Short History Of... - The London Underground

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

The London Underground – often known simply as the Tube – is central to the city’s global identity. A pioneering feat of engineering at the time of its construction in the 19th century, on a typical weekday, the network now carries 5 million passengers between 272 stations, on 11 different lines, over a total of 250 miles of track. It’s an emblem of entrepreneurial ambition, cutting-edge technology, and genius design – but has also seen heartbreaking tragedy. Who were the audacious visionaries who built the London Underground from scratch more than 160 years ago? How did it go from being a marvel of transportation to a marketing phenomenon, and one of the most recognisable brands on earth? And, how did the Tube reinvent itself once again as the face of twenty-first century London? A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Christian Wolmar, author of ‘The Subterranean Railway,’ and host of the ‘Calling All Stations’ podcast. Written by Edward White | Produced by Kate Simants | Assistant Producer: Nicole Edmunds | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay, Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Get every episode of Short History Of… a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fly Air Transat! Seven Time winners! Champions, again! Fly the Seven Time World's Best Leisure Airline Champions, Air Transat. It's 7.29 p.m. on the 18th of November, 1987. Beneath the streets of Central London, King's Cross Station, is a churn of activity. This is the busiest interchange on the London Underground, the oldest subterranean railway in the world. Tonight, passengers hurry on and off the trains as usual.

Patrolling the station is police constable Stephen Hanson. For him, it's been an uneventful evening, little to report. But then his radio sparks into life. The fire has been reported on the Piggy Dilly Line escalator. As P.C. Hansen hurries to the scene, another officer calls the fire brigade. Hansen descends the escalator. Halfway down, he sees it. A lick of flame, emerging from beneath the moving wooden staircase. Two of his fellow officers see it too and head to the bottom. There, they divert passengers towards the Victoria Line escalators, at the top of which Hansen now moves to stand guard,

shepherding passengers out of the station to safety. All the while, the fire grows. Smoke drifts its way up into the ticket hall. The flames climb higher and the heat intensifies. Hopeful the trains are now being diverted away from the station until the situation is brought under control. Hansen continues to encourage passengers to exit quickly but calmly. Then he hears a sound that turns his blood cold, a train coming to a halt.

Clearly, some haven't got the message to avoid King's Cross. The doors of the train open. Dozens of passengers exit. Now, unable to hide his agitation, Hansen starts shouting at the arriving passengers to leave the station immediately. He goes a short distance towards the ticket hall and sees that the first firefighters are now approaching the blaze. But just then, a fireball engulfs the escalator. Hansen is knocked off balance as flames roll across the ceiling of the ticket hall towards him. Chaos breaks out.

In the extreme heat, glass shatters and wall tiles explode. The flames are swiftly followed by blinding black. by blinding black smoke. His hands cut and badly burned, P.C. Hansen crawls on all fours towards what he hopes is the exit. Eventually a fellow policeman finds him and drags him outside where he sits, panting with relief in the cold November night. But for the others, the ordeal is only just beginning.

For the next two hours, more than 100 firefighters battle the conflagration underground. Temperatures rise to 600 degrees Celsius, well over 1,000 Fahrenheit. At 9.48 p.m., the fire is officially brought under control. But for 31 unlucky people, caught up in the blaze that goes down in history as one of the underground's worst disasters, it is too late. The London Underground, often known simply, as the tube, is central to the city's global identity. A pioneering feat of engineering at the time of its construction in the 19th century, on a typical weekday the network now carries 5 million passengers,

between 272 stations on 11 different lines, over a total of 250 miles of track. It's an emblem of entrepreneurial ambition, cutting-edge technology, and genius design, but has also seen heartbreaking tragedy. So who were the audacious visionaries who built the London underground from scratch more than 160 years ago? How did it go from being a marvel of transportation

to a marketing phenomenon and one of the most recognizable brands on earth? And how did the tube reinvent itself once again as the face of 21st century London? I'm John Hopkins, from the Noysa Podcast Network. This is a short history of the London Underground. In the mid-19th century, London is a city bursting at the seams. As the capital of a global empire, this is the largest metropolis in Europe, a vibrant throng of industry and commerce, densely populated by two.

