US Edition Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day. A vast concourse of people, buried deep within the clay of the Eocene period, move beneath your feet in underground trains. Rooms and corridors have been created for the settlement of thousands of people in the event of calamity.
You are also treading on the city of the past, all of its history from the prehistoric settlers to the present day packed within 24 feet of earthen fabric. The past exists still as the companion of the present city. It is crowded. It has its own heat. A hundred feet beneath the ground the temperature hovers at 65F (19C). It was once a little cooler, but the heat of the electric trains has quickened it.
Certain creatures roam the underworld. Rats, eels, mice and frogs abound. The brown rat from Russia is the most abundant. The native black rat was supposed to exist underground, but is now more likely to be extinct.
It is hard to estimate the number of rats beneath the city, but urban legend that they exceed the human population can be discounted. They are in any case diminished by natural forces; if they cannot escape, they are drowned in heavy rainstorms. They are rivalled by the cockroaches that can live partly on human excrement.
Reports also sometimes circulate of white crabs existing upon the walls of underground tunnels. There have even been descriptions of scorpions, an inch long and pale yellow, on the Central Line. Such white atrophied creatures are known as cavernophiles.
In a previous book I explored the city above the surface; now I wish to descend and explore its depths. Like the nerves within the human body, the underworld controls the life of the surface. Our activities are governed and sustained by materials and signals that emanate from beneath the ground.
It was said of the Victorian Londoner, wrapped in fog and darkness, that he or she would not know the difference between the two worlds. The underworld is haphazard, with many abandoned passages and vast tunnels of brick leading nowhere. Beneath Piccadilly Circus is another great circus of myriad ways. The roads that converge on the Angel, Islington, have their counterparts beneath.
The geology of London is a clue to the labyrinth beneath. The city sits upon a bed of sand, gravel, clay and chalk that make up the London Basin. Deep beneath them are the rocks of the Palaeozoic period shaped hundreds of millions of years before; no one has reached them yet. Above them lie ancient materials known as Gault clay and upper greensand. In turn they support broad bands of chalk laid down when the site of London lay below a vast sea. Upon the chalk rests the clay.
London clay is thick, viscous, and malleable. It was formed more than 50 million years ago. This is the material in which the underworld sits, and through which the tunnels of the underground railway are burrowed.
Above the clay is a mixture of sand and gravel from which the springs of London rise; elevators and escalator shafts lower passengers through this sandy medium. The glaciers of the Ice Age formed the rivers that still flow beneath the surface, and descend into the Thames.
We inhabit an inconceivably ancient space. London is based upon clay, while Manhattan is established upon layers of hard rock known as mica-schist. That accounts for the preponderance of skyscrapers in the latter city. But may it not also help to explain the manifest differences in behaviour and attitude between their citizens?
London is slowly sinking, while Manhattan seems to rise and rise into the empyrean.
So we go down to the clay and the water, the old elemental things of London. They are the origin, and they may also be the ending. The deep groundwater of the city is rising, and 15.4 million gallons must be pumped out each day to save the entire structure.
The 13 rivers and brooks of London still flow. Once they passed through fields and valleys, and now they run along pipes and sewers. They are buried, but they are not dead.
The Westbourne rises in Hampstead and makes its way to the Thames at Chelsea. On its route it passes through Kilburn before flowing through Paddington towards Hyde Park. It once replenished the Serpentine, and that body of water still rests in the valley it created. The knight’s bridge was over the Chelsea reach of the Westbourne, giving its name to the neighbourhood. The area of Bayswater was also named after the river. Kilburn, or cyne-berna (royal stream), is another beneficiary.
On its journey to the Thames the Westbourne passes through a great iron pipe to be seen above the platforms of Sloane Square tube station. In the 18th and early 19th centuries it ran through desolate fields and muddy swamps, but the territory was drained and covered before being transformed into Belgravia. The Westbourne is now known as the Ranelagh sewer.
