It was the first underground rail system in the world and became the blueprint for underground rail systems around the globe.
In this episode, we’ll look into the history of the London underground, and how it grew into the state-of-the-art public transport system it is today.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about one of the world’s most iconic public transport systems, the London Underground.
[00:00:30] It’s a sprawling system that connects one of the world's megacities, and handles over a billion passenger journeys every single year.
[00:00:39] It was, as you may know, the first underground rail system in the world, creating a blueprint that has been followed everywhere from Seoul to Sao Paulo, Bucharest to Bangkok.
[00:00:52] And in this episode we’ll take a short look at its history, and learn how it grew from a handful of dark, smoky underground tunnels into a state of the art public transport system.
[00:01:05] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the history of the London underground.
[00:01:12] To start us off, I wanted to tell you a few statistics, a few numbers, to give you some idea of just how big - and busy - the London underground really is.
[00:01:23] Every year over a billion passenger journeys are made on the London underground, up to 5 million per day.
[00:01:32] Sure, it’s no longer the world's biggest in terms of the number of passengers, that prize goes to Seoul, with 3 billion trips per year, but it is still considerable.
[00:01:43] The London Underground network consists of 272 stations, and is split up into 11 different lines, or routes, we might say, covering over 400 kilometres of track.
[00:01:56] It is a sprawling network of underground lines dug deep beneath the city, responsible for carrying busy Londoners all over the capital.
[00:02:06] The journey to get there, however, was long and not exactly straightforward.
[00:02:12] To be precise, the first London Underground line opened in 1863, more than 100 years before today’s busiest subway system, Seoul.
[00:02:23] And this is what is particularly impressive, in my view, that the work on the London subway system started while the American Civil War was still going on, 10 years before Napoleon III took his last breath.
[00:02:38] The point is, it’s very old, and that’s where our story will start.
[00:02:45] Now, London has long been the largest city in England, but until the Industrial Revolution it was still relatively small - something like 14,000 people in the 15th century, 350,000 in the 17th century, but shortly after this its population began to balloon, to swell, to grow dramatically.
[00:03:10] To give you some idea of just how quickly it grew, in 1780 there were around 750,000 people living in London, but by 1815 it had almost doubled, to 1.4 million, and then doubled again by 1860, to almost three million people.
[00:03:31] It might have been a big city, but people still lived relatively “local” lives.
[00:03:38] Travelling from one part of the city to another wasn’t easy, and besides, for most people, there simply wasn’t a reason to do it.
[00:03:47] For those that did need to travel from one part of the city to another, the options were limited.
[00:03:54] There were primitive public horse buses. A horse bus is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a bus pulled by a horse. By 1832 there were 400 horse buses in the capital, but it wasn’t a particularly convenient way of getting around.
[00:04:12] For those who could afford it, they would have private horse and carriages, but even this was hardly ideal. The roads were busy and dirty, so it wasn’t exactly easy.
[00:04:25] What’s more, London has a big river running through the middle, The Thames. Today there are 35 bridges that cross the river, but in the early 19th century there were only two.
[00:04:40] The point I'm trying to make is that getting around the city was no simple task.
[00:04:46] So, what could be done?
[00:04:48] Well, outside the cities, Great Britain had been experiencing a boom in the railways.
[00:04:55] The Liverpool-Manchester railway had opened in 1830, and by 1852 there was over 10,000 kilometres of railway track across the country, connecting every major town and city.
[00:05:09] Clearly, trains were an effective means of transport, but it wasn’t exactly like you could construct a trainline in the middle of a city. I mean, there were houses, streets, there was a city in the way.
[00:05:23] But a group of innovative civil engineers had an idea.
[00:05:28] What if we added a train line below the city?
[00:05:33] It seemed like a mad idea, but a private company called “Metropolitan Line” was given permission to start work on an underground railway line, which would connect Paddington railway station in the west with Farringdon railway station in the City of London, in the heart of the city.
[00:05:54] Construction started in 1860. It was technically underground, but it wasn’t so far underground. Workers dug a hole, built a sort of tunnel around it, and then covered it over with earth again.
[00:06:09] It opened to the public in 1863, and was a rip roaring success, it was a great success. On its first day, 38,000 passengers used it, travelling the 6 kilometres from Paddington to Farringdon.
[00:06:26] And, not to spoil the story, but if you have been to London you will know that this line still stands today. There is a line of the Underground called The Metropolitan Line that links up Paddington and Farringdon Stations.
[00:06:41] It’s somewhat different today, of course.
[00:06:44] The first iteration of the Underground, of the tube, as it's now called, had wooden carriages that were lit by gas lanterns and pulled by steam trains. It wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable, but it was revolutionary.