and a half million people. But it's also a commuter's nightmare. With hundreds of thousands traveling into the city for work every day, the roads are clogged with a stinking mass of pedestrians, wagons, omnibuses, coaches, and of course horses that pave the streets with manure. The arrival of steam trains has only added to the slow-moving chaos. In the 1830s, a few years after the world's first steam-powered passenger railway is opened in northern England, train lines to and from London are built by a host of rival companies, connecting the capital with the rest of the country. By the 1850s, London has several mainline stations, such as Paddington in the West and Kings Cross to the north. But making a connection across the city from one

mainline route to another is a tedious, time-consuming business. Thankfully, among London's squashed masses are some visionary thinkers. One of them is the lawyer Charles Pearson. On numerous issues, he is a man ahead of his time, a supporter of universal suffrage and prison reform. He also has some radical ideas about reducing overcrowding in London. Christian Woolmar is the author of the Subterranean Railway and host of the Calling All Stations podcast. Charles Pearson really can lay claim to being the father of their London underground system. London was a crowded mess, and a lot of the slums were right in the centre.

His idea was that people should live further out, and the only way that they would be able to achieve that would be with a railway system. Well, you can't demolish all their houses on the way to central London from the suburbs. would have to put the railway underground. And that was the revolutionary idea. Pearson's early ideas involved trains being pulled around subterranean tracks by atmospheric pressure, eliminating the smoke and steam produced on conventional railways. His vision is often ridiculed. To some Victorians, the idea of an underground railway, funneling people down into dark tunnels like rats seems appalling and becomes known as the Trains in Drain's Plan.

Yet Pearson won't be discouraged. In 1852 he establishes the City Terminus Company. The plan is to build an underground railway big enough to host eight separate lines. Each will connect various London mainline stations to one enormous new hub to be constructed in Farringdon, right in the heart of the city. If that happens, many of London's poorest will be able to move out of the slums, but still have quick, cheap access to their places of work. Initially, the idea goes nowhere, partly because of the cost and disruption that building such a vast new terminus in central London would cause.

But by this time, rival plans for an underground railway are beginning to attract attention. In 1853, a group, unconnected to Pearson, approached the authorities with something more pragmatic. Known as the Metropolitan Railway, this scheme will feature no new terminus, just a single line running from Paddington to King's Cross, then heading south-eastwards to Farringdon. The company assures the government that the trains will be powered by smokeless steam engines, though the precise detail of how these will work is yet to be determined. A year later, the Metropolitan Railway Company has given the go-ahead. But immediately there is a problem.

Sources of potential investment dry up, in large part because of the outbreak of the Crimean War. Q. Charles Pearson once again. Pearson managed to patch together a group of railway companies and a bit of money from the city of London to get this railway started. In October 1859, Spades break ground for the first time. And it caused a lot of disruption. There was no tunneling that comes later. You basically dug your great big hole where there was a road

and then you put the railway in and then you covered it over. It's called cut and cover. But doubts about the safety of the project are only exacerbated in 1862 when building work hits an enormous snag. In June, a storm floods the fleet sewer, which runs close to the line between King's Cross and Farringdon. Overwhelmed by rain, the sewer bursts, seriously damaging the metropolitan construction site. Thankfully, no lives are lost, although work is delayed by several months. Ultimately, this means Charles Pearson will never see his dream of an underground railway realized.

He dies a few months before the line is open to the public. to the public. That momentous day arrives on Saturday the 10th of January 1863. Any fears that Londoners would be too cautious to patronize it are immediately dispelled. More than 30,000 passengers are carried on the first day. Over the next six months, the Metropolitan carries a daily average of 26,500. passengers. Newspapers declare the new railway a resounding success. Not only are 90-minute journeys cut to just 20, but travelling underground turns out much less nightmarish than anticipated.

