really, yet nobody would dispute the validity of its existence. Damned if I understand the suburbs.

Thank You For Not Smoking

Much has been made by the Mayor’s office about the great age of the Underground system in order to justify the current heinous amounts of engineering work. Not that I disagree, mark you, I appreciate that the system is very, very old. Ironic, really, given that when it was built it was actually slightly ahead of its time.

Sometimes, you see, technology gets a bit ahead of itself. In the case of the Underground in the 1860s, the problem was that while they could dig a tunnel just fine, they couldn’t find a clean way to send a train through it. Steam engines, as you are no doubt aware, produce the Dickens of a lot of smoke and steam. A number of solutions were tried. Those pipes you see on the front of the engine above left, the ones running from the cylinders up, you see those? Those are condensers, which collect the waste steam and, yes, condense it for re-use. Every so often, the tunnels were fitted with large ventilation shafts – including one that was ingeniously disguised as a pair of fake houses. The Metropolitan, unusually for a Victorian railway, allowed its drivers and firemen to grow enormous ZZ Top-style beards in the hope that said shrubbery would act as a kind of air filter. They even tried brazening it out, claiming that the smoky air was actually really good for bronchial complaints (although at least one chemist sold “Metropolitan Mixture,” a cough medicine targeting regular Underground users).

The only known photo of Fowlers Ghost.

One solution was proposed by John Fowler – remove the fire altogether. He suggested an engine with an “egg-ended boiler” – in reality a storage receptacle for steam produced by a stationary boiler. This engine was never built, but what was eventually produced was a strange locomotive known as “Fowler’s Ghost,” and I can give no better explanation of it than that offered by the Museum of Retrotech.

Clockwork powered Underground loco. I think I may have made a mistake.

On the same site, I came across an interesting little snippet about a concept tested at the Metropolitan District Railway’s Lillie Bridge Depot (that’s the District Line to you) in 1875. The idea was a clockwork tram. I know, right? Now, I’d heard a vague rumour that such a thing was tried, but no more than that. Was this trial carried out in the hope of finding a smokeless alternative to steam on the Underground? Sadly, the indices of the various Underground histories I have list “clockwork tram” under “piss, taking the” and offer little further information.

There were various other possibilities, none of them all that great. Isambard Kingdom Brunel had been something of a champion of the atmospheric railway – as seen left, this was powered by a piston in a vaccuum pipe. I’ve not come across any evidence that this was ever suggested for the Tube, though see the Pneumatic Dispatch for a similar idea that actually was tried. Ironically, Brunel himself, when consulted early on about the proposed Metropolitan, suggested that there was no need to worry, as the smoke from a steam engine would surely not be a problem in the first place.

Another was cable haulage. This was employed on the Glasgow Subway and, less successfully, on the London and Blackwall Railway in its early days. When it came to constructing the City and South London Railway (now roughly the City Branch of the Northern Line) in the 1880s, this was the favoured choice. Unlike the earlier Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways, the C&SLR was constructed entirely below ground in very narrow tunnels rather than being built by the cut-and-cover method (this, incidentally, is also why the former lines today have much larger trains than the latter). You can make excuses about a few coughing passengers, but full asphyxiation was generally frowned upon even back then.

However, by 1886, train technology had caught up with the Underground and the cable concept was dropped in favour of more flexible and easier to maintain electric trains, hauled by dinky little locomotives like that one there. However, there was still a little work to do – one of the early problems the system had was that the power plant wasn’t able to generate enough electricity to get trains up the gradient at Stockwell, which was a bit embarrassing. Nevertheless, once these teething troubles were ironed out, it was clear that finally there was a clean solution to the Underground problem, and the other lines soon followed in the adoption of electric power.

You know what’s ironic in all of this? The Metropolitan was one of the only railways not to ban smoking in its carriages. Was this a wangle to avoid taking responsibility for bronchial irritation? It is a mystery.

Ghosts of the Northern Line

I love Halloween, probably because it allows me to combine my perverse fascination with the macabre with my love of high camp. It’s funny, I was never really bothered about it when I was small. Anyway, that in mind, there’s a certain theme to the blentries this week.

