The tunnel through time, p.1
The Tunnel Through Time, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Gillian Tindall
Title Page
Epigraph
List of Maps
Introduction
1. Coming into London
2. The Engines of Progress
3. The Underground in the Mind
4. The High Road and the Low Road
5. ‘No Man may by the Eye discern it’
6. Going East
7. ‘Man goeth to his long home’
8. St Giles Before the Fall. And After
9. ‘The Imperious Demands of Public Necessity and Convenience’
10. A Convenient Spot for the Habitation of Mariners
11. Favoured Slums
12. From the End of the World to Pickled Onions
13. The Mind’s Eye
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Crossrail, the ‘Elizabeth’ line, with its spacious, light-filled stations, is simply the latest way of traversing a very old east-west route through what was once countryside to the old City core and out again. Visiting Stepney, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road (alias St Giles-in-the-Fields) and the route along Oxford Street (alias the Way to Oxford and also Tyburn) this richly descriptive book traces the course of many of these historical journeys across time as well as space.
Archaeology disinters layers of actual matter; one may also disinter the lives that walked where many of our streets, however altered in appearance, still run today. These people spoke the names of ancient farms, manors and slums that now belong to our squares and tube stations. They endured the cycle of the seasons as we do; they ate, drank, laughed, worked, prayed, despaired and hoped in what are essentially the same spaces we occupy today. As The Tunnel Through Time expertly shows, destruction and renewal are a constant rhythm in the city’s story.
About the Author
Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.
By the same author
Fly Away Home
The Intruder
Give Them All My Love
The Fields Beneath: The History of One Village
The Born Exile: George Gissing
City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay
Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers
Célestine: Voices from a French Village
The Journey of Martin Nadaud
The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination
The House by the Thames
Footprints in Paris
Three Houses, Many Lives
We have not an abiding city, but we seek after the city that is to come.
From Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 14
Remembering how generations of men and women come and go, and how swiftly the lingering memories of their lives follow them, one cannot help looking with some degree of interest upon the old houses in which they were born, lived, and died. We fancy that the walls which echoed their first wailing cry, and caught, in the hushed, awful silence, the sound of their last breath, deaf, dumb and blind though they are, must cherish remembrance of such daily doings; of loving, hating, rejoicing and grieving, hoping and fearing; of hard struggles and terrible failures, or glorious victories.
From an editorial in The Builder, 11 September 1875
Yerkes, the projector of the new Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead electric underground, said to me that in spite of the opposition which he meets at every turn he proposes to go through with it . . . He predicted to me that a generation hence London will be completely transformed; that people will think nothing of living twenty or more miles from town, owing to electrified trains. He also thinks that the horse omnibus is doomed. Twenty years hence, he says, there will be no horse omnibuses in London. Although he is a very shrewd man, I think he is a good deal of a dreamer.
From R. D. Blumenfeld’s R.D.B.’s Diary, 6 October 1900
These works, like all alterations and repairs, will give employment to many, and be a nuisance to others, as long as they are being constructed; but when the mess is cleared up, and the new channels are thrown open, a sense of comfort and relief will be felt throughout the vast general traffic of London.
The concluding words of John Hollingshead’s
Underground London, 1862
List of Maps
x London, c. 1550
xii London today
60 St Giles-in-the-Fields, c. 1550
61 St Giles/Tottenham Court Road district today
80 The way north from the Bishop’s Gate, c. 1550
81 Bishopsgate/Liverpool Street/Shoreditch district today
112 Stepney, c. 1710
124 Farringdon and Holborn, c. 1550
125 Farringdon and Holborn today
208 Stepney today
221 St Giles and Seven Dials district, c. 1840
242 ‘The way to Oxford’ through the Tyburn crossroads, c. 1750
243 Oxford Street, Marble Arch and Marylebone districts today
London, c. 1550. The significantly built-up area is shown in darker grey
London today, with the Crossrail route
INTRODUCTION
The new Crossrail underground line, which has been built across central London even as I have been writing this account, is, for the greater part, invisible. It is the biggest building project in Europe today, yet surface evidence for it is limited to a small number of deeply excavated sites that have opened up in the heart of London like bubbling geyser holes in a volcanic region. When completed, the new long-distance line, re-baptised the Elizabeth line, is designed to carry passengers from areas outside London to key points in the City and the West End, bypassing intermediate inner-London stops. The great scheme has been on planners’ desks for several decades, through propitious and unpropitious seasons, but by 2012 construction was well under way and on time, with tunnelling and earth-shifting machines moving very slowly but inexorably, like mythic underground monsters, from separate directions to their final meeting point beneath Farringdon on the western edge of the City.