In particular, it's a great relief to discover that the trains and stations are not pitch black, thanks to the installation of plentiful gas lamps. Some stations also feature ingenious apertures carved into the ceilings and walls, allowing daylight to flood the platforms. The service appeals to rich and poor alike. Swift transit around the city is as attractive to those off for an evening at the opera as it is to workers on the morning shift. Inevitably in 19th century England, class distinctions are evident in the ticketing. A seat in a roomy, well-lit and luxuriously upholstered first-class carriage, costs sixpence, while four pennies will get you a leather-covered seat in a less spacious

second-class carriage. Everyone else makes do with the more basic third-class surroundings for tuppence. At a time when many Londoners' weekly income is far less than a pound, or 240 pence, those fares are still steep, though in coming years prices will fall considerably. But it's not all good news. Despite the Metropolitan's promises, engineers have failed to develop reliable, smokeless trains. So, from the first day of service, the underground runs nothing but steam engines. They had a type of engine that condensed a lot of the smoke. They had stations such as Oldgate, where they came out of the open air, so that was kind of helpful. I still can't quite believe it, really, because, you know, it was impossible to condense everything.

And yet people were ready to use this, and they did so in large numbers, because it was such a convenient service. Various pharmacies at the stations provided something called the Metropolitan Mixure, which presumably was smelling salts or whatever to kind of revive them after their horrors of being in the smoky atmosphere at the stations. All in all, however, the opening of the Metropolitan... is hailed as a triumph. London has a new institution of which to be proud. Once it's up and running, a horde of private firms

pitch the government ideas for expanding the network. In Great Britain, we do do things by competition rather than by a cooperation. So our railway network, for example, was developed largely or entirely by private companies, often rivaling each other and often kind of duplicating each other's services. It was the same pattern on the London Underground. The main focus of expansion is a line that will link either end of the Metropolitan Route,

forming what's dubbed an Inner Circle Railway. The contract to build this circle is awarded to a brand new company, called, somewhat confusingly, the Metropolitan District Railway, or the District for short. Initially, the idea is that once the circle is complete, the district will merge with the Metropolitan. Until then, they are to operate as separate entities. This unwieldy arrangement sounds to some like a headache waiting to happen. The concerns, as it turns out, are not unfounded. From the outset, the two companies are at loggerheads, mainly over ticket pricing and profit sharing.

The conflicts are aggravated by a long-standing rivalry between the men who will become the company's respective leaders, James Forbes of the District and Edward Watkin of the Metropolitan. These two guys, Forbes and Watkins hated each other because they ran different railway companies in Kent. One of them ran the South Eastern and the other ran the London Chatham and Dover. And these were rival companies and so they continued to rival each other in London. Maybe it's just a phase you're going through. You'll get over it. I can't help you with that.

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to help us forge a better path for mental health care. Hungry now. Now? What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are, grab an O. Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge

with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O. Henry today. Oh, hungry, oh Henry. The first stretch of the district's new line opens in 1868. It's a further 16 years until the circle is complete. Forbes and Watkin both travel on the first circle train, but it's far from a joyous occasion. On the day that they finally opened the circle line in 1884,

they sat together in the carriage but absolutely refused to speak to each other. The companies do not merge as originally planned. The enmity continues. The conflicts have a direct impact on circle line customers. The Metropolitan Railway ran clockwise trains, and the district railway ran the other trains in the other direction. And indeed, every station would have two different ticket offices. And if you made a mistake and went to the wrong ticket office,

they'll sell you a ticket that would take you three quarters around the system instead of saying, oh, go over there and buy the ticket for the other system. I mean, it's quite extraordinary. A particular low point comes when the two companies argue over who possesses the rights to a siding at South Kensington. To assert its ownership, the district chains one of its trains to the tracks and refuses to move it. Incensed, the Metropolitan sends three of its own engines to try to physically pull the district engine out of the way. Despite the squabbling, by the early 1880s, London's underground railway connects disparate parts of the city, from Harrow on the hill in the north to Putney down south, ealing Broadway in the west to Aldgate further east.

