Free London Under by Peter Ackroyd Page B

Ill.22)
    Water was once pumped, at a pressure of 400 pounds per square inch, beneath the streets of central London; it created hydraulic power, by means of which lifts rose and fell, safety curtains were drawn up and down, presses fired into action. By the early 1920s, 200 miles ofhydraulic pipes had been laid beneath the surface of the city; the water has gone, but the pipes survive to carry other services such as cable and fibre optic networks. Ceramic pipes of the early nineteenth century were in time exchanged for cast iron. The nineteenth century was the age of cast iron, and its sturdy skeleton of services still lies beneath our feet. Cast iron was in part replaced by spun iron, and spun iron by serviceable polyethylene. But there are still many iron pipes in use for the transportation of gas; the last ones will not be removed until the spring of 2032.
    A door within the plinth of thestatue of Boadicea, onWestminster Bridge, leads to a tunnel some 6 feet inheight that goes beneath the Embankment to all points east. This is the highway for a host of pipes, from thecables of the telephone companies to the pipes of the gas and water industries. Many such underground avenues weave beneath the streets. Nerve tunnels run fromPiccadilly Circus toHigh Holborn, fromTottenham Court Road to theNational Gallery, and fromIslington to Soho. They all employ gratings for ventilation, through which can be seen the panoply of surface life; yet from this vantage the outer world somehow becomes alien and unusual. The oldest of these tunnels, beneathGarrick Street, was laid in 1861. They are all controlled by another “circus” of installations beneath Piccadilly Circus. The life and activity beneath the streets are of immense size and complexity. Under the ground flow telecommunications, gas, drinking water, fibre optics, light, electricity, district heat mains, non-potable water, private wire networks and vacuum waste.
    There are signals and pulses in the darkness beneath. London was the first city in the world to harbour an entire telephone system under the ground. The wires and cables went deeper and deeper, some of them carried through tunnels built byBritish Telecom and theLondon Electricity Board. Hundreds of thousands of miles of cable take electricity into every dwelling and place of work; it is the life force beneath the surface. The tentacles of theNational Grid touch the cables at a numberof points through the agency of 12,000 sub-stations that lower the voltage. The heat is so intense that every cable has to be well insulated.
    Otherwise there would be a reprise of the situation experienced byJohn Evelyn in the autumn of 1666, after the Great Fire, when “the ground under my feet was so hot as made me not only sweat, but even burnt the soles of my shoes and put me all over in a sweat.” He contemplated an underground world where “the very waters remained boiling; the voragos [abysses] of subterranean cellars, wells and dungeons formerly warehouses still burning in stench and dark clouds of smoke like Hell.” This is the heat now being exploited by a process known as “underground thermal energy storage,” by means of which excessive heat or cold can be stored in the earth for later use in public buildings. So the ancient earth can still become an agent of social change.
    Yet the fear of fire and heat beneath the ground, the definition of hell itself, still survives. The electriccables are buried in trenches, ducts,conduits and tunnels. They run through the tunnels of the London Underground, but small tunnels were also built for the purpose of holding them. Tunnels, for example, lie beneath the Thames. Other tunnels, some 80 or 90 feet beneath the surface, have recently been built; one of them runs underCity Road, and another goes under the city itself. Forty feet beneathLeicester Square lies a vast electricity station on three levels. No one is aware of its presence,except for those who service it. It is entered by a