‘I am happy to carry more people for more money,’ Sir Herbert Ashcombe Walker, the first general manager of the Southern Railway explained to the then John Elliot, his public relations assistant. ‘I don’t mind carrying fewer people for more money, but what you are asking me to do is to carry more people for less money, and that’s the way to go bankrupt. You will remember that won’t you?’
Elliot clearly did remember for, in later years, as Sir John Elliot, chairman of the Railways Executive and of London Transport, he oversaw organisations that were indeed carrying fewer people for more money.
But that is to move on almost 120 years from the early days of the railways in London in the 1830s to the one period when all of London’s scheduled passenger transport was in a single ownership, that of the state, whose public persona was that of the British Transport Commission. This was a rare and in fact short-lived period, following the nationalisation of Britain’s main line railways in 1948 and long before the break-up of the first British nationalised transport undertaking, London Transport, and the later privatisation of the railways.
We need to go back to the beginning. On the eve of the railway age, London was already the world’s largest and most populous city in the world. In 1801, a census of the Greater London area, somewhat larger in size than that of the Greater London Council, which was established in 1965, showed that there were 1,110,000 people living there. By 1841, this had more than doubled to 2,250,000, and the population continued to grow until it reached 6,381,000 in 1901; and eventually 8,187,000 by 1964.
During the early nineteenth century, London was already closely built-up, mainly in and around the twin cities of London and Westminster and the immediate suburbs. West of Marble Arch was open fields. Most of the development was north of the Thames, while south of the river the land was flat and marshy; but already areas such as Southwark contained a tightly-packed overflow from the more expensive, and healthier, accommodation available north of the river. While the Thames was a natural barrier to the south, to the north, some three to five miles back, there were heights such as those around Hampstead Heath, which also helped to define the limits of the old city, much of which dated from the Roman era. The spread of London downstream had already started, with the first enclosed docks built in the previous century.
The West End of London ended at Marble Arch, beyond which were large farms and small villages to the west, one of which was Paddington. Such development as lay to the west was along the banks of the Thames.
Onto this scene emerged the early railways, but at first their impact was hardly noticeable as London’s first recorded railway was the Surrey Iron Railway of 1803, which was horse-drawn and used solely for the conveyance of freight to and from the riverside at Wandsworth. Nevertheless, the congested roads and densely-packed property of all types meant that travel within London was difficult and time consuming, as well as often unpleasant. This was the driving force behind the first two London railways: the London & Greenwich, authorised in 1833 and opened between Spa Road and Deptford in February 1836, and then Spa Road to London Bridge that December, with Deptford to Greenwich in December 1838; and the London & Blackwall Railway, authorised in 1836 as the Commercial Railway, and opened after a change of terminus from the Minories to Fenchurch Street and a change of name to the London & Blackwall Railway, in 1840. To minimise the impact on the property along the routes, and overcome the problem of bridging the many streets and narrow lanes crossed by the lines, both railways were built on arches, with the London & Greenwich needing 60 million bricks and running over 878 arches. The LGR used especially low slung carriages to avoid the risk of them falling over the side of the viaduct, despite its walls being 4 ft 6 in high, while the LBR used cable haulage to avoid the risk that sparks from steam locomotives might set fire to the shipping or the cargo in the docks.
These early railways were not without their disruptive effect. They ran through slum areas so displaced many of the poorer sections of society, but did not offend the affluent and influential landowners. Railways could not be built without massive upheaval, not unlike major road schemes today, and the construction of their London termini proved as disruptive in their construction as an airport would be in modern times, and, of course, every new terminus needed its access lines running from the countryside, through the suburbs and through ever more densely-populated areas until at last the end was reached. Like an airport, the passenger terminus was just part of the whole, for there was usually a goods station, although both the London & South Western and the London Brighton & South Coast used their original, somewhat distant, London termini at Nine Elms and Bricklayers’ Arms respectively, for this purpose, and there had to be a maintenance area, in short, a locomotive depot, as well as carriage sidings and cleaning facilities.
