When was the first london underground line

How you can help garden wildlife this winter. Home Menu. A history of the London Underground. Getty Images. When was the London Underground built?

The world's first underground railway. This print shows commuters waving their hats in the air during a trial journey on the London Metropolitan Underground railway.

First steam train through Thames Tunnel. World's first electric railway deep underground opens. Where did the Tube logo come from? Where did the Tube map come from? The Tube map has been updated over time as the London Underground has developed. What happened to Tube during the war? This picture shows Londoners sheltering on a platform at Bounds Green tube station on 6 October and also what it looks like now.

The Tube today. During planning the line was known as Route 8 or Route C references, one assumes, to long forgotten consultation documents , but those would obviously never have survived contact with the Tube Map. Despite the fact that this latter name is brilliant , the authorities decided to be boring as hell and name it the Victoria line: this was presumably to advertise the fact that its main function was to improve links between Victoria station and the West End.

And so, half a century on, we can do nothing but mourn the loss of the Viking line. Jubilee line The Jubbly, too, was created to relieve the existing network. In fact, it did so before it was even conceived as a new line: it started life in , when the London Passenger Transport Board extended the Bakerloo line through a new tunnel from Baker Street to Finchley Road; beyond that, it took over Metropolitan line services to Stanmore, thus relieving pressure on Baker Street. After the war, various official sounding bodies proposed all sorts of ideas to expand the central London network, and with south-west to north-east travel dealt with by the Victoria line, north-west to south-east was next on the list.

The original plan, discussed in the mid s, would have seen the Stanmore branch connected to a new line, via Bond Street and Charing Cross; it would then continue under the Strand and Fleet Street to Cannon Street and Fenchurch Street, before heading on to pathetically under tube-d south east London. This line, in reference one of the key streets in served, and the buried river after which it was named, would be known as the Fleet Line.

Various proposals for the Fleet Line, dating from the mid s. Except, everything went wrong. Construction began in , even as the Victoria line was being polished off — but the various fiscal crises of that decade meant that the government decided to build it in stages, with the first stage only running as far as Charing Cross. Improving links in the City and connecting up south east London were now less of a priority than serving the South Bank and Canary Wharf. So when the extension finally opened in , it never went near Fleet Street at all.

Perhaps they got the name right after all. Presumably they wanted to highlight that this was the Hammersmith branch, but it was nonetheless a pretty lazy choice of name for a line that runs from Hammersmith to the City, not least since the District line runs from Hammersmith to the City as well.

Ah well. Not everyone can be creative, I suppose. Image: Getty. Since the integration of the tube network under the London Passenger Transport Board in , the city authorities have succeeded in creating precisely no new major underground railways without naming them after the royal family. And this is why we will never have true equality in Britain. This bloody country. Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.

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Password Please enter a valid password. Submit Submit. By Sian Bayley. D id you know that during the morning and evening rush hours, there are more than Tube trains zooming around the capital at any one time? London Waterloo Station is regarded as the busiest, seeing If not, read on.

Vague schemes for subterranean rail routes date back to the s. A ludicrously optimistic proposal in , for example, suggested that "one from London to Dover would cost less than the tunnel near Primrose Hill". Charles Pearson is usually credited with the first serious scheme for an underground railway, in His original plans called for an atmospheric railway — one relying on air pressure, like firing a pea shooter.

He wasn't the only champion of the idea, however. That same year, a John Williams mooted the following:. Over the next decade, many rival schemes were proposed. Most people agreed that London needed a subterranean railway to relieve surface traffic, but how best to do this, and how to raise the money?

Charles Pearson remained at the forefront of proceedings and his influence was instrumental in gaining planning permission. Wrangling over the route and how to raise the capital held up the project for the remainder of the s. It was not until January that earth was excavated.

The first shafts were dug in King's Cross and, the earliest mention we can find, at Euston Square:. Seymour Street is the old name for Eversholt Street.