Underground London
It seems like the streets of the East End get busier every day, as cars, buses, lorries and pedestrians rush frantically about their daily business.
But if London seems busy on the surface, there is another world, a subterranean world we only see glimpses of. As much is going on beneath the streets of the city – and a new edition of a fascinating book scratches away at the London clay to uncover the complex world that lies beneath our feet.
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London leaves no stone unturned, as the pair look at East Enders being driven underground by the Blitz, the lost and buried rivers of London, the intricate network of water, hydraulic power and gas pipes that feed our city, tunnels under the Thames, underground railways, civil defence… and ‘oddities’.
Many of these oddities are underground systems that have been made redundant by progress and the passage of time – the subterranean tram system proposed by a Royal Commission in the early 1900s but never adopted; the ghost Underground stations, such as St Mary’s Whitechapel, which were left behind by population shifts, ruthless competition, or just rank bad planning; and the disastrous attempts to join east and south London by tunnels under the Thames.
We see the often shambolic progress of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel – 18 years and several bankruptcies in the construction, it claimed the lives of several workmen and, ultimately, that of the broken Brunel himself.
The tunnel, like many under-London schemes, adapted to the times, becoming first a footway, then the route of the London to Brighton railway, before finally settling into its role as the conduit of the East London Line between Wapping and Rotherhithe.
Of course, much of the tunnelling was essential to protect the life of London as a city. The East End was sinking under a tide of filth and sewage before Joseph Bazalgette built his new sewage system in the 1800s, and we follow the progress of London’s fresh drinking water eastward – in fact only the pipes that run from the River Lea’s reservoirs go against this flow, pumping water westward and back into the East End.
And if you think London is overcrowded today, take a look at Victorian street scenes – if possible, the traffic moves even more slowly. It was in response to this Dickensian gridlock that underground railways were first proposed – boring through the East End soil in the case of the Central Line, but causing much more chaos in the construction with the cut-and-cover District Line and wholesale destruction of streets and houses.
Some tunnelling is more secret than others of course. The book charts the building and appropriation by tunnels of generations of governments, ministries and essential utilities, as they built bolt holes against terrorism, insurrection and nuclear war
And we see how the undermining of London continues into our new century, as ever more traffic competes for a finite amount of space – the Isle of Dogs, already carved to pieces a century or so ago to accommodate the ocean-going goods ships, is now holed beneath the surface too, as the Jubilee Line extension snakes under the borough.
London Under London: a subterranean guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman; published by John Murray ISBN 0719552885; £15.99.