by Everything about the Metropolitan Line is richly English. It personifies the British trick of creating new things and making them old: an underground train of the world now full of conservative nostalgia; the first underground line to be built but the last to be nationalized; the railway that started in a smog-heavy Victorian city and went on to bring the dream of “fresh air, sunshine, roomy houses, green lawns and social benefits” to millions in the rolling hills of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.
The name suggests the city but most of its 41 miles are suburban or rural. The Urban City created the suburban Metro-land as its 4-4-0 steam locomotives gave way to the “red electric train” and the stucco stages of Italianate terraced houses in Paddington developed into clapboards, pebbles and timber frames. Fake Metro-. The “Stockbroker Tudor” of the land and “Variegated Bypass”. When you drive the City from Farringdon to Chesham you are not only passing through lost Middlesex but traveling in time. No wonder, really, that it was ranked as the best Underground line in a recent study by the Telegraph.
The paradox began in 1860 with a mess on Euston Road. The idea was first proposed in 1845 by an elderly 18th-century solicitor, Charles Pearson, born in the Metropolitan’s. Without Pearson’s obsessive persistence, penning pamphlets, proposing schemes and arranging finances, the Metropolitan would Railway, as it was called at that time. which was never created. It ran from Paddington to Farringdon under London’s first bypass (the 18th century “New Road”, now the A501) and down the lost River Fleet valley.
It was a terrible nuisance to build. The Victorian railway chronicler, Frederick Smeeton Williams, described the horrors facing a nearby homeowner: “An endless chaos of timbers, shaft holes, lifting and lowering chains and iron buckets… the erecting workers insisted his family with huge logs to make it safer… he can hardly go out to business or home to supper without slipping.”
The Metropolitan was built quickly, completed in less than two years and opened on Saturday, January 10, 1863. It was bold, brash and ahead of its time. Paris had no Metro until 1900; New York none until 1904. The conditions were terrible at first with tunnels filled, according to one traveler, with “sulphurous fumes”.
However, in the first of many contradictions, it was an immediate and runaway success: 30,000 people used the line on its first day and 11.8 million in the first year. Profits were impressive: £102,000 in the first year with a generous 6.25 per cent dividend. The future was popular, and it paid off.
The directors invested those profits well. They grew and electrified the network with remarkable speed. First, the line extended east to Moorgate and west to Hammersmith (now the Hammersmith & City and District Lines) and then, imaginatively, by building and purchase north-west to Swiss Cottage, Harrow, Pinner, Rickmansworth, Chorleywood, Aylesbury. and Verney Junction, 50 miles from distant Baker Street.
What else? The train had passed its commuter market. How to continue paying dividends? Beginning with Pinner in 1900 the City began building houses on surplus land: laying out streets, granting building leases and selling ground rents. If commuters didn’t exist they would create them. In doing so they helped create 20th century Britain, the home-owning democracy of suburban living.
Early brochures extolled the virtues of home ownership rather than the “uneasy feeling” of the tenant, the norm even for most middle-class Victorian households. The City’s “lush brochures” gave the suburban dream “it’s my castle” a name: “Metro-land”.
John Betjeman was the bard of Metro-land. His love, at first ironic and then sincere, for the neighborhoods that created the City, the social progress they encouraged, and the suburban gentrification they allowed, permeates his poetry and prose.
Of Betjeman’s many gifts to the English literary landscape, from the Cornish coast to the pines of Aldershot, none is greater than Metro-land, an anonymous copywriter’s marketing slogan from 1915, which he longed for the commuting clerk, shopping housewife. or “steam office” returning home to Mount Park or Ruislip Gardens.
Betjeman took the child on a “journey on North London trains / To forgotten stations, wooden shackles / On flaming oil-lit platforms among fields”. By the time 67-year-old Betjeman made his journey along the City Line for his elegant 1973 film Metro-landthe fields were gone but he loved the “Bucks estate” as much as the inhabitants.
The Metropolitan City was nationalized, against their wishes, in 1933. The green belt prevented the new London Passenger Transport Board from developing land. And therefore, unable to create commuters, he shrank. It has nearly 30 miles of backtracking from Verney Junction to Chesham.
We may love the Metropolitan, the line to the Chilterns, the only Tube with fast services and all stations, whose doctors, just, remember its early red carriages, but it is only part of what was there at one time.
