Making the Underground Underground

Abstract

Although we think of the Metropolitan Railway as the world’s first Underground, its distinctiveness lay as much in its metropolitan character as in its subterranean setting. This paper examines early representations of the Metropolitan and District as more, or less, underground than contemporaries might have expected, especially in controversies over air quality and light; in discourses associated with controversies over smoking, speed and ventilation; and in the implications, real and imagined, of alternating open and closed, light and dark sections of line. With the substitution of electric for steam trains in the early twentieth century, attempts to make the Underground less underground by opening up additional ventilation shafts were replaced by a longer-term trend of making the Underground more underground, ‘girdering’ over cuttings and building over stations, with corresponding implications for how the Underground was experienced.