From a traveller’s point of view, the effect of this new railway will be far-reaching. Dwellers near District Railway termini, such as Wimbledon, New Cross, Bow Road, South Harrow, Hounslow Barracks, Richmond, and intermediate stations, will have, by means of exchange—at Earl’s Court Station with the Metropolitan District Railway; at Gloucester Road and South Kensington Station with the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railway; at Piccadilly Circus Station with the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway; at Cranbourn Street Station with the Charing Cross, Euston, and Hampstead Railway; and at King’s Cross and Finsbury Park Stations with the Great Northern Railway—ready access to practically all centres and quarters of our big city; its own immediate objective from Earl’s Court being Finsbury Park, a distance of 7½ miles. It is similar in construction to the Central. The cars, built at Loughborough, will resemble those of the new Inner Circle, and the driving force will come from the Power House at Chelsea.
Truly, under pleasant scenes will the new Tube be carried—as fashionable, romantic, and historical a route as any in London. Here is Earl’s Court, where, in the midst of market gardens far away from town, once stood John Hunter’s house, where the great anatomist kept a menagerie of wild beasts to experiment upon, and in the dead of night boiled down the body of O’Brien, the Irish giant, to obtain the skeleton, which now adorns the museum of the College of Surgeons. The well-known Edmund Tattersall lived close by for many years at Coleherne Court, on the site of one of either Fairfax’s or Lord Essex’s redoubts (they appear to have had a good many), thrown up after the battle of Brentford, when the victorious Royalists were expected to cross the river (which they never did) and besiege London.
Gloucester Road, the next station, recalls the fact that when the District Railway came there, it was still a mere lane with hawthorn hedges, a blacksmith’s forge somewhere near, while pleasant paths right and left led to orchards, in the midst of which was St. Jude’s Church, so famous later on for its fashionable congregation and its eloquent preacher, the Rev. Dr. Forrest, now Dean of Worcester.
From Gloucester Road the Tube runs under pleasant Stanhope Gardens and part of Harrington Road with its fine mansions, to South Kensington. The ground about the Hoop and Toy Tavern close by was, so tradition says, designated in the draft Parliamentary Bill for the Great Western Railway terminus. At that time the site was sufficiently countrified to satisfy those who would banish railway stations to Jericho or to the uttermost verge of London, and remained so for a long time; and I have been told by an old Bromptonian that he has seen a covey of partridges put up where the Natural History Museum now stands.
At this point the new Tube—leaving its course parallel with, but at a far deeper level than, the District Railway—proceeds unaccompanied to Piccadilly, and, so to say, enters the Brompton Road at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, formerly a very plain brick edifice erected by the Oratorian Fathers, who had begun their good work on a humble scale in King William Street, Charing Cross, in a building subsequently occupied by Woodin, the ventriloquist, and later on by Toole, as his own peculiar theatre.
The present conspicuous basilica is at last completed, all but the towers. Adjoining it, down an avenue of trees, recalling the approach to Shakespeare’s last resting-place, is Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, reminiscent of Dr. Irons, its vicar, who ultimately became Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, beneath which is the City station of the City and South London Electric Railway.
Brompton Square is close by, associated by many of us with a once popular song, “Ada with the golden hair,” composed and sung by G. W. Moore, of the Christy Minstrels. In this Square have dwelt many actors and actresses: Wigan, Buckstone, Robert Keeley, etc.; and also Shirley Brooks. At one corner used to be a house standing a little back from the road, occupied by an eccentric individual whose craze was to have several clocks in every room, and the task of keeping them in order encouraged a watch-and-clock-maker to settle down in a small shop next door. Another feature of his craze was to present a watch of some kind to every lady he knew; so that his neighbour must have done a fair business. A bank now occupies this site, and the author recollects watching the strong-room being built deep down in the gravelly soil peculiar to South Kensington. Next door will be located the unpretentious Brompton Station of the new railway. An official of the bank was heard to remark facetiously that he trusted the Tube would not bore into the strong-room aforesaid—a new possibility and grievance to be duly noted.
Directly underneath Brompton Road goes London’s latest Tube, passing “Harrod’s,” the most palatial General Store in the metropolis, if not in the world. It originated some years ago in a narrow little shop, where good tea, excellent butter, and, rumour says, jam made by Mr. Harrod’s mother, were the chief articles sold to the customers, the bulk of whom were of the working-class.
Now Knightsbridge is reached, in olden times called Kingsbridge, when it was represented by a bridge only (on the site of the modern Albert Gate), built by Edward the Confessor over a brook, or bourn, rising, like the Tybourn and the Oldbourn, in the Hampstead Hills, and flowing thence to the Thames.
No part of London has so completely changed in appearance as this; lofty modern buildings having taken the place of small old-fashioned houses. These improvements culminate at Sloane Street, where anyone approaching town by way of Kensington, meets the first of the numerous metropolitan “rond-points,” surrounded by mansions and shops so tall as to put into the shade the French Embassy and the houses at Albert Gate, which for many years were considered the highest in town. At the equestrian statue of Field-Marshal Lord Strathnairn, four thoroughfares converge—Kensington Road, Brompton Road, Sloane Street, and St. George’s Place—pouring around it a continual stream of traffic day and night. Three of these thoroughfares are perfect paradises to ladies who delight in such alluring shops as Harrod’s, Harvey Nichols and Co., and Woolland Brothers, whose prolonged and magnificent frontages are unequalled in Modern Babylon.