I thought it would be nice to talk about something spooky. Britain is apparently the most haunted country in the world, and London makes up a significant proportion of that. And if we’re talking about hauntings and London, the subject of the Underground is never far behind. With its long and complex history, its hundreds of miles of tunnels (not all of which are accounted for, so a former London Transport worker tells me) and the fact that it’s, you know, under the ground, it’s inevitable that spooky stories would arise around it.

I’m going to largely limit myself to the Northern Line for now, simply because there are so very many ghosts on the entire system that I’d be here all night if I attempted to catalogue them all, and I appreciate how busy you are.

The most southerly sighting was at Stockwell, and took the form of an elderly workman spotted by a trainee. This gent was apparently quite sociable, having a brief conversation with the trainee who saw him. Indeed, were it not for the fact that no maintenance was due on that stretch of tunnel, the man might never have been noticed. It was surmised that he was the ghost of someone killed in the 1950s.

You might think Kennington was troublesome enough without spooks, but drivers with empty trains waiting in the tunnel for clearance to come into the station proper have reported the sound of doors on the train opening and closing, as if there’s someone walking up the train – approaching the cab…

Elephant and Castle might be the most haunted station on the network. Maybe this is because one of the tunnels on the Bakerloo Line cuts through a plague pit. Whatever reason, there have been numerous eerie occurances here. The most common was the sound of running footsteps along the platforms and up the stairs when the station was supposedly deserted apart from staff. Doors would open and shut, and a porter named Mr Horton refused to go back there after one night shift when he was alone in the break room and heard someone approaching and knocking on the door. He opened up to find the corridor deserted. A familiar ghost consists of a woman who gets on the train, walks towards the front and then disappears. This ghost supposedly haunts the last train on the Bakerloo Line, but I include it for completeness’ sake. I should also mention one seen by commuters seated alone in the carriage who, upon looking in the opposite window, are startled to see a woman sitting next to them.

The Northern Line ticket hall at Bank was built in the crypt of the church of St Mary Woolnoth, which may go some way to explaining the oppressive feeling of terror experienced by commuters there, often accompanied by a foul stench. Down on the platforms, a figure known as the Black Nun has been sighted. This ghost has also been seen in and around the Bank of England, and is named Sarah Whitehead. Her brother was executed for forgery in 1811, following which Sarah went mad with grief.

Oppressive feelings have also been reported at Embankment, in a staff-only tunnel known as “Page’s Walk”. Unexplained gusts of wind and the sounds of doors opening and closing are heard.

At Moorgate, in the mid-1970s, workers in the Northern City Line tunnels (then part of the Northern Line, now National Rail) spoke of a man in blue overalls who would approach them. As he came closer, a look of unspeakable horror would appear on his face, and he would vanish into the tunnel wall. Some paranormal enthusiasts have suggested that seeing this ghost might have been the cause of the 1975 tube crash in that part of the station, the true cause of which is unknown to this day. Others have suggested that the haint may have been a premonition of the disaster.

At King’s Cross, in the entrance tunnel, a rather modern spectre has been seen – a woman in jeans, crying piteously. The most likely event to have caused such a spirit to become manifest would have been the fire in the Underground station in 1987, in which 31 people lost their lives.

Possibly one like this.

At East Finchley, on the sidings near the station, a ghostly steam train of the Great Northern Railway has been sighted, a relic of the days before the line was run by London Underground.

Highgate, in addition to the Northern Line station that is still very much in use, has an abandoned station  that was to form part of an extensive expansion project for the line, a project known as the Northern Heights. The plan was abandoned, as was the station, but the buildings remain. This ruined station is situated in a deep cutting, and is described by author W. B. Herbert as having “an emotive, eerie atmosphere.” Local residents have reported the sound of trains in the cutting, and visitors to the ruins describe a feeling of being watched.

Last train, anyone?

Up and down the City Road

This entry may be a little brief, for which I apologise. I found myself on an unexpected evening out with Teachmaster D, the Catlady, Mistress Bitch and Mistress Bitch’s boyfriend, among others. It was a surprisingly eventful evening in which the Archies somehow became associated with Holocaust denial.

You bastards.

