To Tulse Hill by Third Rail

Is it a different world this side of the Thames?  Many of us in south London like to think so.  After all, everything south of the river, even right up to Southwark and Lambeth, has traditionally lain beyond the immediate authority of the Cities of London or Westminster over the water.  Partly this is because, in the old days, the diocese of Winchester once came all the way up to the river, so that the South Bank, though actually directly overlooked by St Paul’s Cathedral across the river, lay under the jurisdiction of a see sixty miles away.  All through the history of London the Thames has made all the difference: for instance, it was to avoid trouble from the authorities that the theatres of Shakespeare’s time decamped to their transpontine position.

These administrative and ecclesiastical boundaries all seem quite faded now. Today, the mass of ‘Greater London’ sprawls greyly to horizons north and south alike, and elects a single Mayor (who is not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of the City of London). Not without considerable hesitation can Vauxhall or the Borough be described as being in Surrey, a name which now calls to mind rural red-tiled gables,  or downs descending into denes.  Indeed, how laughable is the name ‘Surrey Quays’ for those old docklands of Rotherhithe, left stranded as they are by the ebbing of their historical county?  In recent years even the insatiable developers have crossed the river, hungry to thicken the skyline of south London, too, with their towers.

All the same, there are certain ways in which the Thames still constitutes a barrier between central London and its southern suburbs, and which have no counterparts to the north.  The swathe the river cuts through the city tends towards the south; it still has an isolating effect on Lambeth and Southwark even as it leaves the north contiguous with the centre.  South Londoners wishing to reach the city proper still have the river to cross first, and this means, in contrast to north Londoners, that they know the sensation of crossing the river into the city, into the heart of things.  They shoot out onto one of the bridges aboard a bus or train, or even slide into Blackfriars railway station, with its new platforms spanning the water — and the sky widens without warning, a panorama unfolds along the Embankment, the Houses of Parliament sail clear — and then they come to land in the heart of the city.  Even if few will murmur that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’; even if the feeling can be dulled by habit, it never vanishes entirely, and will last as long as the river itself.  Those coming to the West End or the City from the north, however, miss it altogether.

The Tube, of course, provides southerners with several ways to sneak into London without acknowledging or noticing the river.  But, as we are keen to point out, most of us are in any case a long way from the nearest Underground station.  There is always some sort of change needed from the world of south London to the world of central London.  The Underground network is heavily biased towards and largely contiguous with north London, whereas it hardly ventures south of the river (apart from the bold, incongruous and ultimately rather ironic adventure of the Northern line, through Britain’s longest railway tunnel, to Morden, the Underground’s most southerly station).

Yes, as well as crossing the Thames, the majority of south Londoners going ‘up to town’ have a definite threshold to cross: there is for us a clear moment of arrival in London.  North Londoners, however, can generally pile straight onto the Tube, and are already in the system when they set off from their home station.  In their tunnels they see nothing, poor souls, and apart from the entry to these tunnels their journey into the city crosses no perceptible boundary.  Perhaps this is why ‘Metroland’ is a phenomenon of North London rather than South.

Christian Wolmar’s enjoyable history of the Underground, The Subterranean Railway, offers several explanations for this imbalance in provision between north and south. [1]  For instance, the geology of south London is notoriously difficult to tunnel through.  Apart from the obvious obstacle posed by the Thames, Tube tunnelling was defied almost until the new millennium by the the deposits of gravel that overlie the typical London clay in this area, sometimes to a depth of ten metres.

South Bermondsey station

Wolmar also explains that, by the time that the Underground had begun to expand beyond central London at the turn of the twentieth century, the city’s south had already gained its dense network of suburban railways.  It was North London that had greater need of transport connections, having been neglected by the builders of the lines out of Euston and King’s Cross.  These companies had bigger fish to fry than Edgware or Barnet: their sights were set on the big prizes — Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow — and they needed to send express trains as far afield as they could, and as quickly as possible.  They did not concern themselves with the more trifling places in between, and constructed their lines accordingly, forging northwards with a smattering of intermediate stations and only paltry connections between east and west.  Speed and directness were everything: ‘There we were aimed’ was Philip Larkin’s impression, racing from Hull towards London straight up the East Coast Main Line.  It was the Underground that was to fill in the gaps.

