Lines on the Underground

On My Bookshelf I rediscover a book I bought by mistake…

Have you ever bought a book thinking it was one thing and it turned out to be quite another? That’s what happened when I picked up this book in a London used book store years ago. I thought Lines on the Underground referred to the London Transport project of posting lines of poetry in the trains to give strap-hanging commuters something more interesting to read than ads. Started in January 1986 as an experiment, the project was so popular it continues to this day. I knew an anthology of the poems had been published and I assumed this was it, adding it to the pile of books I always end up buying when in London.

But when I got home and opened it up I found something quite different, but marvelous in its own way, with a clever pun in the title. This book contains not only lines of poetry but prose as well, quotations from literature, guidebooks, and historical writing from myriad sources past and present. The book is arranged by Underground Line with each station in order of travel receiving one or more quotations. So you could ride on the Circle Line, for example, book in hand, and follow along station by station with interesting snippets of reading about each place. All 270 stations that existed at the time of publication in 1994 are covered.

If you’re thinking that compiling such an anthology would take a daunting amount of research you are right; in fact it took almost 50 years! Authors Dorothy Meade and Tatiana Wolff met as young students in London during World War II. Like so many Londoners they took refuge from the bombing in Underground stations and it was on one such night that they came up with the idea. After the war they began research and even found a potential publisher, but with the distractions of careers and children the project fell by the wayside. They returned to it on and off, but it wasn’t until they retired that they were able to devote full-time to the research. They note that free travel for seniors on the Underground was a big help! They spent hours in the British Museum Reading Room, small museums and libraries across the metropolitan area, and reading everything from classics to yellowing paperbacks of wartime fiction. The result is wonderfully varied, covering literature from Pepys and Trollope and Dickens of course, to children’s adventure stories, modern mystery authors like Ruth Rendell, and “the poet of the suburbs,” John Betjeman. 

The famous stations known to all London tourists are here of course, Charing Cross, Oxford Circus, Trafalgar Square, and their ilk. But I was most interested in seeing what the authors found on the more obscure stations I knew from my youth. Could my home station of Newbury Park in the Essex suburbs possibly have been immortalized in verse or prose? It seemed unlikely. But it did inspire a limerick:

A man went to Newbury Park
Expecting a bit of a lark
It’s one of those places
I thought would have races –
I see I’m quite wide of the mark.

John Grimshaw wrote this in 1994, the year the book was published. So perhaps Meade and Wolff did come up blank on Newbury Park and had to commission a limerick. And perhaps Grimshaw came up blank on a theme until he realized Walthamstow isn’t too far away, a town famous for it’s greyhound racing stadium. The book’s entry for Walthamstow Station though, records Henry VIII’s visit to Waltham Forest, waiting for the sound of gunfire from the Tower of London announcing Anne Boleyn’s execution. Once he heard it he ordered the day’s hunt to begin.

My other home station was Gants Hill on the same Central Line. We would get off there if we were too late for the last bus from Newbury Park, because there was a taxi rank outside. In all my years passing through Gants Hill Station I never knew that the architecture was inspired by the Moscow Metro! The quotation from London’s Underground Stations by Laurence Menear notes that:

The most striking feature of Gants Hill station occurs at the foot of the escalators at platform level where the Moscow concourse … was a major inspiration.

Another station I recall from my youth is Dagenham Heathway on the District Line. We lived in Dagenham until I was seven and Heathway was where we went shopping. The place had a sinister brush with history recounted by Daniel Defoe:

A little beyond the Town, on the Road to Dagenham, stood a great house, antient, and now almost fallen down, where Tradition says, the Gunpowder Treason Plot was at first contriv’d, and that all the first Consultations about it were held here.

After we moved from Dagenham our nearest shopping town was Romford which doesn’t have an Underground station. But nearby Hainault Forest, where we used to picnic in the summer, does. Apparently the authors couldn’t find anything about Hainault because they chose a poem about Romford Market for this station: 

With human bellow, bovine blare,
Glittering trumpery, gaudy ware,
The life of Romford Market Square
Set all our pulses pounding:
The gypsy drover with his stick,
The huckster with his hoary trick,
The pork with fat six inches thick
And sausages abounding.

This captures the hectic atmosphere of Romford Market as I remember it, though the pens for animals were gone. There were no more drovers but plenty of hucksters calling out their gaudy wares in broad Cockney accents. My mother frequented the fabric remnant stalls where she bought the materials to sew all our clothes.