That being said, here is the entry for today, such as it is.

I’ve always been a bit sceptical about those people who claim there’s something mystical about wandering about the city. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice and all, but let’s not pretend it’s anything other than a pleasant way to fill a boring afternoon. Still, yesterday I had a trip out that did rather make me wonder.

You see, I set out with no particular goal in mind. It’s quite often how I roll on a boring weekend – jump on a train and see where I end up. As the train rolled into London Bridge, it occurred to me that it might be quite pleasant to head over to Islington and have a look down Camden Passage. Cass Art have a very large shop there, and I felt I could justify a visit.

While there, I remembered a thing I’d seen a couple of weeks ago on the walk described in the entry I tastefully titled ‘Canal Penetration.’ Opposite the towpath, I’d seen an old factory converted into offices, complete with what looked like an elderly crane. I have a strange fascination with old machinery, so I thought I’d see if I could get any closer, as I was in the area and all. I’d been meaning to.

I was therefore surprised to see that, as part of the Open House weekend, about which I’d entirely forgotten, the normally-closed-off wharf was open. It’s just weird to me that the one day I decide, randomly, to check this out on the offchance is the one day that I actually can check it out. No doubt the statisticians will tell me that actually there’s nothing weird about that, but boo.

I managed to get plenty of photos of the factory and the crane. The crane appears to have had its cabin replaced, judging by the neatness of the wood.

I was also quite interested to note that there is what looks like an abandoned railway on the wharfside. It’s a narrow gauge railway, as was once common in industry in Britain. A few old trucks had also survived and were dotted about the place.

I took many photos, most of which would be of interest only to nerds like me. But check out the picture on the left. A pillar of the factory goes straight through the railway track, suggesting to me that the line pre-dates the factory (or at least, that part of it).

The trucks have had their bodies replaced, so even if we assume they’re original, it’s hard to tell what they would have looked like during their working lives. However, they were very light to push over cobbles, and even with their original bodies I suspect they would not have been difficult to move on rails. Long story short, I don’t think this railway would ever have been locomotive worked, although I suspect it would once have been longer. Two tracks are in situ, one of which I suspect would have been a siding used for storage. Unfortunately, I’ve been able to find nothing on Google about this railway, and the rest of the area has been built over.

I had a quick shufti at the City Road Basin, seen on the right. This was once an important industrial site, built in 1820 (was this the date when our mystery railway appeared?) and the closest canal basin to the City. Despite its profitable location, like the rest of Britain’s canal system, it’s become more-or-less obsolete in recent years. There have been some residential developments, but even on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the place had an air of quiet loneliness about it.

The little boat on the left deserves some brief attention. It’s a Bantam tug. These were built in Brentford in the 1950s and 60s to push and pull barges on the canals. Several have been preserved and several more remain in service. Life is obviously slower on the waterways. Or they’re just pretty good tugboats.

As I turned on to City Road, the building on the right caught my eye. At first glance, it’s just your standard common-or-garden eyesore. It looks like an ancillary building for the tower block behind. Yet there were one or two things that made me wonder. For instance, it looks like there’s quite a large door that’s been boarded over at the front. And though it’s not entirely clear in this photo, there’s some architectural detail that seems a little fancy for the rough-and-ready architecture on display behind.

My suspicions were confirmed when I got home. This is, in fact, an abandoned Tube station, or as much as survives. It’s City Road, opened by the City and South London Railway in 1901. It lay between Angel and Old Street on what is now the Northern Line, City Branch. It was never a very popular station, and to be honest even today it’s not hard to see why. It’s only about 15-20 minutes gentle stroll from Angel to Old Street, and it’s not like there’s anything around here that really justifies a whole Tube station.

When rebuilding work was carried out on the stations of the C&SLR in the 1920s, the Company decided to cut their losses and simply shut the station down rather than waste money bringing it up to then-modern standards. Aside from being used as an air raid shelter, the station saw no further use after 1924. The only reason there’s anything above ground at all is because it was decided to convert the old lift shafts into ventilation shafts – what survives is the brickwork that once surrounded those shafts, the rest having been demolished. There are also remains at platform level, though I’ll own I’ve not seen them myself.

