The First Tube Line… sort of

If you’ve ever been to the Tower of London, and to be fair, most Londoners haven’t, you might have noticed this building near the souvenir shop:

Or you might not. It’s hardly the most notable building in the area, what with it being Tower Hill and all. You might have seen the words “THE LONDON HYDRAULIC POWER COMPANY” written at the top and thought, “Hmm.” And as random windowless brick shed things go, it’s not bad, architecturally speaking.

This is, however, the last visible remnant of a white elephant in the history of London’s public transport. It’s the entrance to the Tower Subway.

In the latter half of the 19th century, London was a very busy place (well, duh). People wanted to get across the river and there was no crossing between London Bridge and the Thames Tunnel. Another bridge wasn’t seen as an option, as it would interfere with shipping. So if someone could find a way to get people across the river without messing about with the boats, they’d have a licence to print money, right?

This would appear to have been the thinking behind the Tower Subway, authorised in 1868. This would go under the river, as the earlier Thames Tunnel had done. Unfortunately, the contractors remembered the Thames Tunnel all too well. They remembered that it had gone over budget, taken an awfully long time to build and had killed several workers during its construction. Fortunately for London, at this point James Greathead and Peter Barlow stepped in.

Statue of Greathead, The City

Greathead and Barlow proposed using a shield of their own invention to dig the tunnel. It improved on the one devised by Marc Brunel to dig the Thames Tunnel, but the principle was basically the same. It was an iron tube that was pushed through the earth by a series of screw jacks, sheltering the workers while they dug the clay out. Then they would reinforce the tunnel using rings of cast iron. Surprisingly, given the difficulties Brunel had faced, the tunnel was completed in under a year.

The subway opened for business on 2nd August 1870. There was an entrance on Tower Hill and another on Vine Street on the South Bank. Passengers were carried down to the subway in a lift. Thereupon, they would get into a narrow gauge railway carriage which was attached to a cable and get winched through the tunnel to the other side.

The carriage (or “omnibus,” as the Subway referred to it) was apparently very cramped – the gauge of the rails was 2′ 6″ and the tunnel was 7′ in diameter. The picture on the left would therefore appear to be somewhat flexible with the truth. I know people were smaller then, but damn. Oddly enough, it was also possible to buy first and second class tickets, despite the fact that there was only one non-compartmentalised carriage. All a first class ticket really meant was that you could jump the queue.

Unfortunately, not as many people as you might think were willing to pay a penny for the luxury of trundling through a narrow tunnel in a cramped carriage (tuppence to jump the queue), and the venture failed a grand total of three months after opening.

After some hasty refurbishment, the subway was reopened as a foot tunnel with a half-penny toll. In this form, it was rather more successful. Well, at least until 1894. That was the year when Tower Bridge opened, which a lot more people could cross toll-free and which, of course, didn’t interfere with shipping and allowed road traffic across.

And so the London Hydraulic Power Company bought it up and used it to hold their pipes and water mains. The tunnel survives to this day, albeit now carrying telecommunication cables as well. The building on the surface was constructed in the 1920s and replaces the original entrance. There was once a corresponding structure on the South Bank, but it has since been demolished.

However, I think it would be unfair to call the Tower Subway a failure. Well, in a certain sense, anyway. Prior to this, no one had constructed a public railway that ran entirely underground (the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways were built in trenches and covered over rather than built in tunnels). The same method of tunnelling has been used to construct the London Underground’s “deep” lines, and Greathead himself worked on the City and South London Railway, the Central London Railway and the Waterloo and City Railway (now the Northern, Central and Waterloo and City lines respectively). One of Greathead’s shields, improved from the one used to build the Subway, is preserved in Bank station.

So although the Tower Subway is these days an obscure footnote in London’s history, it deserves to be far better remembered – it was, after all, the direct ancestor of the London Underground.

A Frosty Reception

Frost fair, 1683

I suppose today is as good a day as any for an entry about the old Frost Fairs. What with it being really snowy and all. The frost fairs, for those of you who aren’t “in the know” as we say, were undoubtedly a class of event whose time has passed.

From the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Europe experienced an unusually cold period known as the “Little Ice Age.” The exact duration is unknown, as are the causes. Suggestions for the cause have ranged from solar activity to reduced agriculture following the Black Death, the latter of which I think can’t have been much more than a contributing factor at best. What is known is that during this period, winters were harsh. Britain, a chilly sort of place at the best of times, was particularly hard hit.

