The Victorian Era

What Was the London Underground Like in Victorian Times

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The London Underground in Victorian times was the first underground railway in the world, a smoky, steam-hauled cut-and-cover line that ran under the streets of north and west London from 1863. The first section, the Metropolitan Railway between Paddington and Farringdon, opened on 10 January 1863, engineered by John Fowler and built by the contractor John Kelk; it was followed over the next quarter-century by a network of underground lines that would, by the end of the century, carry hundreds of millions of passengers a year. The story of the Underground is told in detail in Urban Transport in the Victorian Era, and the wider setting is described in Victorian London.

The Metropolitan Railway

The Metropolitan Railway, the first underground line in the world, was built by the cut-and-cover method: a trench was dug along the route, the brick tunnel was built inside it, and the surface was reinstated. The 3¾-mile line from Paddington to Farringdon Street ran largely beneath the New Road — later the Marylebone, Euston, and Pentonville Roads — and had seven intermediate stations. It opened on 10 January 1863 and was an immediate success: some 26,000 passengers were carried on the first day, and over twelve million in the first year.

The line was worked by steam locomotives, the engines burning coke to reduce the smoke and gases in the tunnels. Conditions were uncomfortable — the carriages were lit by gas and the atmosphere was heavy with steam — but the line cut the journey from Paddington to the City to about fifteen minutes and changed the geography of London for good.

The District and the Hammersmith and City

Two further companies extended the network in the 1860s. The District Railway opened on 24 December 1868, running from South Kensington to Westminster, and was gradually extended in the 1870s and 1880s to Hammersmith, Richmond, Ealing, and Hounslow in the west and to Bow, Plaistow, and Upminster in the east. The Hammersmith and City Railway, opened in 1864 as the Hammersmith branch of the Metropolitan, gave a separate identity to the joint line between Paddington and Hammersmith.

The two companies’ parallel routes, roughly forming a ring around the west and north of central London, were connected by the Inner Circle service, which ran from its completion in 1884 as the Circle Line. By the late 1880s the steam-operated Circle carried millions of passengers a year through a chain of over twenty stations.

The East London Line and the Thames Tunnel

A fourth underground route, the East London Railway, opened in 1869 between Wapping and New Cross, using the Thames Tunnel that Marc Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel had completed in 1843. The tunnel, the first successful tunnel under a navigable river, had been converted from a pedestrian curiosity into a railway by the East London Railway Company, and for the rest of the Victorian period it offered the only fixed river crossing in the East End.

The Deep-Level Tubes

The cut-and-cover lines of the 1860s and 1870s served mainly the north and west of central London, where the new suburbs were developing; coverage of the south and east came only with the deep-level tubes of the 1890s. The first deep-level tube was the City and South London Railway, opened on 4 November 1890, which ran from the City to Stockwell under electric traction through deep-bored cylindrical tunnels. The Central London Railway, nicknamed the Twopenny Tube for its flat fare, opened in 1900 and ran from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush.

The Experience of the Victorian Underground

The Victorian Underground was a dark, smoky, noisy, and uncomfortable place. The steam locomotives of the Metropolitan and District threw cinders and ash into the carriages; the gas lighting cast a yellow gloom; the wooden bodies of the carriages had no heating, no ventilation, and no lavatories; and the tunnels smelt of sulphur. The first electric trains of the City and South London in 1890 were a vast improvement, and the deep-level tubes of the Edwardian period were cleaner, brighter, and deeper. Even the steam Underground, however, was vastly faster and cheaper than the omnibus or the hansom cab, and it remained the chosen transport of the new suburban middle class throughout the reign.