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

well that this is a great mistake. No railway works were ever more painfully plain...For the best part of three years a great public thoroughfare has been turned into a builders’ yard...Many long patches of what was once a broad open roadway were enclosed with boarding; filled with mountains of gravel, brick, and stone...temporary wooden footways, greasy with wet clay, wereerected across echoing caverns.’ This was no exaggeration. A photograph of later excavations for the District Railway in Parliament Square shows what resembles a bomb site, London during the Blitz, perhaps, or some hideous natural disaster.
    Enough disasters, natural and man-made, did occur during the construction. In November 1860, a locomotive exploded, killing two people; in May 1861, there was a landslide; and in 1862, the River Fleet – long filled with sewage, covered over as the Fleet Ditch, and known as the ‘Black River of North London’ – ruptured. By this time, the work on the underground alongside the new Fleet sewer was moving into its final stages, with the train tunnel being laid parallel to it (see Plate 10). The first intimation of looming catastrophe came when water was discovered seeping into the cellars of houses in Clerkenwell; three days later when a rush of water was spotted beside the sewer, it became clear that the Fleet Ditch was going to burst. Most of the workmen were evacuated; several others were lowered in baskets on ropes, to breach the brickwork to allow the water to escape. But even as they descended, they saw the foundations give way. They were hauled to safety minutes before the wall supporting the western embankment of the railway, a massive brick structure over eight feet thick, ‘rose bodily from its foundations as the water [from the Fleet] forced its way beneath...breaking up into fragments’ and scattering down ‘scaffolding, roadway, lamps, pavement and “plant” of every description’. A hundred feet of wall was swept away, and through the next twelve hours the water rushed north and west to King’s Cross and Paddington, a distance of two and a half miles. The water also poured into a mausoleum that had been created to take the human remains from the churchyards that had been destroyed in the construction of Farringdon Road, washing the bodies out into the excavation. It was to be another ten days before the engineers, damming the railway tunnel and creating a trench to divert the water, regained control.
    Nonetheless, the Metropolitan Railway – the first line of the tube – opened on 10 January 1863, running between Paddington and Farringdon Street, with six intermediary stations. The previous day, a group of grandees had been transported along the track in open wagons, although Palmerston, the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, had refused to go, on the groundsthat at his age it was advisable to stay above ground as long as possible (or so it was said). A photograph of this preliminary voyage, with Gladstone sitting prominently at the front, is today often captioned to suggest these were the first-class passenger vehicles. In reality, the first-class carriages were ‘luxuriously fitted up’, with six compartments each seating ten. Even second- and third-class compartments were lit with gas stored ‘in long india-rubber bags, within wooden boxes’ that were located on top of the carriages. Fares were 6d, 4d and 3d. The first day 30,000 people took the opportunity to travel underground. That evening ‘the crush at the Farringdon-street station was as great at the doors of a theatre on the first night’, and in the following week another 200,000 passengers ventured underground.
    Such was the line’s success that extensions were planned westward and eastward, to South Kensington and to Blackfriars. Work on the Hammersmith and City line began in 1864, starting from Green Line (now Westbourne Park), travelling through Porto Bello (sic), Notting Barn (also sic) and ultimately to Hammersmith