The train pulls into Baker Street Underground Station, grinding to a halt beneath the great vaulted ceiling. With the obnoxious enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t have to go to work for the next two weeks, I turn to a fellow passenger and declare: “This is the world’s most magnificent subway. It really is.”
With a look of horror from being addressed so early in the morning by a vacationing American, he stammers, “But it’s…it’s…falling to bits.”
Well, maybe. It has become fashionable in Britain to dump on the world’s oldest underground railway. A recent editorial in The Times of London labeled it “crowded, fetid and in desperate need of cash,” and friends here call it a national disgrace. That’s not how I see it, but I admit to being a train-spotter at heart, a grown-up kid who thrills at the sight of the 7:55 on its morning dash into Grand Central and thinks nothing of jumping on a subway and riding to the end of the line, just to see what’s there. Not hip in New York, worse in “Cool Britannia.”
Unlike the subway in Manhattan—which basically goes uptown and downtown, with a few furtive forays east and west, and stops at stations in a parade of numbers: 14th, 23rd, 34th—London’s Underground is like an old mansion with an endless maze of hidden passageways and secret rooms in a pattern as seemingly random as strands of spaghetti on a plate.
The Circle Line, for example, makes a complete ring underneath the city, running through a lasso loop of 27 stations. Other branches travel out to villages along the Thames (almost three fifths of the Underground is surface rail). At King’s Cross, four different lines stack up like a subterranean version of the L.A. freeway. And I get goose bumps when pulling into stations called Tower Hill and Waterloo; giggle at Pudding Mill Lane, Barking, and Tooting Bec.
The Tube is big and solid, almost stately. Carriages lumber into stations like great hulking beasts (the average train speed is just under 21 miles per hour). Inside the older trains, padded seats and armrests seem properly British, making a trip on the Tube feel more like a rail journey than a subway ride. The French are horrified by the Underground—their métro is so much more efficient, and quieter, running as it does on large rubber tires—but every time I ride the métro, I feel as though I’m trapped in a child’s toy. The métro is too cute. The Tokyo subway is even worse: shiny, clean, and far too functional.
The Underground, on the other hand, is historic. The bricks arching over Baker Street Station may be covered with grime, but some of that dirt harks back to the Victorian era. Baker Street Station opened in January 1863—almost six months before the Battle of Gettysburg. There were, of course, no electric trains back then, and tunnels had to be left exposed at points along the route to let smoke and steam escape.
When electricity made deep tunnels possible, London was again the leader with, in 1890, the City and South London Railway, the first real subway. Today’s Northern Line still passes through portions of the original tube-shaped tunnel, which not only dictated the signature round-top shape of all Underground trains to come but gave the system its nickname.
Now the world’s oldest subway is ready for the new century, with the just-opened -$5.5 billion extension to the Jubilee Line, which transports passengers through the booming Docklands—where world-renowned architect Norman Foster has designed at Canary Wharf a station with a cathedral-like grandeur—and direct to the Millennium Dome in North Greenwich. Parliament also announced a $12 billion bailout package for improvements to the entire system.
That may be great news for the commuter sitting next to me in Baker Street, but it worries me: For I’ve already seen the future in the new cars that operate on some lines. Gone are the armrests and bobbing knobs, London’s version of the old-fashioned strap that gave birth to the term straphanger in New York. New cars now sport a flashy red, white, and blue livery that makes them look like mobile French tricolors. The Jubilee Line’s new stations may be marvels of modern architecture, but they lack the character of the original stop at Baker Street.
A little Victorian grime makes all the difference.
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