[00:07:01] Almost immediately, there were plans to expand the line, to add more stations, and to continue to connect the city.
[00:07:10] By the 1870s, technological developments meant that these underground train lines could be dug and built much deeper, far below the city, but even these deeper lines still used more traditional steam trains.
[00:07:26] These thin, narrow tunnels were drilled to almost exactly the width of the trains in the shape of a tube, which is where the name ‘the tube’ comes from.
[00:07:37] And although these underground networks existed in the 1860s and 1870s, they didn’t become entirely practical or popular until they began running on electricity in the late 1880s.
[00:07:52] What's more, for the first 70 years of its existence, the London underground was still owned and operated by a series of different private companies, which meant that efforts to expand and invest in it weren’t particularly coordinated.
[00:08:09] But after it was brought into public ownership in 1933, things really started to change - decisions could be more long-term, rather than made with the aim of short-term profit.
[00:08:22] And clearly when you need to invest lots of money to dig large tunnels underground and you are creating a public, not private transport system, long term thinking is important.
[00:08:34] Now, before we move on with our historical journey, I want to alert you to another revolutionary aspect of the London Underground from 1933, the year that it was brought into public ownership, and that is the map of the London Underground.
[00:08:52] If you can imagine the map of the London underground, it's a series of more or less straight lines. It looks more like an electricity grid than a geographical map, and that’s actually by design, it's on purpose.
[00:09:08] It was created in 1933 by a man called Harry Beck. He wasn’t a map drawer, a cartographer. He was actually an electrical draughtsman, someone who draws electrical circuits.
[00:09:24] And he was something of a revolutionary. When he was asked to create a map of the Underground, he decided to base it on an electrical circuit board, not on traditional map design.
[00:09:38] His map didn’t accurately reflect the distance between stops, or whether the line snaked left or right. His map was beautifully simple; a series of more or less straight lines.
[00:09:52] In fact, it was initially rejected, because it was too radical.
[00:09:58] But after some testing on members of the public, it was introduced. It did exactly what it needed to - it showed people what direction they needed to go, north or south, east or west. It showed people how to get from A to B, and didn’t include superfluous, confusing or unnecessary information.
[00:10:21] And, as you may know, this model is used for most underground maps around the world today, they tend to be simple, with straight lines, and opt for user simplicity rather than geographical accuracy.
[00:10:36] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:38] Now in public ownership, there were big plans to expand the underground, but these had to be put on pause when the Second World War broke out.
[00:10:48] But that didn’t mean that the London underground lay empty and unused during the war.
[00:10:54] Far from it, in fact.
[00:10:56] As you may know, during the Second World War the London underground was used as a bomb shelter, a place for Londoners to hide from the Nazi bombs.
[00:11:07] Though the early tube network had also been used for shelter during the First World War, it was nothing like the 1940s, when the intensity of the Blitz, the German bombing campaign, forced thousands of Londonders underground.
[00:11:21] London’s tube stations doubled as air raid shelters, with thousands of men, women and children sleeping on the station platforms, the walkways, and even on the tracks.
[00:11:33] There were so many people down there, in fact, that tickets were introduced to make sure stations didn’t become overcrowded.
[00:11:42] And because these German air raids went on for so long, there was even a special train service, known as the ‘Tube Refreshments Special’, that delivered food and drinks to the sheltering Londoners.
[00:11:56] And interestingly, the Underground didn’t only provide shelter for the people of London.
[00:12:02] Part of the Picadilly line was used to store artefacts and treasures from the British Museum, including the famous but controversial Elgin Marbles.
[00:12:14] When the war ended, the tube network continued expanding in order to keep up with London’s growing population, as it had done when it first opened in the 1860s.
[00:12:24] More lines were laid, more stations opened, the routes spreading further and further across the city, creating this sprawling network that extends across the city today.
[00:12:35] Interestingly, however, there is one part of London where the tube didn’t expand to.
[00:12:41] Or not much, anyway.
[00:12:43] If you have visited London, you might have realised that there’s a noticeable difference between the tube service in north and south London, between the north side of the river and the south side of the river.
[00:12:57] In fact, there are only 31 tube stations south of the river Thames, whereas there are 250 north of the river.
[00:13:07] Several underground lines, including the Circle, Central, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines don’t even go to south London.
[00:13:16] So, why is that?
[00:13:18] Well, there are two main reasons.
[00:13:21] The first is to do with geology, that is, the type of soil, the ground.
[00:13:27] Put simply, the soil in south London contains a lot of sand and other deposits that make it more difficult to build underground tunnels.
