Free Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin

London in supposed partnership with the District, there is an emerging north-pointing prong that ought to be noted. In April 1868 a line was constructed north from Baker Street by the Metropolitan & St John’s Wood Railway, a subsidiary of the Met that would be incorporated into the parent in 1872. The line went up to Swiss Cottage, occupying for much of the way a single-bore tunnel that only accommodated one train like a deep-level Tube tunnel, even though the line was built on the cut-and-cover principle associated with vault-like tunnels holding two trains. There was barely room to open the outward swinging doors of the Metropolitan carriages, and since there were no corridors connecting the compartments of these carriages, the passenger had just better hope that no prolonged delays occurred within the tunnel – because they would have been prisoners.
    In 1872 a second, parallel, single-bore tunnel was built to serve the line, creating the possibility of
two
train loads of passengers being trapped. But these little tunnels, emerging into the open at Finchley Road (reached in 1879) were the start of something big. By the early twentieth century it would be possible to think of them as two mouseholes in the skirting board of a wall separating two great ballrooms. On the south side was the ballroom of central London and the City; to the north, the ballroom of the suburbs that would grow up alongside this rapidly extending projection of the Metropolitan, suburbs made famous in the Twenties as Metroland. The line was known – and still is known to elderly traditionalists – as ‘The Extension Railway’.
THE CITY WIDENED
    We are about to broach the fraught saga of the Circle Line, but there is another Metropolitan spin-off that comes first, one thathas always appealed to me by the baleful beauty of its name: the City Widened Lines or ‘The Widened Lines’ for short. Its modern legacy is the central core of the Thameslink service, and whereas there are still elderly buffers who speak of ‘The Extension Railway’ (described above), or call the Circle Line ‘The Inner Circle’, you will not find many Londoners who speak of Thameslink as ‘The City Widened’, and if you did find one he’d probably be wearing a bowler hat.
    This is a story of north–south connection, and it begins with the fact that late in 1863 the Great Northern Railway completed a subterranean connection from its terminus at King’s Cross to the tracks of the Metropolitan enabling the Great Northern to run through to the Met’s easterly terminus at Farringdon Street. As mentioned, the Met, in its descent towards the heart of the City, extended in 1865 from Farringdon Street to a station called Moorgate Street (now Moorgate), via Aldersgate Street (now Barbican).
    In making this extension, the Metropolitan also built a connection from Farringdon Street towards an overground railway that had just barged its way into the City from Kent. This railway was the London, Chatham & Dover. In 1860 it had obtained an Act permitting an exception to the ban on railways in central London recommended in 1846. The line would traverse a bridge at Blackfriars before running along a viaduct to a station called Ludgate Hill.
    In proceeding north from the Thames towards Ludgate Hill station, the line crossed over an iron bridge spanning Ludgate Hill itself (between what is now a Waterstone’s and a Santander bank), neatly obliterating any view of St Paul’s from Ludgate Circus or Fleet Street. A thousand people had put their names to a petition against the bridge. To add insult to injury, it carried a small thicket of railway signals as well as regular steam trains. There is a Gustave Doré engraving of the street underthe bridge. In the jostling throng every Victorian artefact you would expect seemed present: horses, carts, carriages (including a hearse), top hats, slouch hats, canes. The only item