Great Victorian ways

25 02 2011

1: Joseph Paxton, perspective view of the Great Victorian Way, 1855

In July 1855, a Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications published its report on how best to improve London’s chronic traffic congestion. One of the proposals came from Joseph Paxton, celebrated designer of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Paxton’s plan comprised a vast iron and glass arcade, which would form an uninterrupted covered space of 10 miles around central London: the ‘Great Victorian Way’ (1). Unsurprisingly, given its projected cost of £11 million, the Committee decided not to adopt this scheme, despite Paxton’s high reputation, and would later choose a far less ambitious underground railway, which was built from 1859-63.

2: Wayfarer's arcade, Southport, 1896

Despite the failure of utopian projects like Paxton’s, the idea of a micro-city under glass and iron persisted in the second half of the 19th century. Although never realised on the kind of scale envisaged by Paxton, there were attempts to create sealed environments offering protection from both the elements and the chaos of the street, most notably in the countless shopping arcades that were built in Victorian towns and cities. One of these – the Wayfarer’s Arcade in Southport – was designed to integrate into an already existing network of covered walkways. Built in 1896 by the Scottish iron manufacturer Walter Macfarlane, this arcade extends the concept of the canopy beyond the street, creating a new enclosed space between two buildings fronting Lord Street (2).

3: Lord Street, Southport

In fact, Lord Street itself is unique in its scale in the Victorian period. For over half a mile, covered canopies project from the shops creating an almost continuous shelter for shoppers in the unpredictable seaside weather of north-west England (3). These canopies were not built by a central municipal authority (as would have been the case if Paxton’s proposal had been built), but by individual property owners responding to demand. One at a time, and presumably in competition with one another, each property owner acquired a canopy for their premises, employing a host of mainly Glasgow-based iron manufacturers to produce ornamental cast-iron columns and railings. So the castings of Walter Macfarlane sit next to those of J & A Law (4); those of McDowell, Steven & Co sit next to George Smith (5). Different-sized columns sit side by side in what amounts to an exhibition of the ironfounders technique. The result is a sense of unity in diversity, with each company vying with its competitors to produce the most elaborate designs to attract customers and heighten the esteem of the property owners. It is almost as if the resulting covered arcade is an accident, achieved piecemeal over the years by the principles of free competition.

4: Lord Street canopies, Southport

5: Lord Street canopies, Southport

If Southport’s Lord Street represents the part-realisation of utopian dreams in relation to iron and glass, other seaside resorts had similar ambitions. As early as 1874, Walter Macfarlane proposed building a mile-long iron colonnade under the cliffs in Brighton. This was never built, but its concept was revived 25 years later in the construction of Madeira Drive (6), a vast covered walkway that formed part of the wholesale re-sculpting of the cliffs to the east of the Palace Pier, which included terraced walkways and an elevator at the eastern end. All of this was the product of cast iron being produced and employed on an industrial scale for decorative purposes. The resulting colonnade was likened to a enormous grotto, hewn from the cliff and emblazoned with mythic subjects: Neptune, acanthus leaves, and water nymphs. This was iron remaking nature into a modern, progressive space but simultaneously adopting the image of an ancient and mythic past.

6: Madeira Drive, Brighton, 1888-95


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Categories : architecture, cities, iron, London, ornament, seaside, symbolism, Victorian

The underground at war

5 01 2011

Corridor in Paddock, the alternative war rooms below Dollis Hill

Underground spaces take on heightened significance during times of crisis above-ground, particularly wartime. When cities are threatened by war, subterranean spaces are mobilised in new ways: as places of shelter, secrecy and production. During the Blitz in London in 1940-41, the normal associations of the city’s underground – darkness, danger and death – were dramatically reversed: the workaday Tube became immobilised by crowds of people sleeping on the platforms; new tunnels were dug to house munitions workers; the government built underground rooms to house their war operations; and church crypts, vaults and even coffins were used as places of shelter.