[00:13:37] The soil in north and central London, however, is mostly made up of clay and is much easier to drill and tunnel through.
[00:13:46] The second reason is that when the first lines began to open in the 1860s, south London was already quite well-covered by railway, that is, by normal train stations, so there simply wasn’t much of a need to add more track underground.
[00:14:03] The result is what you see today - south London has very poor underground connections, which often leads to people in North London complaining about having to travel south, because it takes so long.
[00:14:16] Sure, there are more overground trains, and decent bus connections, but in general it takes longer to get around, and much longer to get into central London, meaning that south London is generally a cheaper area to live in than north London.
[00:14:32] Now, back to the history of the underground.
[00:14:35] From the post-war period right through to the present day it has undergone near-constant enlargements and improvements, with the most recent being the opening of the “Elizabeth Line”, named after Queen Elizabeth, which was opened a few months before her death.
[00:14:51] And in 2023, 160 years after the first passengers chugged along through that smoky tunnel, it remains a living artefact of a technological breakthrough that has been emulated in almost 200 cities worldwide.
[00:15:08] So if your city has a subway system with a slightly odd looking map, it can probably trace its roots back here, to the London Underground.
[00:15:18] Now, to finish off this short exploration into the history of the tube, I have five pieces of trivia, facts, about the London underground.
[00:15:29] So, first up: if you are on the Central line, which unsurprisingly goes through central London, and you find the train twisting and turning, that is because the tunnel follows the city’s medieval street plan, full of twists and turns.
[00:15:46] Fact number two, the underground system’s escalators travel a distance equivalent to going twice around the globe every single week.
[00:15:56] Now, fact number three might actually surprise you, because a little over half, 55% to be precise, of the London Underground is overground.
[00:16:08] That’s right, despite it being called the ‘underground’, less than half of it is actually underground.
[00:16:15] And remember how I said that the distances on the map don’t actually reflect the real distances above the ground?
[00:16:23] Well, fact number four is the perfect example of this.
[00:16:27] The shortest distance between two stations on the underground network is in central London between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, which is on the Piccadilly line, and is just 300 metres.
[00:16:40] It’s so close, in fact, that there is no point taking the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden, as by the time you’ve tapped in with your card, or bought a ticket, gone down the escalators, walked to the platform, waited for the train, taken it and come out the other side, it would’ve been quicker to walk.
[00:17:00] And finally, our fifth fact, in a single year trains on the London Underground travel a staggering 83.6 million kilometres. It’s quite the journey from the gas-light steam-powered trains that made that first journey in 1863.
[00:17:17] So, there you go, a brief but hopefully interesting journey through the history of the London Underground.
[00:17:26] It might not be the biggest, the cleanest, the prettiest, the most on-time, or even the best, but it was a pioneer that paved the way for cities all over the world.
[00:17:38] So next time you ride the metro in your city, or even if you have the chance to visit London and ride the Tube, you’ll know a little bit more about how the world’s original subway system got started.
[00:17:52] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on a short history of the London Underground.
[00:18:00] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about it or this was the first time you’d heard about the London Underground, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:18:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:13] Have you been on the London underground before?
[00:18:15] How does it compare to the subway system in your country?
[00:18:18] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:22] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about one of the world’s most iconic public transport systems, the London Underground.
[00:00:30] It’s a sprawling system that connects one of the world's megacities, and handles over a billion passenger journeys every single year.
[00:00:39] It was, as you may know, the first underground rail system in the world, creating a blueprint that has been followed everywhere from Seoul to Sao Paulo, Bucharest to Bangkok.
[00:00:52] And in this episode we’ll take a short look at its history, and learn how it grew from a handful of dark, smoky underground tunnels into a state of the art public transport system.
[00:01:05] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the history of the London underground.
[00:01:12] To start us off, I wanted to tell you a few statistics, a few numbers, to give you some idea of just how big - and busy - the London underground really is.
[00:01:23] Every year over a billion passenger journeys are made on the London underground, up to 5 million per day.
[00:01:32] Sure, it’s no longer the world's biggest in terms of the number of passengers, that prize goes to Seoul, with 3 billion trips per year, but it is still considerable.
[00:01:43] The London Underground network consists of 272 stations, and is split up into 11 different lines, or routes, we might say, covering over 400 kilometres of track.
[00:01:56] It is a sprawling network of underground lines dug deep beneath the city, responsible for carrying busy Londoners all over the capital.
[00:02:06] The journey to get there, however, was long and not exactly straightforward.
[00:02:12] To be precise, the first London Underground line opened in 1863, more than 100 years before today’s busiest subway system, Seoul.
