Nearly two decades after Charles Pearson first proposed the idea of an underground railway for London, after two years of construction, the Metropolitan Railway opened the oldest stretch of London Underground – between Paddington and Farringdon – to the public on 10 January 1863.

Click to enlarge

Now serving 34 stations along its 41.4 mile length, the Metropolitan Line has recently celebrated its 150th anniversary. Discover more about the history of this engineering triumph and its impact on transport infrastructure in London and across the world.

Introduction

In the early 1800s with population and employment booming, London’s traditional road based horse drawn transport could not cope, and the city had expanded too far from the river for water transport to provide useful capacity. By 1850, London's population had tripled to 3 million, as it emerged as the centre point of governance and trade of the British Empire. Additional strain was placed on the transport infrastructure by a quarter of a million commuting into the city every day. Road improvements schemes such as New Road – today’s Marylebone and Euston roads – and Regents Street did little to alleviate the strain.

In parallel, railway enthusiasm had gripped the country. By 1850, seven railway termini - still active commuter hubs today – served London. These stations, bar Fenchurch Street, did not have direct access to the City. The Royal Commission of 1846 had prohibited railway termini from penetrating the ‘urban core’, i.e. the area now enclosed by London Underground’s Circle Line. As a result all railway termini are peppered along the border to the inner core and along the Circle Line today. The Royal Commission intended to preserve the inner city. A direct result of this legislation combined with a growing population and employment centralisation was that London became plagued with congested roads.

The absence of a London-wide planning authority exasperated the issue. There was an inherent lack of integrated thinking and understanding of travel patterns. Traffic was so bad that those commuting from Brighton found it quicker upon arriving at London Bridge train station, to walk rather than catch a cab or omnibus to their offices in Trafalgar Square, a walk of some 2.5 miles. In order for London to continue growing and maintain its status as the centre of the world, an innovative solution was sought.

In the 1840s, Charles Pearson, a solicitor at the City of London, proposed a novel solution to London’s congestion: connecting the mainline termini by building an underground train service – thereby providing the missing link to transport workers to their employment. Building the railway line would minimise destruction of property and overcome the prohibition imposed by Royal Commission.

An early map of the proposed route of the Metropolitan Line (click to enlarge)

Nearly two decades after proposing the idea and after two years of construction, the Metropolitan Railway opened the oldest stretch of London Underground – between Paddington and Farringdon – to the public on 10 January 1863.

Photo of Paddington Station (click to enlarge)

The first underground railway welcomed 30,000 enthusiastic and curious passengers on the first day. The popularity of the railway continued silencing doubters. A year before its opening, The Times commented on the ideas as an “insult to common sense […] to suppose that people […] would ever prefer […] to be driven amid palpable darkness through the foul subsoil of London … as a merely quicker medium [to the bus]

Construction

Construction of the pioneering Metropolitan Railway was intended to be rapid, taking just under two years to complete against the planned three. Although intended to alleviate congestion, the construction of the subterranean railway caused horrendous levels of disruption to travellers and inhabitants. The main section running between Paddington and Kings Cross passed directly under New Road and therefore required little demolition of existing properties. This could not be more different for the remaining route where it veered south down through the Fleet Valley to Farringdon. The law required that the rail company bought and demolished any property that the line passed under. Homes and slum areas were therefore ruthlessly swept aside. Though official figures record the displacement of only 307 individuals, taking into account those living in the slum areas who did not count due to not officially owning property, it is estimated some 12,000 Londoners were made homeless, receiving no compensation.

Construction began in March 1860, despite concerns about undermining and vibrations causing subsistence of nearby buildings. Due to these, the majority of the route followed major streets, in the Metropolitan’s case being New Street, and therefore added significantly to the mayhem already present on London’s streets during their construction.

The need to follow major roads meant that construction caused horrendous disruption to travellers and inhabitants

The method of construction for the new railway was relatively straightforward, mostly built using the cut and cover method which employed existing technology to build a railway within an excavated cutting. East of Kings Cross the route continued in a traditional railway tunnel 728 yard (666m) long under Mount Pleasant, Clerkenwell, then followed the route of the River Fleet beside Farringdon Road in an open cutting to the meat market at Smithfield.