Sleeping in a coffin in a church crypt in wartime London

The Cabinet war rooms – now a popular tourist attraction – were built under the Treasury in Whitehall in 1939 and remained in operation throughout the Second World War. They were in fact the successors to another set of war rooms, constructed in Dollis Hill in north London and known as ‘Paddock’, which can still be visited by the public twice a year. The original war rooms were abandoned in 1939 in favour of a more central site but they remain today in their original state, albeit in the advanced stages of decay. In contrast to the comfortable experience of visiting the Cabinet war rooms, complete with underground cafe, visiting Paddock is disconcerting. Standing empty for 70 years, stalactites now hang from the ceilings and rise from the sodden floor; piles of rubbish and mud fill the rooms, while the furnishings rot and rust unchecked. Without the explanations given in the restored Cabinet war rooms, these spaces take on a nightmarish, uncanny quality: rooms meant for equipment recede into the darkness, their odd-shapes feeling alien and disorientating; and relics from the intervening years – 1970s Coca-Cola bottles and fire extinguishers – speak of other stories of illicit exploration.

The Cabinet war rooms under Whitehall

Paddock: the first Cabinet war rooms

The battery room at Paddock

Old drinks bottles and decaying doors at Paddock

In fact, the spaces at Paddock feel more akin to the countless post-apocalyptic film sets that have defined cinema since its early-20th century beginnings. They seem to speak of a disaster that is yet to happen, where even underground spaces are no longer safe from destruction. Post-apocalyptic films such as Day of the Dead (1985), Threads (1984) and The Road (2009) provide differing causes of annihilation – zombies, nuclear war and an unidentified cosmic strike – but they all use bunkers as an initial means of escaping apocalyptic destruction. However, in these pessimistic visions of the future, the underground is eventually overwhelmed by the apocalyptic forces above or, alternatively, by social breakdown below. Experiencing the decaying spaces at Paddock reminds us forcefully that it is impossible to escape the consequences of war, even if their sanitised counterparts under Whitehall continue to celebrate that very escape.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, death, film, London, ruins, tourism, underground space, war

Cathedral of sewage: the Abbey Mills pumping station

18 12 2010

The Abbey Mills pumping station from the Greenway

The Abbey Mills Pumping Station (1865-68) was the last to be constructed in the first phase of London’s main drainage project in the 1860s, masterminded by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. It was also architecturally the most extravagant and has come to be known as the ‘cathedral of sewage’. The style of the building has been variously described as Byzantine, Italian Medieval, Russian, Ruskinian Gothic and Moorish. The Builder commented in 1868 that the building ‘seemed to be an elegant structure in a swamp [which] might be taken for a mosque or Chinese temple’. The original twin ventilation chimneys (2), richly ornamented and standing 212 feet high, gave this building a prominence that has consistently attracted public attention, and today it still provides a focus for introducing the public to Bazalgette’s system.

2 Abbey Mills in 1868

The stylistic and decorative elements of Abbey Mills ‘dress up’ the engineering function and present it in symbolic terms: the underground spaces of the building are claustrophobic, dark and disorientating (3) while the second-storey gallery level is light, airy and filled with naturalistic decoration (4); the cruciform plan, cathedral-like doors and internal octagon suggest religious associations normally restricted to churches. Such design elements were employed in many contemporaneous Victorian industrial buildings, most notably markets, which were often built to a cruciform plan and with similar decorative central octagonal pavilions. The symbolic associations of these design features indicate that the architectural embellishment seen at both Crossness and Abbey Mills has a very different function from mere technological expediency.

3 Underground spaces at Abbey Mills

4 Interior ironwork from the upper gallery

The architect of Abbey Mills was Charles Driver, a specialist in the use of iron, and it is in the ornamental iron at Abbey Mills that we sense his desire to elevate the value of iron above its strictly utilitarian character. This was an attitude that went against the grain of architectural practise and theory in the 1860s, which, under the influence of the influential architectural critic John Ruskin, strove for truth to nature in architecture, rejecting the use of cast iron because it was a synthetic, artificial material. Iron was seen by Ruskin as not fit to express the noblest architectural ideas. Indeed, Ruskin viewed the use of cast iron as excluding a building from being true architecture; likewise, cast-iron ornament is condemned as ‘cold, clumsy, and vulgar’. But in the interior of Abbey Mills we see no such reservations; rather a reversal of Ruskin’s views: the profuse decorative cast-iron motifs, including roses, lilies and acanthus leaves (5) imitate nature so convincingly that iron here effectively appropriates the function of a natural and ‘noble’ material such as stone.