Honestly, this place is pretty good if you like your abandoned transport systems. If T. S. Eliot was an industrial archaeologist, he’d probably write a poem about it.

Further Reading

http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/City_Road_station.html - An excellent feature showing the below-ground remains of City Road.

The Case of the Missing Tube Line

My explorations in and around Islington continue, and last week saw a visit to one of London Underground’s oddities. Take a look at this old map of the Northern Line found at Acton.

As you can see, it shows a branch that is no longer there. A slightly pointless branch, in fact, given that Essex Road and Highbury & Islington are just a short walk from Angel (unless you’re lazy). This is the not-quite-departed Northern City Line.

The line was devised by the Great Northern Railway (the company who built the terminus at King’s Cross and also came up with the Flying Scotsman). While King’s Cross was nice and all, it wasn’t in the best place for city folk. The Northern City Line would let them send trains into the City itself, as well as clear up some of their congested lines around King’s Cross. Unfortunately, they lost interest in the idea and so the Great Northern & City Railway was built without the help of its original backer.

The completed line ran from Finsbury Park to Moorgate, incorporating all the stations seen above. With the exception of Drayton Park, the whole thing was built underground. Uniquely, while it was definitely a “tube” line, i.e. built completely underground in a tunnel, as opposed to being built in a trench and then covered over a la the District and Metropolitan lines, it was large enough to hold full-size trains. For comparative purposes, here’s a normal Tube train next to a District Line train, which is about the size of a regular train:

So there it was. A short Tube line designed for greater things but rendered essentially useless by unfortunate circumstances. The Metropolitan Railway, as it was then, stepped in and bought it in 1913. They essentially aimed to finish what the Great Northern Railway had started, running services from the GNR station at Finsbury Park via the GN&C Line, extending to the Metropolitan station at Aldgate. But they weren’t allowed to build the extension, so that was that. The Metropolitan Railway was left sheepishly holding on to a line that not only didn’t go there, but didn’t even connect with the rest of their line.

1933 saw the Metropolitan Railway taken over by London Transport, and the notion of an integrated transport system could finally be explored. London Transport had a scheme that was known as the “Northern Heights” Plan. This was a scheme to extend the currently-existing Morden-Edgware Line (it wasn’t the Northern Line in those days) up through the Northern suburbs of London. It would have taken over a number of already-existing GNR branches, giving the Northern Line a service to High Barnet and Alexandra Palace among other places. It would also have added an extension from Edgware to Bushy Heath. Most importantly for the purposes of this entry, it would have incorporated a line from Highgate to Finsbury Park and then taken over the GN&C. All in all, it would have made it even harder than it already is to find a Tube going in the right direction.

Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why the Northern Line is so called, despite the fact that it’s not especially Northern compared to other lines (in fact, it goes further south than any other Underground line), it’s because of this scheme.

A certain amount of work on the Northern Heights went ahead, including an incomplete station at Highbury that stands to this day, but the full scheme was scuppered by the Second World War and post-war Green Belt legislation.

And now the Northern Line was left with the Northern City Line (as it was now known). A line which, again, didn’t link directly to any of their other lines. In 1964 the Victoria Line swiped the Northern City’s Finsbury Park platforms and in 1971 it was decided, sensibly, to hand the line over to British Rail in 1975.

28 February 1975 was the date of the most notorious event in the line’s history, when a Northern Line train overran the platform at Moorgate and crashed straight into the end of the tunnel. Forty-three people, including the driver, were killed in the accident and several more died from injuries, rescue attempts made all the more difficult by the accident having taken place in the tunnel. The circumstances of the accident are a mystery. Driver Leslie Newson appeared to actually accelerate as the train approached Moorgate, and witnesses reported that he looked perfectly calm as the train shot through the station. No strong evidence was found of any intoxicating substance, nor was there any apparent reason for suicide – Newson even had money in his pocket to buy a car for his daughter. Various suggestions have been made for the driver’s actions, from brain seizure to simple human error, but none are entirely satisfactory.

A few months later, British Rail took the line over, and it remains in their hands as a commuter route. I’d long been curious about this route, having first encountered it in 2000 when commuting to Highbury & Islington Station. I’d never had the chance to actually explore it until a couple of weeks ago.

