Underground, Overground Read Online Free Page B

of Parliament to build a railway, but that wasn’t very hard to obtain if you could give the appearance of adequately funded competence. There was some guiding legislation; Parliamentary committees would issue recommendations, but British governments would not fund, still less plan, railways. ‘Having observed this policy in action,’ notes the
Oxford Companion to British Railway History
, ‘countries on the European mainland adopted others of an entirely different kind.’ Why were Victorian governments so attached to
laissez-faire
? In his book on British railways
Eleven Minutes Late
(2009), Matthew Engel blames the French Revolution:
that
was what happened when the state got involved in the operation of society. Stephen Joseph,the director of the Campaign for Better Transport, says, ‘It may be because we never maintained a standing army. So there was no sense of the tactical importance of transport.’
    What marked Charles Pearson out was that he was not
intimidated
by railways. He saw the good and the bad in them, and how they could be used for humane purposes. For example, they might be used to cure a problem they had exacerbated, namely slum-living.
    Pearson’s London was what we now call central London, and much of it was slums. Today most of us wouldn’t say no to a
pied à terre
in Clerkenwell, but in 1850 it was a slum. Drury Lane? A slum. Seven Dials and Covent Garden? Holborn and Finsbury? Slums. The new railways were of no help to the residents of these places, and they had made life worse for the poor who happened to be in their way. In
Landlords to London
, Simon Jenkins observes: ‘By the end of the century, it is estimated that over 100,000 people had been uprooted from their homes by the coming of the railways … Railway building in London simply crowded neighbouring slum properties even more densely and forced up their rents.’
    Pearson saw an answer in ‘oscillation’. He noted that the poor were keen on Sunday railway excursions to the country, and commuting was getting under way; it is just that the poor couldn’t afford to take part. The merchants of the City were moving out to places such as Camberwell, Kensington, Islington, Mile End or salubrious and newly suburbanised Hackney. They might travel by coach and horses or by train. Thomas Briggs, a senior bank clerk in the City, lived in Hackney, and on 9 July 1864 he was returning there by train from Fenchurch Street after a Saturday spent at work when he was bludgeoned to death in a first-class carriage, probably by a young German tailor called Franz Müller. (Let’s hope it
was
Müller, because he was hanged for it.) And so Briggs was an all-round pioneer: an early commuter andthe very first victim of a railway murder. For the slightly less well-off, moving to the slightly cheaper houses of, say, Fulham or Brixton, the new fleets of horse-drawn omnibuses would come into play, but there was a problem on the roads. Victorian Londoners did not speak of ‘traffic jams’ – that term came from America after the First World War. They spoke rather of traffic ‘locks’ or ‘blocks’, and their prevalence would be one reason why Pearson began to direct his thoughts underground.
THE NEW ROAD (AND THE NEW TRAFFIC)
    The New Road – and we might now imagine a more violent quaking along its length, as its moment of truth approaches – had been built in 1757. In 1857 it was decided it was no longer new, and it was renamed, along most of its length, the Euston Road, while the stretches to the west and east became Marylebone Road and Pentonville Road.
    It ran from Paddington to the City, which may sound familiar. Crossrail, the underground express line that is supposed to be opening in 2017, will also connect those two places. The definitive London commute is from west London to the City in the east, and in his novel
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936) George Orwell