London's Labyrinth: The World Beneath the City's Streets

Introduction

My journey into London’s underground labyrinth began on a warm July afternoon, in the leafy communal gardens that lay behind the red-brick walls of a mansion block in west London. A residents’ party was in full swing and, as the wine flowed and tempting smells wafted from the barbecue, I struck up a conversation with a fellow partygoer. I told her about my fascination with London, and how I’d always been especially interested in the city hidden beneath our feet. ‘There’s all sorts of things down there,’ I enthused. ‘Old tunnels, bunkers, disused Tube stations …’

‘My daughter works for London Underground,’ she told me. ‘She might be able to show you around some of those abandoned stations.’ So began my exploration of the secrets of subterranean London.

London’s underground railway is indeed a labyrinth. Although hundreds of its winding tunnels are seen by thousands of travellers every day, there are many more that lie dark and deserted beneath the city streets, hidden from view behind anonymous doors, ignored by hordes of commuters who pass them every day. But, for anyone interested in the history of the city, these blank doors are the gateway into a wonderland.

On a quiet street off Piccadilly, a graffiti-covered entrance leads to a tiny stairwell that descends into total blackness. This is what remains of Down Street Tube station, an abandoned stop on the Piccadilly Line. Never having been used very much, the station closed its doors in 1932 – only to find an unlikely purpose as a secret government bunker known as ‘The Burrow’ during the Second World War.

Soon after the grave declaration of war was made, Down Street’s abandoned platforms were hurriedly bricked up and the station became the makeshift headquarters of the Emergency Railway Committee, whose unenviable task was to keep London moving throughout the duration of the conflict. Their subterranean headquarters served them so well that Winston Churchill and his Cabinet used some of the rooms from time to time. As Hitler’s bombs began to rain down on the city, soberly dressed civil servants, cabinet members, secretaries and telephonists slipped quietly through the station’s side door and made the way down to their top-secret workplace. Here they would stay for hours, or sometimes days, at a time, concealed from the view of passengers on the trains rushing past the platform’s edge.

Today, the Down Street war bunker is long deserted but its shell still remains, along with a few clues to its incongruous former use. In a narrow, claustrophobic corridor an old telephone switchboard stands in the darkness, covered with sixty years of dust and grime. Other, smaller rooms in the complex are still fitted with washing facilities, for staff forced to sleep there when the Blitz was at its most ferocious.

My exploration of the underground railway’s hidden places revealed the many diverse stories the Tube network has to tell. At Aldgate, I was shown the shadowy remains of the original station, just visible in the fading light before blackness engulfs the tunnel. At Moorgate, the tiny blind tunnel that a packed Northern Line train ploughed into at full speed, one terrible day in 1975, was grimly indicated. The front carriage of the doomed train slammed into the tunnel wall with such force that the two carriages immediately behind it were forced up and under each other, trapping the people inside in a tangled forest of warped metal and shattered glass. The scene that met the men and women who came to rescue them must have been hellish.

I found my excursions underground fascinating, sometimes unnerving but always intriguing. The stories I uncovered inspired me to journey deeper into the subterranean city, to explore all the facets of this complex labyrinth. What I found was a hidden network as essential to the life of London as anything above ground. From the miles of electrical and telecom cabling secreted beneath the pavements to the sewers that carry the city’s waste, what goes on beneath London is essential to the city’s existence.

Underground London is largely Victorian. Britain’s emergence as a nineteenth-century superpower prompted its capital to grow at an alarmingly fast rate. Suddenly, the above-ground infrastructure that had worked for centuries became woefully insufficient. Faced with such a challenge, Victorian engineers found the answer lay beneath their feet. Thus the underground labyrinth began to evolve, in order to enable London to survive.

The fetid miasmas created by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 prompted the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to originate one of London’s first underground innovations – a network of subterranean pipes that carried away the city’s rotting detritus. This visionary project saved countless Londoners from the horrors of the deadly water-borne disease that had ravaged the city for generations.

The first forays beneath the streets were dirty and massively disruptive, as teams of burly ‘navvies’ dug colossal trenches into which pipes and tunnels were laid. As Londoners picked their way through the towering piles of earth that lined the streets, a man named James Greathead was busy putting the finishing touches to his ‘tunnelling shield’ – a monstrously large circular device that worked on similar lines to a giant pastry cutter, slicing through the sticky subterranean clay and avoiding the need to start digging above ground. The ‘Greathead Shield’, as it became known, took the subterranean city into a new era where no project was deemed impossible. Soon, the labyrinth beneath the streets began to stretch away from the city centre, toward the new housing estates that lay on its perimeter, providing the residents with water, light and transport – with all workings hidden from view.