One of the things that I found strange about this line – apart from the fact that it’s half regular railway and half Tube – is the fact that the stations are timewarped. This one, for instance, carries the colours of Network SouthEast, which ceased to exist in 1994. It rather reminds me of the way the Waterloo and City Line used to look before it was taken over by London Underground.

This building was at Drayton Park. I’d guess it’s either an old electricity substation or a goods shed.

The platform ends at Drayton Park, in the shadow of the Emirates Stadium.

I rather like this strange, twisty tunnel you use to get from the Northern Line to the Northern City Line at Old Street. I don’t know why. I feel like using it in a low-budget horror movie.

Train departing Essex Road. If I were to set a low-budget horror movie on this line, this would be the point where our hero is left trapped in the station on his own with the monster. Wait, I think I just described the exact plot of Creep. Damn it all.

In order to get up to street level, you have to go quite a long way down from platform level. This may be taken as a sign of unfortunate planning, or possibly that the builders of this station wanted to mess with our heads in order to soften us up for the inevitable late-night vampire attack.

I don’t know why it was felt necessary to fit these buttons to the lift. If you try to press “lower level” when you’re already on the lower level or vice versa, the chances are you’re not the sort of person who’s allowed out unsupervised anyway.

Essex Road Station at street level. I wish I’d had a bit more time to explore the line, as frankly I never realised how spooky it is in the middle of the day with no commuters around.

Every so often someone will suggest doing something with the line. The Green Party want to link it to the Waterloo and City to create a new cross-London route, for instance. But I quite like it as it is. I know, it’s a fairly useless line when you get down to it, but I’m just sentimental like that.

Further Reading

http://www.londonrailways.net/gn_c.html - A fuller history of the line.

http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/oh-banksy-banksy-banksy/ - Something else I found that day.

http://londonparticulars.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/lets-democratize-some-luxury/ - And another thing.

Going Deeper Underground

How many people have cursed their luck on making a dash to the Tube station after a night out, only to discover that they’ve missed the last train? And how many people have seen New York’s 24-hour subway service and thought, “Why can’t we have one of those over here?”

The reason, simply, is that the Tube needs to be shut down every night for maintenance purposes. The reason New York can run 24-hours is because their tunnels have regular crossovers, meaning that trains can be diverted from one line to another while routine maintenance is carried out. Above ground, crossovers aren’t a major expense (so it’s possible to get the train from St Pancras to St Albans more-or-less 24/7). Under the ground, however, it’s a different matter. Tube lines were expensive enough without building a whole load of extra tunnel. So, the result is a remarkably inflexible railway (with narrow tunnels). No night trains, no overtaking and when a train fails you’re screwed.

Stockwell

Which is why the gaudily-painted building on the left is of interest. It’s located in Stockwell, just a short distance  from the Tube station. Gay paintwork aside, it could be more-or-less anything – an electricity substation, a public toilet or something even less interesting. Another of

Just south of Stockwell

those random buildings you get. However, if you look around the metropolis, you’ll notice that it’s not alone. There are several similar structures. The majority are in South London, a few are in Central and a couple more are North.

This one, hidden behind wooden fence panels, is in Clapham North.

Some of them are disguised, as per the one on Clapham High Street seen left. Some are painted, as per Stockwell. Others just stand there, being weird and mysterious.

Well, the story of these buildings is rather interesting. They were originally built during the Second World War.

Clapham Common

It’s a commonly known fact that the Tubes were used for shelter during the Second World War (and also the First, but people tend not to talk about that). So it was that the Ministry of Home Security had their great idea – if the London Underground could be used as a deep shelter, why not vice versa?

On Clapham Common, a hop, skip and a jump from Clapham South.

So they approached London Transport with a proposal. London Transport could build a series of deep-level shelters, some for public use and some for the Government. In return, the Government would grant them permission, after the cessation of hostilities, to build tunnels linking them.

Between Clapham and Balham

They would form an express Tube line running along the approximate route of the Northern Line, increasing speed and capacity along its busiest stretches. The idea had been proposed in the late 1930s, but nixed until now. London Transport leapt at the chance to finally carry their scheme out.