5 Cast-iron lilies in the upper gallery

Such ‘dressing up’ of iron, seen by most architectural historians as a kind of structural deceit, at Abbey Mills provides a symbolic embellishment of the building’s engineering function. For the Victorians, morality and architecture were inseparable and the morality of architecture was expressed through style and decoration. To Victorian architectural critics like Ruskin, the engineering function of this building would have possessed no moral meaning in itself precisely because it was divested of all such symbolism. Therefore, the moral value of Abbey Mills is communicated through its decorative and symbolic elements: the cruciform plan and cathedral-like doors use religious symbolism to elevate its meaning above mere utility; the exterior façades include features alluding to Gothic Venice – the apotheosis of nobility in architecture, according to Ruskin - while the interior use of decorative ironwork represents an attempt to both elevate iron as a noble constructive material and to give further symbolic meaning to the functional aspects of the building.

The spaces of the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, as the visible part and symbolic representation of a largely invisible system, are ones where old and new conceptions of sewer space collide: Bazalgette’s new rational understanding of sewers conflates with the architectural embellishments which use an older symbolic language to suggest the nobility of both sewers and the constructive material associated with them, namely iron. It remains a point of contention whether these new ideas really did successfully displace and transform the old conceptions of the wider public.

6 Visitors at Abbey Mills in 1868

On 30 July 1868, many of London’s dignitaries did see Abbey Mills when a sumptuous banquet was held at the site to mark the official opening of the entire sewer system north of the Thames (6). Visitors, who were each supplied with a copy of Bazalgette’s description of the building, marvelled at the lack of smell, the lightness of construction and the rich floral ornamentation, all of which suggested a true ennoblement of the sewer and its function.But such a sense of nobility depended on the effective concealment of the underground parts of the building where the sewage was pumped. In the almost identical ceremony that took place at Crossness on 4 April 1865, visitors also admired the beauty of the ornament and the ‘poetical’ qualities of the religious symbolism, but many also descended into the crypt-like space of part of the vast subterranean sewage reservoir (7). Despite the temporary exclusion of the sewage and the dazzling lighting, some visitors felt distinct unease at the thought of being in such close proximity to ‘the filthiest mess in Europe’ ready to ‘leap out like a black panther’ after the guests had left. It was in these underground spaces, close to the ‘ignoble’ sewage, that older associations were stimulated. The complete invisibility of these spaces at Abbey Mills perhaps closed down opportunities for such associations to emerge. However, such concealment by no means marks the demise of these older conceptions: rather, it has been contended that: ‘in mental life, nothing that has once taken shape can be lost … everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances’.

7 Visiting Crossness's underground sewage reservoir in 1865


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Categories : architecture, cities, iron, London, ornament, sewers, symbolism, underground space, Victorian

Layers of time: reading the everyday

19 11 2010

Posters on a phone box, Marylebone Road, London

Poster on the Underground, Metropolitan Line, London

On a recent journey to and from the British Library in London, I was led to reflect upon posters and the act of reading them. On one leg of the journey, I saw a poster in a tube carriage advertising an advertising company – playfully drawing attention to the fact that posters are effective tools of communication. On my return journey on foot along the Marylebone Road, remnants of posters on a phone box drew my attention for their unusual texture.

The sight of a billboard just after a poster has been removed is certainly mundane, but contains within it hidden truths about the visual culture of our towns and cities. In the decaying remnants of posters we glimpse, for a moment, the tattered layers of time, seen like rings in a tree trunk. Such remnants demonstrate the contradiction at the heart of advertising, that is, it’s focus on the always new that creates, in its wake, a vast waste-dump of the old. As long as new posters are in place, that waste is kept hidden and our focus is on the new product being advertised. However, once the old posters are exposed we are reminded, in a shockingly graphic form, that those desires have not been fulfilled and never will be. Yet, against this disillusionment, we can also rediscover new worlds: traces of the old that are constantly being either erased or concealed. Such playful curiosity forms the basis of much counter-cultural artistic activity, particularly graffiti, which makes a virtue out of these layers, creating a babel of messages that cannot easily be read but nevertheless mirror the city with its multitude of conflicting voices and histories.

Graffiti in Leake Street, Waterloo

Reading graffiti or layers of posters is like grasping a hidden language of the city, one that normally evades everyday perception. Yet, once we start looking, new worlds open up at every turn: in the ceaseless flows above and below ground; in the obscure stains upon the pavement; or even in the marks on shop shutters, opened and closed every day. In short, everyday life produces its own visual marks that remind us that in the city, like Freud’s definition of the mind, ‘nothing that has once taken shape can be lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances’.

