The Sudden Straight Face

It is strange that one of the saddest songs in the English language should have been written by two comedians.  Michael Flanders and Donald Swann are still best known for their light comic and satirical pieces — ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘The Gnu’ or ‘The Gas-Man Cometh’ — but when they turned their satirical eye to the Beeching Axe, the mass closure from 1963 of about a third of the British passenger railway network, they produced, in ‘The Slow Train’, for many people the definitive lament for these mostly rural branch lines, and for the way of life that was lost with them.

The song bears all the Flanders and Swann hallmarks — the deft word-play, the affectionate satire, the sense of the ludicrous — but the mood is utterly different from usual.  Seing the damage that Beeching was doing, suddenly they were serious — and indeed, in the live recording, made sixty years ago when it was all actually happening, there is, apart from a few appreciative titters at a pun or a station name, no laughter at all, only rapt silence.

This complete change of key seems to me utterly audacious.  The audience had paid for comedy, after all, yet here suddenly was tragedy, an entirely sincere farewell to a familiar feature of the national landscape, to a distinctive characteristic of our society, destroyed by human folly, with only the word-play providing the thinnest veil of wit.  Audacious, but thoroughly effective: first we are puzzled that we can’t find anything to laugh at, disconcerted to think that we might have missed a joke.  Then the inverse feeling: surprise, in the pit of the stomach, as we realise that we really are being addressed seriously.  There is a sense of having had a narrow escape, as if one has nearly walked giggling into a full and silent church.   (They’re being serious, and we thought it was going to be a joke!).  

And yet it is still satire, for Flanders and Swann had noticed, along with others since, the totally inadvertent poetry of Section 1 Part 3 of Dr. Beeching’s report, the ‘List of Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ (in England, though the destruction in Wales and Scotland was just as wanton).  Buried deep behind the oily bureaucratic euphemism of the report’s title, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, is a list that has been called some of the most moving poetry in the language — or are ‘like names on a war memorial’, as the satirist Ian Hislop has said:

Abbey Town

Acrow Halt 

Acton Central 

Addingham 

Adlestrop 

Ainsdale 

Airmyn 

Aldeburgh 

Aldermaston 

Aldridge 

Alford Town (Lincs.) 

Alfreton and South Normanton 

Alresford (Hants.) 

Alrewas 

Altofts and Whitwood 

Alton Towers 

Ambergate 

Andover Town 

Apperley Bridge …

Of course, it is bleakly amusing that those unable to perceive the true value of railways, their marriage of elegance and efficiency, had by their very tin ear betrayed themselves in accidentally producing such moving poetry — fifth on the list is Adlestrop itself! — and Flanders and Swann, simply by transforming it into a serious song, throw this irony into definition.  They are punning away as usual, ‘The sleepers sleep…’ but the music itself has all the pathos of a folk-song.

The British passenger railway network, 1963 (left) and 1984 (right)

The Sudden Straight Face had another strategic advantage in that particular era, and that was the strength it lent to anyone making a point that was easily mocked.  This was the age of the satire boom, satire far more biting than Michael Flanders’. Then, as now, mockery was one of the vandalisers’ chief weapons; anyone who objected to the sweeping away of old things was opening themselves up to a round of scoffing (“Backward!  Nostalgist!  Move with the times!”).  But by proving that they could make an audience laugh, and indeed by laughing at themselves, they could build up a kind of credit with their wit, to be expended in an outbreak of earnestness like ‘The Slow Train’.

The person who knew this as well as Flanders and Swann was, of course, the poet John Betjeman — the man who in some ways ought to have written ‘The Slow Train’.  (In fact, my friend Maolsheachlann justifiably said he was ‘flabbergasted’ I hadn’t mentioned it when I wrote a few years ago about Betjeman’s poem ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’).  Reading A. N. Wilson’s biography of Betjeman reminded me of the occasion in 2018 when I had passed through the Halt, a tiny station of two short platforms on the outskirts of Warminster in Wiltshire.  At the time I wrote that Betjeman’s poem seemed to capture a paradoxical seam that runs through all of his work: irrepressible humour on the one hand hand, and sincere, vulnerable sorrow on the other.  It applied to his life as well: Wilson paints a picture of a man distraught at the ruination of England, acutely conscious of his personal flaws and ‘afraid of being found out’, who nevertheless craved merriment and silliness, and would gleefully assign nicknames to his friends, or throw his table-napkin over his face and howl with glee.  