Tottenham Court Road

Unfortunately, the scheme didn’t proceed quite as planned. For a start, the war had left the country with a labour shortage. Then, as with any major construction project, there was the NIMBY factor to be taken into consideration.

Goodge Street

Probably the one person you really don’t want to annoy during a major construction programme in the middle of the biggest war the world has ever known is God. The authorities at St Paul’s Cathedral are the next best thing in London, and they had a few objections to the concept.

Camden Town, just behind the Market, off the High Street.

They hadn’t been big fans of the Central Line, and they weren’t going to stand for anyone else digging in the vicinity of their Cathedral either. Their concerns were not entirely baseless – the ground beneath St Paul’s is somewhat shifty at the best of times, so much so that Christopher Wren incorporated an early example of an expansion gap into its design. Anyway, that was that shelter scuppered. A lone Central Line shelter was, however, built under Chancery Lane.

The Goodge Street shelter – seen in the somewhat abortive attempt at night time photography above – was opened in 1942 as General Eisenhower’s London HQ, and is known to this day as the Eisenhower Centre (although it’s been a long time since it’s had a use half as interesting). The others were used for similar administrative purposes until 1944, when a new menace came to town – the fearsome V2 rockets. Stockwell, Clapham North, Clapham South, Belsize Park and Camden Town were all opened to the public.

Belsize Park

Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as planned after the war. One way or another, it was discovered that, with a handful of exceptions, the shelters were no longer suitable to be converted into Tube stations. They served other purposes – first they were used to house demobbed soldiers, then the large influx of immigrants from the West Indies. Finally, they were turned into document storage facilities. In the 1990s, London Transport bought the shelters for their own use once more, with the aim of improving facilities at already-existing stations. By the look of things, at least one is now available to let.

They’ve had, to my knowledge, two appearances in fiction – in his classic work of London-based fantasy, Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman has a character making his home in one. The building on Clapham Common appears in Michael de Larrabeiti’s children’s fantasy, The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis, in which it’s used as a secret police HQ.

Sadly, though, this seems to be about as much as the deep-level workings can hope for. They’re unlikely to ever be used for their intended purpose now. For all Ken and Boris’ exciting plans for transport in this city, so far none have included reviving this scheme.

Which is a pity, because, to return to the point with which I began this rambling entry, it would be nice if the Northern Line had an extra tunnel or two. You know, for night trains, overtaking and when a train fails…

If you go down to the Wood today

Ninety-ninth post, and to celebrate this arbitrary occasion, I thought I’d blog a bit about something closer to home than usual. Well, closer to home for me. I’m talkin’ Colliers Wood.

Colliers Wood is, on the face of it, a bit of a nothing place. If you don’t live in South West London, the chances are you won’t have heard of it, or at most it’ll be just a name on a Tube map. In some ways, that’s appropriate – the place pretty much didn’t exist until a Tube station was built there in 1926. Had it not been for that, it would probably just be another part of Merton. It’s named after a wood frequented by colliers, or charcoal burners to you, that was uprooted in the 1890s.

There’s one really notable building, and that’s this little beauty:

This building has gone by many names. It’s been called “The Vortex”, “The Brown and Root Tower” and “The Lyons Tower”. Now it’s just called “The Tower” or, going by the lettering above the door, “T e  ow r”. It won’t have escaped your attention that it is, frankly, so ugly that its own mother would disown it. In 2006, it was voted the ugliest building in London – and it’s got some stiff competition.

Developers Golfrate have been talking for some time about doing something with this tower, most likely an external redevelopment to make it a bit easier on the eye. However, in the three years since the BBC interviewed them about it (see link below), nothing has been done. There are no tenants and the building is, quite literally, falling apart. As you can see in the photo, the windows are now boarded up and netting has been applied to the sides to protect pedestrians from falling bits.

Nonetheless, there is hope – Criterion Capital have announced on their website that they’re planning to turn the place into a state-of-the-art residential development, destroying the rotting multi-storey car park next to it and building a replacement for Colliers Wood’s ugly-as-all-hell public library. The project is called “Colliers Wood Island”, which is much better than the original choice of “Colliers Wood Mudflat”.