[00:02:23] And this is what is particularly impressive, in my view, that the work on the London subway system started while the American Civil War was still going on, 10 years before Napoleon III took his last breath.
[00:02:38] The point is, it’s very old, and that’s where our story will start.
[00:02:45] Now, London has long been the largest city in England, but until the Industrial Revolution it was still relatively small - something like 14,000 people in the 15th century, 350,000 in the 17th century, but shortly after this its population began to balloon, to swell, to grow dramatically.
[00:03:10] To give you some idea of just how quickly it grew, in 1780 there were around 750,000 people living in London, but by 1815 it had almost doubled, to 1.4 million, and then doubled again by 1860, to almost three million people.
[00:03:31] It might have been a big city, but people still lived relatively “local” lives.
[00:03:38] Travelling from one part of the city to another wasn’t easy, and besides, for most people, there simply wasn’t a reason to do it.
[00:03:47] For those that did need to travel from one part of the city to another, the options were limited.
[00:03:54] There were primitive public horse buses. A horse bus is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a bus pulled by a horse. By 1832 there were 400 horse buses in the capital, but it wasn’t a particularly convenient way of getting around.
[00:04:12] For those who could afford it, they would have private horse and carriages, but even this was hardly ideal. The roads were busy and dirty, so it wasn’t exactly easy.
[00:04:25] What’s more, London has a big river running through the middle, The Thames. Today there are 35 bridges that cross the river, but in the early 19th century there were only two.
[00:04:40] The point I'm trying to make is that getting around the city was no simple task.
[00:04:46] So, what could be done?
[00:04:48] Well, outside the cities, Great Britain had been experiencing a boom in the railways.
[00:04:55] The Liverpool-Manchester railway had opened in 1830, and by 1852 there was over 10,000 kilometres of railway track across the country, connecting every major town and city.
[00:05:09] Clearly, trains were an effective means of transport, but it wasn’t exactly like you could construct a trainline in the middle of a city. I mean, there were houses, streets, there was a city in the way.
[00:05:23] But a group of innovative civil engineers had an idea.
[00:05:28] What if we added a train line below the city?
[00:05:33] It seemed like a mad idea, but a private company called “Metropolitan Line” was given permission to start work on an underground railway line, which would connect Paddington railway station in the west with Farringdon railway station in the City of London, in the heart of the city.
[00:05:54] Construction started in 1860. It was technically underground, but it wasn’t so far underground. Workers dug a hole, built a sort of tunnel around it, and then covered it over with earth again.
[00:06:09] It opened to the public in 1863, and was a rip roaring success, it was a great success. On its first day, 38,000 passengers used it, travelling the 6 kilometres from Paddington to Farringdon.
[00:06:26] And, not to spoil the story, but if you have been to London you will know that this line still stands today. There is a line of the Underground called The Metropolitan Line that links up Paddington and Farringdon Stations.
[00:06:41] It’s somewhat different today, of course.
[00:06:44] The first iteration of the Underground, of the tube, as it's now called, had wooden carriages that were lit by gas lanterns and pulled by steam trains. It wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable, but it was revolutionary.
[00:07:01] Almost immediately, there were plans to expand the line, to add more stations, and to continue to connect the city.
[00:07:10] By the 1870s, technological developments meant that these underground train lines could be dug and built much deeper, far below the city, but even these deeper lines still used more traditional steam trains.
[00:07:26] These thin, narrow tunnels were drilled to almost exactly the width of the trains in the shape of a tube, which is where the name ‘the tube’ comes from.
[00:07:37] And although these underground networks existed in the 1860s and 1870s, they didn’t become entirely practical or popular until they began running on electricity in the late 1880s.
[00:07:52] What's more, for the first 70 years of its existence, the London underground was still owned and operated by a series of different private companies, which meant that efforts to expand and invest in it weren’t particularly coordinated.
[00:08:09] But after it was brought into public ownership in 1933, things really started to change - decisions could be more long-term, rather than made with the aim of short-term profit.
[00:08:22] And clearly when you need to invest lots of money to dig large tunnels underground and you are creating a public, not private transport system, long term thinking is important.
[00:08:34] Now, before we move on with our historical journey, I want to alert you to another revolutionary aspect of the London Underground from 1933, the year that it was brought into public ownership, and that is the map of the London Underground.
[00:08:52] If you can imagine the map of the London underground, it's a series of more or less straight lines. It looks more like an electricity grid than a geographical map, and that’s actually by design, it's on purpose.
[00:09:08] It was created in 1933 by a man called Harry Beck. He wasn’t a map drawer, a cartographer. He was actually an electrical draughtsman, someone who draws electrical circuits.
