London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets by Roger Ackroyd.
The Holy and Unholy
“Yet there may be monsters. The lower depths have been the object of superstition and of legend as long as there have been men and women to wonder. The minotaur, half man and half bull, lived in a labyrinth buried beneath the palace and Knossos in Crete. A dog with three heads, Cerberus, guarded the gates of the underworld in classical myth. The Egyptian god of the underworld, Anubis, was a man with the head of a jackal. The journey underground prompted strange transformations. Anubis was also known as “the lord of the sacred land,” with the world beneath the ground creating a spiritual as much as a material presence. The great writers of antiquity – Plato and Homer, Pliny and Herodotus—have described the underground world as places of dreams and hallucinations. Most of the great religions have created temples and shrines beneath the surface of the earth. Terror lingers in caverns and caves, where there may be subterranean rivers and fires. Sixteen thousand years ago the wandering people of Europe lived in or beside the entrances to caves, but they painted frescos in the deeper and darker spaces of the caverns. The further downward you travel, the closer you come to the power.
Good and evil can be found side by side; enchantment and terror mingle. If the underworld can be understood as a place of fear and of danger, it can also be regarded as a place of safety. A subterranean space may be the object of attraction as well as fear. Healing well s and places of worship lie beneath the streets. Like a mother, the lower deep may have been a warm embrace. It is a haven from the outside world. It is a refuge from attack. In the darkness you cannot be seen.”(p5-6)
“When a system of underground railways was first proposed in the middle of the nineteenth century, a popular preacher declared vary seriously that ‘the forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil.’” (p14)
Sacred Wells: “The neighborhood of Islington, of which Clerkenwell is a part, was the site for many such wells. Hence the verse of a confirmed invalid who had tried the waters at various spas:
‘But in vain till to Islington’s waters I came
To try if my cure would add to their fame.’”
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Ancient London
“London is based upon clay... London is slowly sinking into its clay...So we go down to the clay and the water, the old elemental things of London. They are the origin, and they may be the ending.” (p12)
“When Christopher Wren was digging below the remains of Old St. Paul’s, after the Great Fire, he found Anglo-Saxon graves lined with chalk-stone. Saxon coffins of the same material lay beside them. Beneath the vestiges of a vanished civilization were Britons, with ivory and wood pins showing that their shrouds had been laid in rows. Below these were Roman remains and pieces of Roman pavement. Beneath these Wren found sand and seashells. Ludgate Hill had once been under the sea…. The bustling life persists, but the evidence for it has gone underground. We are treading upon our ancestors. As soon as the original city was built above the ground it began to sink. As it descended beneath the earth ground-floor rooms were transformed into basement, and the front door became the door to the cellar; the first floor was then the street level.” (p17-18)
“In 1882 a colossal head of the emperor Hadrian was retrieved from the Themes in which it had been buried for 1,700 years. In 1865 a gang of workmen, digging beneath the surface of Oxford Street, found a curious trap door. They opened it and were astonished to find a flight of sixteen brick steps. They followed them and ‘entered a room of considerable size.” The walls were built of red brick, with eight arches originally designed to let in the light. In the middle of the chamber was a pool or bath, about 6 feet in depth. It was half-full of water, and a spring could still be seen bubbling up. It was in all probability a Roman baptistery in which the water still flowed from a tributary of the Tyburn.” (p20-21)
“In the course of [the Jubilee Line’s] excavation it traversed the ground beneath the oldest parts of London. The line travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were discovered Neolithic pottery and Roman tiles, a twelfth-century quay, a thirteenth-century gatehouse and a fourteenth-century wool market.” (P147-148)
“In the course of [the underground system’s] construction fossils buried fifty million years before were discovered. They now reside in the Natural History Museum. Their discovery is another indication of the depth at which the tunnels were laid.” (p147)
“The Underground curves and swerves beneath the surface, some tunnels in a constant state of movement. The tunnels beneath the City of London still follow the medieval street plan in order to curb the risk to ancient buildings.” (p148)
There is buried treasure beneath London. (p176)
.Creatures