[PARENTHESIS: Critics of the concept of global warming argue that we're still recovering from the Little Ice Age, hence the gradually rising temperature although this is considered to be a poorly-supported theory at best.]

Farming was the trade worst hit for obvious reasons. Fishermen, too, found themselves at a loss (although if they’d had a bit of nous, Captain Birdseye might have come on to the scene centuries earlier). Fuel was at a premium, and many found themselves unable to afford enough fire to keep themselves alive. It goes without saying that river trade was, so to speak, up the creek.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. In London, the Thames froze on several occasions. At first, it was simply a way of getting across the river without paying for a boat or using the eternally-congested London Bridge. Tentatively, though, people started to realise that they could have a bit of fun. After all, it’s not every day that the Thames freezes. By the sixteenth century the frozen river was used for sport and recreation, with dances and games played on the ice. Henry VIII would sleigh down the river, and if it could bear his weight then it was a sure sign the ice was safe (cheap shot, I know).

A souvenir from the 1683 Frost Fair

The first true frost fair is generally acknowledged to be the one seen above, the 1683 fair when the river was frozen for two entire months. Enterprising tradesmen set up stalls, many of them watermen temporarily put out of business by the ice. Coachmen plied their trade up and down this new highway. There are even accounts of animals being roasted on the ice, though it would take a braver man than me to set up a fire in the middle of a frozen river.

Frost fairs took place on a number of later occasions, but the last was in 1814, when nothing less than a full-grown elephant was seen on the ice.

Since 2003, an event known as the ‘Frost Fair’ has taken place on the South Bank, but I think it lacks a certain something by virtue of not being on a frozen river. Or maybe that’s just me. There was also a slightly bat’s-arse idea to freeze the river again in 2000 using a network of refrigeration pipes, which was abandoned due to environmental concerns and, one suspects, because it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that James Bond would be called in to prevent.

The nineteenth century really put paid to the Thames freezing again, supervillainy aside. The reason the Thames to the west of London Bridge was so prone to freezing was, to a large extent, due to the old London Bridge, seen left. The bridge, as you can see, was supported on a series of narrow arches. The already narrow passages were cluttered up further by waterwheels, fishing nets, mooring posts and any old crap people felt like putting down there. As a consequence, the water rushed through the arches at a hell of a rate. It was said that a wise man would cross over the bridge, but a fool would cross under it, and watermen considered it a test of skill to shoot the rapids without, you know, dying. What this meant was that the water west of the bridge was fresh – not a hope of any brine getting past that lot. Furthermore, it meant that if a chunk of ice got stuck in one of the arches, the whole thing could very quickly get dammed up. In 1831, though, the medieval bridge was replaced. It was considered to be woefully inadequate for its purpose, making boat trade and cross-river traffic alike unnecessarily difficult, and a new bridge with wider arches replaced it.

The next obstacle to the Thames freezing was Sir Joseph Bazalgette, whose name has graced these pages before. His embankments may have done wonders for the cleanliness of the water, but they also narrowed the river, making it too fast flowing to freeze. Further construction, including several more bridges, made it even less likely.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s a lot warmer these days. Remember that as you struggle into work tomorrow.

Link-o-rama

Prior to tomorrow’s actual entry, I’ve been surfing YouTube for documentary footage. I love old public information films and I can’t explain why. Here are some items that may be of interest to London-liking folk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABILtla_lE&feature=channel - Blackfriars Bridge, 1896

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJi7x2QIO-8&feature=channel - London Bridge, thirty years later, in colour. Gives you a brief snapshot of just how busy the Pool of London was in those pre-war days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_gjh_YTJ0&feature=channel - The Houses of Parliament, 1926, again in colour. Surprisingly little has changed since this was filmed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAYUpqDVNI&NR=1 - Some Bright Young Things in Hyde Park. This colour footage was all shot by Claude Friese-Green for a film called ‘The Open Road’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzeBDcmrjjY&feature=channel - Petticoat Lane, London. Some fine footage of what the gentleman-about-town was wearing in the Roaring Twenties. Hats, mostly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwvX8P0ZRKE&NR=1 - Taking in the sights at St James’s Palace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LGavykBbxM&feature=channel - ‘Colour on the Thames’ from 1935. Highlights include Richmond and construction of the ugly Hungerford Bridge. The heavily industrialised Pool of London is unrecognisable but for the few landmarks that survive. As for the Docklands, you wouldn’t know it was the same place today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slk1KCQPolE&feature=related - The London Underground in 1963, including Upminster Depot, Loughton Station and signalling at Camden Town.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B92MnoPVtGs&feature=related - Coffee shops in London in the 1960s. Some fine footage of Soho. I particularly like the square narrator trying to be “down with the kids” and the supremely wooden proprietor complaining about overheads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvFeZqv7WuQ&feature=related - King’s Road, Chelsea, 1967.