Since then, the city under London has found other, more ominous uses. Ministers and military men followed the course of the Second World War from bunkers buried deep beneath the streets, while civilians sat anxiously in subterranean shelters and deep-level Tube stations, listening to Hitler’s bombs raining down on the city above. Later, the Cold War prompted the construction of ever deeper shelters that might give a handful of Londoners a chance of surviving the atom bomb.

Today, parts of London’s bafflingly complex network of underground tunnels and pipelines are over 100 years old. The labyrinth has acquired its own history and folklore. Fascinating stories abound of abandoned tunnels, ghost stations and shadowy spaces hidden beneath the city streets.

Over the last two centuries, subterranean London has continued to grow and evolve. Today, its labyrinthine byways stretch out for miles, from the centre into the adjacent suburbs and surrounding countryside. They are the roots of the city, giving life to the metropolis above.

Chapter 1

The Great Stink

The earliest days of June 1858 brought balmy summer weather to London. The city basked under clear skies, interrupted only by occasional brief night-time thunderstorms. However, as mid-month approached, the weather suddenly turned more sultry and oppressive. Temperatures soared to well over 80°F and, as Londoners went about their business along the sun-baked city streets, those closest to the Thames began to notice how the great river’s waters were becoming somehow thicker, darker and distinctly fouler smelling.

On Saturday 12 June, a young man who set out from Westminster pier in a small rowing boat, destined for the Crabtree Inn at Putney Reach, was so overcome by the foul-smelling river he was almost compelled to turn back. Further east, lightermen delivering cargo to the tall sailing ships berthed at the docks found the stench so bad in places that they were forced to rush to the side of their boats, where they became repeatedly and violently sick.

As the heatwave continued unabated, the whole city surrounding the Thames became shrouded in a stinking miasma. Work became almost impossible as Londoners deliberated over which was the lesser of two evils – the heat or the smell. ‘T.S.’, a lawyer whose offices were in the Temple, wrote, ‘The stench … today is sickening and nauseous in the extreme … If I open my windows in rushes the stench; if I close them the heat is so great that I am almost suffocated.’

The lawyer’s dilemma was shared by thousands of other Londoners, including Members of Parliament whose meeting rooms at the Palace of Westminster overlooked the river. As temperatures reached a stifling 93°F on Wednesday 16 June, MPs at the House of Commons reeled from the stench permeating the rooms closest to the river. The Times reported, ‘A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the subject at its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.’

Determined to seek out and identify the cause, Parliament’s ‘Inspector for Ventilation’, Mr Goldsworthy Gurney, was dispatched in a boat to investigate the situation on the Thames. During his unpleasant journey, Gurney noticed that the cloudy, reeking water stretched along the entire central section of the river, from Woolwich in the east to Putney in the west. He also saw that this foul-smelling soup primarily comprised sewage. In his subsequent report to the House of Commons, Gurney concluded:

The water that comes into the Thames no doubt goes to the sea and carries some of the sewage with it, but a very large proportion still remains sufficient to settle on the banks of the river and to produce a nuisance. The black water is deposited on the flats or banks on the sides nearly the whole way.

The fact that the city’s sewage was disgorged into the Thames had been a cause for concern for years. However, the stinking fumes from the river had been at their worst while Parliament was on its summer recess and, consequently, very little had been done to address the problem. The fact that the government was now experiencing the disgusting odour at first hand was wholeheartedly welcomed by the press. On 18 June The Times wrote:

We are heartily glad of it … It is their fault that the river Thames has not … been purified … On Wednesday, when the heat was overpowering, they began to imagine that there was something in the popular outcry. Conviction rose with the quicksilver of the thermometer.

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, it had been a popularly held belief that although the odour periodically emanating from the Thames was hugely unpleasant, it was in no way harmful. However, in the 1850s opinion began to change and many London doctors were increasingly concerned that the water may indeed have been carrying a hazard to health.

During the Great Stink of 1858, Bermondsey’s chief medical officer, Dr John Challice, wrote:

I have daily persons consulting me who have been seized with nausea, sickness and diarrhoea, by them attributed to the effects of the effluvia from the river. Some have complained that the peculiar taste remained on their palate for days.

