CHAPTER X

_LONDON’S LATEST AND LONGEST TUBE_

“Green pastures and Piccadilly.”--W. BLACK.

Sanctioned by the Legislature as one of the most comprehensive schemes laid before it last year for linking together existing underground, as well as trunk, lines, the Great Northern, Piccadilly, and Brompton Railway, now under construction, has attracted such universal attention, and traverses such hitherto exclusive quarters, that it deserves more than a passing reference.

From a traveller’s point of view, the effect of this new railway will be far-reaching. Dwellers near District Railway termini, such as Wimbledon, New Cross, Bow Road, South Harrow, Hounslow Barracks, Richmond, and intermediate stations, will have, by means of exchange--at Earl’s Court Station with the Metropolitan District Railway; at Gloucester Road and South Kensington Station with the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railway; at Piccadilly Circus Station with the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway; at Cranbourn Street Station with the Charing Cross, Euston, and Hampstead Railway; and at King’s Cross and Finsbury Park Stations with the Great Northern Railway--ready access to practically all centres and quarters of our big city; its own immediate objective from Earl’s Court being Finsbury Park, a distance of 7½ miles. It is similar in construction to the Central. The cars, built at Loughborough, will resemble those of the new Inner Circle, and the driving force will come from the Power House at Chelsea.

Truly, under pleasant scenes will the new Tube be carried--as fashionable, romantic, and historical a route as any in London. Here is Earl’s Court, where, in the midst of market gardens far away from town, once stood John Hunter’s house, where the great anatomist kept a menagerie of wild beasts to experiment upon, and in the dead of night boiled down the body of O’Brien, the Irish giant, to obtain the skeleton, which now adorns the museum of the College of Surgeons. The well-known Edmund Tattersall lived close by for many years at Coleherne Court, on the site of one of either Fairfax’s or Lord Essex’s redoubts (they appear to have had a good many), thrown up after the battle of Brentford, when the victorious Royalists were expected to cross the river (which they never did) and besiege London.

Gloucester Road, the next station, recalls the fact that when the District Railway came there, it was still a mere lane with hawthorn hedges, a blacksmith’s forge somewhere near, while pleasant paths right and left led to orchards, in the midst of which was St. Jude’s Church, so famous later on for its fashionable congregation and its eloquent preacher, the Rev. Dr. Forrest, now Dean of Worcester.

From Gloucester Road the Tube runs under pleasant Stanhope Gardens and part of Harrington Road with its fine mansions, to South Kensington. The ground about the Hoop and Toy Tavern close by was, so tradition says, designated in the draft Parliamentary Bill for the Great Western Railway terminus. At that time the site was sufficiently countrified to satisfy those who would banish railway stations to Jericho or to the uttermost verge of London, and remained so for a long time; and I have been told by an old Bromptonian that he has seen a covey of partridges put up where the Natural History Museum now stands.

At this point the new Tube--leaving its course parallel with, but at a far deeper level than, the District Railway--proceeds unaccompanied to Piccadilly, and, so to say, enters the Brompton Road at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, formerly a very plain brick edifice erected by the Oratorian Fathers, who had begun their good work on a humble scale in King William Street, Charing Cross, in a building subsequently occupied by Woodin, the ventriloquist, and later on by Toole, as his own peculiar theatre.

The present conspicuous basilica is at last completed, all but the towers. Adjoining it, down an avenue of trees, recalling the approach to Shakespeare’s last resting-place, is Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, reminiscent of Dr. Irons, its vicar, who ultimately became Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, beneath which is the City station of the City and South London Electric Railway.

Brompton Square is close by, associated by many of us with a once popular song, “Ada with the golden hair,” composed and sung by G. W. Moore, of the Christy Minstrels. In this Square have dwelt many actors and actresses: Wigan, Buckstone, Robert Keeley, etc.; and also Shirley Brooks. At one corner used to be a house standing a little back from the road, occupied by an eccentric individual whose craze was to have several clocks in every room, and the task of keeping them in order encouraged a watch-and-clock-maker to settle down in a small shop next door. Another feature of his craze was to present a watch of some kind to every lady he knew; so that his neighbour must have done a fair business. A bank now occupies this site, and the author recollects watching the strong-room being built deep down in the gravelly soil peculiar to South Kensington. Next door will be located the unpretentious Brompton Station of the new railway. An official of the bank was heard to remark facetiously that he trusted the Tube would not bore into the strong-room aforesaid--a new possibility and grievance to be duly noted.

Directly underneath Brompton Road goes London’s latest Tube, passing “Harrod’s,” the most palatial General Store in the metropolis, if not in the world. It originated some years ago in a narrow little shop, where good tea, excellent butter, and, rumour says, jam made by Mr. Harrod’s mother, were the chief articles sold to the customers, the bulk of whom were of the working-class.

