DISCOVER LONDONP
roposals to build the world’s first
underground railway came out
of the search for a solution to
London’s growing traffic problems
and the congestion on its streets. By the
mid-19th century, Britain’s capital was the
largest and most prosperous city in the
world. Its success as a port and commercial
centre, based on Britain’s rapidly growingempire, led to an unprecedented explosion
in the city’s population. This rose from just
under one million at the first census in 1801
to more than 2.5 million 50 years later,
when the Great Exhibition of 1851 provided
London’s first major tourist attraction in
Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Most of
the many thousands of visitors from out of
© BENJAMIN GRAHAM town, whether from elsewhere in Britain or
³
Left: The Ritz hotel
overlooks the entrance
to Green Park stationfrom overseas, arrived in London at a main-
line station and then had to walk or fight for
a seat on an omnibus in order to reach Hyde
Park. There were no railways across the
capital, and only the Great Western Railway
(GWR) terminus at Paddington, through
which visitors from the west of England
arrived, was close to the park.
The unprecedented crowds that thronged
to the Great Exhibition highlighted for
the first time a pressing issue of which
Londoners and regular visitors were well
aware. Improved communications and
transport within and across the metropolis
were essential in unlocking the impossible
congestion on the city’s main thoroughfares,
where people, horses, carts, wagons, cabs,
omnibuses and livestock being driven
to market could bring the streets to
a virtual standstill.
The first main-line railways established
separate London termini at London
Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Shoreditch
and Fenchurch Street. There were many
more railway promotions in the “railway
mania” of the 1840s, when the House of
Commons had to consider 435 railway
bills for England and Wales. These were
all private enterprise schemes in which the
government had no direct involvement,
but every project had to be scrutinised and
authorised by Parliament. This “light touch”
state regulation was standard procedure in
Victorian Britain and could both delay and
frustrate major infrastructure projects.
However, back in the 1840s and 1850s,
both Parliament and the City Corporation
were determined to keep central London
free of railways and, as one historian neatly
put it, “hold back the London termini at an
invisible ring wall”.
In 1855, a Parliamentary
Select Committee on Metropolitan
Communications recommended, as a
potential solution, that the existing and
future main-line termini in London should
be linked by an underground railway,