Free The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders Page A

driving perilous. Holborn Hill, with its steep gradient across the Fleet Valley, was a well-known black spot for horses: extra horses were stabled at the bottom of the hill, to be harnessed on to each bus before it attempted the ascent. The bus companies also had men stationed at the top of the hill to thrust skids under the wheels of the buses as they started back down, slowing the motion of the wheels, both as a brake and to prevent the vehicle crashing against the horses’ heels. (As it was, bus drivers were strapped to a post behind their seat, which allowed them to throw their full weight on to the drag as they went downhill.) At the bottom of Holborn Hill more men were posted to dart into the road to remove the skids as the buses passed. And everywhere the rain and the mud routinely caused problems, making ‘horses sink slowly on their sides or knees, amid the greasy mud, and, having sunk, make fruitless endeavours to rise’. Accidents to the vehicles were so common that people wrote casually of an entire bus tipping over, as a matter of course. When there was a hard frost, no horse-drawn vehicles could go out at all (although small boys rejoiced, as they skated along the suddenly emptied roads).
    Even with these drawbacks, buses were one of London’s great conveniences. In the early days, they, like the short-stages, gave personal service. In Nicholas Nickleby , the omnibus calls for Miss La Creevy, who is visiting friends in Bow. She makes a protracted farewell, ‘during which proceedings, “the omnibus”, as Miss La Creevy protested, “swore so dreadfully, that it was quite awful to hear it”’ – but still it waits. For prosperous men with a workday routine, the bus went even further. The journalist Charles Manby Smith described a typical suburban street in the late 1840s, where at 8.30 and 9.30 every morning, two buses appeared to collect their regular passengers.After that the street saw no more buses until they returned in the evening: it was not a regular route, and ‘the vehicles diverge from their...course in order to pick them up at their own doors’.
    Methods of inner-city mass transit were increasing at a furious rate: after the steamers and the buses came the underground, confusingly also called the ‘railway’. It was long in the planning. In 1830, the first part of a new major north–south road, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been completed, and in 1838 the City Corporation obtained powers to extend this new Farringdon Street further, up to Clerkenwell Green. Partly it was to improve the flow of traffic across the Holborn area. More importantly, the aim was to clear the slum district of Clerkenwell, Saffron Hill and around the Fleet prison. (For more on slum clearance, see pp. 188–92.) A Clerkenwell Improvement Commission was established in 1840, which oversaw the relocation of the Fleet market and the demolition of the prison in 1848, but did nothing further, with the result that for decades the north end of what was to become Farringdon Road lay in a pockmarked, rubble-strewn landscape. Fresh impetus came in 1850 with the arrival of the Great Northern Railway at Euston. The following year, plans were presented to widen the road, finish it off and have a railway running underneath, from Farringdon Street to King’s Cross. Just when it appeared the project might actually move ahead, the Crimean War made its financing impossible. (All railways then were private enterprises.) It was not until, in despair, the Corporation of the City of London bought £200,000-worth of shares that building could begin in 1859.
    Although people had become used to the wasteland of Farringdon Road over the decades, the construction that followed proved even worse. One newspaper asserted that the word ‘underground’ implied an air of ‘mole-like secrecy’, but ‘Those who have had the misfortune to live, or whose business has called them frequently along the line of its operations, know too