William Ord, surgical registrar of St Thomas’s Hospital, investigated the effects of the stench on river workers and noted:

They described themselves as experiencing, at first languor, and soon afterwards, nausea and pain, beginning most commonly at the temples and spreading over the head. After a time followed giddiness, and in many of them temporary loss or impairment of sight, the presence of black spots before their eyes and often utter mental confusion … In a considerable number the throat was swollen and red, causing much ‘soreness’ and intense thirst.

The river workers struggled through the physical discomforts caused by its dirty waters, totally unaware that they had fallen prey to one of the most dangerous diseases of the nineteenth century – cholera.

London experienced its first cholera epidemic in 1832. By the end of that year, it had killed over 6,000 inhabitants. A second epidemic broke out in 1848, killing around 14,000, and the disease would strike again just four years later. As more and more people succumbed to the sickness, a physician named John Snow vowed to stop it in its tracks by proving his theory that cholera was not caused by bad smells – as most people believed – but by contaminated water. He identified a small area of Soho, between Regent Street and Wardour Street, which had been badly affected by the epidemic, and questioned local residents about where they obtained their water. To his excitement, a huge proportion of households affected by the disease used a specific pump in Broad Street (today’s Broadwick Street). Snow petitioned the local parish council and, after telling them of his findings, persuaded them to remove the pump handle to stop anyone accessing the contents of the well beneath. Once this had been done, the cholera outbreak began to subside.

With the cause now identified, Dr Snow analysed the pump water and investigated the condition of the well. Although the samples yielded nothing conclusive, he was intrigued to discover how the well was situated very close to an old, leaky cesspit. It suddenly became clear that cholera epidemics were not only waterborne but were effectively created by contaminated sewage. Armed with this new information, he turned his attentions to the greatest water source in London – the Thames. His most significant realisation was that riverside companies were systematically poisoning their customers by supplying them with disease-ridden water.

John Snow’s discoveries were among the most important scientific advances of the era. However, like many trailblazers before him, he failed to convince the government. His detractors argued that he relied too heavily on circumstantial evidence rather than scientific fact, and further, that by the time the pump handle in Broad Street had been removed, the cholera epidemic was already in decline. This, coupled with the prohibitive expense that a countrywide investigation into levels of water pollution would entail, prompted the authorities to disregard Dr Snow’s hypothesis.

Although Snow was largely ignored by those in power, ordinary Londoners were not surprised by his findings. For decades, people living close to the Thames had found its water so unpalatable that they opted to give their children beer, or even gin, to drink. In his book Town Swamps and Social Bridges, published a year after the Great Stink, the writer George Godwin noted:

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, the Thames water was not so bad, and persons on the river did not hesitate at dipping in a vessel and drinking the contents. Such a thing now would be an act of insanity; and yet we are told, on good authority, that in a part of Rotherhithe a number of poor persons, who have no proper water supply, are obliged to use, for drinking and other purposes, the Thames water in its present abominable condition, unfiltered.’

It seems incredible now that London, then the richest and most influential city in the world, had allowed the river at its heart to become so horrendously polluted. However, the poisoning of the Thames had been a very gradual intermittent process, with its roots in the medieval period. Several centuries earlier, a network of rivers had run through London into the Thames from sources high in the surrounding hills. These rivers provided the obvious means to dispose of both sewage and industrial waste, which slowly turned them from pleasant waterways into filthy open drains. Keen to obscure these unsightly, foul-smelling watercourses from view, residents began to cover them over, and thus London acquired its first underground tunnel network. Over the centuries, these rivers would be diverted deeper underground – still flowing silently beneath our feet to this day.

The London landscape looked very different before the rivers were closed off from view. Close to the River Lea, the forbiddingly named Black Ditch flowed through east London into the Thames at Limehouse. The sacred Walbrook ran through the centre of the Roman city of Londinium, where the occupying soldiers worshipped at the Temple of Mithras. The Fleet and the Tyburn rose at rural Hampstead and streamed past the villages that surrounded the northern and western edges of the metropolis. The River Westbourne provided a pleasant place for travellers to rest their livestock at Bayard’s Watering Place (modern Bayswater) before flowing into Hyde Park, where Queen Caroline dammed its waters in 1730 to create the Serpentine. Further west, Counter’s Creek and Stamford Brook provided water for the inhabitants of the ancient settlements we now know as Chelsea and Hammersmith.

South of the Thames, the Falcon meandered through the common land of Wandsworth and Clapham while the Effra’s course led from Norwood, through the villages of Dulwich and Brixton, down to the Thames at Vauxhall. Today, the Imperial War Museum conceals the source of the River Neckinger, which flowed through south-east London (possibly joined by two tributaries – Earl’s Sluice and the Peck) before forking into two rivulets that formed a watery boundary to the notorious rookery of Jacob’s Island.

