London Underground

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 10th of January 1863, the London Underground carried its first passengers between Paddington and Farringdon, becoming the world's first underground passenger railway. The carriages were wooden and lit by gas. Steam locomotives hauled them through the dark, and the air filled with sulphurous fumes. Yet 38,000 people rode it on opening day alone, with trains borrowed from other railways just to keep up. In its first year, the line carried 9.5 million passengers. From that smoky start grew a network that now spans eleven lines and 272 stations. It serves up to 5 million journeys a day. In 2024/25 it carried 1.216 billion passenger journeys. How did a railway built for steam come to define a modern city? How did a tangle of rival private companies become one brand? And why, despite its name, does most of it run above the ground? The answers begin with a hole in the earth and a test tunnel in a small northern town.

• 2. Cut And Cover

  ›

  In Kibblesworth, a small town chosen because its geology resembled London's, engineers built a short test tunnel in 1855. They used it for two years to develop the first underground train, then filled it in by 1861. The idea of an underground railway linking the City of London with the urban centre had been proposed back in the 1830s, and the Metropolitan Railway won permission to build in 1854. The earliest tunnels were dug just below street level, using a method called cut and cover. Workers opened a trench, laid the railway, then roofed it over. The Metropolitan District Railway, known simply as the District, opened in December 1868 from South Kensington to Westminster. It formed part of a plan for an inner circle linking London's main-line stations. The Metropolitan and District completed the Circle line in 1884, again by cutting and covering. Both railways pushed outward. The District built five western branches reaching Ealing, Hounslow, Uxbridge, Richmond and Wimbledon. The Metropolitan stretched into Buckinghamshire, more than 50 miles from Baker Street. That reach would later be sold to commuters under a single seductive name.

• 3. Down Through The Clay

  ›

  Two circular tunnels, each 10 feet 2 inches across, were bored deep beneath the streets between King William Street and Stockwell. This was the City and South London Railway, the first deep-level tube. Tunnelling under the roads avoided the need to bargain with property owners above. It opened in 1890 with electric locomotives pulling carriages whose windows were small and opaque. Passengers nicknamed them padded cells. The Waterloo and City Railway followed in 1898, then the Central London Railway in 1900, known as the twopenny tube. Their tunnels measured between 11 feet 8 inches and 12 feet 2.5 inches across. The Great Northern and City Railway, opened in 1904, was different. It was built to take main-line trains from Finsbury Park to Moorgate, so its tunnels were a generous 16 feet wide. These smaller, roughly circular bores gave the whole system its enduring nickname. The deeper the engineers dug, the more the trains themselves would have to change.

• 4. From Steam To Spark

  ›

  Passengers collapsed on the steam-era Underground, overcome by heat and pollution. Some called for garden plants to clean the air, and the Metropolitan even encouraged its staff to grow beards as a kind of filter. Other reports claimed strange benefits. Great Portland Street was billed as a sanatorium for asthma and bronchial complaints, and the Twopenny Tube was said to cure anorexia. The arrival of electric tube services, along with competition from electric trams, forced the pioneering companies to modernise. The District and Metropolitan needed to electrify and a joint committee recommended an AC system. The District, hunting for finance, found the American investor Charles Yerkes, who preferred a DC system. The Metropolitan protested, but after arbitration by the Board of Trade, DC won. Yerkes soon controlled the District and founded the Underground Electric Railways Company of London in 1902. It financed and ran three new tube lines, the Bakerloo, the Hampstead and the Piccadilly, which opened between 1906 and 1907. When the Bakerloo was named in July 1906, a railway publication scolded it as an undignified gutter title. The man who built this empire of tunnels had also chosen the word that would brand it for a century.

• 5. One Word, One Map

  ›

  Three names were considered for the joint marketing identity that emerged in the early twentieth century: Underground, Tube and Electric. Underground was selected. Tube and Electric were both officially rejected, though ironically Tube was later adopted alongside the winner. The companies shared maps, joint publicity, through ticketing and UNDERGROUND signs bearing the first bullseye symbol outside Central London stations. In 1916, Edward Johnston created the typeface that still carries the system's lettering, and the roundel became one of the most recognisable transport emblems anywhere. The greatest design leap came in 1931, when Harry Beck drew a schematic tube map that ignored real geography in favour of clarity. It first appeared in 1933 and was voted a national design icon in 2006. Today that same map carries far more than the Underground. It shows the DLR, London Overground, Thameslink, the Elizabeth line and Tramlink. A clean diagram had turned a sprawling tangle into something a stranger could read at a glance. Behind the elegant map, though, the business of running the railway was about to be swept into a single public body.

