The following day thirty thousand passengers journeyed over the line, and everybody in London talked about the Underground as somewhat of a marvel. But people exhibited strange ignorance on the subject, nervous people preparing for wonderful possibilities, imagining that the cellars would collapse as the trains thundered by, or that the houses would tumble through on to the line, flinging their occupants before some passing engine!
Yet, after all, the Underground was only an ordinary tunnel (such as pierce a score of hills), placed in an exceptional position in the midst of London.
Bit by bit, as years went by, the Metropolitan Railway extended itself eastward and westward to High Street, Kensington, whence the District Railway that had sprung into existence went ahead and got as far as Westminster, its line being partly open and partly tunnelled. There the District stuck for three years, and then found its way into the City (a great boon as an alternative route). At the Mansion House Station it seemed determined to rest for a long period; the Metropolitan showing the same propensity at the Moorgate Street sheds, until City men began to give up all hope of the two ends ever meeting.
It came about at last, however, and the year 1884 witnessed the completion of the irregular Inner Circle—a total length of about 12½ miles—by way of Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Mark Lane, the Monument, and Cannon Street, without any serious disturbance of the traffic, but with much wonderful underpinning of warehouses and offices (a notable instance of this operation being beneath King William the Fourth’s statue, which weighs over 250 tons!).
At first there were no smoking-carriages, but the numerous complaints on the subject induced the directors to alter their rules, and they went to the other extreme, so that now non-smokers think there seem to be more smoking-carriages than any others.
In its young days the Metropolitan was clean and its atmosphere tolerable. In fact, it had been proposed to use smokeless engines, but for some reason the idea was abandoned, and, as the main railway lines began to send out feelers towards the inner districts of London, they sought for, and obtained, running powers over the Underground, junctions being made with the Great Northern Railway and Great Western, the London and North Western, and the Midland. Consequently, the number of trains immensely increased, and the smoke nuisance was intensified. Ventilating shafts were adopted, and afforded some relief, but the imprisoned fog of winter precipitated the “blacks,” and summer weather only made the atmosphere still more stifling; while Baker Street, Gower Street, and King’s Cross stations and tunnels were positive infernos, and for how many deaths from asthma and bronchitis they were responsible no one knows!
The rolling-stock of the Metropolitan became dirtier and dirtier, grime and disfigurement settled down upon it, and everybody’s experience of it resembled that of Mrs. Lilian Rosamond, described in Chapter VIII.
THE NEW DISTRICT RAILWAY
Just opposite St. Mark’s College, Chelsea, is a narrow thoroughfare called Lot’s Road, leading to a creek that separates the Borough from Fulham. Tradition says that the locality was formerly known as “The Lots” (about four acres in extent), and was granted to a Sir Arthur Gorges by the lord of the manor, in lieu of certain rights over land which he gave up for the formation of the Kensington Canal; but incredulous old folk dismissed this tradition with contempt, and maintained that there was a Chelsea personage named Lot, very distantly related to the patriarch’s nephew, who pitched his tent in the fertile Jordan Valley, and that the dismal Chelsea wastes so much resembled the desolateness of the fatal plains, that diligent search therein might even result in the discovery of the Pillar of Salt, brought over to this country at some remote period by a pious descendant! But whoever, or whatever, the name Lot may represent, it is now associated with one of the greatest electrical undertakings of the age—the huge generating station of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London, Limited, who, as at present arranged, will supply the District and other railways with power.
At the bottom of Lot’s Road, and at a point on the Middlesex bank of Battersea Reach, facing the ugly parish church of St. Mary, is the mouth of Chelsea Creek, filled twice a day by the muddy waters of the Thames, and here the Electrical Works are being erected. They are in sight of an obscure cottage in Cheyne Walk where the painter Turner lived in concealment, and where he died. The building, with its four great chimney-shafts, is unæsthetic to a degree, and Turner would probably have thought it ruined his favourite landscape. But it represents something more valuable than æsthetic effect.