Yet as a route tunnelled out by machines boring deep under central London, Crossrail is not essentially different in kind from the other tube lines, which began to be constructed in the final years of the nineteenth century. In the Edwardian era, when money for public works was easily found, the popular journalist George R. Simms wrote:
To the engineer of the tube railway, as to the passengers who travel through it, the buildings overhead are a matter of supreme indifference. Eighty or a hundred feet beneath the surface, under the foundations of the houses, the bed of the river, the gas and water pipes, and the older underground railways, he worms his way through the earth, leaving a section of iron tube behind him at every yard of his advance.1
That remains as true today, and the photograph that accompanied this article, of a great, round tunnelling shield attended by workmen with moustaches and pickaxes, depicts essentially the same technology that is being used for Crossrail.
It was the development of electric traction which made the Tube as we know it possible. Before that, the trains were steam-powered, so their underground course could only be a series of relatively short and shallow tunnels punctuated with openings through which the sulphurous smoke could excitingly escape – evoking shocked speculations about the Underworld from impressionable Londoners. Because of this, for the Metropolitan line and also for the District line which grew from it, the cut-and-cover method of construction was used. The whole surface of the route over which the line would run was dug up, usually following an existing roadway to keep demolition of buildings to a minimum, the line was laid in the bottom of the cutting and then an arch was built over the top with the roadway restored above. But in the 1890s the possibility of letting electric trains run for miles in deep-down tunnels without obvious communication with the upper air changed all this, and finally severed subterranean trains’ connection with the surface railways.
Contrary to various myths and expectations that have attended its construction, Crossrail does not run significantly deeper than the existing tube lines, nor much faster – except in that it will stop at fewer stations. Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel are its core central route. Beyond Whitechapel, at Stepney Green in the East End, it divides into two, one branch going to the new docklands development at Canary Wharf and eventually to Woolwich, and the other via Stratford out to Ilford and finally to Shenfield. Most of this latter branch runs in the open air over pre-existing tracks.
The same is true of the westward extension from Paddington, which runs over established lines through suburbs such as Ealing and Southall, with a spur line to Heathrow airport, and then on to Slough and Maidenhead. There has been, as I write, an announcement tha t it will be carried on as far as Reading. Although it has always been understood that Crossrail must link the City with Heathrow (indeed, some people seem to be under the illusion that this alone is what it is for), the western part of the line has been the most volatile and uncertain in the planning.
The Crossrail stations, most of which will be alongside the hundred-year-old tube stations or amalgamated with them, are designed to be lighter and far more spacious than the traditional rabbit-warren tube stop. However, they will not have the above-ground walk-in grandeur of some of these. Instead, the new ticket halls are being inserted as ‘boxes’ not far below the surface of the ground, and it is the excavation for these, rather than the tunnelling itself, that is giving archaeologists extraordinary and probably unrepeatable opportunities for careful examination of what lies there before it is finally displaced, opportunities eagerly taken up by the team of the Museum of London.
Such digs call up once again a question that is always there, both in waking life and in our dreams, concerning the nature and identity of place itself. What do we mean by ‘a place’? To what extent can a location still be said to ‘be’ the place that it was long ago, when a boggy field has been replaced by a Georgian square or by Victorian warehouses and then again by glass towers, and when even the earth of the original field has been dispersed to other sites as landfill? Yet how can it not be the same place when we uncover, beneath the sewers, gas pipes, water mains and electricity and telephone lines, the remains of the conduits our ancestors built to contain London’s streams and the clay pipes of men who worked in holes in the earth, just as several thousand orange-jacketed men have been doing today? Much of what lies beneath is the buried detritus of what, once, was human life in the light of the day and in all its varied busyness.
This book makes figurative historical excavations on several of the oldest and most significant sites through which the brand-new Elizabeth–Crossrail is passing. Rather, I should say, under which it is passing, for though the stations break through to the surface the line itself runs at a depth of thirty metres and thus below the accreted two thousand years’ residue of what has been there before. Archaeology disinters layers of actual matter; one may also disinter the layers of different human life that walked where many of our streets, however altered in appearance, still run today. These people spoke the names of ancient places that now belong to our squares and our tube stations. They suffered the cycle of the seasons as we do; they ate, drank, laughed, worked, prayed, hoped, dreamed and despaired in what are essentially, despite enormous physical and social changes, the same spaces we occupy now. They also made some of the same regular journeys.