Now Knightsbridge is reached, in olden times called Kingsbridge, when it was represented by a bridge only (on the site of the modern Albert Gate), built by Edward the Confessor over a brook, or bourn, rising, like the Tybourn and the Oldbourn, in the Hampstead Hills, and flowing thence to the Thames.

No part of London has so completely changed in appearance as this; lofty modern buildings having taken the place of small old-fashioned houses. These improvements culminate at Sloane Street, where anyone approaching town by way of Kensington, meets the first of the numerous metropolitan “rond-points,” surrounded by mansions and shops so tall as to put into the shade the French Embassy and the houses at Albert Gate, which for many years were considered the highest in town. At the equestrian statue of Field-Marshal Lord Strathnairn, four thoroughfares converge--Kensington Road, Brompton Road, Sloane Street, and St. George’s Place--pouring around it a continual stream of traffic day and night. Three of these thoroughfares are perfect paradises to ladies who delight in such alluring shops as Harrod’s, Harvey Nichols and Co., and Woolland Brothers, whose prolonged and magnificent frontages are unequalled in Modern Babylon.

A few doors from the “rond-point” in Brompton Road is a Tube station; and the workmen, as they bore close to the triangular grass-covered enclosure in front of Tattersall’s, are probably unaware that a comparatively slight deviation would take them through a pit beneath the enclosure, which, tradition avers, was used, during the Great Plague of London, for the dead. It is likely enough; for centuries ago there existed, a little to the east of Albert Gate, a hospital belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, which in 1665 was given up for the use of infected patients; and as this little piece of ground has never been disturbed, it probably was originally the burying-place attached to the hospital, and was converted into a plague-pit.

A house close to Hyde Park Court was once occupied by Charles Reade, the novelist. At a house close by (long since pulled down), Horace Smith, joint-author of _Rejected Addresses_, lived from 1810 to 1818, and drove himself daily to and from the City--he was then a stockbroker--in a vehicle called a “whisky.” A little farther on, where the London and County Bank is dwarfed by the late Sir Herbert Naylor Leyland’s great mansion, used to stand the “Fox and Bull,” a quaint old tavern dating back to Queen Elizabeth’s time, and a favourite resort of Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Morland, and other painters. Holy Trinity Chapel, St. George’s Place, no longer wedged in between two public-houses, replaces an old church where the celebrated Prime Minister--then plain Robert Walpole--was married in 1700 to a Lord Mayor’s daughter, who became the mother of Sir Horace Walpole. In St. George’s Place, where it faces the Park--surely one of the most desirable of situations, the first intimation that we are approaching “Green pastures and Piccadilly”--is the Hyde Park Corner Station of the new railway, next door to No. 8, conspicuous as the residence of the Baden-Powell family, on the site of which house, in an old-fashioned tenement, lived for many years John Liston, the comedian identified with the character of “Paul Pry.” Being freehold--a unique feature in the neighbourhood--this small plot of ground has cost the Company dear. It had to pay £30,750 for its acquisition.

It is hard to believe that at this point London once terminated, Lanesborough House, where St. George’s Hospital stands, being described in Pennant’s days as a “country mansion,” and thus it remained until little more than a century ago. While in the time of Charles the Second, near Hamilton Place was an inn, bearing the sign of the “Hercules Pillars,” signifying that, like the “First and Last House” at Land’s End, no habitation existed beyond it.

All sorts and conditions of people, mostly distinguished, live, and have lived, along this part of the route, which has its Tube stations at Down Street and Dover Street. There is Apsley House, and next to it Baron Rothschild’s mansion. At No. 1 Hamilton