[00:09:24] And he was something of a revolutionary. When he was asked to create a map of the Underground, he decided to base it on an electrical circuit board, not on traditional map design.
[00:09:38] His map didn’t accurately reflect the distance between stops, or whether the line snaked left or right. His map was beautifully simple; a series of more or less straight lines.
[00:09:52] In fact, it was initially rejected, because it was too radical.
[00:09:58] But after some testing on members of the public, it was introduced. It did exactly what it needed to - it showed people what direction they needed to go, north or south, east or west. It showed people how to get from A to B, and didn’t include superfluous, confusing or unnecessary information.
[00:10:21] And, as you may know, this model is used for most underground maps around the world today, they tend to be simple, with straight lines, and opt for user simplicity rather than geographical accuracy.
[00:10:36] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:38] Now in public ownership, there were big plans to expand the underground, but these had to be put on pause when the Second World War broke out.
[00:10:48] But that didn’t mean that the London underground lay empty and unused during the war.
[00:10:54] Far from it, in fact.
[00:10:56] As you may know, during the Second World War the London underground was used as a bomb shelter, a place for Londoners to hide from the Nazi bombs.
[00:11:07] Though the early tube network had also been used for shelter during the First World War, it was nothing like the 1940s, when the intensity of the Blitz, the German bombing campaign, forced thousands of Londonders underground.
[00:11:21] London’s tube stations doubled as air raid shelters, with thousands of men, women and children sleeping on the station platforms, the walkways, and even on the tracks.
[00:11:33] There were so many people down there, in fact, that tickets were introduced to make sure stations didn’t become overcrowded.
[00:11:42] And because these German air raids went on for so long, there was even a special train service, known as the ‘Tube Refreshments Special’, that delivered food and drinks to the sheltering Londoners.
[00:11:56] And interestingly, the Underground didn’t only provide shelter for the people of London.
[00:12:02] Part of the Picadilly line was used to store artefacts and treasures from the British Museum, including the famous but controversial Elgin Marbles.
[00:12:14] When the war ended, the tube network continued expanding in order to keep up with London’s growing population, as it had done when it first opened in the 1860s.
[00:12:24] More lines were laid, more stations opened, the routes spreading further and further across the city, creating this sprawling network that extends across the city today.
[00:12:35] Interestingly, however, there is one part of London where the tube didn’t expand to.
[00:12:41] Or not much, anyway.
[00:12:43] If you have visited London, you might have realised that there’s a noticeable difference between the tube service in north and south London, between the north side of the river and the south side of the river.
[00:12:57] In fact, there are only 31 tube stations south of the river Thames, whereas there are 250 north of the river.
[00:13:07] Several underground lines, including the Circle, Central, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines don’t even go to south London.
[00:13:16] So, why is that?
[00:13:18] Well, there are two main reasons.
[00:13:21] The first is to do with geology, that is, the type of soil, the ground.
[00:13:27] Put simply, the soil in south London contains a lot of sand and other deposits that make it more difficult to build underground tunnels.
[00:13:37] The soil in north and central London, however, is mostly made up of clay and is much easier to drill and tunnel through.
[00:13:46] The second reason is that when the first lines began to open in the 1860s, south London was already quite well-covered by railway, that is, by normal train stations, so there simply wasn’t much of a need to add more track underground.
[00:14:03] The result is what you see today - south London has very poor underground connections, which often leads to people in North London complaining about having to travel south, because it takes so long.
[00:14:16] Sure, there are more overground trains, and decent bus connections, but in general it takes longer to get around, and much longer to get into central London, meaning that south London is generally a cheaper area to live in than north London.
[00:14:32] Now, back to the history of the underground.
[00:14:35] From the post-war period right through to the present day it has undergone near-constant enlargements and improvements, with the most recent being the opening of the “Elizabeth Line”, named after Queen Elizabeth, which was opened a few months before her death.
[00:14:51] And in 2023, 160 years after the first passengers chugged along through that smoky tunnel, it remains a living artefact of a technological breakthrough that has been emulated in almost 200 cities worldwide.
[00:15:08] So if your city has a subway system with a slightly odd looking map, it can probably trace its roots back here, to the London Underground.
[00:15:18] Now, to finish off this short exploration into the history of the tube, I have five pieces of trivia, facts, about the London underground.
[00:15:29] So, first up: if you are on the Central line, which unsurprisingly goes through central London, and you find the train twisting and turning, that is because the tunnel follows the city’s medieval street plan, full of twists and turns.
[00:15:46] Fact number two, the underground system’s escalators travel a distance equivalent to going twice around the globe every single week.
[00:15:56] Now, fact number three might actually surprise you, because a little over half, 55% to be precise, of the London Underground is overground.