And despite early fears, it proves remarkably safe. By the time the circle line opens in 1884, other parts of the system have been operating for 21 years, and as yet, there's been. have been no fatalities as a result of an underground train accident. But as the network grows, one problem remains. The pollution that fills the underground air, choke damp, as it's now called. It is the 23rd of June, 1887. On a pleasant summer's afternoon, the American journalist R.D. Blumenfeld is walking along the southern edge of Regents Park. London this summer is a picture. The start of the week saw two days

of city-wide festivities celebrating Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Blumenfeld, sociable, witty, incurably inquisitive, has been in his element, people watching among the crowds for a grand royal procession and marvelling at the flare Londoners seem to have for alcohol consumption. Today he's sauntering to Baker Street for another new experience. his first journey on the world-famous underground railway. In the elegant high-ceilinged ticket hall, clusters of people make their way to and from the platforms below. The hum of conversation all around him,

he joins one of the lengthy cues for a ticket. After a couple of minutes, he finds himself in front of the counter. A young, smartly-dressed clerk asks him what ticket he'd like. Blumenfeld purchases a single first class for Morgate Street, a few stops east. Once he descends the stairs, he sees Baker Street's impressive platform, those curving apertures cut into the brickwork that allow the sunlight to pour in. It is, however, more than a little hot down here. He pulls at his stiff collar and exhales heavily.

Even though the Metropolitan Line is only about 20 feet, beneath the surface, it's enough to bring about a noticeable shift in temperature. Happily, a train soon arrives. Blumenfeld steps inside a carriage and settles himself on one of the rows of leather seats. The carriage door is slammed shut, and the train slowly pulls away from the platform. Within seconds of departing, though, he's thinking he might have made a terrible mistake. of the other men in the carriage light up their pipes. A particularly British habit, Blumenfeld thinks, and one that he can't stand. Each puff of tobacco lingers in the air. The

journalist looks above and sees the windows are all closed. It's just as well. Opening them down here would only fill the carriage with steam and engine smoke. The train chugs its way away from the platform. The carriage rocks and jolts as they accelerate. The noise of the engine, only intensifying as they head into the tight tunnel. For Blumenfeld, it is a surprisingly intense sensory experience. In this noisy, juddering, stultifying space, he feels as though he's being poisoned. He can taste the horrors in each breath, stale tobacco, sulfurous engine smoke, claggy coal dust. By the time his journey comes to its end at Morgate Street, he can barely wait to get out. He feels on the verge of collapsing with the heat and the rancid air.

As he hurries up the station steps, he feels as though he is ascending from the depths of hell. The first hit of fresh air is an immense relief. The city is alive with its own foul odors, of course, but the American would rather contend with those than the asphyxiating stench of the underground railway. Why Londoners subject themselves to that, all for the sake of a few minutes saved, is a mystery to him. The first 25 years of London's underground railways, air pollution is the smelly elephant in the room.

But as the 19th century draws to a close, things change. Plans emerge for a new line named the City and South London Railway, which will take the underground south of the Thames for the first time. To achieve that, something unprecedented is required a railway tunnel dug deep beneath the river. The engineers utilise a new invention called the Great Head Shield, a vast cylindrical device that helps to cut through London's soft clay. The resulting tunnel gives rise to the city's nickname for its underground system, the tube.

But there is a problem. Ventilation for steam engines is difficult and not. enough on the shallow, cut and cover lines that occasionally emerge into the open air. Down here, in the tube, pollution would be simply unbearable. Happily, another technological leap forward is at hand, electrification. But the early iteration of the system is far from flawless. It was powered by little electric locomotives, which didn't always have enough power. So when they got to the city, they had to go up an incline, and sometimes they didn't quite manage.

is to get up the inclines that they'd have to roll back and then try again as one does when one's trying to get up a hill when you're which is covered in snow or whatever and it's not an experience i just think that people would put up with today of kind of rolling back and then giving it another go over the years the technology will improve but in any case when the city and south london railway opens in 1890 it's a two in one world first the only deep level tube and the first electrified underground railway. By now, Paris is about to open its own metro, and work is yet to start on New York's, but London already has a sophisticated and extensive underground infrastructure.