John Betjeman and Flanders and Swann knew that they were operating in a culture of heavy cynicism.  Sincerity alone, from a standing start, was no good: this was precisely the age in which anyone speaking in defence of old things or high ideals would bring clanging mockery down around his ears.  But the Sudden Straight Face was their secret weapon.  First Betjeman poked fun at this tiny station, answering his own rhetorical question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open?”…

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,

Two and sometimes three

Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches

To Westbury, home for tea.”

As many as three passengers for a mile’s journey!  Clearly a vital transport interchange, we chuckle; good old Betjeman, silly old England.  But then in the final stanza comes this outburst: 

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,

And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol

Steam trains will return.

Betjeman’s work derives much of its poetic power from this contrast between the gleefully satirical and the ingenuous — in some circles embarrassing — earnestness.  The man is a great jester, as Wilson’s biography shows, but there are some things in this world so serious that they snuff out even the jester’s laughter.  This is why that plangent ‘horrible roads’ and the prophecy of the return of steam, a ripe, irresistible invitation for Sixties mockery, nevertheless withstands that mockery.  The Sixties Modernists stand primed to scoff at anyone avowing a sentimental attachment to this unprofitable station, but the poet has got there first — he has already laughed gently at its ridership of ‘two and sometimes three’ passengers, and has laughed at himself for loving it.  So the love, which is serious, has now been fired by clay; by pre-empting the jeers the poet has hardened his work to withstand and outlast hostility.

I think Betjeman employs this manoeuvre to greatest effect in his poem ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N’ (such a Betjemanian touch to give the postal district!).  Here he begins by relating a typical Betjeman church visit, beautifully written as always, but with a hint of self-deprecation of his own style:

With oh such peculiar branching and overreaching of wire

Trolley-bus standards pick their threads from the London sky

Diminishing up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire

Threads and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by

And, more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire

Bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high.

Stop the trolley-bus, stop! And here, where the roads unite

Of weariest worn-out London — no cigarettes, no beer,

No repairs undertaken, nothing in stock — alight;

But then the tone changes, and the poem more becomes earnest, and highly personal:

These were the streets they knew; and I, by descent, belong

To these tall neglected houses divided into flats.

Only the church remains, where carriages used to throng

And my mother stepped out in flounces and my father stepped out in spats

To shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong

And back in a country quiet with doffing of chimney hats.

Still there is the typical Betjeman detail, the evocation of details of the vanished past.  But now he has made himself vulnerable by writing of his parents, of the deeper, more personal connection that he has to this church.  And then he goes further.  The church is not merely an architectural curiosity, nor even a relic of family history or of a bygone age, but the House of God in which Betjeman is no passing visitor but an invited guest:

Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small

Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,

Is the Power that sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,

Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;

Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all —

Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.

So it is that the Sudden Straight Face allows Betjeman to do what I believe he generally struggled with, to write straightforwardly about his faith, in perhaps the most confident proclamation of faith he ever made (and it is nice to think that some of these lines were chosen to accompany his statue at London St. Pancras station in 2007).  By the protective layer of his self-deprecation he pre-empts any mockery or satire of these most personal things, his memories of his parents and his vulnerable faith.  Thus he shows how, even in an age of cynicism, sincerity, once whetted to a blade, cuts cleanly through cynical clinker with a strange and unequalled power.

And we, the audience, cannot deny the sincerity even to ourselves; it is almost as infectious as laughter.  By our uproarious laughter of a moment ago we have proven to each other that we have hearts — at least it has with this open, wholehearted humour of Betjeman and Michael Flanders, as opposed to the sniggering of modern comics.   If we have hearts, we have no need to pretend to be unmoved by sorrow and loss.  So it is, first by laughter and then by sighs, that we find companionship in each other.

More on ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park’  from the Rev. Malcolm Guite.

Farewell to the 455s

Through Mitcham Eastfields on a Horsham train, 10 August 2011

This coming Saturday, 14th May, sees the withdrawal from the suburban routes of the South Central Division — the tangle of railways running out of Victoria and London Bridge into south London — of the class 455 electric multiple units that have held sway in these parts for nearly forty years.  Their siblings on the South Western lines out of Waterloo will apparently follow in the next few months.

