Not motoring
Electrifying effect
Gavin Stamp
t is a curiosity of London's railway histo- ry and geography that there are only three north-south through routes across the Thames. All were created in the 1860s, the decade that saw the railway companies behaving quite as ruthlessly as the motor- way builders do today. Two are intriguingly obscure lines and all three hold great fasci- nation for those of us who delight in exploring the capital by public transport.
The westernmost is the West London Railway, running from Kensington, Addi- son Road, to Clapham Junction by bridging the river near Lots Road Power Station. Back in the 1960s only one passenger train a day each way apparently used it, and this was for Post Office workers and not in the timetable. As a schoolboy, I longed to catch that train, but never did. But now it is easy to cross that bridge and have a new view of the Thames, for, with Addison Road renamed Olympia, the line is much used by long-distance trains — from Glas- gow to Brighton, for instance.
The middle route is, or was, all too obvi- ous. It is the line that cut right through the City by running north of Blackfriars to run, with unspeakable arrogance, across Ludgate Hill before plunging down to join the Metropolitan Railway below Smithfield Market. In the 19th century, it was the principal route connecting North and South London and was a key component in Sir Edward Watkin's megalomaniac dream of the 1880s of connecting Sheffield with Paris via the railways he ran and the Chan- nel Tunnel he promoted.
After the second world war, this strategic connection was run down by British Rail- ways and finally closed. Once, in the 1970s, a friend who lived in the Barbican took me down a back alley near Holborn Viaduct and, somehow, we got into the railway tun- nel. We walked along the track bed; it was a depressing experience as, incredibly, even the rails had been lifted: such was the insane degradation of our railways. But, in fact, all was not lost. A decade later the line was dug down — to run under Ludgate Hill this time — electrified and re-opened. Today it carries hundreds of Thameslink trains a day connecting Bedfordshire with Gatwick and Brighton. Which all goes to show that, sometimes, sanity can prevail and that no closed railway should ever be written off.
Last, but not least, there is the East London Railway, now an obscure limb of the London Underground running from Whitechapel to New Cross not over but under the Thames. This was a mysterious and tantalising journey. The stations at Rotherhithe and Wapping are deep below ground sandwiched between sublime brick retaining walls kept apart by massive iron beams. There was the constant background noise of dripping and running water; to wait here for infrequent trains to emerge from the dark tunnel mouth could be an eerie experience.
But when steam trains first ran through this tunnel it was already decades old: the railway had taken over one of the great heroic failures of engineering history. For this was the Thames Tunnel, built in 1823-43 under the river as twin foot tun- nels by Sir Mark Brunel — father of I.K. — using a tunnelling shield. During the work a candle-lit banquet for hundreds was held beneath the Thames, and, more than once, filthy river water burst into the works.
Those brick-lined tunnels are still there — a monument to engineering skill and persistence — but they are now threatened with mutilation by London Underground Limited which insists on repairing imagined defects by `shotcreting' the inside. In March, the tunnel was listed, and a trio of eminent consulting engineers commis- sioned by English Heritage has concluded that the repair is unnecessary and a wicked waste of £7.5 million of taxpayers' money. But, without having read this report, Mr Gummer, Minister for the Environ- ment, has declined to call the case in for public inquiry.
The controversy surrounding the threat to Brunel's `Great Bore' may well leave Spectator readers unmoved. I can only agree with an editorial in the New Civil Engineer that the tunnel is 'an engineering work of art' and observe that, while we remain the continuing effete beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution, monuments of British engineering are quite as important as Georgian country houses. But there is another cause for concern: if the tunnel is `shotcreted', will it not become too narrow to take conventional trains, so deliberately rendering it useless as a potential East London rail crossing with connections north and south for other (privatised?) rail- way operators? Could London Under- ground really be so anti-social and parochial? In the present political climate, I am afraid I can believe almost anything.
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