As such, ambitious mavericks are keen to involve themselves with this exciting, ever-developing project, and make themselves a tidy profit along the way. Enter the American entrepreneur Charles Yerkes. A key figure in the development of public transport in Chicago, he is a notorious philanderer who once served a prison sentence in the US for embezzlement. In 1900, he visits London and scopes out the potential for investing in its underground railway. Whether motivated by profit, romance, adventure, or a combination of all three, he decides that the city's subterranean depths, will host his next grand scheme. Charles Yerkes was an extraordinary character.

I've always struck by the Victorian and Edwardian entrepreneurs and how they were prepared to innovate and risk things. It's a real spirit of genuine capitalist enterprise that flourished from the middle of the 19th century to the First World War and a period in which everything seemed possible. Of course, there's lots of ideas that failed. I mean, there was an idea for an elevated railway in the early Edwardian period that was a kind of monorail. So the ones that we see today are those are the ones that have survived this process of trial and error.

But I love the fact that there were these people. A lot of them were not particularly nice characters, but they left their legacy. By 1901, Yerkes has control of the district, as well as a number of other prominent companies. The following year, he acquires further assets and unites them all within a new organization, the Underground Electric Railways of London, better known as the U-E-R-L. It's a big step towards ending the capitalist free-for-all that has powered the development of the underground. Yerke's impact is vast and virtually immediate. He begins work on three new lines, which today London's work on three new lines, which today London

Londoners know as the Bakerloo, the Northern and the Piccadilly. Then, almost as quickly as it began, his association with the underground railway reaches its terminus. In the last week of 1905, roughly four years into his involvement with London's transport network, Yerkes suddenly dies. But his transformative work is all in place. Within the next two years, the new lines, all deep level electrified services are open for business. Many historians of 20th century London are convinced that without Yerkes, the underground, and therefore the city itself would look very different. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like?

With Ancestry's global historical records, you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked, and for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free. Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records, or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. After the flurry of new Yerkees built lines in 1907, no entirely new. new deep level line is built until the 1960s. But the existing network continues to grow through extensions and mergers. The complicating factor here is that although the UERL holds the biggest chair, in the early

years of the 20th century, the Underground Railway still consists of various independent companies with their own agendas and interests. Yet in 1907 there is a breakthrough. An agreement is reached among all parties on a new, Unile, form fair structure, a boon for customers. Around the same time, the various companies come to a consensus on an overarching brand identity. Several pioneering figures are involved in this. One is the recently appointed publicity manager, Frank Pick.

Previously employed at a major overground railway company in the north of England, unlike some of the other characters in this tale, Pick is no extrovert. Aloof and taciturn, he has very little in the way of patience. What he does have, however, is an understanding of marketing. Among his first moves is to oversee the redesign of the logo that will appear on trains and stations, a unique marker for the underground in the way that the intertwined red and white stripes are for London's barbershops. Though an early version of the red roundel has been in use for decades, the updated logo overlays a red circle with a blue bar.

Bold, all-white capital letters finished the design, with a word underground, book-ended with larger letters at the beginning and end. Well over 100 years later, it's still instantly recognisable. The famous Roundel with the station name across the middle of a circle, it's world-famous, and has been imitated. The Indian Railways actually have a version of it. Along with the Roundell, there is a distinctive new typeface, commissioned by Pick and designed by Edward John. PIC also recruits leading British creative talents to position the underground as something more than a public transport system. He also helped commission a whole lot of wonderful art posters kind of advertising the idea of the tube and with really the key artists of the day. And they're a magnificent set of posters which you can find in the London Transport Museum and online, which are really unparalleled.

commercial art. The original underground line, the Metropolitan Railway, is still a separate company from the U.E.R.L. But it too makes excellent use of leading creative talents. One project in particular stands out from the crowd. Uniquely of all railway companies in the UK, the Metropolitan Railway was able to develop land that it owned. around stations. And that gave it a fantastic advantage in being able to sell the houses

to people who would want to come to live there. But also, those people would necessarily become customers, passengers on the railway. The company builds huge housing estates to the northwest of London, at places such as Pinner, Wembley and Niesden. Populations saw as sleepy villages turn into bustling suburbs invigorated by rail stations.

