Underground, Overground Read Online Free Page A

arrived in London. The first was the London & Birmingham, which launched Euston station in July 1837. In 1838 it celebrated its arrival with a stone giant arch, which was demolished in 1962. The London & Birmingham did not, at this point, cater for commuters. It did not create an inner London passenger station north of its Euston terminus (the first stop after Euston was at Harrow); instead, it built a giant goods yard, its main interest being the carriage from south to north of freight and passengers – or rather, from
north
to
south
, because the L&B emanated from Birmingham, and the early railways generally uncoiled from the north, and were funded by northern industrial wealth.
    Charles Dickens wrote about the coming of the L&B in
Dombey and Son.
He describes its effects on the ‘frowzy fields and cow-houses, and dunghills, dustheaps, and ditches and gardens and summer houses’ of 1830s’ Camden, which he called Staggs’s Gardens. (A ‘Stag’ was a railway speculator.)
    Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up … There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream … In short, the yet unfinished and unopened railway was in progress.
    He described this railway as ‘defiant of all obstacles’, but it pulled up sharply enough on the New Road, stopping short of the grand estates of the West End, whose landlords were not about to have their elegant streets and squares invaded by so many coke-dusted Gradgrinds from the north. So the Great Northern visited all its chaos and destruction on the people who were the traditional recipients of that kind of thing: the poor.
    The second ‘inter-city’ railway rolled into the suburban village of Paddington. The Great Western opened a Paddington station in 1838, a wooden terminus to the north of the present station, which would arrive in 1853. As with Euston, the site was bounded to the south by high-class property: a no-go zone for railways.
    Paddington was at the western end of the New Road, so there were two main-line stations on that road. Two more will be along shortly, and we might now imagine ominous tremors along its length as the road surface prepares to erupt, because Charles Pearson would come to the audacious conclusion that the answer to London’s problems lay beneath it.
    His interest in railways is not the quality that marks Pearsonout. Everyone was interested in railways. Over a thousand miles of them opened between 1837 and 1845, most of what would become the national network. They caused a social, economic and psychological revolution that perhaps exceeded the one caused in our own day by the coming of the internet. (Imagine the Information Superhighway as an actual physical structure.) The disparate time zones of Britain were unified under ‘railway time’ – as Dickens famously observed in
Dombey
: ‘It was as if the sun itself had given in.’ In 1847
Punch
magazine stated that ‘How many miles will become how many minutes’, and that was absolutely correct. (Passengers on the Underground do not know how many miles they’ve travelled, only how long it has taken.)
    In the face of the railways, a romantic fatalism developed. John Martin painted canvases of the Ancient World elided with industry, a genre called the ‘apocalyptic sublime’. His painting of
The Last Judgement
(1853) features a scene of Biblical angst taking place under a blood-red midnight sun. Approaching in the background is
a train
. Whether it is heading for heaven or hell at the parting of the ways is not clear, but it is coming on very purposefully indeed.
    Mere governments were certainly not going to stand in their way. You needed an Act