London’s rivers had become dangerously contaminated by the Middle Ages. As early as 1290, the prior of a Carmelite monastery in Whitefriars complained of how members of the brethren had succumbed to miasmas rising from the Fleet. In addition, the Walbrook was constantly choked by refuse thrown into its waters by the numerous skinners practising their craft on its banks. The Common Council endeavoured to rectify the problem, making leaseholders of land surrounding the riverbanks responsible for keeping the waterways clear of filth.

Nevertheless, the Fleet and the Walbrook grew more choked and foul-smelling with every year that passed. In order to obscure the revolting sight of the fetid waters flowing through their midst, landowners began to pave over parts of the rivers. In his Survey of London published in 1603, John Stow wrote of the Walbrook:

This water course having diverse Bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with bricke and paved levell with the Streetes and Lanes where through it passed, and since then also houses have been builded thereon, so that the course of the Walbroke is now hidden under ground, and thereby hardly knowne.

It was the first of London’s rivers to vanish from view.

The River Fleet remained above ground for some years more, although it was generally perceived as a blight on the city. By the 1600s it was referred to by Londoners as a ‘ditch’ rather than a river, its central section impassable due to use as a dump for butchers’ refuse. Numerous clean-up attempts were made throughout the century, but each time the Fleet quickly refilled with rotting viscera and sewage. Its muddy banks became treacherous to pedestrians and rumours abounded of unwary individuals slipping into the slurry. One particularly grisly story related the fate of a barber from Bromley, Kent, who, after a drunken night out at a City hostelry, fell into the Fleet. He was found the next day standing upright in the mud, frozen to death.

By the early 1700s the authorities had admitted defeat and attempts to clean up the Fleet were abandoned. Respectable families living close to its banks fled to more salubrious climes and the once pleasant riverside properties degenerated into slums. The area surrounding the Fleet Ditch at Clerkenwell became one of London’s worst rookeries, packed with dilapidated lodging houses occupied by thieves and other undesirables. According to local legend, the worst of these lodging houses stood at the corner of Brewhouse Yard. Commonly referred to as ‘Jonathan Wild’s House’, after the notorious thief-taker, it contained myriad hiding places and escape routes for villains on the run. Trapdoors were concealed in cupboards and behind curtains, through which felons could disappear into the murky depths of the Fleet. The ditch also provided a handy place to dispose of incriminating evidence, which quickly sank into the mud.

The Fleet became nothing more than an open sewer and the decision was made to henceforth conceal it from view. In 1735, the section running from Ludgate Hill to Holborn Bridge was covered over and a marketplace was laid out on the new land. A quarter of a century later, work began to cover the remaining part of the Fleet that lay within the city boundaries. By 1768, virtually the entire river – from Holborn to the Thames – had been forced underground.

Despite the problems caused by the dreadful state of the Fleet and the Walbrook, London’s waste still had to be disposed of. The rivers’ convenient habit of carrying deposits to the Thames, where they were dragged out to sea by the tide, meant that they remained the favoured method of refuse removal. All manner of rubbish found its way into the city’s waterways, but the most revolting was undoubtedly human waste. Originally, Londoners had dealt with the disposal of sewage themselves, quietly spreading it on their gardens or surreptitiously dropping it into the nearest drain. However, by the 1300s, the sheer volume meant it was impossible to dispose of it personally. As a result, men were employed as ‘rakers’: freelance workers who removed the contents of household cesspits. The first recorded mention of a raker dates from 1327, while thirty years later a civic document declared, ‘The dung that is found in the streets … shall be carried … out of the City … by the Rakyers.’

However, the onerous task of emptying the cesspits was often left to the householders. In 1535, London physician Thomas Vicary wrote, ‘The Raker … shall have a horne, & blowe at every mannes doore … to lay owt theyre offal.’ Some rakers were willing to do the job themselves for more pay, most notably the unfortunate ‘Richard le Rakyere’ who, in 1326, fell into a cesspit he was emptying and drowned.

Once the raker had filled his cart he would drive out to the countryside, where his unsavoury product was sold to farmers who found it to be excellent manure for their crops (particularly those of the root vegetable variety). In 1816, Solomon Baxter, owner of Potteral’s Farm in North Mimms, Hertfordshire, took out advertisements in the newspapers extolling the benefits of human excrement for turnips, which apparently ‘came up very luxuriantly, and continue uncommonly strong and healthy’.

Due to the nature of their business, London’s rakers were increasingly obliged to carry out