Underground, Overground Read Online Free

brought it about, then London might never have had an Underground because, as Christian Wolmar writes in
The Subterranean Railway
, ‘the advent of the motor car in the late nineteenth century, followed quickly by electric railways and the motor bus, could have resulted in the bypassing of the underground railways as a solution to city traffic problems given the expense and disruption of their construction as happened in most cities in the US.’
PEARSON’S LONDON
    In the middle third of the nineteenth century, when Charles Pearson was campaigning for what would become the Metropolitan Railway, London was changing more than at any timebefore or since. A map of 1845 shows the city extending east not much beyond the City, to the south not much beyond Camberwell, with Clapham as a distinct village. It extended west not much beyond Kensington and Paddington, with Hammersmith as a distinct village, and to the north not much beyond the New Road – which ran from Paddington to a little way north of the City – with pretty Hackney as a separate village.
    A map of 1900, by contrast, shows a London more than twice the size of the 1845 city. All the places mentioned above as being separate villages had been comfortably absorbed. London in 1900 extended to Stratford and Woolwich in the east, to Sydenham and Streatham in the south. Associated with this expansion were three factors, all intermingled. First, growing prosperity: London was rising to its ascendancy as a capital of empire and greatest city in the world. Second, growing population: 1 million in 1800; 2.5 million in 1850; 6.5 million in 1900. The third factor was the coming of the railways.
    The first railway terminus in London was south of the river, at London Bridge, which was opened by the London & Greenwich Railway in 1836. The station was – and is – approached by viaduct, and the humble properties beneath were ‘cleared’. That is to say that the poor were evicted, and their homes demolished. ‘London Bridge station’ sounds like a pretty solid phenomenon, but it would be constantly knocked down and rebuilt, as other companies muscled in on what had been started by the London & Greenwich. During the 1840s, the South Eastern Railway would begin running into London Bridge, as would the London & Croydon, and the London & Brighton (which would amalgamate in 1845 to become the London Brighton & South Coast Railway). Property was cheaper in south London than in north London, which harboured both the commercial centre of the capital – the City – and the mansions of the West End. It was cheaper to build both railways and suburbs to the south, andcommuting – which Charles Pearson called ‘oscillating’ – began between the village of Greenwich and London Bridge. (The term ‘commuting’ is from America, and did not become established in Britain until the 1940s.)
    The Corporation of London did not like railways, and was against having them within the boundaries of the City. Railways were a threat to property. In 1836, when the London & Greenwich began operations, the Corporation was refusing permission for the Commercial Railway to build a terminus within the City, mainly on the grounds that it would only add to traffic congestion. But the Corporation then relented, and in 1840 the London & Blackwall Railway, as the Commercial had become, opened a line from the docks into Fenchurch Street station. This is not the present Fenchurch Street station, but it was
on
Fenchurch Street, which was – and is – within the City of London. So here was a station that had broken through. The line into Fenchurch Street grew in the 1850s, and in 1866 the London & Blackwall was absorbed into the Great Eastern railway, whose cheap train fares would be responsible for the bulging out of north-east London.
    In between the London & Greenwich and the London & Blackwall, two other railways, more typical of their time,