Basking in the sun at Victoria, 28 August 2013

Few ordinary passengers are likely to mourn them.  They are not glamorous, nor were they built to be, though I think better care could still have been taken of their interiors in recent years.  They were designed for mass short-distance transport, to lug commuters around the Hills and Commons of the southern boroughs; to venture to climes no more exotic than Crystal Palace, Epsom Downs, Caterham or Dorking.  I doubt they have averaged more than around twenty miles per hour over the course of their working lives.  But they have worked solidly, clocking up thousands upon thousands of rush-hours since the early 1980s.

Rumbling across the South Circular overbridge into Tulse Hill, bound for the Wimbledon loop, 11 April 2019

I am among those who will miss them.  It was against the backdrop of these faithful workhorses, plying their way up to London or down to Dorking, their acceleration distantly, enticingly audible over the suburban rooftops, that my rail enthusiasm was first contracted and swiftly found to be incurable.  The aforementioned South Western sister-class ran right past my grandmother’s garden, and I used a 455 as my subject for the centre-piece of a school art project (because I knew I could draw trains and buildings, but not people!).  More recently — until the pandemic in fact — my train into work was reliably formed by one of these units.

A Victoria-bound semi-fast accelerating through Mitcham Eastfields, 4 January 2011

Like the slightly younger 319s (themselves a familiar sight around South London until a few years ago) and their cousins the recently-scrapped two-car 456s, the 455s were built at York by British Rail Engineering Limited, as lettering on the step-plates proudly declared.  However, in contrast to the 319s — which were more souped-up trains, designed for Luton and Gatwick routes, for people with flights to catch, always seeming cramped by the chords and spurs of suburban south London, itching for the open stretches of the Brighton or Midland main lines — the 455s seemed gentler and more sedate, more suited to the way we do things here, south of the river, in the land of the electrified third rail.  To a 455, with its seldom-attained top speed of 75 mph, it did not seem to matter if we got to Ewell East now or some time next week.  They trundled their way around, taking their time about everything.  No point rushing this curve or that junction; there’ll only be something else to brake for around the next bend.  

Through the window onto dawn-lit commuterland, 1 October 2018

Adding to the dreamy aura of these trains were the various reassuring sounds they made: the chirruping of the brakes and the soft sigh on their release, the warble-piping of the original door alarms, the clunk of the camshaft on departure, and the leisurely thrumming of the brake compressors, this last being the sound I will miss the most.  Then there were the motors, matching the register of a cello, rising from a growl from a standstill to the very top of the tenor range if given the chance to stretch their legs.  The only alarming sound was the occasional crunch of electricity arcing from the third rail. 

Arriving at Streatham Hill on the 1617 to London Bridge, the once-daily parliamentary service via the Leigham Spur and Tulse Hill, 25 April 2019

The motors themselves are worth remarking on, for they are actually recycled.  Incredible as it may sound, they are over eighty years old, and more than twice the age the trains they have been powering.  The early Eighties, when these units were built, were not an easy time for British Rail, which, struggling under persistent inadequacies in government subsidy, had constantly to make do and mend with their scarce resources.  Their solution in this case was to fit the new trains with not only second- but third-hand motors built originally by the Southern Railway for its electric units in the 1930s.  Though now into their ninth decade and effectively dating from the electrification itself, the motors still seem perfectly sound to my ear.  Whatever the reason is for the withdrawal of these trains, I doubt it has anything to do with the traction equipment.

A down train draws into Wandsworth Common, 9 December 2018

I am not the only one sad to see them go.  ‘South London is [going to] feel weird without them,’ said one contributor to the ever-perusable Rail Forums.  Another chap, a driver who also films the modern railway scene and has a presence on YouTube, told me in an exchange in the comments, ‘These were the trains I grew up on, the trains that took me on all sorts of adventures and when I passed out [i.e. qualified] as a driver became my core traction.’

Epsom train rounding the curve south of Mitcham Junction, 4 February 2022

There is always a pang to see the clearing out of the furniture of our beginnings, however ordinary these things may be.  Perhaps, in fact, the more ordinary and the more constant they have seemed, the sharper the pang.  Bit by bit, the railscape of my childhood is disappearing (the analogue signals, the bell at Eastfields level crossing, the late Phil Sayer’s voice over the speakers…), and by the end of this weekend another major part of it will have crumbled completely away.  I will certainly miss the familiar presence of these old units, with the many associations they hold for me.