In 1915, the marketing department of the Metropolitan coins a name for these suburbs, Metroland. In the decades between the two world wars, Metroland thrives, physically and conceptually. Leading graphic artists are recruited to create posters, newspaper adverts and pamphlets that are still considered classics of design and marketing. They sell Metroland as a rural idyll, just a short train ride away from the beating heart of the capital. In later years, the poet laureate John Betchaman will write poems and make television documentaries extolling Metroland, though this vision of suburbia is ridiculed and demeaned by others who find it bland, soulless and artificial.

Either way, the story of Metroland is the clearest example of the full reach of the London Underground's impact, by the 1930s. It's an absolutely symbiotic relationship, and transport is always a bit like that. Do you have the transport infrastructure and then hope that the towns are going to build around it, or do you do it the other way around? The last of the Metroland advertising pamphlets

is produced in 1932. The following year, the business model that has defined the London Underground for seven decades is swept away. Until now, development has, more or less, been driven by competition between rival companies. Though it fosters and thrives upon entrepreneurial vision, it's also a system that fosters confusion and inefficiency. But in 1933, a momentous decision is taken to merge all the underground companies, as well as bus and tram operators, into a single entity, the London Passenger Transport Board, or London Transport for short.

Now named Vice Chairman and CEO, Frank Pick seizes the opportunity to push his ideas even further. Throughout the 30s, several lines are extended, and Pick drafts in the architect Charles Holden to lead the design of the new stations. What results is a fresh style for the underground, evident in stations on the Piccadilly line such as Turnpike Lane, Wood Green and Anus Grove. Inspired by European modernism, Holden holds to prove. principles of what he calls simple, honest architecture. Often described as brick boxes with concrete lids, they're characterized by clean, modernist look in the art deco fashion, generously punctuated with windows and prominently adorned with the now famous underground roundel. Holden prides himself on attention to detail. Inside the new buildings, everything from lighting

fixtures to litter bins are designed to mirror the aesthetics of the architecture. To their admirers, these details are what make the station's modern design classics. Not everyone is impressed, however, and critics complain that the new look is overly functional, devoid of the romance of the old days of rail travel. But the sleek, spare aesthetic is soon taken up by other designers of public buildings. Schools, hospitals, even power stations are built along the same lines. Yet again, the underground is shaping the city that created it. Perhaps even more consequential than the new station is a new map designed in 1933 by Harry Beck.

Harry Beck was actually an electrician, and that was important because really, if you look at it, it's a wiring diagram in a lot of respects. And the big difference was that the old underground maps were rather confusing because they were representational. So they were just the lines plonked in various colors on top of a surface map. And their kind of went higgledy, piggled it around. Beck instead made them diagrammatic rather than representational. So his lines do not represent the actual parts of the lines, but they represent the links between them. And that simplifies it.

He had certain rules like, you know, you can only have 45 degree angles or 90 degree angles. to link places. There's barely a tube subway system in the world that doesn't use some kind of aspect of Beck's map. Tokyo, which has the most complicated system in the world, still has a map that is recognisable as being inspired by Harry Beck's work. By the end of the 1930s,

the London Underground is a vibrant living monument to the city's past and present. rational and modern, as well as bursting with its pioneering heritage, this revamped system has expanded services right across the city, and its captivating brand identity has made it as much a symbol of the capital as Buckingham Palace or Big Ben. But as the decade draws to a close, London is shaken, quite literally, by global conflict. However, far from passively waiting it out, the underground itself plays a cruxious. role for the citizens who have been its loyal passengers.

In September 1939, the British government declares war against Nazi Germany. London braces itself for bombardment from Adolf Hitler's Air Force. But the expected onslaught doesn't materialize, not immediately at least. For the next 12 months, Londoners nervously await annihilation from the skies. eyes. In the meantime, those who are able build bomb shelters in their back gardens. In poorer districts, communal brick shelters are erected, but this still leaves swathes of the population without protection. There are calls for the authorities to build large, deep-level shelters, but at first at least, the demands go unheeded. In the relatively few bombing raids on

London during the First World War, some tube stations had been used as shelters. But the government fears that repeating this could spread disease and lead to what it calls deep shelter mentality, making people reluctant to return to the surface. Their message is clear. The underground is not an impromptu air raid shelter. But once the havoc begins, things quickly change. It is early in the evening of the 8th of September 1940. In the east end of London, the air is filled with the sound of sirens.