Many people are fascinated by the course of the subterranean rivers; they track them, sometimes with maps and sometimes with dowsing rods, through unpromising surroundings of council blocks or shopping malls or derelict plots of marshy land.
On stretches of their route the outer world is in mourning for its lost companion. A verse from Job may act as a summary: “Even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.” Time itself does not matter in the presence of the lost river. The Tyburn, for example, flowed in prehistory just as it flows now; joining past and present in a perpetual embrace.
The Neckinger flows south of the Thames; it has its origin beneath the Imperial War Museum and then runs under Elephant and Castle before following the New Kent Road; it turns north-east into Prioress Street and Abbey Street, the site of Bermondsey Abbey.
Its channels, in the lower reaches, formed one of the most notorious London districts. Jacob’s Island was immortalised by Dickens as the home of Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, and was dubbed in the Morning Chronicle as the “Venice of drains” and the “capital of cholera”.
Charles Kingsley visited the river’s neighbourhood in 1849, and exclaimed to his wife, “Oh God! What I saw! People having no water to drink – hundreds of them – but the water of the common sewer which stagnates …”
Underground water has often been associated with disease. But there is another phenomenon associated with London’s lost rivers. In his survey entitled The Geography of London’s Ghosts (1960), GW Lambert concluded that approximately three quarters of the city’s paranormal activity takes place near buried waters.
Some may conclude that the spiritual properties of the rivers have been confirmed. The more sceptical will believe that the flowing of buried waters merely creates strange effects of sound.
The most powerful of all London’s buried rivers is undoubtedly the Fleet, which rises at two spots on Hampstead Heath before flowing down the Fleet Road to Camden Town. Its history is as varied as that of the city itself. It has created its own mythology. A number of poems have been dedicated to it.
Even its origin has literary associations. Samuel Pickwick read a paper to the Pickwick Club, on May 12 1827, entitled “Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead ponds, with some observations on the Theory of Tittlebats”. At a later and more melancholy date in his illustrious career Pickwick found himself incarcerated within the Fleet Prison. So he came to know the river well.
Its name derives from the Anglo-Saxon fleotan, meaning to float, or from the Saxon flod or flood. Its two sources are united north of Camden Town, where in the early 19th century the river was more than 60ft wide; an anchor was found in the riverbed here, suggesting that it was possible for boats to reach upriver into what were then the outskirts of London.
It ran south past Old St Pancras Church towards King’s Cross. From that point forward the modern streets give a clear indication of its course. In vision we see the slopes of the hills and valleys all around us, as we walk along King’s Cross Bridge into St Chad’s Place before turning right into King’s Cross Road; the adjacent roads here rise up on the left hand, in an area that was once the haunt of wells, springs and pleasure gardens.
As we proceed along Pakenham Street, Phoenix Place and Warner Street, the roads rise on the right and we see Eyre Street Hill and Back Hill. This was a place of green banks and gardens. The river then turns southward into Farringdon Lane and Turnmill Street, where once its current turned three mills.
Five bridges once spanned the lower part of the Fleet, which eventually decants into the Thames at Blackfriars. Holborn Bridge rose where Holborn Viaduct now stands: Holborn is a derivation from “old bourne” or stream.
The Fleet was the western boundary of Roman London and still marks the border of Westminster and the City. But the curse of the city was already upon this notable river.
The slaughterhouses and tanneries of Smithfield discharged all their waste into the waters, fouling it almost to choking point. Only periodic attempts were made at cleansing. It was scoured clean at the beginning of the 16th century, for example, so that boats could once again sail up to Fleet Bridge and Oldbourne Bridge. It was thoroughly cleaned a hundred years later, and again in 1652 when it was clogged “by the throwing in of offal and other garbage by butchers, saucemen, and others, and by reason of the many houses of office standing over upon it”. A “house of office” was a public lavatory. It was now in its lower reaches a brown soup.
Ben Jonson’s poem “On the Famous Voyage” (1612), celebrates – if that is the word – a journey up the Fleet: “How dare Your daintie nostrils (in so hot a season, When every clerke eates artichokes and peason, Laxative lettus, and such windie meat) /Tempt such a passage? When each privies seate Is fill’d with buttock? And the walls doe sweate Urine and plaisters?”