Of course, for some of us, this isn’t quick enough. Shoinan, whose blog you may see linked to the right if I’ve got the hang of this “linking” thing, founded a group on Facebook called “Let’s Blow Up The Colliers Wood Tower”. It seems to be rather popular with South Londoners, and even got an article in the local paper. Yr. Humble Chronicler was featured in the article’s photo, as was comedian David Cross, mistakenly identified as a friend of ours. And no, we didn’t correct their mistake.

Apparently just blowing the Tower up isn’t an option, due to the Northern Line running underneath. Which is a lame excuse. I mean, “boo hoo I can’t get to Morden”? If you want to get there that badly, you probably already live there, in which case stay home and stop yer whining.

Further reading

http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2006/05/25/most_hated_building_feature.shtml - the BBC pulls no punches.

http://www.criterioncapital.co.uk/development-colliers-wood.html - Criterion’s website

http://te-in.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2237527501 - Make your voice heard… in Facebook form!

http://shoinan.com/ - for Shoinan’s non-blowing-things-up-related thoughts.

It’s grim up North London

I never know what to do with myself on a bank holiday. I thought I’d take a little trip up to the Museum of London. It’s a long time since I was last there, and on that occasion they were refurbishing some of the galleries. I took the Tube to Bank, half of which seemed to be closed (marry, ‘tis a “Bank” holiday in troth, hey nonny!) and strolled up there, through the City.

Upon arriving at the Museum, I discovered that all the lower galleries were being refurbished, and after muttering “Christ’s sake” under my breath, I decided to just go for a bit of a wander (a dérive, as the psychogeographers say). It took me through the Barbican Centre, Clerkenwell, Kings Cross, Islington, Camden, Kentish Town, Highgate, Gospel Oak, Highgate Village (by accident) and Archway. Describing the whole route would take forever, and I appreciate you’re a very busy man/woman/spam program, so for now I’ll just mention the abandoned Tube stations I found. You can have the rest later.

Abandoned tube stations are endlessly fascinating. I think the reason so many people find them interesting is actually slightly psychogeographical. So many people use Tube stations every day (never just one, for some reason) that one you can’t use, that’s terra incognita, gives us pause. And, of course, they have the air of the haunted house or the urban legend – in many cases, they’ve simply been left as they were when the trains stopped running.

I found two of these by accident on my walk. I’d heard of them, thanks to J. E. Connor’s excellent Abandoned Stations on London’s Underground, one of the few books in my collection of Underground books that people actually read without being forced. But to actually stumble across them still feels like a bit of an achievement. The first was York Road, formerly on the Piccadilly Line. This involves cutting up alongside King’s Cross Station (the road on the right as you face it) and going on and on. The route becomes very industrial and grim, not the sort of place you’d want to visit on your own after dark or, indeed, ever.

And there it is, just standing there. It looks completely incongruous, like it should be on a street in the West End, not surrounded by abandoned buildings, facing on to a field. The station lies between King’s Cross and Caledonian Road and was closed in 1932. The fact that the area was so industrial was its doom. However, redevelopment of the area as part of the Kings Cross Central project means that there are calls for the station to be reopened, so who knows? Maybe this entry will become embarrassingly out of date.

The other one I found was not so easy to identify, as the location was covered up by a massive ‘CASH CONVERTERS’ sign.

However, diligent research (i.e. reading Mr Connor’s book) revealed this to be South Kentish Town. It was located between Camden Town and Regular Kentish Town on the Northern Line. Never particularly popular (it’s only a short distance from Kentish Town Station), it closed in 1924 during a strike, and the Powers that Be decided that this was a convenient point to close it down. Apparently one passenger didn’t get the message, and was briefly stranded on the platform after alighting by mistake in 1933.

If you’ve ever wanted to live in an abandoned Tube station (and who hasn’t?), I see that part of the station is to let there. A massage parlour appears to have opened there as well. Opening a massage parlour right next to a busy Underground line is an excellent idea, as it’s one of the few places where you can legitimately guarantee that the earth will move.

Further reading:

http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/ - a comprehensive guide to the ghost stations of London.