Yesterday, the Nazis launched their first bombing raid on London. Their principal target was the area around the docks in the east of the city, a working-class enclave. 430 lives were claimed in the first installment of what is to be known as the Blitz. This evening, Londoners refused to be sitting ducks when the attacks begin. In Stepney Green, a huge crowd of agitated people is on the move. Among them is Bernard Cops, a 13-year-old boy with a blanket tucked under his arm. Alongside him are his seven siblings and their parents who are doing an admirable job of hiding their frantic concern from the children. The family, among hundreds of their fellow Londoners,

are making their way to Liverpool Street Station, a transport hub for the area and one of the largest underground stations in the city. As they close in on Liverpool Street, the crowd thickens. People are coming from all over the East End, Whitechapel, Spittelfields, Shortwich. At the station entrance, a group of air raid wardens and raided. railway staff block their path. They are under strict instructions not to allow anyone in. Shouting and screaming begins. Jammed in the thick of bodies, Bernard is terrified. Soon he can barely find the breath to shout and feels himself going limp. He is carried forward

with the crowd while to his side his mother begins praying. Then a sudden cheer goes up from the front and the press of body's loosens. The soldiers have relented. With the metal gates flung open, the people, perhaps thousands of them by now, surge into the station. Careful to stay close to his family, Bernard follows the throng inside.

Down on the platform, the teenager hurries ahead to find a spare stretch of concrete and lays his blanket down. His mother has brought sandwiches, packed in a tin. Opening them up, she shares them out. The spare is going to complete strangers. Bernard looks around as the mass of people settle, spread all over the platforms and the track. Some children have found a space to chalk out a hopscotch grid. Mothers turn their backs to the crowd to suckle their babies. As night falls, the chatter on the platform subsides. The relative quiet

is filled with a dull thud of bombs. Lights flicker. The ground shakes. Bernard, exhausted by stress and fear, tries in vain to sleep. But everything down here is too unfamiliar and everything up there too frightening. When morning comes, the people are given the all clear. They file out, and the trains resume their journeys around the city. Bernard emerges back into the light of day to see Londoners cleaning up from the raid, sweeping glass, trying to restore normality. His hometown is battered, but just about standing. The moment the crowds are let into Liverpool Street Station, the government ban on using the underground as air raid shelters is effectively ended.

Over the next eight months, its platforms and tunnels become vital places of refuge for countless Londoners during the Luftwaffe's bombing raids. At first, conditions are appalling. There are no facilities for housing thousands of people overnight, no toilets, food or medical supplies, and no demarcation of space. Then it became organised, and London Transport actually kept running during the day, and then people would shelter in the underground stations. night and there'd be trains bringing buns and bread and so on so it then became you know part institutionalized by the end of 1940 almost all 79 tube stations are in use as shelters with more than 15 miles of platform and tunnels sheltering more than 150,000 people each night in some stations a real sense of community builds up libraries newsletters and

and even series of lectures are established. However, it's all too easy to romanticise what is an extremely difficult time for hundreds of thousands of people. There was some tragedies on the underground system. There was a terrible trampling incident in Bethnal Green where there was a sort of panic and people were trampled on the staircase

and more than 100 people were killed. And then there was a bomb which burst of water main in Ballam and lots of people drowned. But undoubtedly, found, or tens of thousands of thousands of people's lives were saved by being able to shelter in the underground. And it was a fantastic system. This episode is brought to you by Peloton.

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Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts,

a secure VPN for a private connection, and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web? Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. With the end of the war comes a far-reaching reassessment of life in London and beyond.