Whilst some machinery was utilised as in this image, much of the excavating was carried out manually

Cut and cover tunnelling is a simple construction method used to build shallow tunnels such as those commonly used by subways, railways and metro systems. Huge trenches were carved into the streets along Marylebone and Euston Roads, then lined with brick and tracks laid in the bottom. The only differences to the process from that of building a cutting in the countryside was that the adjacent buildings had to be shored up with huge beams during construction.

Covering a tunnel so that the road could pass over

The innovation of the Metropolitan Railway lay in the covering of the cutting with a tunnel roof and laying the road back on top. In order to do this, brick arched roofs were employed, allowing the street above to be reinstated without risk of collapse. The trench excavated for the running tunnels was 33 feet 6 inches (10.2m) wide, into which brick retaining walls were constructed to support an elliptical brick arch or iron girders spanning 28 feet 6 inches (8.7m). The tunnels were wider at stations to accommodate the platforms. Most of the excavation work was carried out manually by navvies, although earth-moving conveyor’s, developed during the construction of the canals for the industrial towns of the north, were used to remove excavated spoil from the trenches.

An artist's impression of how a station at Baker Street may look

Within the tunnel, two tracks were laid with a six foot (1.8m) gap between. To accommodate both the standard gauge trains of the GNR and the broad gauge trains of the GWR, the track was laid as three-rail mixed gauge, the rail nearest the platforms being shared by both gauges. Signalling was arranged on the absolute block method, using electric Sagnoletti block instruments and fixed signals. Trial runs on the line were carried out from November 1861 while construction was still under way. The first trip to run over the entire length of the line was in May 1862 with William Gladstone among the guests. By the end of 1862 work was completed at a total cost of £1.3 million, with the line opening in January of 1863.

Challenges and tragedy

Construction was not without incident. In May 1860, a mainline GNR train overshot the platform at Kings Cross station and fell into the workings. Later in 1860, a boiler explosion on an engine pulling contractor's wagons killed the driver and his assistant. In May 1861, the excavation collapsed at Euston causing considerable damage to the neighbouring buildings.

The final accident occurred in June 1862 when the fleet sewer burst following a heavy rainstorm and flooded the excavations. The railway company and the Metropolitan Board of Works managed to stem and divert the water and the construction was only delayed by a few months. An event like this was not surprising. The fleet sewer, which contained the foul fleet river, crossed the route 3 times, and in addition to that the number of additional underground services encountered was enormous, including water mains, main and branch sewers, gas mains and telegraph wires.

Construction was also made difficult by the presence of vast mass burial pits dating back to the summer of 1665 when London was ravaged by an outbreak of bubonic plague. Details of number and locations of burial pits were almost non-existent, and it was therefore inevitable that these 17th century plague pits would be uncovered, often without warning and a problem that persists to this day, resulting in the traumatisation of many a brawny construction worker.

Liverpool Street Station and Aldgate Tube Station both sit upon these plague pits, and a number of the tube lines built are purposefully diverted around ‘pits so dense that they cannot be tunnelled through.’ Such grisly details have provided the background to a number of bizarre happenings during the Metropolitan Railways life. Aldgate Tube Station, built upon a plague pit that according to Daniel Defoe in his Journal of a Plague Year, is the resting place of 1000 souls all buried in a two week period during 1665.

It was here that an electrician made what should have been his last mistake. Managing to send over 20,000 volts of electricity through his body, he should have by all accounts been killed, but miraculously was only knocked unconscious, and otherwise left unharmed. His colleagues who observed the event all claimed to have seen an almost transparent old lady gently stroking his hair before they could get to him. Phantom footsteps are also often reported, echoing from within the tunnel.

Early Conditions for Travellers

Passengers on board an early Metropolitan Line service

The original intention was that hot water locomotives would be employed, and therefore in many stretches the only ventilation would come from the staircases accessing the stations. Even with this limited means of ventilation, esteemed individuals such as Brunel proposed that the line could be run with ordinary locomotives. ‘I believe it would be perfectly easy to work this line with an ordinary locomotive. I thought the impression had been exploded long since that railway tunnels require much ventilation.’

