That title may sound slightly intriguing and indeed it is intended to do so; you may therefore wonder what it needed to be protected from and the answer is very simple – water. Firstly, though, perhaps I should try to define ‘The Tube’. Is it, as is often assumed, the whole of London’s Underground railway network or is it simply the deep level lines? For the purposes of this article I intend to refer to all those deep level lines which pass beneath the River Thames in the central area, although the part of the District Line which lies in close proximity to the river is also very relevant, as is what used to be known as the East London section of the Metropolitan Line to the south of Whitechapel but which nowadays forms part of the London Overground system.
Many people know that the Underground came into existence in 1863 when the Metropolitan Railway opened from Praed Street (Paddington) to King’s Cross and was gradually extended to form an eliptical route which, together with the Metropolitan District Railway, became known as the Inner Circle. This is not a ‘deep tube’ though but it is generally described nowadays as one of the ‘sub-surface’ lines, much of it having been constructed by means of the ‘cut and cover’ method.
Now after that brief introduction let me pose another question – which was the first of the deep level railways which could be described as a tube line? Was it, as is often suggested, the City & South London Railway? The answer has to be ‘no’ as there was a number of predecessor schemes, not all of which came to fruition and carried passengers. The earliest was planned not too long after the Metropolitan Railway started its services, this being the Waterloo & Whitehall (W&W) scheme which was intended to connect the London & South Western’s (LSWR) terminus at Waterloo on the south bank of the river with the heart of the British Government based in and around Westminster and Whitehall. Travellers wishing to cross the river had therefore to pay a toll to use either Waterloo or Hungerford Bridges and in 1865 it became known that the LSWR’s directors were behind the W&W scheme, being inspired by the potential of a pneumatic underground railway which had recently been demonstrated at the Crystal Palace site at Sydenham – described previously in Backtrack. (Vol.29 No.8)
The line would have been literally a tube laid in a trench dug in the river bed and would have terminated in Great Scotland Yard. After the Parliamentary procedures had been fulfilled, work did start on the south side of the river but soon a financial crisis caused this to cease, never to be resumed and with nothing to show except “stacks of wooden piles” on the construction site. A suggestion that it could become a pedestrian walkway instead of a railway was floated in December 1866 but received little support and the whole project was officially abandoned in 1870.
Other 'tube' lines
After this various other schemes were planned and built and brief details of them follow. The first was the Tower Subway, originally conceived before the W&W scheme was officially wound up; with its single carriage pulled along by a mix of cable and gravity, it was considered by its engineer to be an experiment and did not last long as a railway, becoming instead a pedestrian walkway until Tower Bridge was opened. After this the Subway was closed and instead carried water pipes and later communication cables. The next project was the King William Street subway, also with a terminus in the City of London, but this became a victim of its own
