Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality
- 2 Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground
- 3 The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis
- 4 Underground Revolutions: Invisible Networks of Terror in Fin-de-Siècle London
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Incontinent City: Sewers, Disgust and Liminality
- 2 Tubing It: Speeding Through Modernity in the London Underground
- 3 The (Un)Buried Life: Death in the Modern Necropolis
- 4 Underground Revolutions: Invisible Networks of Terror in Fin-de-Siècle London
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
… the coming of the railways to London from the mid-1830s onwards dealt the metropolis a bigger, and certainly more lasting, blow than anything since the Great Fire. Like the Great Fire, the railways shattered both the living and working arrangements of hundreds of thousands of Londoners. Like the Fire, they ate up vast quantities of labour, material, and capital, and destroyed acres of the metropolis in the process. Most importantly of all, like the Fire, they spun the population of London further away from the core, spreading the decay of the central districts, yet at the same time enabling Londoners to enjoy higher standard of space and cleanliness in their housing than in any other city in the world.
Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London (1975)The contradictory forces of progress and destruction remained a powerful spectre in the Victorian underground, but the construction of the underground railway also created social and psychological fissures in the urban psyche, while irrevocably changing London's landscape. In many ways, its dual nature is captured in the Janus-edged façade of 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens in Paddington (Fig. 2.1). At first glance, the Georgian exterior, complete with plant trimmings and iron railings, is undifferentiated from the row of terrace houses that line the elegant street. However, just beyond the veneer of gentrification, a network of railway tracks disappearing into a dark tunnel reveals one of the few visible remnants of the original Metropolitan Line, where steam-engine trains emerged for ventilation purposes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- London's Underground SpacesRepresenting the Victorian City, 1840-1915, pp. 72 - 115Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013