Unfortunately, hot water locomotives could not manage the weight of the trains that were required, and it therefore fell to Messrs. Stephenson and Co. of Newcastle to design and construct of the locomotives for the Metropolitan Line. The design provided close fitting dampers to prevent the discharge of gases from the burning of the coke, and an injection condenser with air pump to dispose of the steam.

Kings Cross station

Therefore, the line, operated by steam, with engines that were supposed to consume their own smoke and steam, should have mitigated the need for excessive ventilation. It was noted though that by the end of the first day ‘they had produced an atmosphere in the stations and tunnels which was an outstanding feature of London life for forty years to come.’

In its first year, 11.8 million passengers braved the foul, smoked filled tunnels. Owners claimed that the ‘invigorating atmosphere, provided a sort of health resort for people who suffered from asthma,’ but then also contradictorily allowed the drivers to grow beards so as to filter out of the worst of the smog.

The individuals and groups responsible

While it is engineers such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel or George and Robert Stephenson who are traditionally receiving of praise for the UKs railway infrastructure, it was the vast groups of men termed Navvies (named after the navigators who built the first navigation canals in the eighteenth century) who actually built the railways. The building of rail was very labour intensive, and at one stage during the 19th Century, one in every hundred persons who worked in this country was a navvy. By the 1800s, the height of railway construction, there were 250,000 navvies throughout the country.

Workers often had to rely on the most primitive of tools to excavate tunnels

Navvies, in part due to engineers such as Brunel who resisted all efforts to provide their workers with adequate housing and sanitation, lived in atrocious conditions by the rail line that they were building, in so called shanty towns composed of rough timber and turf huts. Huts could accommodate 20 men and they paid one and a half pennies for a bed for the night, whilst those who slept on the floor paid less, five nights costing one penny. Living and working in these terrible conditions, and the communal lifestyle of the shanty towns meant that the navvies evolved a culture and even language of their own.

Their reputation for hard work was only matched by the reputation for hard drinking and fighting, with towns often fearing their arrival. Going on a 'randy' was navvy slang for going on a drinking spree that could last several days. But, while viewed as degenerates by the majority of the respectable population, the extreme deprivation and cruel exploitation only makes the incredible feats of engineering achieved with little more than the standard tools of a pick, shovel and wheelbarrow all the more impressive.

Armies of so called 'navvies' were used to build much of the new route

By the standards of the time, navvies were well paid. They could earn 25 pence a day which compared well to those who worked in factories. However, their pay could take some time to arrive and many railways paid their navvies right next to a tavern – owned by the railway company.

Why did the navvies live such a lifestyle? Many navvies chose to live for the day. Death while working was high. Those that were working in tunnels that were being built were especially vulnerable to collapses and explosions. A particularly bad example is that of the Woodhead Tunnel, where the death rate among the navvies between 1839 and 1852 was higher than that of the soldiers who fought at the Battle of Waterloo. All work was done in a hurry and safety procedures were minimal. Getting the job done was far more important than employee safety especially as there were plenty of navvies.

However, British navvies had a good reputation. Many went on to work in Europe where their hard work was rewarded – British navvies frequently got paid twice as much as anybody else working on the rail lines simply because they worked twice as hard as anybody else.

Development of the Metropolitan Line over time

Painting of Baker Street station

Originally the Metropolitan Line connected Farringdon to Paddington, but by 1921 it had expanded greatly, covering routes that modern day Londoner’s would associate with other tube lines. In 1921 it ran from Aldgate and Aldgate East to Hammersmith and through the outer circle branch with connections also going to High Street Kensington, as well as into the north-west area. This didn’t change until 1938, when the Bakerloo extension was complete. St Johns Road and Swiss Cottage became part of the Bakerloo Line, while Marlboro Road was taken away as it was found to be too near one of the stations (Williams. H).

1871 map of Metropolitan Line and Metropolitan District Railway

The branch to Stanmore was also affected by the extension of the nearby Bakerloo Line. The Bakerloo got the Stanmore branch yet the Metropolitan Line continued to travel the same route as the Bakerloo line up until Wembley Park where it then departed to the north-west (Transport for London). The route for the outer circle to Addison Road was next to go. The map from 1948 shows the loss of Uxbridge Road but the route itself was closed in the late 1940’s (Willsher. M).