[00:16:08] That’s right, despite it being called the ‘underground’, less than half of it is actually underground.
[00:16:15] And remember how I said that the distances on the map don’t actually reflect the real distances above the ground?
[00:16:23] Well, fact number four is the perfect example of this.
[00:16:27] The shortest distance between two stations on the underground network is in central London between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, which is on the Piccadilly line, and is just 300 metres.
[00:16:40] It’s so close, in fact, that there is no point taking the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden, as by the time you’ve tapped in with your card, or bought a ticket, gone down the escalators, walked to the platform, waited for the train, taken it and come out the other side, it would’ve been quicker to walk.
[00:17:00] And finally, our fifth fact, in a single year trains on the London Underground travel a staggering 83.6 million kilometres. It’s quite the journey from the gas-light steam-powered trains that made that first journey in 1863.
[00:17:17] So, there you go, a brief but hopefully interesting journey through the history of the London Underground.
[00:17:26] It might not be the biggest, the cleanest, the prettiest, the most on-time, or even the best, but it was a pioneer that paved the way for cities all over the world.
[00:17:38] So next time you ride the metro in your city, or even if you have the chance to visit London and ride the Tube, you’ll know a little bit more about how the world’s original subway system got started.
[00:17:52] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on a short history of the London Underground.
[00:18:00] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about it or this was the first time you’d heard about the London Underground, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:18:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:13] Have you been on the London underground before?
[00:18:15] How does it compare to the subway system in your country?
[00:18:18] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:22] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about one of the world’s most iconic public transport systems, the London Underground.
[00:00:30] It’s a sprawling system that connects one of the world's megacities, and handles over a billion passenger journeys every single year.
[00:00:39] It was, as you may know, the first underground rail system in the world, creating a blueprint that has been followed everywhere from Seoul to Sao Paulo, Bucharest to Bangkok.
[00:00:52] And in this episode we’ll take a short look at its history, and learn how it grew from a handful of dark, smoky underground tunnels into a state of the art public transport system.
[00:01:05] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the history of the London underground.
[00:01:12] To start us off, I wanted to tell you a few statistics, a few numbers, to give you some idea of just how big - and busy - the London underground really is.
[00:01:23] Every year over a billion passenger journeys are made on the London underground, up to 5 million per day.
[00:01:32] Sure, it’s no longer the world's biggest in terms of the number of passengers, that prize goes to Seoul, with 3 billion trips per year, but it is still considerable.
[00:01:43] The London Underground network consists of 272 stations, and is split up into 11 different lines, or routes, we might say, covering over 400 kilometres of track.
[00:01:56] It is a sprawling network of underground lines dug deep beneath the city, responsible for carrying busy Londoners all over the capital.
[00:02:06] The journey to get there, however, was long and not exactly straightforward.
[00:02:12] To be precise, the first London Underground line opened in 1863, more than 100 years before today’s busiest subway system, Seoul.
[00:02:23] And this is what is particularly impressive, in my view, that the work on the London subway system started while the American Civil War was still going on, 10 years before Napoleon III took his last breath.
[00:02:38] The point is, it’s very old, and that’s where our story will start.
[00:02:45] Now, London has long been the largest city in England, but until the Industrial Revolution it was still relatively small - something like 14,000 people in the 15th century, 350,000 in the 17th century, but shortly after this its population began to balloon, to swell, to grow dramatically.
[00:03:10] To give you some idea of just how quickly it grew, in 1780 there were around 750,000 people living in London, but by 1815 it had almost doubled, to 1.4 million, and then doubled again by 1860, to almost three million people.
[00:03:31] It might have been a big city, but people still lived relatively “local” lives.
[00:03:38] Travelling from one part of the city to another wasn’t easy, and besides, for most people, there simply wasn’t a reason to do it.
[00:03:47] For those that did need to travel from one part of the city to another, the options were limited.
[00:03:54] There were primitive public horse buses. A horse bus is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a bus pulled by a horse. By 1832 there were 400 horse buses in the capital, but it wasn’t a particularly convenient way of getting around.
[00:04:12] For those who could afford it, they would have private horse and carriages, but even this was hardly ideal. The roads were busy and dirty, so it wasn’t exactly easy.
[00:04:25] What’s more, London has a big river running through the middle, The Thames. Today there are 35 bridges that cross the river, but in the early 19th century there were only two.
[00:04:40] The point I'm trying to make is that getting around the city was no simple task.
[00:04:46] So, what could be done?
[00:04:48] Well, outside the cities, Great Britain had been experiencing a boom in the railways.
