These conventions did have to be taught before they could be ingrained as a routine part of urban behavior, and the next chapter investigates the press coverage of the opening ceremonies of the various Underground lines - as well as several other urban improvement technologies, such as the Thames Embankment and the Main Drainage sewer work - to show how mid-Victorian reformers used celebrations to demonstrate the proper ways of behaving in and making meaning of new urban spaces. The process of designing, funding, and governing these technologies sparked heated debates that “cut to
46 Fougasse, “Please Stand on the right of the escalator,” Cartoon, London Transport Museum Online. Ref number: 1987/98. www.ltmcollection.org/posters
Figure 1.1 “Please Stand on the Right of the Escalator.”
the quick of Victorian conceptions of civic identity and even British history itself.”47 To combat the fears about the dangerous potential of traveling under the ground, railway officials crafted elaborate parades and formal ceremonies intended to establish the respectability of these spaces and link them to wider concepts of civic and national identity. These first opening ceremonies featured local government officials, but later line openings quickly blossomed into widely publicized affairs that were officiated by
members of the royal family. Parades and opening celebrations like these reinforced the types of civilized comportment Tube officials hoped passengers would display by manifesting bodily self-discipline and rational movement through the processional itself.48
On June 10th, 1863, ordinary Londoners crowded through the station doors for their first taste of a subway ride. Some of the celebratory aspects from the opening ceremonies remained, and as each train drew into the station “the City band played, the men shouted, the women screamed, and the uproar was such that cab horses took fright and bolted.”49 A journalist at the public opening remarked that, “it can be compared to nothing else than the crush at the doors of a theatre on the first night of a pantomime.”50 Pantomime is a useful word here, because the actual integration of underground space into the everyday lives of Londoners required new ways of acting and behaving in public as well. Chapter Three explores the complex negotiations between passengers and
47 Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Orion, 2010), 262.
48 Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 163.
49 W.J. Passingham, Romance of London’s Underground (London: Sampson Low, Marston &
Co., Ltd., 1931), 16. Passingham notes that over 30,000 passengers were carried that day.
50 Peter Ackroyd, London Under (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), 117.
Underground officials that transpired once the exciting Underground had actually become a mundane part of London life.
This chapter examines station designs, posters and other forms of Underground signage, and passengers’ reactions to these Underground aesthetics, in order to
demonstrate how Tube officials attempted to guide behaviors in this space. This chapter also reveals how things as simple as the font chosen for all Underground communications or the roundel logo splashed across Tube advertising materials reflected specific notions of civic authority, modernity, and freedom. Ultimately, station design became a means of attempting to provide an identity for modern London while also lessening the potentially unstable consequences of cross-class and gender interaction.
Chapter Three also explores the relationship between public and private space on the Tube and the consequences this had for norms of behavior. The Underground
increasingly became a part of one’s commute to and from work, and the familiarity of this space and time between work and home could potentially be seen as an extension of one’s home or personal space. And yet, the potential instability of this space – where an unruly stranger or overcrowded train could at any moment disrupt one’s peaceful
commute– always kept this space from becoming too private or comfortable. I argue that officials responded to this instability by designing train cars that encouraged a sort of mental interiority while riding and passengers helped facilitate this evolution through their own complaints. People focused on their own thoughts instead of reaching out to others on their daily commute, and this process of adapting to public space inspired new norms for behaving in Tube carriages - such as reading or looking down at the ground - that remain integral parts of appropriate Underground comportment today.
Because they represented elements of both private and public space, Underground carriages also presented unique opportunities for women to challenge or transgress traditional notions of what constituted acceptable gendered behavior. The opportunities the Underground provided for women to claim access to urban space is the subject of the third chapter. By examining the everyday experiences of female passengers and
discourses about appropriate forms of Underground mobility for men and women, I argue in Chapter Four that the London Underground formed a significant and largely
overlooked space in the struggle for social control of who could move freely through London. Moreover, I argue that women’s own experiences in and writings about the Underground helped shape this new space by challenging and restructuring notions of appropriate gendered behavior.
Chapter Four also highlights the implementation of ladies-only carriages and male-only smoking carriages in the mid-Victorian period to illustrate how Tube officials re-inscribed gender hierarchies belowground. At the same time they were trying to replicate gender boundaries in the Underground, Tube officials also celebrated women’s presence in the city with their advertisements for the “Twopenny Tube” (which provided a direct route to sites of leisure and shopping in the West End) in 1900. This chapter also explores women’s own writings about and use of railways to reveal the strong
connections between mobility and power in modern society. While the shops, restaurants, and other leisure sites in the West End welcomed women’s presence as a sign of
modernity, women’s access to this space was still limited to specific places and times of day if they wanted to maintain the appearance of respectability, and these notions of what
constituted respectable gendered comportment were shaken by the freedom of movement the Underground provided.51
The rapid expansion of the Tube also eroded Londoners’ confidence in their ability to make sense of the vastness of the city. The Tube’s role in the literal growth of London and its influence in shaping Londoners’ imagined maps of the city is the focus of Chapter Five. This chapter begins by exploring how writers about London felt they no longer understood the city as a whole. In response, Underground officials simultaneously packaged London as a unified metropolis to visitors and celebrated the distinct attractions and unique features of the various boroughs and regions of the city. This chapter also shows how Tube advertisements – especially posters crafted before World War I – attempted to resell the city to Londoners as an incomprehensibly varied megalopolis only navigable through the Underground.
Chapter Five also addresses the concept of mapping the city, both above and below-ground, and the iconic Tube map is central to this discussion. Henry Beck, an electrical draftsman working for the Underground, created a map of the Underground in 1933 based on a circuit board. By abstracting the various Tube lines from any real geographical markers (other than the Thames River) Beck’s map made London seem manageable and unified but also far too large to be walkable, and thus further encouraged a dependence on modern transport.52 By obscuring the distance between outer and inner London, Beck also prioritized “the middle class-ness of London” and made London’s
51 Erika D. Rappaport, “Travelling in the Lady Guides’ London: Consumption, Modernity, and the Fin-de-Siècle Metropolis,” in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II. ed., Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 34. 52 Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 60.
suburbs seem like a unified part of Greater London.53 Ultimately, Beck’s map managed to become the primary way most Londoners imagined their city.
While the Underground map might have shaped peoples’ mental maps of London, the Tube became the literal map for London during the Blitz. As German bombs rained destruction onto London, the city below ground was often the only recognizable constant in a rapidly changing physical landscape. The Tube provided a (seemingly) safe, clean, and well-lit environment to escape the chaos of wartime London, and Londoners responded by flocking to stations (at first against government orders) during bombing raids. Chapter Five examines these incidents of Tube sheltering and writings about it to demonstrate how the wartime Tube achieved its iconic status as a symbol of the resilience of the city. By remaining open during this period, the Underground helped to cement the connections between a “keep calm and carry on” mentality of orderliness and British culture.54
This chapter also revisits class and gender issues in the Underground that resurfaced during wartime. Keeping the Tube functioning during the Blitz required a huge increase in the number of female Underground employees. Working-class Londoners, who ignored government orders not to use Tube stations as bomb shelters, used their occupation of urban space to force the government to acknowledge the need to protect its citizens. In this way, examining the wartime Underground network weaves together many of the themes of this work: orderliness, national character, and the tensions between men and women of all classes over their right to urban space.
53 Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 60.
54 These same associations would resurface again during periods of unease in Britain, particularly after the July 7 London bombings in 2007.