After the Great Fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren determined to replace the river of s--t with a river of majesty. He widened the Fleet and gave it some of the characteristics of a Venetian canal, with wharves of stone on either side and with a grand new Holborn bridge. This bridge was found beneath the ground in 1826, having in the end been surmounted by the rubbish of the city.
Only 40 years after Wren’s renovation, Ned Ward, in The London Spy (1703), remarked that “the greatest good that I ever heard it did was to the undertaker, who is bound to acknowledge he has found better fishing in that muddy stream than ever he did in clear water”.
George Farquhar, in Sir Harry Wildair (1701), refers to “the dear perfume of Fleet Ditch”. Alexander Pope completes this litany of Fleet elegists with the Dunciad (1728), in which the river forms the murky background to a satire on London corruption and wretchedness; on its stream rolls “the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames”. In the winter of 1763 a barber from Bromley, the worse for drink, fell into the waters and was so enmired in mud that he froze to death overnight.
Eventually the canal was built over, and the wharves became streets; a public market was erected just above the junction with Fleet Street, now called Ludgate Circus, and in the 1820s Farringdon Street was built. Yet the Fleet was not wholly or safely buried. In 1846 it blew up and its fetid gases, as well as its waters, escaped into the outer world.
The roads became impassable and the houses inundated. Three poorhouses were deluged and partly destroyed by a great wave of sewage. A steamboat was smashed against the Blackfriars Bridge. The tunnels of London Underground in the vicinity are kept dry by means of pumps.
The archaeology of the area is a matter for wonder. At the place where the Fleet and Thames become one, 11 bodies from the 11th century were uncovered in the early Nineties; the bodies had been dismembered and decapitated before being buried. A lavatory of three seats, dating from the 12th century, was found deposited in the mud as a reminder of one of the river’s original functions. A black rat, the harbinger of plague, was also found.
The Fleet river was always synonymous with crime and disease, not least because of the Fleet Prison that stood beside its eastern bank. This place of dread reputation is mentioned for the first time in documents of the 12th century, and was erected upon one of the two islands of the Fleet, with a bridge connecting it to the mainland of the city ditch; the “Gaol of London” was finally demolished in 1845.
Criminal fraternities congregated along the Fleet. A house close to Smithfield became in the 18th century a haven for thieves and footpads of every description. A trapdoor in the building led directly down to the water, and victims were sometimes unceremoniously bundled out. One sailor had been decoyed before being robbed and stripped; he was “taken up at Blackfriars bridge a corpse”.
When “the Old House in West Street”, as it was known, was demolished its cellars were full of human bones. Turnmill Street was notable for its brothels, and Saffron Hill for its robbers.
In the 19th century William Pinks, in his History of Clerkenwell (1881), remarked that “vice of every kind was rampant in this locality, no measures being effectual for its suppression; the appointed officers of the law were both defied and terrified”.
Schemes have been proposed to allow the Fleet to flow again through the streets of London. A plan has been made to build an observation platform beneath Ludgate Circus, where the buried waters might be seen.
The river has not entirely lost its hold upon the imagination of the city. On the corner of Warner Street and Ray Street, in the road before the Coach and Horses pub, a piece of grating can be found. If you put your ear close to it, you can still hear the sound of the river pulsing underneath. It is not dead.
The Mole Men: Britain's celebrated tunnellers
Some people seem to be born to dig tunnels. William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the fifth Duke of Portland in the mid-19th century, is best known for his obsessive desire to build a system of tunnels beneath his estate so that he could move about unseen; the underground represented for him safety and invisibility. The moment of birth must have been deeply troubling for him.
More recently the late William Lyttle spent 40 years building a system of tunnels, some of them 60 feet long, beneath his home in Hackney. Neighbours’ complaints of inexplicable earth movements led to the system’s discovery in 2003.