[00:04:55] The Liverpool-Manchester railway had opened in 1830, and by 1852 there was over 10,000 kilometres of railway track across the country, connecting every major town and city.
[00:05:09] Clearly, trains were an effective means of transport, but it wasn’t exactly like you could construct a trainline in the middle of a city. I mean, there were houses, streets, there was a city in the way.
[00:05:23] But a group of innovative civil engineers had an idea.
[00:05:28] What if we added a train line below the city?
[00:05:33] It seemed like a mad idea, but a private company called “Metropolitan Line” was given permission to start work on an underground railway line, which would connect Paddington railway station in the west with Farringdon railway station in the City of London, in the heart of the city.
[00:05:54] Construction started in 1860. It was technically underground, but it wasn’t so far underground. Workers dug a hole, built a sort of tunnel around it, and then covered it over with earth again.
[00:06:09] It opened to the public in 1863, and was a rip roaring success, it was a great success. On its first day, 38,000 passengers used it, travelling the 6 kilometres from Paddington to Farringdon.
[00:06:26] And, not to spoil the story, but if you have been to London you will know that this line still stands today. There is a line of the Underground called The Metropolitan Line that links up Paddington and Farringdon Stations.
[00:06:41] It’s somewhat different today, of course.
[00:06:44] The first iteration of the Underground, of the tube, as it's now called, had wooden carriages that were lit by gas lanterns and pulled by steam trains. It wouldn’t have been particularly comfortable, but it was revolutionary.
[00:07:01] Almost immediately, there were plans to expand the line, to add more stations, and to continue to connect the city.
[00:07:10] By the 1870s, technological developments meant that these underground train lines could be dug and built much deeper, far below the city, but even these deeper lines still used more traditional steam trains.
[00:07:26] These thin, narrow tunnels were drilled to almost exactly the width of the trains in the shape of a tube, which is where the name ‘the tube’ comes from.
[00:07:37] And although these underground networks existed in the 1860s and 1870s, they didn’t become entirely practical or popular until they began running on electricity in the late 1880s.
[00:07:52] What's more, for the first 70 years of its existence, the London underground was still owned and operated by a series of different private companies, which meant that efforts to expand and invest in it weren’t particularly coordinated.
[00:08:09] But after it was brought into public ownership in 1933, things really started to change - decisions could be more long-term, rather than made with the aim of short-term profit.
[00:08:22] And clearly when you need to invest lots of money to dig large tunnels underground and you are creating a public, not private transport system, long term thinking is important.
[00:08:34] Now, before we move on with our historical journey, I want to alert you to another revolutionary aspect of the London Underground from 1933, the year that it was brought into public ownership, and that is the map of the London Underground.
[00:08:52] If you can imagine the map of the London underground, it's a series of more or less straight lines. It looks more like an electricity grid than a geographical map, and that’s actually by design, it's on purpose.
[00:09:08] It was created in 1933 by a man called Harry Beck. He wasn’t a map drawer, a cartographer. He was actually an electrical draughtsman, someone who draws electrical circuits.
[00:09:24] And he was something of a revolutionary. When he was asked to create a map of the Underground, he decided to base it on an electrical circuit board, not on traditional map design.
[00:09:38] His map didn’t accurately reflect the distance between stops, or whether the line snaked left or right. His map was beautifully simple; a series of more or less straight lines.
[00:09:52] In fact, it was initially rejected, because it was too radical.
[00:09:58] But after some testing on members of the public, it was introduced. It did exactly what it needed to - it showed people what direction they needed to go, north or south, east or west. It showed people how to get from A to B, and didn’t include superfluous, confusing or unnecessary information.
[00:10:21] And, as you may know, this model is used for most underground maps around the world today, they tend to be simple, with straight lines, and opt for user simplicity rather than geographical accuracy.
[00:10:36] Now, back to our story.
[00:10:38] Now in public ownership, there were big plans to expand the underground, but these had to be put on pause when the Second World War broke out.
[00:10:48] But that didn’t mean that the London underground lay empty and unused during the war.
[00:10:54] Far from it, in fact.
[00:10:56] As you may know, during the Second World War the London underground was used as a bomb shelter, a place for Londoners to hide from the Nazi bombs.
[00:11:07] Though the early tube network had also been used for shelter during the First World War, it was nothing like the 1940s, when the intensity of the Blitz, the German bombing campaign, forced thousands of Londonders underground.
[00:11:21] London’s tube stations doubled as air raid shelters, with thousands of men, women and children sleeping on the station platforms, the walkways, and even on the tracks.
[00:11:33] There were so many people down there, in fact, that tickets were introduced to make sure stations didn’t become overcrowded.