Just what this all meant can be judged by the fact that, in 1854, the extension of the London & South-Western Railway towards the Thames from Nine Elms to the site of Waterloo meant the demolition of 700 houses for a narrower spread of tracks than exists today, while Waterloo itself was a far smaller terminus, reaching its present size with the addition of a further three stations before complete re-design and re-building between 1910 and 1920. Nevertheless, the attitude of the landowners was to undergo a massive change when the Great Western Railway began its advance towards Paddington and the London & Birmingham started to move towards first Camden and then Euston.
The arrival of the railways cannot be under-estimated. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, the streets of the capital were so congested that, in 1867, no less than 3.5 million of the 8 million passengers using the terminus at Cannon Street were travelling solely between the City and the West End terminus of the South Eastern Railway at Charing Cross. The new railway was also competitive, charging fares of 6d first class, 4d second class and 2d third class, compared with 3d for the horse bus, while no doubt first class travel compared well with a handsome cab on cost, timing and comfort.
Parliament was determined that railway travel should be for everyone and not just the wealthy. It introduced the so-called Parliamentary Trains, charging a fare of just a penny a mile and exempt from the Railway Passenger Duty levied on fares, but the generosity of Parliament was not always appreciated by those who used them. In 1883, FS Williams wrote in Our Iron Roads:
To start in the darkness of a winter’s morning to catch the only third-class train that ran; to sit, after a slender breakfast, in a vehicle the windows of which were compounded of the largest amount of wood and the smallest amount of glass, carefully adjusted to exactly those positions in which the fewest passengers could see out; to stop at every roadside station, however insignificant; and to accomplish a journey of 200 miles in about ten hours – such were the ordinary conditions which Parliament in its bounty provided for the people.
Parliament was increasingly involved in the regulation of the railways, and in London this extended to what might even be regarded as an early interest in town planning. In fact, many of the railways arriving in the capital were adding to rather than solving the congestion and overcrowding. The House of Lords considered forcing the railway companies to build and use a single major terminus, but fortunately this was rejected as impractical and it would have resulted in massive upheaval and no doubt simply unimaginable chaos and congestion on the surrounding streets. Parliament then changed its mind and did an abrupt about turn and decided that any new railway termini would have to be outside the central zone, which left the stations at Charing Cross, Blackfriars and Cannon Street almost clinging to the banks of the Thames. The construction of Liverpool Street was allowed simply because it approached the City through a tunnel, and even then the Great Eastern had to provide especially low fares for those thought to have been displaced by the construction of the terminus.
The arrival of the underground lines produced a solution to the dispersal of the main termini and to movement around London, and even created a new series of suburbs, famously known as ‘Metroland’, but this in turn really pointed to further expansion of London. Then, just as the railway map was more or less complete, the electric tram suddenly undermined the railways, taking away a massive share of the inner suburban traffic. The more progressive railways retaliated with electrification, with both the London Brighton & South Coast Railway and the London & South Western Railway having a substantial electrified mileage operational before the First World War.
This is a history of the railway age and its impact on London and the Home Counties, as well as an analysis of the decisions taken by the railway companies, Parliament and local government within London. It shows how in 1906 Golders Green was a muddy country crossroads with hardly a building in sight, but after the Underground reached it the following year, it started to develop into a built-up, but affluent, suburb with a tube depot and a substantial network of bus services operating from the station forecourt and trolleybuses passing close by. It looks at the railways in peace and in war, when occupation by Londoners led to the authorities allowing the deep level tube stations to be used as night time air raid shelters, although as events were to show, these were far less safe than people thought. It looks at the way in which technology has not always come first to London, with the first high speed railway link worthy of the name not finally reaching its terminus at St Pancras until 2007. On the other hand, the popular desire for innovation was not always practical, which is why the Dockland Light Railway was built using ‘steel wheel on steel rail’, rather than some of the more exciting and exotic solutions proposed before construction began.
The railway network around London is complex, making a spider’s web seem logical by comparison. The problems of operating a dense commuter network are equally complex. Many of those travelling in overcrowded peak period trains cannot understand that the train in which they are travelling is losing money due to poor rolling stock utilisation, as much of it lies idle for most of the day, while the commuters can receive discounts of as much as 60 per cent on their season tickets compared to the standard fares.
Yet, while London was not created by the railway, its size and shape and growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was dictated by the railway, and only the railway enables the modern and overcrowded city to function.