what was the need for underground railway?
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When the first urban underground railway was proposed by Charles Pearson for London in 1843, inspired by Brunel's Thames Tunnel (which opened that same year), it was roundly ridiculed. Among other possibilities, Pearson proposed “a majestic eight-track 'covered way'--which he imagined as a cheerful arcade--running the length of the Fleet Valley from King's Cross to Holborn-Cheapside”. (Traffic congestion and insalubrious slums were to be eliminated in the same movement. Early opposition to the plan invoked mythic, social, and material versions of underground space. Doctor Cumming took the theological aproach: “Why not build an overhead Railway? . . . It's better to wait for the Devil than to make roads down into Hell.” Punch dubbed the proposal “The Sewer Railway” and imagined the tunnels running past the cellars of respectable houses, delivering coal, much too close for comfort (Trench and Hillman, 131-32). Henry Mayhew was more indulgent, “smil[ing] at the earnestness with which he [Pearson] advocated his project for girdling London round with one long drain-like tube, from one end of the metropolis to the other” (Ibid. 131). The need for new urban transport was acknowledged, but the representational forms did not yet exist to make any significant portion of the public comfortable with it. As Sir Joseph Paxton, architectof the Crystal Palace, commented in his proposal for a ground-level alternative to the Underground, “People, I find, will never go much above the ground, and they will never go under ground; they always like to keep as much as possible in the ordinary course in which they have been going.”
The Thames Tunnel had proved that Paxton was partially wrong: the middle-class Londoner was quite willing to go underground in the capacity of a tourist in search of a novel sight. Early depictions of the Metropolitan look very similar to those of the Thames Tunnel; borrowing the conventional iconography, they promised stations “open, or covered with a glass roof” or “commodious, airy, and well-lighted with gas,” as in the illustration of the Baker-street station, hich shortens the platforms to the length of a drawing-room, inhabits them with well-dressed men and women decorously arranged in scattered groups, shows a bright exit light at the end of the tunnel, and sketches in the locomotive on the scale of a model train. As with the Thames Tunnel, however, the cut-away view equally stresses the subterranean character of this space, although here it is only a short and civilized staircase that separates the station from the street above. The respectable Londoner, it was thought, would never venture underground unless persuaded that it was a safe and familiar space. Paxton was correct as regarded everyday behavior; the middle-class Londoner still considered the underground in general as the province either of a separate population of persons habitually suited to it, whether workers or criminals, or of a hidden infrastructure not suitable for any persons at all.
What is striking is how quickly, once it was finally built, the Metropolitan Railway was assimilated into the urban imagination of London, especially given the myriad discomforts of its first decades. While the nearly ten million persons carried during the first year of its opening in 1863 could be attributed to the same technological novelty that led so many visitors to Brunel's tunnel, the numbers steadily increased, and the system was rapidly expanded. As we are informed by an aside in John Galsworthy's novel The Man of Property (1906) about 1887 London, “(. . . everyone today went Underground)” (269). The early railways cloaked their novelty in classical garb, remaining firmly nineteenth-century in their public presentation of industrial technology. The new locomotives were given mythological names: “Jupiter, Mars, Juno, Mercury, Apollo, Medusa, Orion, Pluto, Minerva, Cerberus, Latona, Cyclops, Daphne, Dido, Aurora, Achilles, Ixion, and Hercules” (Barker & Robbins, 124). The necessity of using steam locomotion until electrification at the turn of the century made the experience smoky, noisy, suffocating, and malodorous. Control was not wholly taken over the environment until the 1920s and '30s, when filtered, ozonized air was injected into the system (Trench & Hilllman, 147). As the poet John Betjeman described it in retrospect, the Central Line, “was . . . regarded as a sort of health resort, because it was ventilated by the Ozonair system, which was meant to smell like the sea, and certainly did smell of something.” In the fifty years before that movement to a sanitized underground, the discomfort was tolerated just as it was in the streets above.
The discomforts were readily admitted, but made no difference to the trains' popularity. An entry from R. D. Blumenfeld's Diary from 23 June 1887 stressed the atmospheric nightmare of the underground journey:
The Thames Tunnel had proved that Paxton was partially wrong: the middle-class Londoner was quite willing to go underground in the capacity of a tourist in search of a novel sight. Early depictions of the Metropolitan look very similar to those of the Thames Tunnel; borrowing the conventional iconography, they promised stations “open, or covered with a glass roof” or “commodious, airy, and well-lighted with gas,” as in the illustration of the Baker-street station, hich shortens the platforms to the length of a drawing-room, inhabits them with well-dressed men and women decorously arranged in scattered groups, shows a bright exit light at the end of the tunnel, and sketches in the locomotive on the scale of a model train. As with the Thames Tunnel, however, the cut-away view equally stresses the subterranean character of this space, although here it is only a short and civilized staircase that separates the station from the street above. The respectable Londoner, it was thought, would never venture underground unless persuaded that it was a safe and familiar space. Paxton was correct as regarded everyday behavior; the middle-class Londoner still considered the underground in general as the province either of a separate population of persons habitually suited to it, whether workers or criminals, or of a hidden infrastructure not suitable for any persons at all.
What is striking is how quickly, once it was finally built, the Metropolitan Railway was assimilated into the urban imagination of London, especially given the myriad discomforts of its first decades. While the nearly ten million persons carried during the first year of its opening in 1863 could be attributed to the same technological novelty that led so many visitors to Brunel's tunnel, the numbers steadily increased, and the system was rapidly expanded. As we are informed by an aside in John Galsworthy's novel The Man of Property (1906) about 1887 London, “(. . . everyone today went Underground)” (269). The early railways cloaked their novelty in classical garb, remaining firmly nineteenth-century in their public presentation of industrial technology. The new locomotives were given mythological names: “Jupiter, Mars, Juno, Mercury, Apollo, Medusa, Orion, Pluto, Minerva, Cerberus, Latona, Cyclops, Daphne, Dido, Aurora, Achilles, Ixion, and Hercules” (Barker & Robbins, 124). The necessity of using steam locomotion until electrification at the turn of the century made the experience smoky, noisy, suffocating, and malodorous. Control was not wholly taken over the environment until the 1920s and '30s, when filtered, ozonized air was injected into the system (Trench & Hilllman, 147). As the poet John Betjeman described it in retrospect, the Central Line, “was . . . regarded as a sort of health resort, because it was ventilated by the Ozonair system, which was meant to smell like the sea, and certainly did smell of something.” In the fifty years before that movement to a sanitized underground, the discomfort was tolerated just as it was in the streets above.
The discomforts were readily admitted, but made no difference to the trains' popularity. An entry from R. D. Blumenfeld's Diary from 23 June 1887 stressed the atmospheric nightmare of the underground journey:
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