The London Underground is the oldest underground railway in the world. Its story is the story of London growing outwards over 160 years.
Steam under the streets
By the mid-1800s, London's roads were jammed with horses, carts and people walking from the big railway stations to the City. The answer was a railway below the streets. The Metropolitan Railway opened on 10 January 1863, running between Paddington and Farringdon. It was built by digging a trench along the road, laying the track and covering it over, a method called 'cut and cover'. The trains were pulled by steam engines, and the tunnels were smoky, but it was an instant success.
The first tubes
Cut and cover meant tearing up streets, so engineers began boring deep, round tunnels instead. In 1890 the City and South London Railway opened the world's first deep electric underground line, part of today's Northern line. The round tunnels gave the network its nickname: the tube. Over the next 20 years, private companies opened lines that became the Central, Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines.
Joining it all up
The separate companies were brought together, and in 1933 London Transport was created to run the trains and buses as one system. Around the same time, an engineering draughtsman called Harry Beck designed a new kind of map. It ignored real distances and drew lines only straight, horizontal, vertical or at 45 degrees. It was much easier to read, and the idea has been copied by transit maps around the world.
War and change
During the Second World War, many deep stations were used as air-raid shelters, with thousands of people sleeping on platforms. After the war the network grew more slowly, but new lines still arrived: the Victoria line opened between 1968 and 1971, and the Jubilee line in 1979, extended to the Docklands and Stratford in 1999.
The modern network
Recent decades have added the DLR in 1987, the London Overground in 2007, the Northern line extension to Battersea Power Station in 2021 and the Elizabeth line in 2022, a huge new railway crossing London from east to west. Some lines now run all night at weekends.
Quirks worth knowing
- Many stations were closed and abandoned over the years. Some still lie hidden beneath the streets.
- Despite its name, more than half of the Underground actually runs above ground.
- The shortest journey between two neighbouring stations is only a few hundred metres, in central London.