As the job of rebuilding begins, new ideas emerge about the future of transport in the city. In transport planners' heads, there was the idea that actually, public transport is a bit of 19, early 20th century, and that really everybody is going to use their cars to get everywhere. And we've got to redesign cities around that. New plans come thick and fast. Some, in their way, sound as ambitious and fantastical as Charles Pearson's scheme for an underground railway

had been 100 years earlier. It was actually a plan in London to have urban motorways. It had got flyovers and cross. crossovers and three lanes of motorway right into Topham Court Road. Ultimately, such bracing ideas go nowhere. The London Underground enters a period of relative inactivity, decline perhaps, until Queen Elizabeth opens the Victoria line in 1969. It's the first totally new line in more than 60 years.

A decade later, the then-Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, opens the Jubilee line, named to mark his mother's quarter century on the throne. Yet in many ways, the neglect of the London Underground is obvious. For example, Common Garden Station would be closed at weekends, right? And the notion that today you'd close Covent Garden Station and weekends, oh, no, we don't need Common Garden Station. Few people might go on Saturdays, but, poor, you know, we don't need it.

And so there was an idea that this was a declining forward transport. And that decline comes into hideously sharp relief with two appalling tragedies. The first occurs at Moorgate Station in 1975 when a driver who fails to apply the brakes crashes a train into a wall, killing 43 people and injuring a further 74. The second comes 12 years later, the fire at King's Cross in 1987. The investigation into the disaster reveals that the fire had been started by a customer discarding a match on the escalator, the underneath of which was clogged with dirt, debris and grease. Although smoking has already been banned on platforms, the ban is poorly enforced,

and it's common for underground customers to light up on their way out of the station. The official report into the disaster reveals a shaming picture of a dilapidated and antiquated infrastructure, And considering there have been more than 400 fires reported on the underground in the three preceding decades, it's a miracle that a disaster of such scale has been averted for so long. Sweeping reforms are instituted, and a rigorous smoking ban is implemented across the network. The old wooden escalators are removed, and emergency procedures totally overhauled. At the turn of the millennium, the underground is absorbed. The underground is absorbed by a new entity, transport for London, creating one integrated

body for all public transport in the city. A programme to refurbish, improve and extend the entire network begins. Once again, the underground is back at the heart of city life. On the 6th of July 2005, London is a buzz with breaking news. The capital has been selected to host the 2012 Olympics. For the very next day, the underground is hit by one of the most devastating events in its long history. Targeting commuters during rush hour, suicide bombers detonate explosives on three trains and a bus, claiming the lives of 52 people and injuring hundreds more.

It's the single deadliest act of terrorism on English soil, and leaves a profound psychological impact on the city. years later, London welcomes the world for the Games. The government dubs it the first public transport Olympics, with the vast majority of competitors and spectators traveling to and from the venues on public transport. On its busiest day that summer, the tube carries 4.4 million people around the city, a record at the time for a single day. A decade after that, the Elizabeth line opens. Originally known as Crossrail, this project is not text. technically part of the tube system, but it's still part of the city's underground railway network and is hailed by many as the most impressive subterranean train service on the planet.

Running across and beyond Greater London, it connects the underground with towns far outside the busy city centre. To some, the Elizabeth Line means that 160 years after its founding, the tube is at last realizing Charles Pearson's dream, shuttling people from neighboring communities right into the heart of the city via underground tunnels in the blink of an eye. According to its keenest enthusiasts, it's a sign of things to come. Among the current and future projects are line extensions, new stations and newly designed trains, including on the Metropolitan Line, the world's first subterranean railway running since 1863. The dream that

began with Pearson more than a century and a half ago is still evolving. The underground was never just about trains. It was and still is about shaping London itself. London Underground undoubtedly as a great future ahead of it, we are using a system that is 160 years old. The fact that it's being used more now than at any time in history is testimony to its importance and success. Next time on short history of, we'll bring you a short history of the Cold War. There had always been tensions in the relationship. We sometimes forget that.

But really, going all the way back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, there had been mutual suspicion. One could even speak of a kind of east-west conflict already then. But I think what also happens is that there is a post-war vacuum after the end of the Second World War. And so the two largest powers remaining after the end of the war, that is to say the United States, by far now the most powerful player in the international system, and the Soviet Union rush to fill that vacuum. That's next time. If you can't wait a week until the next episode,

you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noyser Plus. Head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions for more information. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca.