Fine lines and fun history

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Last week, as I stood before the vast tunnel boring machines preparing to dig Crossrail, an image from Andrew Martin’s new history of the Tube came to mind. It is the 1890s: three labourers pose inside a Greathead shield, then at the cutting edge of tunnelling technology. This is how most of London’s deep underground lines were dug: by navvies, protected only by this steel sleeve a couple of metres deep as they clawed at the London clay with picks and shovels. Others behind them poured concrete to shore up the newly exposed tunnel.

It was a far cry from the 150m-long, £10 million machines that will carve out Crossrail. Yet the navvies managed to dig three lines in seven years in the first decade of the 20th century (the guts of which are now the Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Charing Cross branch Northern lines). Crossrail — just the tunnelling bit — will take more than two years.

The Underground was long a herald of modernity, from the steam trains puffing through the Metropolitan line in 1863 — the world’s first major underground railway — to the electrified deep Tube lines of the 1890s, to the sleekly designed stations of the 1930s. If that ethos disappeared in the post-war era and the nadir of the 1970s, perhaps it is returning now, with high-tech trains, refurbished stations and new lines once more.

All this is lovingly chronicled by Martin, an unashamed trainspotter. He confesses to wanting to live in Marylebone station, pronounces the Central his favourite line, and admires characters such as the former London Underground official who could name all the (“mind the”) gaps on the entire network (reciting them took 20 minutes). Martin’s knowledge is both encyclopaedic and full of quirky digressions, based on everyday observation — hence the book’s subtitle.

Indeed, he declares that “it is not hard to tune into the romance of the Underground” — and does a good job of trying to convert readers to that view, with tales of ghost stations and abandoned tunnels.

Drinkers can only read wistfully of the Underground’s licensed refreshment rooms: the last closed in 1985, the same year smoking was banned, but in 1933 you could still buy a beer at 15 bars on the Metropolitan line alone. Indeed, from 1910, the Metropolitan’s trains boasted two luxury coaches complete with wood-panelled bars: the photo reproduced in the book suggests unimaginable sophistication compared with my average Tube journey.

Like Christian Wolmar’s The Subterranean Railway, this history has plenty of fun detailing the travails of the Underground’s pioneering figures: Charles Yerkes, the dodgy American entrepreneur behind the lines of the 1900s; Charles Holden, pioneering 1920s and 1930s station architect; and Harry Beck, designer of the classic and enduring 1933 Tube map.

I would have liked more detail on the past 15 years, when the network once more faced up to the engineering — and financial — challenges so gamely tackled by the Victorians, but that is perhaps another story.

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