A final farewell, Mitcham Common, 4 February 2022

But let us end with the nearest a 455 ever came to attaining railway glory.  Under the pre-2018 timetable, one single passenger service each weekday was booked to run non-stop down the fourteen-mile line from Dorking to Horsham, and this was generally allocated to a 455 unit.  So, just before that timetable was abolished, I took one of the last opportunities to experience this run, and filmed the journey from just beyond Betchworth Tunnel to just short of Horsham.  As I have said, 455s hardly ever had the chance of a clear non-stop flat-out run like this, and certainly in their latter years Horsham was the furthest south they ever ventured in regular service.  So it was a rare treat to see this humble suburban unit reliving the glory days of the old Bognor expresses, accelerating to the full line speed of 75 mph along probably my favourite stretch of railway in south-east England.  (We really begin to pick up speed after Holmwood, five minutes in, and after Ockley, at six minutes, there is the added bonus of some jointed track, which we hammer over at full tilt.)  The date was the 14th May, 2018 — four years to the day, as it turns out, before the final withdrawal of the class.

‘Flying Scotsman’ and the Poetry of the Footplate

An enjoyable recent read has been Andrew Roden’s history of the famous locomotive Flying Scotsman (‘Flying Scotsman: the extraordinary story of the world’s most famous train’, London: Aurum, 2007).  No. 4472 has had many adventures since her construction in 1923 for the London and North Eastern Railway’s express fleet.  She was the first steam locomotive officially verified to have reached a speed of 100mph, and was the L.N.E.R.’s show-piece at the British Empire exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925.  Her profile was also raised during performance trials against locomotives of the Great Western Railway.  And she hauled the L.N.E.R.’s elite London–Edinburgh express — also named the Flying Scotsman; the engine had been named after the train — on the first day that the journey was made non-stop, with the aid of an ingenious corridor through the tender that permitted a change of crew.  She had a narrow escape from the scrapman in the 1960s, but was rescued by Alan Pegler, a businessman from Retford, and since then she has been on tour to Australia and to the United States as well as hauling excursion trains all over Britain.  While in Australia, Flying Scotsman set the record for the longest non-stop run ever undertaken by a steam locomotive, 422 miles.  In 2004 the National Railway Museum purchased her for the nation, and from York she still goes out regularly on excursion duties.

It’s always the 1960s, isn’t it?  It seems inconceivable that such a locomotive could ever have been in danger of the cutting-torch, but in those strange times of fanatical modernism it really had been a possibility.  Flying Scotsman was actually omitted from British Railways’ list of engines to be set aside for permanent preservation.  Many of the modernising changes made to the railways in the 1960s were certainly necessary, and it is true that Britain’s continued reliance on steam was at odds with the scene on the Continent, where the Second World War’s targeted destruction had cleared the ground for a fresh start and the renewed development of diesel and electric traction.  But, in those days, something other than a healthy competitive spirit was abroad in Britain; something else drove the wholesale destruction; it was enough to give the vandalism an official, respectable veneer.  Something else bred the atmosphere of sheer cold-bloodedness that hung over the railways, and Britain in general, in the 1960s.  Maybe it was the fate of the railways that first made me aware, when quite young, that something deep must have gone awry in that decade.  Roden’s description of the end of steam locomotion in Britain gives a good impression of the mood of the times:

By the early 1960s, steam was starting to leave the stage.  The planned phased replacement of steam under the Modernisation Plan [of 1955] was becoming outright slaughter.  Already, thousands of serviceable, economic locomotives had been sacrificed, and as the new diesels entered service the scrapman’s hunger became a feeding frenzy.  In 1947, the year before nationalisation, there had been around 20,000 steam locomotives in service on Britain’s main-line railways (a figure that doesn’t include the many thousands of locomotives used by industry).  A decade later, there were still almost 17,000, although diesels were starting to make an impact in places, but that 17,000 would all be gone by August 1968.  It was extinction on a cataclysmic scale. (p.88)