Shop shutter in Seville, Spain


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Categories : cities, everyday, London, ruins, shapes, underground space

Underground overground: London’s Victorian viaducts

13 11 2010

Subterranean Oddbins inside the Holborn viaduct

During the 1860s, London was physically transformed: gigantic new sewers were built, underground railways constructed, new streets and overground railways levelled slums, and the river Thames was embanked. What all of this new construction did was to confuse existing notions of vertical space in the city, that is, between the underground and the overground. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Holborn viaduct, built from 1866 to 1869 at the boundary of the City of Westminster and the City of London. Before it was built, traffic going to and from the City of London had to negotiate the steep-sided Holborn Hill, a road that descended into the Fleet valley before climbing Ludgate Hill on the other side. The Holborn viaduct filled in this space, completely levelling the hill and transforming the environment.

The bridge over Farringdon Street

All that is visible today is the bridge across Farrington Street, beneath which the old River Fleet is enclosed in a sewer. Lavishly decorated with ornamental cast iron, featuring the emblem of the City – the winged dragon killed by St George – the bridge is only one part of a vast network of vaults that honeycomb the spaces either side of it. Within these spaces run gas, electricity, water and sewage pipes and, when built in the 1860s, was the first attempt in Britain to unify urban infrastructure in a single space. The vaults are now used for a variety of purposes: as a cavernous wine cellar for Oddbins; as a store for a bicycle hire company; and as a novel space for wining and dining.

Bicycles for hire in the Holborn viaduct

Everything about these spaces suggest that they are underground – the musty smell, the dark brick arches, and absence of natural light; yet, you enter them on street-level. This mixing up of underground and overground space is characteristic of Victorian London, particularly in its vast stretches of railway viaducts, which created a multitude of brick arches over the city. At London Bridge station, these arches converge to form a 1/2 mile-wide viaduct that towers over the surrounding streets, and into which burrow several roadways.

Road through the London Bridge viaduct

As a testament to the enduring appeal of the Victorian underground, part of the space inside the London Bridge viaduct has been converted into three of London’s most popular tourist attractions: the London Dungeon, the London Bridge Experience and the London Tombs. Drawing on the more sensational aspects of London’s underground history – ghosts, murderers, death and torture – these themed attractions reintroduce the ancient underground into a real Victorian space created for entirely practical purposes. Such a contradiction serves to highlight both the very real differences between the imaginative associations of underground spaces and their intended function, and also the fact that both are inevitably bound up together.

Entrance to the London Dungeon

While the London Dungeon conjures up its fabricated histories of the city’s underworld in its safe and convenient pseudo-subterranean setting, London still has its real underground spaces and communities that continue to haunt the city. If visitors to the London Dungeon want an authentic subterranean experience, they might be better advised to find a homeless person sheltering in one of London’s subways and give them the extortionate entrance fee.


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Categories : architecture, cities, death, iron, London, underground space, Victorian

Art on the underground

28 10 2010

Greeting at Ludgate Circus

Last autumn in London, city slickers passing Ludgate Circus would have been forgiven for not responding to this salutation on the pavement. Barely noticeable and oddly phrased, this was a piece of graffiti that looked more like an official instruction from an unknown but benign authority. London is overcrowded with subterranean spaces, but on this particular day, I could not help but feel that pedestrians were being directed to the disused Kingsway tram tunnel, temporarily reopened at that time for tours of a work of installation art titled Chord. Conceived by the British artist Conrad Shawcross, Chord consisted of two giant, mechanical machines that wove a thick spiral of rope from innumerable spools of coloured string. Following the old tram tracks underground, these two machines moved very slowly away from each other in the Kingsway tunnel, connected by their woven rope until it was cut and the process begun again.

Chord, Kingsway tram tunnel, October 2009

Chord is one of a number of recent art projects that make use of disused underground spaces – in both London and other British cities. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the underground spaces themselves have tended to be the bigger draw than the art which they house. The Kingsway tram tunnel is one of many of London’s ‘lost’ subterranean spaces. It opened in 1902 and was part of the redevelopment of Holborn that cleared away slum housing, replacing it with a broad, tree-lined avenue. Underground, the tram tunnel provided a north-south route that connected London’s tram lines and eased traffic congestion. Closed in 1952, its main use since has been for storage and for film and television sets.