• 6. Years Of Catastrophe

  ›

  On the 11th of January 1941, during the London Blitz, a bomb pierced the booking hall of Bank Station. The blast killed 111 people, many of them asleep in passageways and on platforms. Tube stations had become shelters during air raids, a practice that reached back to 1915, but they were never a guarantee of safety. On the 3rd of March 1943, a test of air-raid sirens and the firing of a new anti-aircraft rocket triggered a crush at Bethnal Green station. A total of 173 people died, including 62 children. It was the worst civilian disaster in Britain during the Second World War and the largest single loss of life on the network. Peacetime brought its own horrors. On the 28th of February 1975, a southbound train failed to stop at Moorgate and struck the wall at the end of the tunnel, killing 43 people and injuring 74. On the 18th of November 1987, fire broke out on an escalator at King's Cross St Pancras, killing 31 and injuring 100. The report that followed forced senior managers at both London Underground and London Regional Transport to resign. Out of that fire came smoking bans, the removal of wooden escalators, CCTV, fire detectors and radio coverage for the emergency services.

• 7. Whose Railway Is It

  ›

  In 1933, most of London's underground railways, tramways and bus services merged into the London Passenger Transport Board, which traded as London Transport. The Waterloo and City Railway, owned by the main-line Southern Railway, stayed out. On the 1st of January 1948, under the Transport Act 1947, the Board was nationalised and renamed the London Transport Executive, sitting beneath the British Transport Commission. The Commission was abolished in 1962, and the operator became the London Transport Board, reporting straight to the Minister of Transport. On the 1st of January 1970, control passed to the Greater London Council. In 1984 it swung back to central government as London Regional Transport. The biggest change came in 2000, when Transport for London was created as an integrated body within the Greater London Authority, its board appointed by the Mayor of London. Control of the Underground transferred in July 2003, when London Underground Limited became a subsidiary of TfL. An early-2000s Public-Private Partnership handed maintenance to private infracos, but Metronet collapsed into administration in 2007 and TfL absorbed Tube Lines in 2010. Through it all the trains kept running, and 92 per cent of operating costs are now covered by passenger fares.

• 8. Touch In, Touch Out

  ›

  The Travelcard arrived in 1983, and in 2003 came the Oyster card, a pre-payment smartcard with an embedded contactless chip. It can be loaded with Travelcards and used across the Underground, the Overground, buses, trams, the Docklands Light Railway and National Rail within London. A daily cap limits the cost to the price of a Day Travelcard, but a card not touched in and out is treated as incomplete and charged the maximum fare. In September 2014, TfL became the first public transport provider in the world to accept contactless bank cards. Apple Pay followed in 2015 and Android Pay in 2016. More than 500 million journeys have since been made by contactless payment, and around 1 in 10 contactless transactions in the United Kingdom now happen on the TfL network. The technology was developed in-house and has been licensed to cities including New York and Boston. A Freedom Pass, run by London Councils, gives free travel to disabled residents and those meeting age criteria, and carries the holder's photograph. Travel without a valid ticket and the penalty fare is 80 pounds, halved to 40 if paid within 21 days. Beneath the smooth tap of a card, the deep tunnels were getting hotter, and engineers were running out of easy ways to cool them.

  When the Bakerloo line opened in 1906, it was advertised with a maximum temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The tunnels have warmed steadily since. During the 2006 European heat wave, temperatures of 117 degrees Fahrenheit were reported, and in 2002 it was claimed that the heat would break European animal welfare laws if livestock were carried. A 2000 study found air quality 73 times worse than at street level, with a twenty-minute Northern line journey delivering the same mass of particulates as a cigarette. By January 2019, particulate pollution was reported as up to 30 times higher underground than on the streets above, the Northern line again the worst. The original tube design used trains as pistons, pushing air through close-fitting tunnels to ventilate the platforms, a flow governed by the Hagen-Poiseuille equation. False ceilings, ducting, cameras and signs have since choked that airflow. At Green Park, panels have cut the above-head airspace by more than half, reducing laminar airflow by 94 per cent. Groundwater cooling was installed at Victoria in June 2006 and at Green Park in 2012. New air-conditioned trains run on the sub-surface lines, and the New Tube for London fleet for the Bakerloo, Central, Waterloo and City and Piccadilly lines is planned to carry air conditioning. Siemens Mobility's Inspiro design was selected in June 2018, with the first train once due to run on the Piccadilly line in 2023.