Free Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin Page B

Viaduct. This upper station was called, logically enough, Holborn Viaduct. In 1912 its downtrodden companion was renamed, rather demeaningly, Holborn Viaduct Low Level. The upper station was destroyed in the Blitz. The shell of the lower station can still be seen at the southern end of the Snow Hill Tunnel from a Thameslink train.
    Anyone standing on the platforms of the Metropolitan at King’s Cross, Farringdon, Aldersgate Street or Moorgate would have been diverted by the site of a variety of ‘guests’. The Great Northern and the Midland ran commuters into Moorgate and operated services of passengers or goods to the south of England. In the late nineteenth century a service ran from Liverpool to Paris via the Widened Lines and a steamer from Folkestone. (Depart Liverpool 8 a.m.; arrive Paris 10.50 p.m.) But there wasn’t much call for that sort of thing. London was too beguiling. People didn’t want to travel through it without getting off.
    There were goods sidings under Smithfield Market, and condensing steam engines – and later diesels – pulled wagons full of frozen meat from Paddington to there until July 1962. Those sidings now form a subterranean car park between what remains of the market and St Bart’s Hospital. Walk down the winding ramp, and as you descend you will see that the walls become arcaded, like the station walls of the old parent company; they become excitingly Metropolitanised.
    From the
south
, the main users were the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern Railway, whose chairmen were respectively James Staats Forbes and Edward Watkin, two perennial adversaries whose names are going to crop up in the Circle trauma.
    The operations of the Widened Lines, as viewed from the Met platforms, must have seemed archaic after 1905, when the Metropolitan began to be electrified: all those filthy guest engines trying their best – sort of – to stifle their emissions, and passenger carriages still lit by oil. (Steam would survive on the Widened Lines until 1962.) In 1916 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed to passenger trains, so those from the south terminated at Holborn Viaduct, and those from the north could only go as far as Moorgate.
    In 1971 the Snow Hill Tunnel was closed entirely. In 1988 it was re-opened for the purpose of running trains from Bedfordto Brighton. In 1990 City Thameslink station was opened, a sprawling underground complex taking the place of Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill stations. ‘It’s very
Blade Runner
,’ a PR for the station told me shortly after the opening. She also said that Thameslink trains were deliberately garish, so as to lure drivers stuck on the M1, which runs alongside the line around Radlett. But I don’t think the overcrowded Thameslink service could handle any more passengers today. As for garishness, what I like about the Widened Lines in their previous incarnation is the absence of that quality. Surely it was never summer on the Widened Lines. It was dark mornings and dark evenings; damp worsted, bowler hats, tightly furled umbrellas, smoke fumes and steam, cigarettes and a stiff whisky in the Holborn Viaduct Hotel – and more of those every day for the bowler-hatted commuter who has reached the limit of his promotion, a man who might, in his cups, lament: ‘The City has not widened sufficiently for
my
liking.’
TOWARDS LEINSTER GARDENS
    By 1876, an expensive eleven years after it had opened Moorgate Street, the Met had crawled under the City streets to Aldgate, via Bishopsgate (which would be renamed Liverpool Street in 1909, after the overground station to which it was adjacent), en route to meet the District Railway at Tower Hill. We have been concentrating on the City because that was the initial target for builders of both overground and underground railways, who were like artists going over and over the same piece of canvas. But we now look at the Met’s
westerly
gropings. These began