My father taught school in the East End and commuted on the Underground every weekday from Newbury Park to Wapping and later Mile End. Long before there was an Underground Station there was a turnpike at Mile End. Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick passed through it on a very tedious journey with Mr. Weller. Wapping was a tough neighborhood where my father claimed only the nuns from the local convent were safe walking the streets. The quote for Wapping Station from a 1903 book by Sir Walter Besant confirms its reputation:

The riverside by Wapping has a bad name. Murders, thefts, and all kind of vice dwell there… but gone are the executions by stake at high-tide. No longer are men hanged on the foreshore to make a public holiday.

Victoria Station has a special place in my heart as we would travel there by Underground to start our journeys to Belgium to visit my mother’s family, from there taking the above ground train to Dover. Later it would be the start of my journeys south to Brighton when I was a student at the University of Sussex. And the quotation chosen by our authors to represent this station comes from a favorite play I studied in school and saw performed on several occasions, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. In this scene Jack Worthing confesses to Lady Bracknell that he is an orphan who was found in a hand-bag:

Lady Bracknell: A hand-bag?

Jack: Yes, Lady Bracknell, I was in a hand-bag – a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag with handles to it – an ordinary hand-bag in fact.

Lady Bracknell: In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this hand-bag?

Jack: In the cloakroom at Victoria Station. It was given him in mistake for his own.

Lady Bracknell: The cloakroom at Victoria Station?

Jack: Yes. The Brighton line.

Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial Mr. Worthing. I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the  worst excesses of the French Revolution.

Well I could go on with that quote, it is so delicious. The authors obviously felt the same as it is one of the longest quotations in the book. One of the joys of this anthology is finding quotes that whet the appetite for further reading. If you’re not familiar with Oscar Wilde’s wickedly funny play I suggest you find a copy immediately!

Not surprisingly some Underground Stations are haunted, among them Covent Garden. J. A. Brooks writes in Ghosts of London:

Some people believe the station is haunted by a Victorian actor. The phantom of William Terris, a famous leading man of the 1890’s … visits Covent Garden Underground Station as well as the Adelphi Theatre where he was appearing at the time of his violent death … stabbed to death by a maniac.

The author with the most quotations in the book is poet John Betjeman, even exceeding Dickens. In Summoned by Bells he recalls a favorite day out:

Great was my joy with London at my feet –
All London mine, five shillings in my hand
And not expected back till after tea!
Great was our joy, Ronald Hughes Wright’s and mine
To travel by the Underground all day
Between the rush hours, so that very soon
There was no station north to Finsbury Park,
To Barking eastwards, Clapham Common south
No temporary platform in the west
Among the Actons and the Ealings, where
We had not once alighted.

And I like to think that perhaps Virginia Woolf caught a glimpse of our authors in their youth. The quotation for Warren Street Station is from Woolf’s diary entry dated October 20th 1940:

The most … impressive … sight in London on Friday was the queue, mostly children with suitcases, outside Warren St. tube. This was about 11:30. We thought they were evacuees, waiting for a bus. But there they were, in a much longer line, with women, men, more bags and blankets, sitting still at 3. Lining up for the shelter in the night’s raid – which came of course.

As for the book I thought I had purchased, the original Poems on the Underground was a best seller and several newer editions are available. There is now a website supported by grants from London Underground, Arts Council England, and the British Council. You can browse an archive of favorite poems by year as well as view the current choices, which are selected three times a year. The program highlights classical, contemporary, and international work, by both famous and relatively unknown poets. The first group of poems in 1986 included classics by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Burns and contemporary poems by Seamus Heaney and Grace Nichols. The selections often follow a theme such as poems on love, music, science, nature, or a particular culture. Poems about London and the River Thames have been featured, and this June the 75th anniversary of the Windrush was celebrated with poems by writers of Caribbean descent.

The posters displayed in the trains are designed by Tom Davidson and can be purchased at the London Transport Museum. Here is a selection:

Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an early supporter of Poems on the Underground. The Railway Children, above, was in the first group of poems featured in the trains. But that is not his only connection with the London Underground. The title poem in his 2006 collection District and Circle was named for two of the Underground lines. The poem is a sequence of five sonnets recalling Heaney’s travels on the Underground when working in London as a young man. Vivid images of these journeys evoke a mythic realm; the Underground as the underworld of Virgil and Dante, a place caught between life and death. 

And so by night and by day to be transported
Through galleried earth with them, the only relict
Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,
Reflecting in a window mirror-backed
By blasted weeping rock-walls
Flicker-lit.

From District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

In a lighter vein, in his poem The Underground Heaney recalls a mad dash through the Underground tunnels when late for a concert at the Albert Hall:

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you …

Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Once having read Lines on the Underground and these poems it is hard to think of the London Underground as just a mundane mode of transport ever again.