In 1951, the differentiation between District and Metropolitan lines was clearly shown on tube maps. The line has an extension to Barking (later to become the Hammersmith and City line). This extension of the line also has a branch in itself, from Shoreditch to New Cross. However the introduction of the Circle line meant the branch to High St Kensington was taken. Yet the line still had its branch to Hammersmith.

Also in this time period, the metropolitan line stations that were adjacent to the Bakerloo lines between Finchley Road and Wembley park were lost from the line. They still existed on the Bakerloo Line. In 1987, this part of the Bakerloo Line became part of the Jubilee Line (Willsher. M). It was in 1964 when the line was shown to lose the top part of the Aylesbury branch. The line still travelled up to Amersham as it still does today.

It was the birth of the Hammersmith and City line that caused the Metropolitan to look the way it does today. The new Hammersmith and City line took the Barking to Hammersmith branch from the Metropolitan line, and so the Metropolitan went from Aldgate, left the inner circle at Baker Street and continued up into the north-west area to Uxbridge, Amersham, Watford and Chesham (Transport for London).

Expansion

Encouraged by the popularity and financial success of its railway, the Metropolitan gradually extended its network. Over the next twenty years, the Metropolitan linked up with the London’s second underground railway company, the District Metropolitan, which constructed the oldest parts of the District Line. Together they completed the Inner Circle line in 1884.

Safety was the cornerstone of the phenomenal success of the Metropolitan Line which could boast a remarkable safety record. In its first forty-four years of service it did not experience a single railway accident resulting in the death of a passenger. This supported the system’s perceived safety and reliability, allaying passengers’ fear of entering the underground network. If there had been a big accident early on, the whole concept might never have taken off.

The Metropolitan Railway, and its current grandchild the Metropolitan line, combines the two ends of spectrum of city transport, providing a high frequency shuttle service along the oldest stretch of the network yet reaching further into the suburbs than any other London Underground line. A combination the newest addition to the network in a generation, Crossrail, which is currently under construction, will also boast. These paradoxical attributes stem from the Metropolitan’s fiercely independent approach in the early 20th century. The Metropolitan decided against further investment in Central London as it deemed public transport provision over saturated there. Instead the railway company extended the branches of the line through Middlesex and Hertfordshire into Buckinghamshire. With this venture the Metropolitan planned to tap into the long-distance market and attract the middle classes.

The railway had aspirations to become a mainline railway feeding middle-class suburban commuters directly to work in London. The push towards the home counties was part of a master plan to secure a strong and dependent clientele and fully use capacity along the central route. The forward thinking and financially foresighted railway company had purchased additional land adjacent to track when planning the route. A vast suburbia emerged from the transformation of the Metropolitan’s ‘surplus’ land holding by the Metropolitan’s own property development company. The new residential areas unlocked by the railway company’s extension line were branded with the catchy marketing name Metro-land by their own publicity department. The publicity department especially created to sell customers the idea of modern living, rural tranquillity and urban proximity, was set up years in advance of Metro-land development. As well as the direct profits from the sale of residential properties, the Metropolitan established a desirable middle-class commuter base dependent on their service.

Metroland highlights how new transport and associated property development shape London. Metroland is a notable example of the direct relationship between transport provision and regional development. The Jubilee Line Extension to the docklands similarly illustrates the development potential and property investment attracted by good transport links. January 2013 saw the London Underground celebrate the innovative solution the Metropolitan Railway took to resolve the eternal problem of congestion. It also celebrates the first line of a network that shaped London and the birth of an icon synonymous with the London life. The concept of subterranean mass rail transit was translated and forms the backbone of urban transport provision in many cities across the world.

References

1.Underground: How the Tube Shaped London, David Bownes, Oliver Green and Sam Mullins 2012
2.Underground, Overground: A Passengers History of the Tube, Andrew Martin 2012
3.http://www.ingenious.org.uk/Read/Identity/RailwaysandIdentity/Navvies
4. Wolmar, Christian. The Subterranean Railway. 2004.
5. Halliday, Stephen. Underground to Everywhere. 2001.
6. London Transport Museum. Metro-land. 2004.
7. Bownes, David et al. Underground: How the Tube shaped London. 2012.

Authors

This article was written by ICE Graduate & Student members Nicole Badstuber, Tony Bowerman and Christopher Brown