CHAPTER IX
LONDON’S TANGLED TUBES
“Tangled in the fold of dire necessity.”—Milton.
THE TANGLE
TO inflict upon the readers of this book a map of existing and projected railways in London would be cruel; and for them to try to master it would be torture worthy of the Inquisition, with loss of reason as the inevitable result.
Roughly speaking, the lines above and below ground stream inwards from the outskirts, after the fashion of the tramways; with this marked difference that there is a direct communication from east to west by the Central Railway, and an Inner Circle route engirdling the middle portion of Greater London.
As with the tramways, the routes of nearly all these lines appear to have been adopted happy-go-luckily. “Here are Highgate, Walthamstow, Beckenham, Kew, Hendon,” say the promoters; “what we have to do is to make a railway from these suburbs, and, somehow or other, get as near the metropolitan centres as possible, and dump down our passengers. The problem of intercommunication is not our business. We leave that to others.” So the lines of the various companies meander away, often by the most indirect routes, and finally arrive more or less near their objective destinations, Charing Cross, or the Bank of England.
If Napoleon the Great with prophetic glance could have foreseen London linked to distant villages in every direction, these hamlets growing into towns, and as population increased, being irresistibly drawn into Greater London’s maelstrom of brick and mortar, even he would have been appalled by the problem of how to give ready means of access from one part to the other. Anticipating railways and electric tubes, he would probably, with the marvellous fertility of resource that distinguished him, have formulated a plan whereby a given circular space in the metropolis would be divided into sections, a mile square, with a station in the centre and at each corner, so that all within that area would have access to a railway, at no point more than half a mile distant, the tube railways below the surface, and others above, converging at a great central depôt. On reaching the limit of the circle, the lines (that would necessarily cross under and over one another) would, by means of loops, return and keep up a continued circulation of traffic from rim to rim of the circle, which, as the city grew bigger and bigger, could be enlarged, and the lines extended, the process continuing ad infinitum.
This, of course, would have been an impossibility; the characteristic British love of half measures and of temporising being opposed to any really comprehensive and imperial scheme, and local jealousy would not have tolerated the necessarily masterful, though wise, domination of a One Man Power in carrying out the plan.
Therefore the great railways and the suburban railways were allowed to do pretty much as they liked, as seen in the entire absence of system in approaching London, and in dealing with its vast traffic.
To meet the difficulty a central station has often been mooted, and much good would ensue therefrom if it accommodated all the lines. Recently, in connection with the Great Western Railway, the idea has been revived, and the site of Christ’s Hospital suggested. In fact, it is an open secret that overture upon overture has been made on the subject, but the enormous price demanded by the old school authorities has always been the bugbear.