[00:11:42] And because these German air raids went on for so long, there was even a special train service, known as the ‘Tube Refreshments Special’, that delivered food and drinks to the sheltering Londoners.
[00:11:56] And interestingly, the Underground didn’t only provide shelter for the people of London.
[00:12:02] Part of the Picadilly line was used to store artefacts and treasures from the British Museum, including the famous but controversial Elgin Marbles.
[00:12:14] When the war ended, the tube network continued expanding in order to keep up with London’s growing population, as it had done when it first opened in the 1860s.
[00:12:24] More lines were laid, more stations opened, the routes spreading further and further across the city, creating this sprawling network that extends across the city today.
[00:12:35] Interestingly, however, there is one part of London where the tube didn’t expand to.
[00:12:41] Or not much, anyway.
[00:12:43] If you have visited London, you might have realised that there’s a noticeable difference between the tube service in north and south London, between the north side of the river and the south side of the river.
[00:12:57] In fact, there are only 31 tube stations south of the river Thames, whereas there are 250 north of the river.
[00:13:07] Several underground lines, including the Circle, Central, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines don’t even go to south London.
[00:13:16] So, why is that?
[00:13:18] Well, there are two main reasons.
[00:13:21] The first is to do with geology, that is, the type of soil, the ground.
[00:13:27] Put simply, the soil in south London contains a lot of sand and other deposits that make it more difficult to build underground tunnels.
[00:13:37] The soil in north and central London, however, is mostly made up of clay and is much easier to drill and tunnel through.
[00:13:46] The second reason is that when the first lines began to open in the 1860s, south London was already quite well-covered by railway, that is, by normal train stations, so there simply wasn’t much of a need to add more track underground.
[00:14:03] The result is what you see today - south London has very poor underground connections, which often leads to people in North London complaining about having to travel south, because it takes so long.
[00:14:16] Sure, there are more overground trains, and decent bus connections, but in general it takes longer to get around, and much longer to get into central London, meaning that south London is generally a cheaper area to live in than north London.
[00:14:32] Now, back to the history of the underground.
[00:14:35] From the post-war period right through to the present day it has undergone near-constant enlargements and improvements, with the most recent being the opening of the “Elizabeth Line”, named after Queen Elizabeth, which was opened a few months before her death.
[00:14:51] And in 2023, 160 years after the first passengers chugged along through that smoky tunnel, it remains a living artefact of a technological breakthrough that has been emulated in almost 200 cities worldwide.
[00:15:08] So if your city has a subway system with a slightly odd looking map, it can probably trace its roots back here, to the London Underground.
[00:15:18] Now, to finish off this short exploration into the history of the tube, I have five pieces of trivia, facts, about the London underground.
[00:15:29] So, first up: if you are on the Central line, which unsurprisingly goes through central London, and you find the train twisting and turning, that is because the tunnel follows the city’s medieval street plan, full of twists and turns.
[00:15:46] Fact number two, the underground system’s escalators travel a distance equivalent to going twice around the globe every single week.
[00:15:56] Now, fact number three might actually surprise you, because a little over half, 55% to be precise, of the London Underground is overground.
[00:16:08] That’s right, despite it being called the ‘underground’, less than half of it is actually underground.
[00:16:15] And remember how I said that the distances on the map don’t actually reflect the real distances above the ground?
[00:16:23] Well, fact number four is the perfect example of this.
[00:16:27] The shortest distance between two stations on the underground network is in central London between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, which is on the Piccadilly line, and is just 300 metres.
[00:16:40] It’s so close, in fact, that there is no point taking the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden, as by the time you’ve tapped in with your card, or bought a ticket, gone down the escalators, walked to the platform, waited for the train, taken it and come out the other side, it would’ve been quicker to walk.
[00:17:00] And finally, our fifth fact, in a single year trains on the London Underground travel a staggering 83.6 million kilometres. It’s quite the journey from the gas-light steam-powered trains that made that first journey in 1863.
[00:17:17] So, there you go, a brief but hopefully interesting journey through the history of the London Underground.
[00:17:26] It might not be the biggest, the cleanest, the prettiest, the most on-time, or even the best, but it was a pioneer that paved the way for cities all over the world.
[00:17:38] So next time you ride the metro in your city, or even if you have the chance to visit London and ride the Tube, you’ll know a little bit more about how the world’s original subway system got started.
[00:17:52] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on a short history of the London Underground.
[00:18:00] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about it or this was the first time you’d heard about the London Underground, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:18:09] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:18:13] Have you been on the London underground before?
[00:18:15] How does it compare to the subway system in your country?
[00:18:18] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:18:22] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:18:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:35] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