“Certain creatures roam the underworld. Rats, and eels, and mice, and frogs, abound. The brown rat from Russia is the most abundant. The native black rat was in recent ears supposed to exist in certain underground quarters, beneath Oxford Street and Canning Town, but it is now more likely to be extinct. Sigmund Freud described the rat as a “chthonic animal,” an emblem of the uncanny rather than the horrid; it is a reminder of darkness, of all that we fear… It is hard to estimate the number of rats beneath the city, but urban legend that they exceed the human population can be discounted… Reports sometimes circulate of white crabs existing upon the walls of underground tunnels, but that may be fantastic rumour. There have even bin descriptions of scorpions, an inch long and pale yellow, on the Central Line. White atrophied creatures are often known as cavernophiles.” (p12-13)
.Underground Dwellers
“The subterranean world can be a place of fantasy, therefore, when ordinary conditions of living are turned upside down. In the nineteenth century it was seen as a sanctuary for criminals, for smugglers, and for what were known as ‘night wanderers’; the cellars and tunnels beneath the ground were described as ‘hidden haunts of vice’ populated by ‘the wild tribes of London’ or the ‘City Arabs.’” (p8-9)
“A subterranean race of ‘toshers’ was born, people who earned their living by savaging in the sewers for any items of value. They looked for pennies or sovereigns, or the fabulous ball of molded coins known as a ‘tosheroon.’ They worked in silence and in stealth, closing off their bull’s-eye lanterns whenever they passed a street-grating ‘for otherwise a crowd might collect overhead.’ Their work was of course illegal. They may have been mistaken for an underground race coming up for air.
They soon acquired a legendary quality, and became the object of sensational reports and descriptions. They were the beings of the underworld who entered the sewers on the banks of the Thames at low tide, armed with large sticks to defend themselves from rats. They carried lanterns to light their way, and wandered for miles beneath the crowded streets. They wore a distinctive uniform, with canvas trousers and long coats with large pockets. They found metal spoons, iron tobacco-boxes, nails and pins, bones, marbles, buttons, pieces of silk, scrubbing brushes, empty purses, corks, candle-ends, seed, pieces of soap, false money and false teeth; these objects were the relics of Victorian London, scavenged by outcasts. (p84-85)
.The Dead
“Crypts, and vaults, and burial grounds are also part of the identity of the city. Their roots are very ancient. … And, in large part, the original city was built upon the bones of the dead. ‘It was a solemn consideration,’ Charles Dickens wrote in an essay entitled ‘Night Walks’ (1861), ‘what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pinpoint in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of the dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’ From Roman London alone there are issued a million corpses.” (p28-29)
“We may also speak of the catacombs of London, communities of the dead buried beneath the earth in serrated ranks and laid out in passageways and corridors at Brompton and Norwood, Kensal Green and Highgate, Abney Park and Tower Hamlets… The buildings of Brompton or of Norwood partake in neither of the maze nor of the labyrinth; The arched brick is familiar to anyone acquainted with Victorian Architecture. The dead are laid out in galleries of these brick chambers striated by damp, in individual niches or stacked in bays.” (P31-32)
“The Underground system passes through many burial grounds and plague pits. Deaths have occurred because of its construction. Murders, and suicides, have occurred on the various lines. So the ghosts are supposed to walk. A phantom of a man has been seen by various station officials on the platforms of Covent Garden; he is described as a ‘slim oval-faced man wearing a light grey suit and glasses.’ The sounds of running steps has often been heard at Elephant and Castle, with the additional claim that the steps always seem to be running towards those who hear them…When Vauxhall station was being built on the Victoria Line in 1968, a number of workers saw a man approximately 7 feet in height wearing brown overalls and a cloth cap. He was never identified. The passengers of the Bakerloo Line are particularly liable to see unannounced visitors. There has often been reports of the reflection of a face in the window, when no one us sitting in the opposite seats.” (p163-164)
.The London Underground System
“The [canal] tunnel has its own weather. A pilot in the days of the steam tug remarked that ‘when it’s foggy outside it’s clear in the tunnel. It’s a very queer tunnel.’” (p98)
“By 1910 a sixpenny ticket allowed the traveler access to the first-class carriages of the Metropolitan Railway’s Pullman cars; the carriages contained morocco armchairs set in the replica of a drawing room with mahogany walls. Electric lamps were placed on side-tables, and blinds of green silk covered the windows.” (p144)
“Like the city above, the Underground grew haphazardly and pragmatically; it was not planned logically or as a whole. Many levels were in place, many lines converging and diverging, with corridors and stairways, lifts and escalators comprising the pieces of an infernal or divine machine. Tunnels were built ever deeper. New stations were erected. And older stations abandoned. It was guided by the imperatives of money and of power, rather than the interests of the citizens. In the first instance it was administered by capitalist financiers of dubious reputation. That is the London story.” (p144)
“Underground is 10 degrees warmer than overground.”