In Kent, Surrey and Sussex, the situation had been different.  Across these counties no siren song floated from any industrial belt; no ‘fields of apparatus’, no ‘furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen’ beckoned the top-hatted industrialist.  The only sources of traffic comparable to the likes of Liverpool and Newcastle were Portsmouth, the trans-Atlantic port of Southampton and, further east, Dover or Newhaven, with their Continental connections.  The other main destinations, such as Eastbourne, Brighton and Hastings, generated a different kind of traffic from the northern cities, local and regional rather than heavy goods or long-distance expresses. (Kidner called London and South Western main line ‘from its earliest days a line for farmers, military men, bishops and high class tourists’). [2]  Moreover, because all of these destinations lay within a hundred miles of the capital, there was relatively little to be gained by sustained high speed, and, in turn, less to be lost by stopping in between.

Neither did the geography of south London and England encourage fast railways.  Instead of straightforward natural courses, such as the Thames presented to Brunel as he went westwards, the builders of railways to the south met almost immediately with long dissuading barriers of high ground.  The first is the ridge rising eastwards from southern Battersea towards Norwood and Sydenham, but beyond lie the North Downs, the Weald, and the South Downs, which can be punched through only with difficulty.  For example, the line from Tonbridge to Hastings passes through eight tunnels in the thirty-two miles of its length.

Thus the companies in the south laid speed aside in favour of a different goal: comprehensiveness of coverage, and not only for the passengers’ sake.  The railway barons were competing with each other for territory as much as for traffic, and often proved themselves willing to build new lines simply to pre-empt their rivals.  What was more, the fewer pickings south of London meant that there was less to be squabbled over, and this was how the suburbs, considered an obstacle north of London, came to be seen in the south as a market in their own right.

All this produced in this part of England a distinctive railway map, the unsung tangle of surface railways on which we have relied ever since.  A dense and wayward network it is, particularly those lines in London’s immediate suburbs and leading directly southwards towards Sussex that were known under British Rail as the ‘South Central Division’.


Geographical map of suburban south London railways, created with use of information © OpenStreetMap contributors

Here in the south is the realm of the ‘rolling English rail’, to paraphrase Chesterton: none of the self-containedness or single-mindedness of the north.  The southern suburban lines criss-cross each other like a board game, before sneaking alongside the main lines to run into startlingly grand termini (Waterloo, Victoria, Charing Cross, London Bridge).  They are inclined to diversions, to duplicating each other merrily and to winding circuitously around obstacles.  Who could blame London-bound travellers on the Tattenham Corner branch for being rather more doubtful than Philip Larkin about where precisely they are ‘aimed’?  Another difference with the North is that physical rail connections between lines are more common than on the Underground, so that trains can in theory be sent along a greater variety of routes.  All around the network it is possible to glimpse chords and spurs and sidings leading off round bends, curving away to who knows where?

This game of joining-the-dots has plenty of practical advantages.  One is the relative ease of travel eastwards and westwards, which can usually be done without having to go via central London.   This perspective of North London shows how all the railways (even the Tube) run quite independently of each other along north-south axes, so that the most practical route from (say) Mill Hill Broadway to Winchmore Hill involves either going all the way into London and out again, or resorting to the bus.  Their unrelenting linearity also restricts north Londoners to a single terminus.  Meanwhile, South London railway stations often enjoy direct services to two or sometimes three different London termini.  It is unusual to have to change trains more than once or twice between any two given south London stations.

And there are quirks and curiosities to match any of the Underground’s.  We have unusual and historic stations such as Peckham Rye or Crystal Palace, both of which see the phenomenon of London-bound trains departing in completely opposite directions.  Then there is Vauxhall, from whose name the Russian word for railway station comes, and Clapham Junction, the busiest station in Britain by the number of trains passing through.  And there is no shortage of memorable names: Gipsy Hill, or Penge West, or Elephant and Castle, or Tooting.  After staring for long enough at a map of the network, patterns loom forth and swirl around, such as the symmetry between Battersea in the west and Bermondsey in the east, echoed neatly by the nearby stations of Queens Road Peckham and Queenstown Road Battersea.

Clapham Junction, unusually quiet

Yet amid these uncritical remarks of mine must be heard another voice, as of a great multitude of passengers, wailing and gnashing their teeth, and saying, ‘But these trains are always late!  And slow!  And overcrowded!  And expensive!  And unreliable!  And late!’  And lo, their lament is far from groundless.  The same layouts that open up the variety of destinations and connections also produce conflicts in movements.  A case in point are the flat junctions, which send trains right across each others’ paths, hamper acceleration and constrain the timetable.  At most stations, the price to pay for the choice of routes is a frequency of trains far sparser than on the Underground.  The guiding principle in south London is this: everything is possible, but only once every half-hour.