That’s all for now, chums, but stay tuned tomorrow for another exciting installment of London Particulars! G’bye now!

West to East

I was bored off my face today, and mildly hungover. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I was sure I didn’t want to stay here. And so I decided to go for another Random Walk through Central London.

The Northern Line was still out, thanks to “planned engineering works.” This is another of those meaningless mantras, like “adverse weather conditions” or “for your safety and security.” Do you get unplanned engineering works? Do a bunch of engineers meet up in a tunnel and say, “Well, as we’re here, let’s do some engineering works!” Enough. Anyway, these PEW necessitated a rail replacement bus trip, during which I was sat behind a loud woman attempting to order cocaine.

I was able to get the Tube from Stockwell, where you sure as hell don’t want to run for your train. As the “Smile! You’re On CCTV!” signs remind us, everyone’s a suspect. You want to misbehave, they’ll know about it. You bastard.

The original plan was to explore around Blackfriars, but I was informed at Embankment that it wasn’t possible to get to Blackfriars by Tube. And so instead I decided to walk along the Embankment, the pathway designed to cover a sewer, squeezing the tidal river into a narrower space than ever before.

The first sight of note was the PS Tattershall Castle. This was originally a ferry built for the London and North Eastern Railway, but since the 1980s has been a floating pub. It’s been extensively rebuilt, removing the engines, wheels and paddleboxes until it looks like an embarrassing parody of a paddle steamer. I’m not a fan.

Of course, it’s far from the only moored vessel serving a new purpose. One I rather like the styling of is the Wellington.

I’m told this used to be a destroyer. A little further up is the entrance to the City Proper, marked by a pair of heraldic dragons.

It always takes me by surprise how little of London is actually London. These days we tend to use the M25 as the London boundary (well, I do, anyway), but a few hundred years ago even Westminster would have been regarded as a separate place.

Pressing on, I came to Blackfriars Bridge, ironically. I decided to walk on, pausing to take a snap of the old station. A month from now, it’s due to be renovated. At one time, Blackfriars Station was located on the South Bank. Now it’s on the North Bank. The rebuild will compromise by setting the whole thing astride the river. The station could do with a rebuild – frankly it’s a dump, the sort of place where the architecture was an afterthought.

Soon I came to Queenhithe, last survivor of the City docks, dating back to the Saxon era. All that remains is a silted inlet, blocked off by an expensive office building. Well, that’s not entirely true – at low tide, the timbers of the old dock can clearly be made out.

Not so clear in the dark.

Here and there you get little reminders of the industrial past of this place – detours round old building and quaysides, rusty hand cranes. At one point the walker is diverted away from the river on to London Wall, which, despite its ancient name, is one of the newer streets in the city. The pavement is rather fragmented here, motor traffic taking very definite priority.

Eventually I came to Tower Bridge, and decided to make this the end. Well, apart from a stroll around St Katherine Docks. I always feel rather out of place here. I think it’s something to do with the incredibly expensive yachts moored here. The route I took out of the docks led me to an area I didn’t recognise at all. Lots of narrow streets with claustrophobia-inducing tall buildings on either side. Difficult-to-negotiate streets, roads in all directions, pavements broken up and hidden. The dark and the rain made things even more difficult. Eventually I found Minories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From there, it was a short walk to Aldgate station – marking the eastern boundary of the city. This is one of the many ends of the Metropolitan Line, the oldest of the Underground lines which, coincidentally, has the oldest trains on the network (47 this year).

I rode this line into Baker Street, the first station build on the Underground (Paul Merton: “What was the point of that, then?”). It’s a station of strange angles. It is decorated, inevitably, with tiles depicting Sherlock Holmes in silhouette, made unmistakeable by his deerstalker hat and calabash pipe (neither of which appear in the original stories). I rode the Bakerloo Line from Baker Street to Waterloo. Baker to Loo, if you will.

Then the overland train to Wimbledon. Again, rain and light and dark made the location indistinct – we could have been anywhere. I feel sure that in years to come, people will look back on our decade and say, “Seriously, what was the deal with all the blue lights?”