‘The Tube is still in large part an old place. It is Victorian. Abandoned tunnels run nowhere, known as “dead tunnels,” snaking their way through the living system; they are sometimes damp, and sometimes dusty, with the patina of past time along their walls and floors. The tunnels beneath the Thames have a layer of moss that has somehow grown across the sheets of metal panels.” (p148)
“A traveler, going west just past Holborn station, may catch a glimpse of tiled walls. They are the last vestiges of a station once known as British Museum. The tiles of Down Street station can also still be seen as you journey underground between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner; above the ground, in Down Street itself, the ox-blood tiles of terracotta mark the spot of the long forgotten station.” (p162)
“Suicides prefer to die beneath the earth. It is estimated that there are three attempts each week, one being successful. More deaths occur in underground than overground stations. The favorite time of day is 11:00am, and the most popular venues are King’s Cross and Victoria. Deep pits are built beneath the rails, known as ‘catch pits’ or ‘suicide pits,’ to contain and save the people if they fall through. The suicides are known as ‘jumpers’ and, after each such attempt, an announcement comes over the loudspeakers calling for an ‘Inspector Sands’ to investigate an ‘incident.’ The roar of the train entering the station many be construed as an invitation to leap.” (p165)
“There are no individuals on the Underground; there is only a crowd. In John Galsworthy’s Man of Property (1906) Soames Forsythe enters the Tube at Sloane Square and notices that ‘these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of fog, took no notice of each other.” (p169-170)
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WWII
Cabinet War Rooms from WWII beneath London. (p180)
“[During the bombing of WWII] Londoners fled to adjacent caves in the tracks of their remote ancestors. The miles of Chislehurst Caves, dug over a period of 8,000 years, became shelter for as many as 15,000 people. A hospital and a chapel, a cinema and a gymnasium, were build 70 feet under the ground just 10 miles from London.” (p190)
“In the first months of the war the raids on London were light and infrequent, but by the autumn of 1940 they became intense and sustained. In their panic the Londoners went under. They came with their children and bought tickets, costing 1 ½ pence, that gave them access to the underground platforms. If the first platform was overcrowded they boarded the train, and moved onto the next…. The people came with deckchairs, and rugs, and umbrellas; they brought quantities of food with them, some with as much as a fortnight’s rations. They had come to stay. By six in the evening the passengers of the trains had to pick their way among recumbent bodies. Two hours later, the platforms were so overcrowded it was hard to walk along them. The atmosphere became almost unbearable, and many people were forced to surface for a few minutes to gulp fresh air. A plague of mosquitos, hatched in the unnatural warmth, caused further discomfort. When the electric current was switched off after the last train had passed, some shelterers squatted on the track. They also lay on the steps and the escalators.
When the sculptor Henry Moore descended into the Northern line.
‘I had never seen so many reclining figures and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture. And amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers formed together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of the passing trains…. I never made any sketches in the Underground. It would have been like drawing in the hold of a slave ship.’” (p190-192)
“The government, and the officials of London Transport, soon understood that the situation was not going to be improved by inaction. Seventy-nine stations were designated as shelters for the civilian population; season tickets were issued for those using them regularly, and elementary measures of hygiene and sanitation were imposed. Wooden bunks were installed, to be replaced with metal versions when the wood became infested with vermin. It was determined that six people should occumy 6 feet of platform; three lay in bunks against the platform wall, while three others lay in front of them along the platform itself. White lines were drawn, 8 feet and 4 feet from the edge of the platform, to designate sleeping areas. A special group of tunnel inspectors came into operation, and before long a refreshment service was introduced. Fifty-two lending libraries were established and automatic cigarette machines were put in place. Some shelters produced their own newspapers. The Swiss Cottager, for example, introduced itself to ‘nightly companions, temporary cave-dwellers, sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage station of the Bakerloo Line from dusk til dawn…’ It was perhaps what the authorities had feared, a world beneath the world. It was another city below the surface city. An underground race had been born.” (p194).