What Lies Beneath
There are always rumours of a world under the ground. Underground chambers and tunnels have been reported, one linking the crypt of St. Bartholomew the Great with Canonbury, another running a shorter distance between the priory and nunnery of Clerkenwell. There are extensive catacombs in Camden Town, beneath the Camden goods yard. Roman temples have been discovered within “hidden” London. Statues of ancient deities have been found in a condition which suggests that, for reasons unknown, they were deliberately buried. At All Hallows, Barking, a buried undercroft and arch of a Christian church were constructed with Roman materials; a cross of sandstone was also found, with the inscription WERHERE of Saxon date; it is somehow strangely evocative of WE ARE HERE. Lost beneath Cheapside, and found only after the bombing of London, was the figure of the “Dead Christ” laid horizontally in a stratum of London soil. Evidence of the passage of generations, themselves buried in the clay and gravel, was found on the corner of Ray Street and Little Saffron Hill; thirteen feet below the surface, in 1855, “the workmen came upon the pavement of an old street, consisting of very large blocks of ragstone of irregular shape. An examination of the paving-stones showed that the street had been well used. They are worn quite smooth by the footsteps and traffic of a past generation.” Beneath these ancient stones were found piles of oak-thick, hard and covered with slime-interpreted as fragments of a great mill. Beneath the oak, in turn, were crude wooden water pipes. The great weight of the past had pressed all this material of London “into a hard and almost solid mass, and it is curious to observe that near the old surface were great numbers of pins.” The mystery of the pins remains.
The author of Unknown London has remarked: “I have climbed down more ladders to explore the buried town than I have toiled up City staircases,” which may lead to the impression that there is more beneath than above. One of the characteristic drawings of the city is that of its horizontal levels, from the rooftops of its houses to the caverns of its sewers, bearing down upon and almost crushing one another with their weight. It was well said, in one guide to the city’s history, that “certain it is that none who know London would deny that its treasures must be sought in its depths”; it is an ambiguous sentence, perhaps, with a social as well as a topographical mystery associated with it.
Another great London historian, Charles Knight, suggested that if we were to “imagine that this great capital of capitals should ever be what Babylon is-its very site forgotten-one could not but almost envy the delight with which the antiquaries of that future time would hear of some discovery of a London below the soil still remaining. We can fancy we see the progress of the excavators from one part to another of the mighty but, for a while, inexplicable labyrinth till the whole was cleared open to the daylight, and the vast systems laid before them.” It is a stupendous conception, but no more stupendous than the reality.
There is indeed a London under the ground, comprising great vaults and passageways, sewers and tunnels, pipes and corridors, issuing into one another. There are great networks of gas and water pipes, many long since disused but others being transformed into conduits for the thousands of miles of coaxial cables which now help to organise and control the city. Walter George Bell, the author of London Rediscoveries, noticed how in the early 1920s Post Office workmen were laying earthenware conduits for their telephone cables within a trough created by the wall of a Roman villa lying in Gracechurch Street, so that, as he said, “our messages go whispering” through rooms where once the citizens of a lost London spoke in an alien tongue. There are deep-level tunnels for British Telecom and for the London Electricity Board, with National Grid cables carried in conduits and trenches. A great system of Post Office tunnels was inaugurated after 1945, complicating the topography of this subterranean region. There are more tunnels under the Thames than under the river of any other capital city-tunnels for trains, for cars, for foot passengers as well as for the supplies of public utilities. The whole area under the river, and indeed under the whole of the city, is a catacomb of avenues and highways mimicking their counterparts above ground.
Yet something happens when you travel beneath the surface of London; the very air itself seems to become old and sorrowful, with its inheritance of grief. The Thames Tunnel, built between 1825 and 1841, was, for example, established only at the cost of much labour and suffering. Its history is recorded in London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman. Marc Brunel began the tunnel at a depth of sixty-three feet, using a great “shield” to take out the earth, while the bricklayers continually formed the walls of the tunnel itself. There were often eruptions of earth and deluges of water; the workmen were “like labourers in a dangerous coal-mine, in constant terror from either fire or water.” One labourer fell down the great shaft, while drunk, and died; some drowned in floods, others died of “ague” or dysentery, and one or two suffocated in the “thick and impure air.” Marc Brunel himself suffered a paralytic stroke, yet insisted upon continuing his work. He left a diary which is sufficiently compelling to need no description-“16 May, 1828, Inflammable gas. Men complain v. much. 26 May. Heywood died this morning. Two more on the sick list. Page is evidently sinking very fast … I feel much debility after having been some time below. 28 May. Bowyer died today or yesterday. A good man.” The metaphor of “sinking” is instructive in this context, as if the whole weight of the underground world were fatal. The air of dream, of hopelessness and dreariness, seems to have haunted this tunnel. “The very walls were in a cold sweat,” The Times reported upon its opening in 1843.
It is suggestive that Marc Brunel discovered his unique way of tunnelling underground while incarcerated in a debtors’ prison in London; here he noticed the activities of a worm, teredo navalis, which itself is a “natural tunneler.” The atmosphere of prison, too, is incorporated within the very structure of these tunnels. Nathaniel Hawthorne descended into the depths of the Thames Tunnel after its completion, down “a wearisome succession of staircases” until “we behold the vista of an arched corridor that extends into everlasting midnight.” Here is a depiction of melancholy anxiety transformed into brick and stone, “gloomier than a street of upper London.” Yet there were some Londoners who soon became acclimatised to the depth and the dankness. Hawthorne observed in the dusk “stalls or shops, in little alcoves, kept principally by women … they assail you with hungry entreaties to buy their merchandise.” It was his belief that these subterranean women “spend their lives there, seldom or never, I presume seeing any daylight.” He describes the Thames Tunnel, therefore, as “an admirable prison.” It was for this reason, precisely, that it never succeeded as a pathway for vehicles or pedestrians; the gloomy associations and connotations were just too strong. So it was little used after its inception, and in 1869 it was taken over by the East London Railway. In that capacity it has existed ever since, and now forms the underground connection between Wapping and Rotherhithe.
The other tunnels under the Thames have not lost their overpowering sense of gloom. Of the Rotherhithe Road Tunnel, built between Stepney and Rotherhithe, Iain Sinclair has written in Downriver, “If you want to sample the worst London can offer, follow me down that slow incline. The tunnel drips with warnings: DO NOT STOP” and he goes on to suggest that “The tunnel can achieve meaning only if it remains unused and silent.” That silence can be forbidding: the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, opened in 1902, can seem more lonely and desolate than any other part of London. Yet there are some, like the female shopkeepers pleading in the dusk of the Thames Tunnel, who seem to belong to this subterranean world.