New steam locomotives were actually being built as late as the year 1960 (the last ever built was christened Evening Star; names with such pathos vanished with the engines) but, within a decade, the abolition of steam traction was total.  Even Dr. Richard Beeching, the man notorious for his recommendation, eagerly adopted, that the least-profitable third of the railway network should be closed outright, cannot claim all the credit for this, as the modernising momentum had gathered before he ever became Chairman of British Railways.  But he did throw his weight behind the project; he certainly wanted steam gone.  Even the sight of the old engines directly contradicted the new image he had in mind for the railways (slick, dynamic, progressive, unfussy, etc., etc.), and he was apparently furious to discover that Alan Pegler had secured the right to run Flying Scotsman on the national network.  Indeed, Roden notes that ‘Beeching’s insistence that no other operating deals like Flying Scotsman’s should be concluded meant that by 1967 she was the only privately owned locomotive allowed to run on British Railways’ (p. 113) and, a year later, the only steam locomotive at all.  The revolution was complete.

But Roden does not linger unduly on the depressing episodes in the story.  This paragraph in particular, on the subject of the speed records chased and broken by steam locomotives in the 1930s, struck me:

It seems odd, in the face of today’s youth-obsessed society, that the drivers who broke the speed records were all in their fifties, and looked nothing like the daredevil speed demons flying aeroplanes at the time.  But, while test pilots needed cat-like reflexes and fearlessness, the express engine driver needed experience.  He had to know every kink in the track, every curve, every hill, every approach to every station, where the signals and signal boxes were, and the speed limits too.  On top of that, he also had to know how to handle his train in conditions from snow and ice to the track-buckling heat of summer.  Trying to drive a train really fast without this knowledge was to court disaster, and, sensibly, the railways kept to their tried and tested ways [in normal service].  (p.60)

It is easy to joke that since trains have no steering, they must be easy to drive, but this is far from the truth.  For one thing, the stakes are higher than with cars: the speeds attained are generally higher, the traction is more powerful, the weight of everything involved far greater.  Starting and stopping take much longer, and the ability to stop in a precise position takes a great deal of skill.  The most important difference between rail and road traffic is that, on the main line at least, it is not possible to drive a train simply by sight.  The braking distance of a train is far greater than a car’s — from 100mph it can be a matter of miles — so, usually far beyond what can be seen round the next bend.  The skill, then, lies not so much in what is seen from the cab, but what the driver knows.  Stations and speed restrictions have to be anticipated before they appear; by the time they come into view it is too late to brake.  This is why signalling involves ‘distant aspects’ — the single or double yellow signals which give advance warning of the absolute bar of a red signal.  The driver’s mind makes the journey ahead of the train itself.  What comes next?  What is the line speed, and for which route at which junction; is the gradient rising or falling, and how steeply; are we stopping at the next station?  Route knowledge is a thread of names and numbers that must be learned by heart, and then altered according to the composition, length and weight of the train, as well as the weather.  Given all this, it stands to reason that drivers must know, or ‘sign’ a route, before they can drive it.

The video below, especially the first minute, must give a good idea of what it feels like to drive a train.  This is a British Rail Type 4 ‘Western’ class (built in the 1960s, later class 52) going up Brunel’s famous stretch of line along the sea wall between Teignmouth, Dawlish and Starcross in Devon.  A lot happens in the first sixty seconds in particular.  Clearly there cannot be a second’s lapse in concentration.

Now imagine trying to do the same thing in a steam engine, with the boiler’s hulk blocking most of the view and smoke and steam getting into the rest, at night, in the rain, with grit and soot and Pentecostal wind and fire in the eyes and ears…!  This video shows the driver’s view as West Country class no. 34046 Braunton storms through Wimbledon in south London:

One final clip, this time from an extraordinary 100mph speed run made in the middle of the night of the 15th May 2017 by the A1 Peppercorn class locomotive 60163 Tornado — which is incidentally a rather a special engine because she is newer than she looks, having been built from scratch by enthusiasts between 1994 and 2008.  All the time the men on the footplate are reading the signals and making judgements about the road ahead.  Hear what is said at the end in praise of the driver: “He’s been doing a lot of concentrating”f… He has thought his way from Newcastle to York.

Is railway route knowledge almost the last thing we have left that resembles an oral culture?  If daredevil pilots and racing-car drivers were great improvisers and virtuosi, the drivers who brought their engines to high speeds were bards, seeing the way to triumph in the mind’s eye, and then translating it into reality.  And to this day we depend on drivers to remember their routes by heart.  It is all part of the hidden poetry of railways, which I believe is still inherent to them, even in this more prosaic age of diesel and electric.

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.