Abandoned cars in the Kingsway tram tunnel

In fact, it is difficult to separate reality from fiction in the Kingsway tunnel. Is the 1970s Ford Cortina of its time or the remnant of a film set? Why are there old Tube maps on the walls? Much of what is there, including the boards full of fake-posters seen below, are the detritus of a more recent venture when this space was used  as a fictional Underground station ‘Union Street’ in the 2008 film The Escapist. But how can we explain the combination of Victorian and post-War print here? Are some of these real, others part of the film? Or are they part of several different films, each new one pasting over its forebear? Or are they even, perhaps, a realistic evocation of a tube station billboard when an old poster is removed, exposing the multiple layers of the past beneath?

Posters in the Kingsway tram tunnel

This mixing up of the real and fictional makes this a natural space for art installations: after all, they are only continuing an already established tradition. Of course, many other London locations have been used in cinema, but those underground maintain the traces of that interaction in a much more tangible, strangely uncanny, way.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, film, London, underground space, Victorian

Into the belly of the beast

4 10 2010

Peepshow of a Victorian sewer, Kew Bridge Steam Museum

Sewers remain a powerful site for mixed ideas about the city. They are both signifiers of a truly modern city, efficiently disposing of its wastes, but also places of imaginative horror: the literal as well as metaphorical bowels of the city; everyday yet alien spaces. Their imaginative power is enhanced by their very invisibility. In London, most people travel underground every day on the hundreds of miles of tube; London’s sewers cover thousands of miles and are all but unknown to the city’s populace because their acceptability depends on their invisibility. But even if we don’t see them, sewers are perhaps the only type of underground space that connects everyone to each other: in the ceaseless flows in the sewers we can’t escape the fact that excrement has no social distinction.

Perhaps because they are invisible, sewers invite illicit or secret journeys motivated by personal curiosity. In relation to London’s sewers, the most famous early modern explorer was Ben Johnson, whose mock-epic poem describing a tour of the Fleet river in 1610 describes all the strange horrors of what was even then a pre-modern sewer. In the Victorian period, perhaps the most obsessive engagement with London’s sewers occurred in the 1860s, with the journalist John Hollingshead’s book Underground London, published in 1862. These series of essays derive from the author’s self-confessed ‘appetite for the wonderful in connection with sewers’. Hollingshead’s collection of essays is remarkable for the sheer variety of viewpoints represented. Indeed, he sums up these multiple conceptions of sewers in his introductory chapter:

‘There are more ways than one of looking at sewers, especially old London sewers. There is a highly romantic point of view from which they are regarded as accessible, pleasant, and convivial hiding-places for criminals flying from justice, but black and dangerous labyrinths for the innocent stranger … [and] there is the scientific or half-scientific way, which is not always wanting in the imaginative element.’

Capturing all of these views in a wonderful moment during one of the sewer journeys described in his book, Hollingshead is told by his guide that he is now walking beneath Buckingham Palace, where he promptly sings the national anthem, whilst up to his knees in what was, presumably, royal excrement.

Hollingshead’s intrepid journeys are mirrored today in the practice of draining, an increasingly popular branch of urban exploration. For urban explorers, illicit sites – industrial ruins, abandoned buildings and underground spaces – are the hidden nexus of the city, places where the rules of progress and order are directly challenged. Visiting sewers presents an opportunity to discover a secret world under the city, one that might challenge existing certainties and provide liberating alternatives. Usually under the cover of night, sewer explorers descend into these spaces and explore them at will. This usually involves a degree of danger, which is part of the attraction: mobile phone networks cease to operate; the space is pitch black and slippery underfoot; and you quickly become highly disorientated.

Sewer under Brockwell Park, Brixton

My single exploration of this kind happened in a storm drain beneath Brockwell Park in Brixton earlier this year. With a more experienced guide, I descended an iron ladder into a large sewer. Using headlamps, we walked several hundred yards and then explored a unknown smaller side drain, down which we walked, or rather stooped, until we forced open a manhole with the help of a passer-by on the street above.

Entering the unknown sewer

What was striking about the experience was how extreme it was: my other senses were so engaged that actually thinking about things and talking was very difficult and very demanding. In this, it was quite different again from other types of urban space from which we are physically shut out from. Indeed, the whole spatial experience was very far removed from anything above ground: with these apparently infinitely receding spaces, you can never tell where you are. Because the sewers are designed in a grid-like network, they are easily comprehensible on a map of the city, but not so underground. In fact, in these spaces, the very things that are supposed to contribute to being able to understand things are working against you, because you’re not supposed to be there. It’s something that’s inherent in the London sewers, in their design – they’re not designed for people to be there, because originally they were supposed to be self-cleansing and no walkways or other helpful features were incorporated into their design.

The Third Man

In fact, this experience and the feelings associated with it relate more closely with imaginative uses of sewers in film and literature. One of the first, and most famous, Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man, explores human depths – unconscious motives, hidden political and personal treachery, and death – which are symbolised by, and return through, the ultra-rationalised spaces of the Vienna sewers just after the Second World War. In a different vein, the smell of London’s sewers summons up childhood memories for the female protagonist of Margaret Drabble’s 1980 novel The Middle Ground: stooping to take a sniff at a grating to one of Bazalgette’s sewers, she cannot resist this ‘powerful odour of London’ that invites her to ‘escape the prison of the present into the past, where dark spirits swam in the fast-moving flood’.

Creep

Things that bubble up from the unconscious might be altogether more unpleasant and, in the world of film, sewers have provided popular locations for nightmarish monsters:  from giant ants in the storm drains of Los Angeles in the cold-war thriller Them! (1954); mutant alligators in the sewers of New York in Alligator (1980); to more recent incarnations such as human-like cockroaches in Guillermo Del Toro’s 1997 film Mimic. Throughout the post-War period the imaginative connotations of London’s sewers have tended to be displaced by those of other cities, in particular New York; yet recently they have resurfaced in both literature and film. In the final moments of Peter Carey’s 1997 novel Jack Maggs the eponymous hero witnesses the construction of the city’s Victorian sewers. Here, the ‘vertiginous unease’ induced by the sight of a deep trench being dug in the street mirrored the general anxiety Jack Magg’s felt about his own life and summoned up an apocalyptic vision of his own demise. Likewise Clare Clark’s 2005 novel The Great Stink sets most of its narrative in the London sewers, exploiting their dark associations to mirror the repressed yearnings of her central character, which are played out in the hidden spaces of the sewers before dramatically entering the life of the world above. More visceral still is the brutally feral monster inhabiting a self-made netherworld in Christopher Smith’s 2004 film Creep, who returns from the sewers through the tunnels of the Underground to enact vicious killings at night. Although crass and exploitative, the horrors in Creep seem to prefigure the much more tangible unease now associated with the city’s substructure since 7 July 2005. Engineers of the past and present might build sewers as rational spaces that bring wastes to order, but it seems they will always be open to other subversive interpretations and uses; clearly we are still fearful of what terrors might return to confront us from the darkness of the world below.


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Mapping London’s subterranean nightmares

1 10 2010

‘The point of cinematic geography is that it is made up’

(Charlotte Brunsdon, London in Cinema)

‘A film, like a topographic projection, can be understood as an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators. When it takes hold, a film encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space’

(Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema)

I focus here on two films that use underground London as their theme: Death Line released in 1972; and Creep, a loose remake of Death Line, released in early 2005. Films that employ the underground, particularly spaces of travel such as the London Underground, create a distinct geographical world that has a close affinity with cinema itself: space is abolished on the London Underground and ‘turned into time, the time it takes for the tube to pass through the dark tunnels to the illuminated, but spatially abstract platforms of the stations.’ Yet, the cinematic underground uses this absence of panorama to make the space more immanent – it becomes a space in which something is going to happen. Indeed, the films I explore also turn the banal experience of the Underground – that of everyday travel – into a more spatially and temporally complex one, in which the spaces of the Underground return as spaces of horror. If these films, as films, abolish space and replace it by time, they also reinstate, imaginatively, a spatial experience of the Underground that is usually absent in the city.

Mapping time

In post-War British cinema, the London Underground has only featured sporadically. Both Death Line and Creep have their origins in the expansive horror genre, but, within its specific use of London’s underground spaces, one that goes against the grain of the traditional British horror subjects: vampires, ghosts, and haunted houses. When Death Line was released in 1972, British horror was still dominated by the Hammer production company, with its countless Draculas and gratuitous female nudity, and the film poster drew on this as a means of publicity (1), however misleading this was.

1

In fact, Death Line, the debut film of the American director Gary Sherman, used defiantly ordinary early-1970s locations in an area around Russell Square tube station. The basic premise of the film is that a forgotten people exist within the Underground network. These are cannibalistic survivors of an underground disaster. In 1892, the City and South London Railway were digging a new line when the tunnel collapsed, the company abandoning the injured workers in the collapsed tunnel after they went bankrupt. Only two survivors are left – the hideously disfigured couple known only as ‘The Man’ and ‘The Woman’. The Woman dies while the Man hunts for ‘raw meat’ (the American title of the film) late at night on the platforms of nearby stations at Russell Square and Holborn. The rest of the film is played out as a dark satire on the British class system: a VIP goes missing at the beginning of the film, drawing in a young student couple, Alex and Patricia; while two working-class policemen investigate the missing man. Patricia is eventually abducted by the Man, intended to replace his dead wife, while Alex descends into the tunnels to rescue her before finally fatally injuring the Man.

2

Creep (2) offers a similar narrative: a single woman, Kate, falls asleep on the platform of Charing Cross underground station late at night, then takes the last train and enters a fearsome underground labyrinth carved out by a viscous killer, also hideously deformed. Through a protracted series of chase sequences (3), punctuated by extremely bloody murders, she eventually kills the monster and re-emerges in the early hours to the same platform on which she began her journey. There is social comment in Creep, especially in its inclusion of two homeless characters as unseen victims; but the monster here is much more powerful than that in Death Line, striking without reason, living in a self-made environment that straddles the above and below ground worlds, and whose murderous impulse is seen as the consequence of a childhood trauma become monstrous in adulthood. Creep is the deformed result of a genetic experiment, doomed to live hidden from London’s normal world above ground. His revenge is only vaguely understood and, although, like the Man in Death Line, he is a social victim, but nevertheless remains as monstrous because we cannot empathise with his plight.

3

Some of the narrative differences between the films can be drawn out using time maps: here are ones that I made of both films (click on the images to enlarge them).

4 Death Line timeline

5 Creep timeline

In these maps, time runs down the page in the wide bar, divided into 10-minutes section, and also divided into white sections (above-ground spaces) and cross-hatched sections (below-ground spaces). Location changes are indicated to the left of this wide bar. To the right of the bar, different-coloured thin lines represent the ‘screen time’ of the seven leading characters in both films.  The major difference seen clearly in these timelines is the comparative amount of time spent underground in these films: bar a short sequence at a party and a street scene, all of Creep is set underground; while Death Line switches between above- and below-ground locations throughout the film until the final 20 minutes, which take place entirely underground. In addition, as seen in the coloured lines, the narrative of Death Line almost entirely revolves around character couples: Alex and Patricia, Inspector Calquorn and sergeant Rodgers, and the Man and the Woman; while Creep has a more fractured narrative of appearance and disappearance centred around the almost continuous screen presence of the lone female, Kate. In Death Line there are several direct cuts between one couple – Alex and Patricia, and another – the Man and the Woman, suggesting that a more direct comparison is being made between these two couples. In fact, as the timeline clearly shows, relationships between couples form the key strategy of the film’s narrative, which serves to heighten both our sympathy and disgust for the monstrous couple below ground. The very disconnection of couples in Creep perhaps reflects the alienation of 21st century London, where singleness and ambition dominate social life both above and below ground. Finally, in Death Line there is a distinct change in tempo in the scenes filmed above and below ground: above ground is characterised by a realist mode, the temporal unfolding dictated by character interaction; while below ground, time unfolds much more slowly with long tracking shots and indistinct lighting. In contrast, Creep maintains a hurried ‘documentary’ pace throughout, with often-shaky camerawork in the extended chase sequences. Only in the very depths of the underworld made by Creep does the camera remain static – the place where he has complete control over his surroundings.

Mapping space

Time-based maps like those I made for these two films obliterate spatial representation – in effect reducing the films to plans that look remarkably similar to the iconic London Underground map, with its coloured lines and lack of geographic specificity. This abstract space, comprising only movement in time, might correspond to our everyday experience of travelling underground but, in both films, this absence of spatial representation is turned on its head in their knitting together of both real and imagined underground spaces. These are perhaps best understood using others types of map, namely the plan and the section, more usually associated with the representation of buildings or other ‘static’ spaces. Removing the variable of time, we can map the spaces of these films in which the narrative is played out. However, unlike similar representations of buildings, the meaning of these spaces cannot be separated from time – and in fact, arguably all representations of ‘space’ cannot be thus separated even if they invariably are so in conventional map representations.

6 Death Line plan

The underground spaces in Death Line are relatively straightforward (6). Between Russell Square and Holborn tube stations, on the Piccadilly Line, is the hidden space of the abandoned line and platform. The platform is named ‘Museum’ and refers to one of the Underground’s 40 or so ‘lost’ stations, British Museum (7), opened in 1900 between Holborn and Tottenham Court road stations on the Central Line. It closed in 1933 and has remained so ever since.

7. 1913 Underground map

The use of this station in the film is topographically accurate, as the station is indeed situated between Russell Square and Holborn as it is in the film. However, the actual station used for filming is Aldwych, another abandoned station that was the terminus of a small stretch of line from Holborn to the Strand. The film obviously draws on the notion of a ‘lost’ underground that is like a ‘rabbit warren’, as is directly referred to in the film. Yet, from the plan of the film’s underground spaces (6), it is apparent that the spaces are more straightforward: a bit of abandoned line, a station, tunnels and the underground lair inhabited by the cannibals. Yet, this ‘closed’ space, with only one apparent entry and exit point, and coupled with the long tracking shots used in the film, contribute to a sense of claustrophobic closedness: this underground is more tomb than rabbit warren. As seen in the schematic section (8), spatial complexity, both horizontally and vertically, is more apparent in the relationship between the above-ground locations, from the ground-level shops, bookshop, café, pub and theatre, to the various vertical levels of Calqourn’s house, Alex’s attic flat and the Police station in the upper level of a tall building.

8. Death Line section

9. Creep plan

Creep’s underground spaces (9) conform much closer to the rabbit-warren description, also used in the film itself, with its labyrinthine quality. Starting at Charing Cross on the now abandoned Jubilee line platform, the film moves to another deeper level platform at Charing Cross, which is actually Aldwych platform, through tunnels to connect with the sewer system, which is both above and below the underground railway; to a long room full of boxes (actually Camden deep level tube shelter), and then a series of rooms in which Creep carries out his monstrous operations, to another ‘lost’ platform (Aldwych again but set up differently), and then finally back to Charing Cross. There are innumerable entry and exit points into Creep’s underground world, from both the sewers and the tube, ones that in the end can only be understood by the monster himself. The abandoned station is named ‘Down Street’ in the film: like ‘Museum’ in Death Line, this refers to an actual ‘lost’ station that lies between Hyde Park Corner and Green Park – Dover Street on the 1913 map (7) - which is again topographically accurate within the film itself. As seen in the sectional view (10), the spatial complexity of the film lies entirely underground, with its many horizontal and vertical movements between the spaces.

10. Creep section

Lost spaces

The maps I have made for these two films give visual confirmation of existing commentary on them. The constricted underground spaces of Death Line are a metaphor for the perceived stasis of the British class system and a fear of the results of such a lack of social mobility – the workers returning as monsters feeding on those above them. When the film was made Britain was experiencing its most sustained period of industrial unrest since the 1920s and this influenced the way in which the film’s spaces play out: movement above ground; stasis below ground. Thirty years later, Creep articulates the very opposite of this: a fear of too much mobility, or rather of a promiscuous mobility in the city by dark forces that transgress social boundaries, particularly the twin forces of globalisation and international terrorism, which in the months leading up the 7 July 2005, was very much centred on the London Underground. In this version of underground London social invisibility leads to indiscriminate violence, the loss of identity and personal trauma. As David Pike has observed, when the underground features in an imaginative context, it does so in the light of some fear in the world above: this is true none more so than in horror films, which do this explicitly and often exploitatively in is the case in Creep. It’s impossible to imagine a film like Creep being released after 7 July 2005, when those fears were actually realised.

There’s much more to be said about this, and also about the relationship between mapping and film, particularly further research on how to integrate maps of time and space to produce a narrative map. Yet,  I think that mapping filmic space is a useful tool in conjunction with conventional filmic analysis. It sheds light on the differing ways in which underground spaces articulate, in their narrative use of urban space, very different kinds of social commentary in the metropolis.


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