The system’s complexity also displays its weaknesses by falling to pieces whenever anything goes wrong.  Disruption is rarely contained along one line or in one area, but spreads like wildfire across the congested network.  The failure of a single set of points can cause chaos in an apparently unrelated part of the network; spectacular delays can be accumulated over only a few miles.  And of course there is the South London trundle: first the hopeful acceleration to about 15mph, then the application of the brakes, slowly but surely gnawing away at the speedometer, slowing and slowing the pace nearer and nearer to a crawl, drawing closer and closer the inevitable red signal and yet always in denial: the signal refuses to change until progress has juddered to an emphatic 0.  And so on and so forth, all the way home. 

Since all railways, representing a noble ideal as they do, are difficult to construct, maintain and improve, most of these problems will remain unresolved for many years to come.  In the meantime, one radical way of surviving commuting, I have found, is to become interested in it.  After all, there is often plenty of time to sit and contemplate the network, even if that time is seldom set aside voluntarily.  Who knows, the long meditative silence of a signal failure might lead some fellow-passengers, not yet thoroughly hardened, to acknowledge that South London’s railways have a certain distinctive atmosphere.  Could it even be said that South London is made distinctive by its railways?  If the best way to see any landscape is by rail, in South London the railways themselves form some of the best aspects of the landscape.  For one thing, they maintain corridors of woodland that ought to be unthinkable this far into London, bringing the countryside deep into the city (just as roads, conversely, are take the town out into the country).  Someone unfamiliar with the area might reasonably think that from Streatham to Peckham Rye stretches a kind of wild garden, populated by occasional gables and chimneys.  Who knows: maybe the last boughs and branches of the old Norwood or Forest Hill are hidden away the in railway cuttings.

North Dulwich station

The suggestion of the rural is enhanced by a feature of the infrastructure: the system of electrification, which supplies power not via bristling overhead catenary but through a discreet ‘third rail’ at ground level.  This arrangement is relatively unusual for main line railways and has practical disadvantages of its own, but it does leave branches and sky unencumbered.  As a matter of fact the electrification programme, undertaken by the Southern Railway in the 1920s and 1930s, was really the only marketing campaign successful enough to mark out these railways as a rival to the Underground.  The Art Deco promise of refuge in suburbia,  brought within comfortable reach by the ‘Southern Electric’, did for the south what ‘Metroland’ had done for the north, and the slogan’s euphony even earned it a footnote in (north-Londoner) Betjeman’s poem ‘Love in a Valley’.  (Betjeman even mentions the third rail in that poem: ‘White down the valley curves the living rail’, he declares from his Coulsdon perch.)

I have wondered if this south London atmosphere exists most completely at Tulse Hill station, a place whose position can only be described as the very middle of deep south London.  The area it serves is much like the rest of the city, except for having served as an unlikely poet’s paradise for Jason Strugnell, Wendy Cope’s spoof 1980s alter ego.  The station itself is in many ways the South London station par excellence: it is a complete muddle.  It has the word ‘Hill’ in its name, for one thing; it has direct but distinctly unhurried services to two different London terminals, Blackfriars and London Bridge; it lies at the convergence of several different routes, and its capacity is constrained irredeemably by two overbridges at each end of its platforms.  (One of these, which crosses the South Circular, was the country’s second most collided-with overbridge last year).  Once a day at mid-morning Tulse Hill even has the quirk of a single Parliamentary train to Streatham Hill (no return).  Finally, after standing on the platform, having stared for long enough at the maps during the aeons of bleak winter-evening delays, there is some satisfaction to be gained in observing that from Tulse Hill the points can theoretically be set so that trains might set off in opposite directions, along quite different routes, and yet be able to reach either London Bridge or Victoria stations without having to reverse.  When the station was first opened, which will be 150 years ago next year, I doubt there seemed any particular reason for it to have been placed where it was.  Now the passenger whose train rounds the excruciatingly tight bends and lumbers at last into Tulse Hill has at least the assurance of being completely lost.

Here then in one place — and Tulse Hill, of all places — is a collection of features that are South London’s own.  On life goes, without anybody noticing; on the railway clunks.  Nobody notices that in north London there is nothing quite like it to be found.  Whether that is a shame or a relief is not necessarily the most pressing matter of the day, but it is enough, I think, to justify my claim that there is something special about the world this side of the Thames.

Tulse Hill station: a two-pronged approach from the south

References:

[1] Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway (London: Atlantic, 2004), p. 14

[2]  R. W. Kidner, The Waterloo – Southampton Line (Oakwood, 1983), p.7.