A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground . Marko Jobst
railway stations were dual from the outset: that is what my next guide proclaimed. They disallowed easy absorption of new materials and technologies into unified objects, and clear wholes. The world’s first long distance railway operated from around the corner from where I write this. Simon, my guide, spoke from behind the joyful facade of his face, all Victorian colours and exuberance for no reason other than to court pleasure. It was Euston, the year was 1837. There was no precedent for this kind of a building, he said, so Euston introduced a number of features that would never be repeated. And yet, it holds the key to what would come later, under the surface.
It had a free-standing Doric portico, this first of London’s railway stations, and an oversized one at that. As for the train platforms – that technological necessity every building accommodating railways has had to address ever since – they were not of a piece with the rest, but an afterthought, tucked away at the back. It was the portico that was key, the archway that marked the triumph of entering the city. The relief of escaping it, perhaps.
The design was split between architects and engineers, Simon told me as we pondered the missing station entrance around the corner from where we sat. He had insisted we meet in the courtyard, peering on some days through the narrow passageway towards St Pancras, facing the direction of Euston on others. The train shed was designed by Charles Fox, the man who would later work on Crystal Palace. ‘Euston’s train shed was relatively low and was covered by parallel pitched-roof spans of ‘ridge and furrow’ type made of wrought iron and glass,’ Simon said to me in the voice of a teacher (Bradley, 2007: 60).
But the curious thing about Euston, I thought, was the way it divorced the various components that had come to form it. The shed, the hall, the hotel and portico (that most interesting part of the disparate assemblage that emphasised the threshold, marked the gateway), they were all separate units. It has a direct bearing on what would emerge as the Underground railway station, I thought, hinting at something that would become much more radical once the Underground was instituted: the peculiar discontinuity between inside and outside, which would play itself out again when we disappear under the surface. But I said nothing, I wasn’t ready to rebel.
King’s Cross opened in 1852, Simon continued as I watched a pigeon circle Newton’s statue in The British Library courtyard. A year after Crystal Palace. It was quite unlike Euston, all its elements designed by the same man, Lewis Cubitt. The station’s outer walls were made of brick. There were two large glazed openings facing Euston Road. They followed the curve of the train-shed arches, making the facade perfectly fit the interior. Modernist historians would find this acceptable, Simon said and smiled, as if everything modernist historians claimed should be taken with a pinch of salt. This relationship between the shed and the building would announce the emergence of modernist logic.
The question is always one of unity of the two aspects of building, the train shed with its industrial heritage, and the station building, its traditional architecture, I thought. The train shed needed to merge with the rest of the building, in order to form a legitimate, unified object. The case of underground railways would turn out to be more complex, yet it remains unacknowledged. An Underground station, unlike the main line railway station, does not allow for this form of specialisation: it is engineering forcing architecture to adjust and disappear, and architecture striking back by co-opting through design the technological aesthetic. Simon couldn’t help me with this, so I never met him again.
Before it had anything to do with station buildings, before it was a city-wide enclosure under the Earth’s surface, the nascent Underground was another form of architecture, a different kind of a hybrid. Few people notice this trajectory, but you will be able to follow, even if you haven’t heard of arcades before. You understand the Underground, or so I’m led to believe.
I started exchanging letters with your father soon upon my arrival in this city, despite the context of my visit. Perhaps he suspected who I was, or imagined me to be. He shared his knowledge with me in any case, and everything I know about the history of the Underground I stole from him. In his first letter – which I read in that odd niche by the staircase – he wrote that to have a railway run under London had first been conceived by Charles Pearson in a pamphlet published in 1845. The initial idea was for a railway to run down Fleet valley to Farringdon, covered by glass. An arcade, of sorts; remember that.
There were other types of schemes at the time, all following the notion of arcades. William Moseley had proposed a railway that would run twelve feet below the surface, more or less following the route of the Central Line later in the century. It would be surrounded by shops, houses, hotels and a walkway above. ‘The second scheme for a ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, suggested by Sir Joseph Paxton,’ your father wrote me, ‘was even grander, a twelve-mile railway built above ground but within a glass arcade and, like Moseley’s scheme, also containing houses and shops. It too broadly followed the route of what would eventually become an Underground line, since the aim was to link London’s railway termini, as forty years later the Circle (which fortunately escaped the fate of being called the Girdle) was to do. Paxton’s scheme, for which he sought public funding and which he cannily called the Great Victoria Way to curry royal favour, was quite liked by the committee but was ultimately rejected on the grounds of cost’ (Wolmar, 2005: 24).
It was to run down the route of what would become the Circle line in the 1880s once again, and, most importantly, be constructed of the prefabricated units that the Crystal Palace had been made of. A hugely stretched version of the Palace, shops and houses lining its sides, with a colossal arcade connecting the railway stations with the Palace of Westminster. Its width was that of the transept of the Crystal Palace exactly: 72 feet. It would have been one hundred and eighty feet high. It was to have two railway tracks. And a road above them. And then, there was a double wall, the supposed guarantee of acoustic separation between the two realms: that of the railways, with their noise and steam, and the shops and houses. Epic madness, no less.
But that was all the information I got from your father, in that first of many letters I’d receive from him. You see where this is going: an extended Crystal Palace was to house a railway line, then insinuate itself into the urban environment. An object as much as a mere tunnel, and a passageway as well.
A manifold conductor of movement, that thing. And then, while the Palace might have been about the geometry of the line in part only, this one would cut through the existing composition of objects. A line, a cut; a never-ending gesture that could go on for ever. Exactly like our Underground tunnels.
Built during the first half of the nineteenth century, before Baron Georges Haussmann had got his hands on the city, Parisian arcades were pedestrian passages of iron and glass, connecting the main thoroughfares. Walter saw them as transitional spaces, simultaneously inside and out, private and public; they were ambiguous and never lent themselves to any single, fixed activity, which is what drew Walter to them, Walter, who would conduct a never-ending, life-long research into them. He described the arcades as places where you could linger and observe, shop perhaps, or simply pass from one part of the city to another; shortcuts, passageways. Passagenwerk, the original title, remember that.
The source I was reading – this wasn’t Walter himself, you understand, but was one of the many commentators who keep sifting through his thoughts, the host of bodies hunched over his writing in The British Library reading rooms – this source of mine claimed the passages had no fixed meaning. They didn’t constitute autonomous places, they were ‘parasitic’ upon existing ones. That is the term the source used, the informant that he was. Open to light yet sheltered from the elements, they were private even when carved from public space. Magic, phantasmagorical, intoxicating: the residue of dreams. Walter wandering through the arcades of his mind, a guide to others, lost to himself.
Residues of a dream world. Isn’t that what makes the experience of the Underground’s endless tunnels what it is, utterly concrete and always somewhat unreal? It was the technologies of glass and iron that had made the arcades possible (my source claimed Walter had said) and they offered a glimpse