To follow these journeys and their staging points over many centuries is to move chronologically as well as through physical space. A true account cannot always run across London in one direction, nor yet tell one continuous story from the Norman Conquest to the twenty-first century. Each of my chapters has its own central subject, whether that subject is a past traveller, the gradual unfolding of transport, the presence everywhere of dead Londoners or the transformation over hundreds of years of what are now key places along the Crossrail journey. A handful of these places have such long and changeful histories that I have devoted more than one chapter to each. In this way, the journey in space across London also becomes a series of journeys through time.
CHAPTER I
Coming into London
People were travelling in and out of London long before there was any question of railways, long before horse-buses, stagecoaches or the earliest bumpy hackney coaches made their appearance. Five hundred years ago the rich, or moderately well-to-do, rode in and out on horseback, or drove a horse with a laden cart behind if that was part of their trade. Everyone else walked.
Some of the main routes in and out of London are extremely old. Watling Street, which is thought to be prehistoric, is followed by the present-day Edgware Road. The way eastwards from Aldgate in the direction of Colchester, which is today a major artery through the East End, was an important Roman road, and so was Ermin Street which ran north from the City through the Bishop’s gate and up to Shoreditch, destined for Lincoln (where a Roman arch across it still survives) and eventually York. York Way itself, running north from King’s Cross, is another ancient route to the same destination. The ‘way to Oxford’, leading west from St Giles-in-the-Fields, was also the Roman road to Silchester on the route to the south-west, and equally old is the way south from London Bridge in the direction of the English Channel.
It is a measure of the persistence of geographical habits, through time and urban change, that the route chosen for Crossrail follows some of the same ancient paths, coming into central London from the west and leaving it again east of the City, or the same journey in the opposite direction.
* * *
One day in 1826, eleven years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and another eleven before Victoria would start her long reign as Queen, a boy decided to keep a diary of his daily comings and goings across London.
Comings and goings was what his days often amounted to, for John Thomas Pocock, who was then not quite twelve years old, was acting much of the time as his father’s messenger boy. Mr Pocock was a builder and he and his wife, with several children younger than John, lived in a house that he had himself designed and built, along with others, in Kilburn, north-west of Paddington. The pretty fields of Kilburn were not yet part of London, and they must have seemed an excellent prospect for property development in the building boom that followed the wars, but that boom had collapsed by the mid-1820s with disastrous results for a number of banks and for the optimistic Pocock and his kind. The building of a station at Paddington lay ten years in the future, for railways had not yet come. The Bristol-to-London line that became the Great Western was only a dream in the mind of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and when it did arrive the hilly land to the north of it was only gradually developed.
When his son’s diary1 begins, Pocock had rented out his previous offices in the City and was working from home. He was being helped out financially by a prosperous coal-merchant brother, dealing in coal then being a lucrative and continually expanding trade; but because of unpaid loans raised on land he had bought but which now lay fallow, Pocock was at several moments in imminent danger of being consigned to a debtors’ prison. (This alarming fact is only referred to in the diary in code, as ‘Banco Regis’ – the King’s Bench – and by manly references to ‘blackguards’ who wished Father ill.)
John Thomas seems to have been temporarily removed from school during the family’s financial crisis, and left entirely at fourteen, unable (he said later) ‘to dictate a letter or spell with any accuracy’. As the eldest boy still living at home it was his job to come and go between Kilburn, Fenchurch Street where there was rent to be collected, St Bride’s Wharf off Fleet Street2 where the uncle had his coal business, and various other places in the City, Southwark, Ratcliffe Highway in the east, and elsewhere. Huge numbers of men employed in the City then walked to work every day, but few of them would have lived anywhere as far off as Kilburn. John also made frequent trips for his mother, walking the one and a half miles to Paddington village, the nearest place where there were a few shops and sometimes a market. In the past the Pococks had kept a horse and gig, but that had now been given up. Money for the Kilburn-to-City coach could not often be spared either, unless Mrs Pocock was visiting one of her London relations, nor yet would it be for the new omnibus, the very first one, that was started by Shillibeer in 1829 to run from a large inn not far from Paddington as far as the Bank in the heart of the City. So it was on foot that young John made his expeditions, apparently cheerfully, since he enjoyed playing a remarkably grown-up role for his age much more than he enjoyed school at Regent’s Park during the periods he was sent back there.
A typical set of entries runs:
Ap.9 [1829]. To the City for my father. Took an advertisement concerning our bricks to the ‘Morning Advertiser’ office, Strand, and then went to the Wharf and to Bouverie Street.