Place lived the great Lord Chancellor Eldon. From 139, Piccadilly (Lord Glenesk’s) Lady Byron, after one of her quarrels with the poet, fled with her infant daughter. At Nos. 138 and 139, formerly one building, the Marquis of Queensbury (the notorious “Old Q.”) used, when an octogenarian, to sit at a certain window for hours, and ogle the passing fair sex. Gloucester House adjoining, is the residence of the Duke of Cambridge, occupied, when it was Elgin House, by the Earl of Elgin, who brought over to England the famous marbles that bear his name. Nearly opposite Down Street, on the park side of Piccadilly, stands a curious reminder that once upon a time, parcels and packages of all kinds had to be conveyed all over London, not by train or by Carter Paterson’s speedy vans, but on the shoulders of stalwart porters. It is a “bulk,” replacing an old timber one. A “bulk,” it may be explained, is a kind of shelf supported by two posts at a convenient height for the bearers of burdens to temporarily dispose of them and rest awhile. On the site of No. 106 (the St. James’s Club) was formerly the “Greyhound,” a very old inn, which, with the “White Horse” close by, and the “Half Moon,” a little further on, was a favourite pulling-up place for the numerous carriers, tranters, and market-gardeners who were incessantly coming from the country to town; for Piccadilly was one of London’s great highways westward. In a house (now a club) at the corner of White Horse Street, Sir Walter Scott sometimes stayed when in town. Cambridge House (the Naval and Military Club) recalls Lord Palmerston and the notable political receptions of his accomplished wife. At the corner of Clarges Street, where lived Edmund Kean and also Lady Hamilton, is the Turf Club, and at No. 84 the Imperial Service Club, the last of Piccadilly’s line of clubs that, commencing with The Bachelors’, at the corner of Hamilton Place, forms a kind of approach to the real club-land of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. Bath House, at the corner of Bolton Street, was the residence of the late millionaire, Baron Hirsch. No. 80, Piccadilly, and No. 1, Stratton Street together form the town house of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and it was from No. 80 that her father, Sir Francis Burdett, M.P., was, in 1810, amidst serious rioting, taken to the Tower for having made use of bad language in the House of Commons. From the roof can be obtained a splendid view of the Westminster and Pimlico district, across the Park, rightly called “Green,” with its beautiful stretches of turf and graceful trees, and far away to the Surrey Hills and the Crystal Palace.

Devonshire House, seen through its fine old iron gates--brought here from Chiswick--is plain enough externally, but its saloons are very handsome, and here the lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, reigned as Queen of Fashion long ago. Arlington Street reminds us of the Marquis of Salisbury, of Earl Nelson, who lodged here, and of Sir Horace Walpole and his father. In Albemarle Street, Percy Bysshe Shelley once had quarters at Cooke’s Hotel.

The Tube now carries its passengers ninety feet below the beautiful Piccadilly shops, past St. James’s Street and Bond Street, the Burlington Arcade and Burlington House, past the Egyptian Hall, past Fortnum and Mason’s--so universally associated with hampers, long-necked bottles, and race-meetings; past the Albany, where lived Byron, Lytton, and Lord Macaulay; past the Prince’s Restaurant, and its neighbour, St. James’s Church, where there are some splendid specimens of Grinling Gibbons’ wood-carving, and where, in 1762, occurred a singular thing. In some unexplained manner the vaults caught fire, and two hundred coffins with their inmates underwent an uncontemplated process of cremation; past St. James’s Hall opposite (eventually to be enlarged and converted to purposes other than harmony only). And now Piccadilly Circus, where six roads meet, and where, next to Spiers and Pond’s Restaurant, is the Piccadilly Circus Station of this, the longest Tube. Subways should certainly be arranged for access to this station, to avoid the very dangerous crossings from each of the six roads. Why does not the London County Council, emulating the City Fathers and their Mansion House subterranean passages, undertake this beneficent work in the West End?

We are now in the region of music-halls, theatres, cafés, dining-places, and Scott’s, the famous shell-fish shop.

“What is the origin of the name _Piccadilly_?” is a question asked again and again. It is difficult to decide. Was it from the ruffs called “peckadils” (from the Spanish _pica_), whose stiffened points were like diminutive spearheads, worn by the mashers or dudes of the early Carolean period, who gathered here at a gaming-house, Piccadilly Hall? Or was it, as Pennant thought, from the “piccadills” (cakes) which may have been sold in the surrounding fields? Who in the year 1903 can decide?

Here I pause. The rest of the new Tube’s route to Stamford Hill is useful but prosaic, and none of the remaining ten stations, except Cranbourn Street, Covent Garden, and Holborn are surrounded with any remarkably interesting associations, either historical or modern.

From South Kensington to Piccadilly this railway is certainly an aristocratic one. Daintily-clad ladies will, doubtless, use it largely for shopping and paying visits. The rank and fashion of London will patronise it. Countesses, marchionesses, even duchesses, may condescend to travel by it; nay, royalty may even give it a trial! Nobody would be surprised to see its booking-office æsthetically designed; the officials well-groomed and decorous as bank clerks; the lifts luxuriously upholstered with seats for all; the _cars-de-luxe_ (for which an extra charge would be made) beautifully decorated, warmed in winter and delightfully cooled during summer heats, with fresh flowers provided, and perfumes sprayed at intervals to remove the least trace of bad smell; copies of the _Court Guide_ and the most fashionable magazines at the disposal of the passengers; umbrella and parasol stands; special and comfortable quarters for pet dogs; the smoking-cars models of elegance and comfort; and the guards’ uniform scarlet and gold.

Seriously, however, is there or is there not, “one little rift within the lute”? Will the size of the tunnels--11½ feet in diameter--suffice for maintaining an equable and pure atmosphere throughout the year? Doubtless it will; for special attention has been given to this matter by the distinguished consulting engineer, and inlets for fresh, and up-cast shafts for foul air, together with fans worked by machinery, will be liberally provided.