You come to an unusual hole in the street, and enter it, and find yourself on a large floor surrounded by advertisements of whisky and art furniture. The whole floor suddenly sinks with you towards the centre of the earth, far below sewers. You emerge into a system of tunnels, and, guided by painted white hands, you traverse these tunnels till you arrive at a precipice. Then a suite of drawing-rooms, four or six, glides along the front of the precipice. Each saloon is lighted by scores of electric lamps, and the steel doors of each are magically thrown wide open. An attendant urges you to come in and sit down. You do so, and instantly the suite of rooms glides glittering away with you, curving through an endless subterranean passage, and stopping now and then for two seconds at a precipice. At last you get out, and hurry through more tunnels, and another flying floor wafts you up out of the earth again, and you stagger into daylight and a strange street, and when your eyes have recovered themselves you perceive that the strange street is merely Holborn.. . . And all this because of the roaring necromancers’ castle in Lots-road! All this impossible without the roaring necromancers’ castle!
People ejaculate, “The new Tubes!” and think they have described these astounding phenomena. But they have not.
The fact that strikes the traveller beyond all other facts of the new London is the immensity of the penalty which the Metropolis is now paying for its size. Tubes, electrified “Districts,” petrol omnibuses, electric cars and cabs, and automobiles; these are only the more theatrical aspects of an activity which permeates and exhausts the life of the community. Locomotion has become an obsession in London; it has become a perfect nightmare. The city gets larger and larger, but the centre remains the centre and everybody must get to it.
See the motor cars speeding over Barnes Common to plunge into London. One after another, treading on each other’s heels, scurrying, preoccupied, and malodorous, they fly past in an interminable procession for hours, to give a melodramatic interest to the streets of London. See the attack on the omnibuses by a coldly-determined mob of workers outside Putney Station, and the stream that ceaselessly descends into Putney Station. Follow the omnibuses as they rush across the bridge into Fulham-road. See the girls on the top at 8 a. m. in the frosty fog. They are glad to be anywhere, even on the top.
See the acrobatic young men who, all along the route, jump on to the step and drop off disappointed because there are already sixteen inside and eighteen out. Notice the fight at every stopping-place. Watch the gradual growth of the traffic, until the driver, from being a charioteer, is transformed into a solver of Chinese puzzles. And remember that Fulham-road is one great highway out of fifty. Bend your head, and gaze through London clay into the tunnels full of gliding drawing-rooms and the drawing-rooms jammed with people. Think of the five hundred railway stations of all sorts in London, all at the same business of transporting people to the centre! Then put yourself in front of one station, the type-terminus, Liver-pool-street, and see the incredible thick, surging, bursting torrent that it vomits (there is no other word) from long before dawn till ten o’clock. And, finally, see the silent, sanguinary battles on bridges for common tram-cars and ’buses.
Not clubs, not hotels, not cathedrals, not halls of song, not emporia, not mansions; but this is London, now; this necessary, passionate, complex locomotion! All other phenomena are insignificant beside it.