One of the greatest of the mole men is Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, whose dream of tunnelling beneath the Thames was achieved at the expense of much cost and suffering. The secret of his success lay in the humble mollusc, the Teredo navalis or shipworm.
It eats the timber of a ship and passes the wood through its body; its excreta are then used to bolster the fabric of the tunnel it has created. Brunel realised that the same process could be used on a much grander scale, with the invention of a massive Teredo navalis made out of iron.
As the engine advanced, the workers, in 36 separate “cells” at the front, would carve out two inches of clay at a time; a team of men in the rear would then line the newly uncovered piece of tunnel with brick and stone.
The chosen route beneath the river united Rotherhithe with Wapping. The work began on March 2 1825 with the building of the initial shaft to link the surface with the tunnel’s mouth. Four months later, a workman fell down it and was killed. He was the first propitiatory sacrifice.
At the beginning of 1826, the river flooded the workings. The damp and darkness provoked symptoms variously described as “ague” and “dysentery”; one miner succumbed to delirium, and died. The terror of the underworld had taken hold.
When the project’s Chief Engineer collapsed from the strain, he was replaced by Marc Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who soon found that the tunnel was approaching the bed of the Thames. This part was packed with bags of clay, but they weren’t enough. In 1827, the Thames broke through once more; one workman was killed in the flood, another developed fever and dysentery and died.
Two more died in 1828 when the river again inundated the workings, but Isambard Kingdom Brunel was swept by the force of the water up the shaft to the surface. A parson from Rotherhithe deemed the calamity “a just judgment on the presumptuous aspirations of mortal men”. It was wrong to go beneath the earth, closer to the infernal regions.
The project was halted, but revived in 1836. By now workers were digging through earth heavily impregnated with foul gases, described by one as “vomiting flames of fire which burned with a roaring noise”.
Marc Brunel’s diary is a litany of sorrowful mysteries. On March 16 1838, he wrote that the workmen were complaining “very much” and 10 days later reported that “Heywood [a miner] died this morning. Two more on the sick list. Page is evidently sinking very fast…”
On August 10, the foreman of the works was escorted to a lunatic asylum.
Eleven died in the last two years of the enterprise. There was no science of underground engineering. Brunel had merely copied the activity of a mollusc.
When the first subaqueous tunnel of the modern world was opened by Queen Victoria at the beginning of 1843, the triumph was not what it seemed. With the only way in or out of the tunnel by means of the vertical shafts on either bank, it offered no opportunity for the vehicle traffic originally envisaged.
Many people visited it, eager for the sensation of walking beneath the Thames, but its popularity did not last. “The very walls were in a cold sweat,” The Times reported on its opening, with the first visitors also afflicted by “a lurking, chilling fear.”
Popularly supposed to be the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, the tunnel became known as “the Hades Hotel”. In 1865, it was taken over by the East London Railway and it has remained an underground tunnel for the “tube” ever since.
Sea air and cocktails: Things you never knew about London Underground
Ozone was pumped onto tube platforms in the Twenties. The bizarre attempt to make the world beneath smell of the sea succeeded only in making commuters feel ill.
Deep pits known as “catch pits” are built beneath underground rails, to catch and save people if they fall through.
Bars serving alcohol once graced the Underground, including the famed “Hole in the Wall” on the west platform of Sloane Square.
People who try to throw themselves under trains are known as “jumpers”. Any suicide attempt is followed by an announcement asking an “Inspector Sands” to investigate an “incident”.
The tiles of the now forgotten “Down Street” Station can be spotted as you journey between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner.
The favoured time of day for suicide attempts is 11am, the most common stations being King’s Cross and Victoria.
Lancaster Gate was once known as an assignation place for homosexuals.
Much literature has been inspired by the “romance” of the Underground, including Rose Macaulay’s Told By An Idiot (1923), in which two young people indulge in the pleasure of going around and around the Circle Line.
Extracted from ‘London Under’ by Peter Ackroyd, (Chatto & Windus, rrp £12.99), available from Telegraph Books at £11.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk