The New Commuters Railways: The Making of a Nation

The morning rush hour in London.

More than half-a-million people

arrive at the central termini every day.

This is a daily reality for so many people.

But before the age of steam, you would have needed a horse

to travel long distances over land,

and most of us lived close to where we worked.

The railways changed all of that.

The expanding transport network was at the heart of modern,

powerful Victorian Britain.

A Britain bursting with energy and confidence.

Railways were transforming virtually everything.

From where we live to how we work.

From what we eat to how we spend our leisure time.

The railways helped to create the new suburbia.

And where better to see the impact than London and the South East?

Home to a new type of worker and resident - the commuter.

TRAIN WHISTLE

For a person sitting in this carriage in the 1890s,

railways were already old hat.

For more than 60 years earlier,

the first passenger line had opened -

the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

And over the decades, people were able to live further

and further from their place of work.

But the original motivation for developing rail travel

was to support industry.

And industry was centred up north.

London was a little behind the curve.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Before long, private railway companies realised

there was money to be made from passengers.

And it was inevitable that London would soon catch up.

The year was 1838.

London's first passenger railway opened.

Taking people from London Bridge all the way to Greenwich.

This is the train from London Bridge to Greenwich today,

running on exactly the same route.

And, just like in 1838, at no point do we touch the ground.

That's because, incredibly,

the railway was built entirely on arches

so it could cross the many streets and roads in its path.

This is the tracks of the London and Greenwich Railway

built in between 1836 and 1838.

And, really, Britain's first suburban railway.

And it was an amazing engineering achievement,

because it was built on 878 arches,

which still stand today, and we're still using them.

The success of this railway

meant there was pressure on the railway companies

to build more lines.

Because what happened was that once you had a station

in maybe a village or a small hamlet,

once you had connections to London,

then more houses would be built, more developments,

and therefore, more people would use the railway.

So it was a self-fulfilling success, as it were.

The London and Greenwich's engineer was Colonel George Landmann.

Five years before the railway was opened, he predicted that -

"The speed with which the inhabitants can be conveyed

"from the smoke of the city

"to the pure air

"of Blackheath and Shooter's Hill will be a great

"inducement to the occupation of houses

"on this side of London".

He was absolutely right.

Ten years later, 3.75 million passengers

were using London Bridge station every year.

Of course, before the railway arrived,

a good way to get from the city to Greenwich

was to sail down the Thames.

Nowadays, the site of London Bridge station

is marked by the tallest building in Britain - the Shard.

The perfect place to see the routes to Greenwich.

Over there, we have the old highway, as it were, the river.

And now, over here, we have what was obviously in the day, a superhighway

for the trains, and a much faster way

to get between London and Greenwich.

But the railway company wasn't entirely sure their plan would work,

so they actually allowed people to walk alongside.

They created a footpath next to it,

for which you had to pay a little bit to go on,

because they weren't sure they could attract enough business on the railway.

In fact, of course, the railway became very busy quite quickly

and took over from the river traffic because it was much quicker.

If Greenwich was the start, it wouldn't be long before

other rail companies followed, in and around London.

And one particular location would become synonymous

with the very idea of commuting.

Within a couple of years, the London and Southampton Railway Company

was building a line to Southampton.

The company wanted to go through Kingston upon Thames,

but the locals were having none of it.

Coaching companies didn't want the competition,

and there was always the River Thames.

But, I think, the major factor was the reaction

of some of the major landowners,

who didn't really want the railway

going through their land.

So a station was built away from Kingston, in the middle of farmland.

Because it was near Kingston upon Thames,

some bright spark came up with an appropriate name.

It was called Kingston upon Railway, this new area,

with a very small station,

which was not here, it was further up the track.

They called it Kingston upon Railway,

but this didn't last for very long.

And then the station was moved about a quarter of a mile,

to its current location

and was finally given the name it has today - Surbiton.

Houses began to spring up around it,

and it's very significant in railway history,

because it's the first suburb that came into existence

entirely because of a railway.

This is one of the mid-Victorian middleclass houses

that sprang up around Surbiton station.

Today, it's split into several homes.

I work for one of the big banks.

I do procurement for them.

How do you feel about the fact that you're commuting in the same way

that somebody in the 1850s did?

Part of the reason I'm here

is because I wanted to be able to commute.

I'm working in town, and it's really easy.

And upstairs, in the main part of the house...

So before we moved here, we both worked in advertising.

And I've slightly changed my work. I do editorial work now from home.

So I do telecommuting and John does proper commuting.

Do you feel any kind of personal connection

between the Victorian characters who occupied your house before?

Well, it's quite interesting, because I read in the Census that

as well as the generals that lived in this house,

there were also a couple of town clerks.

So they would have left the house

probably the same time as my husband,

walked up the road, went to the train station,

took 24 minutes, apparently, to get to London.

There is a definite sense that

the railway station links this whole community.

And it is the reason, if I'm honest,

why most of my friends and myself have moved here.

And it's an added bonus that it's a really nice place to live.

In the 1840s, there was a huge rush to build railways.

Fortunes were to be made in a period known as Railway Mania.

Massive sums were invested.

The closest modern comparison is the amount spent on Britain's defence

during the Second World War.

A satirical cartoon from the Times shows railway bosses

frantic to deliver all their individual plans before a deadline.

But as the British railway network was created,

the one thing it lacked was an overall strategy.

The British railway system was very much made up

as it went along.

It was up to local interests, local businessmen, local politicians,

to decide that there was a need, or they saw a need for a railway

in a particular area. They promoted it, they raised the money.

They had to go to Parliament to get permission,

so there was a bit of a check there,

but the state made no attempt whatsoever

to plan a national system.

This line in Sussex is a case in point,

from later in the Victorian period.

It was first authorised by

the Lewes and East Grinstead Railway Act in 1877.

But built in a sparsely-populated area,

at the request of local landowners.

It's now the Bluebell Railway, a heritage line.

As railways sprang up all over the country,

there was one man who tried to create order out of the chaos.

He was Lord Dalhousie, President of the Board of Trade.

But it didn't work. There were too many particular interests involved.

And Dalhousie's plan, which would have given each region

a carefully-thought-out set of railway routes,

was scrapped after maybe a year of planning.

And I think that was a great tragedy, really,

because the British railway system today

would probably be a lot more efficient

if Dalhousie's plan had been allowed to run.

There was intense competition between railway companies

to corner different parts of the passenger market.

In many cases, this would be a good thing and encourage innovation,

but the battlegrounds could sometimes get ugly

and results were far from perfect.

One of the battlegrounds was Kent.

The first line that the Southeastern Railway Company

built into the county

was from London to Dover.

And the first line that the East Kent Railway Company built

went from Strood to Faversham.

And that was fine, as long as the two railways

served two separate parts of Kent.

But as they started to grow, as more people started to travel by train,

each company became more and more ambitious

and started to try to compete with the other one

to move into the other one's territory.

By the end of the 19th century,

the Southeastern Railway had lines all over Kent.

At the same time, the East Kent Railway had changed its name

to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

The rivals' lines were tangled across the county.

The battle became personal between two formidable figures.

Sir Edward Watkin, boss of the Southeastern Railway,

and James Staats Forbes of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

The two of them spent the best part of a quarter of a century

fighting each other.

I don't think it was just about profit.

I think these were, these were big, macho entrepreneurs

who were really fighting just to show that they were the top dogs.

And they absolutely hated each other

and did everything to do each other down.

And even if one of them built

a railway to a particular town or branch line,

the other would then want to build a railway to the same place

just to pinch each other's customers.

There was a lot of duplication.

Canterbury, for example, got two railway stations.

Ramsgate got two railway stations.

We live with that consequence today.

We live with a very, very tangled network of lines.

So that's why we didn't end up with the best possible railway,

we ended up with a railway that is all higgledy-piggledy,

lots of duplication, and not particularly efficient.

One result of the battle for Kent

was that several competing companies

were building lines into London Bridge station.

The upshot was a tangle of tracks, which is now being untangled.

Well, the railways in the Victorian era

were capitalism red in tooth and claw.

At one point, we had four different companies here at London Bridge,

all competing with each other, all over the same tracks.

You've got a spaghetti of tracks all crisscrossing each other,

all coming in from different angles.

They weren't designed with a sort of guiding mind in place.

They were sort of... They evolved.

London Bridge evolved, rather than being designed.

So now Network Rail is going through the process

of untangling the lines into London Bridge

so that commuters can pass through the station more smoothly.

So a little bit like going back in time

and telling all the disparate companies to do it a certain way,

-according to a big, major plan.

-That would be fantastic.

If you could jump in a time machine and go back to 1844 and say,

"Look, guys, quit squabbling and think about it together

"and design a station for the future",

that would be absolutely brilliant,

but we can't do that. We're doing our best with it now.

But I really do want to emphasise

that the Victorians did a lot of great stuff as well.

One of the great things the Victorians did

was they built their viaducts really strong.

That was partly because in the Victorian era,

they weren't quite as good at

understanding tolerances as we are now,

so the viaducts were built incredibly strong.

And we're now throwing a huge number of trains across them every day

and they're solid as a rock.

By the mid 1800s, rail travel was reaching a new level of popularity.

The network was expanding rapidly.

Steam trains were striking out all across the country

and they were picking up speed.

The railways started to come within the reach of the working classes.

This was helped by special schemes

operating out of the big new stations,

like Liverpool Street in London.

By the time Liverpool Street was built in 1874,

many railways were running workmen's trains.

They offered cheap, early-morning transport into town

for as little as tuppence return.

The government liked the idea.

When they passed an Act of Parliament

to give a company permission to build a railway,

they began to write in workmen's trains as part of the deal.

In the first wave of railway building and station building

in the early part of the 19th century,

the government didn't really take any interest in the fact that

that displaced a lot of people who'd been living and working

in the places where the railways are built.

But now we're in the 1860s and the 1870s

and the government's much more socially aware

and concerned about what's going to happen

to those people living in these places,

so they start to make it a condition of building railways

and building the track out

that you provide workmen's trains and that you price them cheaply

and that they start early in the morning,

precisely so that those people who have been displaced

have the opportunity, at least, to get back into London.

But variations in the cost of the ticket

caused variations in the character of different parts of London.

When the government says you've got to put on workmen's trains,

they're never explicit about how much they ought to cost,

or how many there ought to be.

So different companies make different decisions.

And here in the east, a lot of the companies put on two-pence trains.

In parts of the south of London

and the railways going out to the south and to the west,

often, those workmen's trains would be six or seven pence.

That's quite a lot more.

So that starts to determine what kind of housing is built

in the different parts of London.

For instance, what was the small hamlet of Walthamstow

now has a huge number of comparatively-small terraced houses.

Walthamstow really develops its housing.

Kind of terraced housing, quite densely packed,

precisely because there's a large number of workers

who want to take advantage of the two-pence train.

So they actually really look...

I mean, these places still look very much like they do today

precisely because of the way the railways were built.

As time went on, the railways became unstoppable

as the networks spread across the country.

-MEDIA BROADCAST:

-A spate of British railway building astonished the world.

A century of pioneering with the sky the limit.

And transport kept pace.

To meet the needs of factories and trade,

to carry our country's new-found greatness to far horizons,

modern transport was born.

But what about the town that came into existence

entirely because of the railways?

How was Surbiton getting on?

In the local archive at Kingston upon Thames,

the Census information and original maps

show the growth of Surbiton's population.

For example, in 1841,

the population was still under 400.

But with the arrival of the railways,

it began to grow very, very rapidly.

So that by 1861, we're looking at just under 5,000.

By 1881, we're looking at just under 10,000,

and then by the turn of the century, 1901,

we're looking at 12,000.

But an odd phenomenon grew around Surbiton

at the same time as the population.

It became the butt of jokes

and has been known for its comedy value ever since.

Like this Punch cartoon from 1938.

"We really must be going now, darling,

"we've got to get right out to Surbiton!"

Though, perhaps, some of the joke has been lost in the midst of time.

There were jokes about the development of Surbiton,

which I think are pretty unfair, to be honest.

And I think the origins of this were

a small, intelligent, um...faction in London

who tended to poke fun at the suburbs.

And ever since then, we've had this strand in British culture

which has tended to look down on the suburbs.

And, in particular, of course, it's looked upon as being

dull, boring. People were inward-looking

and didn't really take much part in any community activity.

And, of course, what is the ultimate suburb, but Surbiton.

Because Surbiton sounds like suburbia.

Surbiton was never part of the grand plan.

It evolved, like so many other railway towns.

But in the 1900s, things started to change,

and commuting and suburbia were taken to a whole new level.

To the northwest of London, you'll find streets,

avenues and crescents of the ultimate English suburbia.

This is because, as the 20th century arrived,

the Metropolitan Railway, with their new electric trains,

could do something that no other railway company could do.

They had the legal power to use land

they no longer wanted to build houses.

And they called it Metro-land.

So, to them it was wonderful,

they'd created a market

for the railway services.

A win-win situation for

the Metropolitan Railway.

That was a smart move.

The Metropolitan Railway could open stations,

fairly confident that housing

development would follow shortly thereafter,

because it was the company that was either building the houses

or selling the land very cheaply to developers.

So the Metropolitan Railway generated its own demand.

They did wonderful publicity,

they did posters that were really very beautiful, evocative.

And they sold the northwest extension into the Chilterns

as a way of being in London

without having to live in the inner-city.

Metro-land is famous for being the archetype of English suburbia.

And it was also the inspiration for poetry by John Betjeman.

"Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train.

"With a thousand Ta's and Pardon's, daintily descends Elaine."

Yes. I mean, you knew he was going to rhyme

"electric train" with "Elaine" there.

Well, Betjeman is really the great author of Metro-land.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Betjeman's fascination with the new suburbia

led him to make this documentary in 1973.

The Metropolitan had a very good idea.

Look at these fields!

"Why not..." said a clever member of the board,

"..fill the meadowland with houses?"

The healthy air of Harrow in the 1920s and '30s,

when these villas were built.

In fact, the country had come to the suburbs.

Roses are blooming in Metro-land,

just as they do in the brochure.

English people have this yearning to own a house of their own

in a leafy, green area.

Which was, of course, the way the Metropolitan Railway

marketed Metro-land.

You could enjoy the countryside

and yet work in the city.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of London,

the Southern Railway was also targeting the commuters.

Unlike the Metropolitan, they weren't able to build houses,

but in parts of their territory near the capital,

they enthusiastically began to electrify their railways.

We stand here, beside the evidence of progress,

which the railways have made since the station was opened in 1842.

The National Railway Museum in York has a collection of posters

from the time of the electrification of the Southern Railway.

Herbert Walker, who was the dynamic manager of the Southern Railway,

decided that electricity was the way forward.

The way to compete with trams for that inner-suburban traffic,

but also, to expand the market and to encourage people,

as was happening in the north of London, with Metro-land,

to live outside of London itself,

in what were going to become the suburbs.

A wonderful example being the line to Brighton,

which was electrified in the early 1930s.

And the Southern went all-out to persuade people

not just to use the electric trains to go to Brighton,

to go to the seaside, to enjoy a day out,

but also to persuade people to go and live in Brighton

and commute into London, a good 50 miles.

It was a long way to travel in the 1930s to go to work,

but the Southern managed to persuade people to do that.

And they did it by using modern,

cutting-edge advertising.

Very early on, it marketed its

newly-electrified suburban lines

as Southern Electric.

Just those two words.

Very powerful, I think.

Really, the creation of a brand.

-MEDIA BROADCAST:

-A new type of electric train

makes its first appearance along the Southern Railway.

It is capable of a speed of 75mph.

Through the 20th century,

commuters travelled further and further by rail.

Now, the London larger urban zone has a population

of nearly 12 million and is the largest in Europe.

One attempt to deal with some of the limitations left to us

by the Victorians is the Crossrail project.

What we ended up with was a vast network of lines,

radiating mainly out from London, north, east, south and west.

A fantastic way to get in and out of the capital.

But what passengers found difficult

was to travel long distance from another part of the country,

through London and out the other side in one seat.

When the Victorians built lots of railway lines heading into London,

it would seem logical to join them up in a massive central hub.

But a Royal Commission on London railways in 1846

advised against it

because it would destroy too much valuable property in the centre.

Instead, it advised that an inner-circle underground railway

should be built.

Joining up most of the major London termini.

Today, it is known as the Circle line.

But now the Crossrail project has been busy underground.

It's created new routes from east and west,

through the heart of the capital.

This will extend the commuter belt out into new places around London.

Traditionally, in the UK, particularly in London,

railways, big national railways,

they stopped at the edge of the city.

And so you then had to come down an escalator,

get on a different train to take you around the middle of the city.

That's something that projects like Crossrail,

a boundary that's being removed,

so you'll be able to travel straight through and out the other side

if you want to.

Commuting by train.

Millions of us do it every day.

You may see your commute as liberating.

A way to get away from your desk in the busy city,

and live somewhere attractive that you can afford.

On the other hand, you may see yourself condemned

to wasting hours every day

in the daily trudge to and from work.

For this, we can thank or blame the Victorians.

They gave us a new type of place to live, suburbia,

and a new type of person, the commuter.