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Authors: Andrew Martin
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painful process.
Before we broach the Circle saga, two other extensions of the Met need to be mentioned. The first is the Hammersmith & City Railway â now the western part of the Hammersmith and City
Line
. It was built and jointly funded by the Metropolitan and the Great Western, even as they were arguing over operation of the Metropolitan. It opened in June 1864, running north on 20-foot-high viaducts from the pretty village of Hammersmith via Shepherdâs Bush to Latimer Road (where there was a connection to a Kensington station via the West London Railway) before proceeding north and east, to connect with the original westerly terminus of the Metropolitan, at Paddington (Bishopâs Road). There it dived underground, eventually enabling its train services to run over, and be entangled with, the easterly extensions of the Metropolitan and the District.
The Hammersmith & City is an annoying railway â an anomaly or distracting complication, like a hair in the gate of a cinema projector. For example, that connection to west London would allow trains of various operators to run from north to south London in complicated ways. And although built by the Met and Great Western, it was initially owned by a third company: the Hammersmith & City Railway Company, and the line only exists because two of its directors owned land along the route, which they could â and did â sell back to the railway at vast profit.
The line would feature on Underground maps as part of the Metropolitan, and was therefore coloured purple along with the rest of the Met. But in 1989 it became pink (âWhy do I got to be Mr Pink?â says Steve Buscemi in
Reservoir Dogs
), the colour denoting a line running from Hammersmith to Barking. From 2008 its original westerly stretch also doubled as part of the Circle service â an âextensionâ of the Circle Line, like a piece of Sellotape pulled away from the roll. And one further complication: the original Hammersmith & City Railway was built on the high level.
It has its charm, though. Royal Oak is like a country branch line dropped down amid the main line approaches to Paddington. Itâs as if two very different train sets got mixed up in the same box. Westbourne Park is also countrified, with valanced canopies and fancy ironwork (which is painted a dingy yellow). West of here, it ascends to its viaduct where, 20 foot off the ground, the Westway seeks to emulate it: two scruffy reprobates shouldering their way through a not very pretty streetscape: the one a railway built by corporate buccaneers, the other a road constructed as part of a discredited plan to girdle London with motorways. A lot of streets and squares, built speculatively with the coming of the Hammersmith & City, failed to go âupâ as expected. Christian Wolmar notes:
The squares near Ladbroke Grove station ⦠never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington. It was only with the gentrification process which started a hundred years later, in the 1970s, that these squares started to attract the class for which they had been built.
People whoâd been with me at university in the early Eighties were part of that gentrification process, and I associate it with the smell of dope smoke floating through the shabby-genteel house bordering the H & C.
As for Hammersmith itself, thatâs now a transport hub, but unfortunately cars were invited to the party, so the centre is a roaring roundabout. There are two Underground stations. That serving the District and Piccadilly is on one side of an un-crossable road called Hammersmith Broadway; that serving the Hammersmith & City is on the other side. Whichever exit you emerge from, at whichever station, you are immediately lost.
Before moving on to the Metropolitanâs painful encirclement of central
Before we broach the Circle saga, two other extensions of the Met need to be mentioned. The first is the Hammersmith & City Railway â now the western part of the Hammersmith and City
Line
. It was built and jointly funded by the Metropolitan and the Great Western, even as they were arguing over operation of the Metropolitan. It opened in June 1864, running north on 20-foot-high viaducts from the pretty village of Hammersmith via Shepherdâs Bush to Latimer Road (where there was a connection to a Kensington station via the West London Railway) before proceeding north and east, to connect with the original westerly terminus of the Metropolitan, at Paddington (Bishopâs Road). There it dived underground, eventually enabling its train services to run over, and be entangled with, the easterly extensions of the Metropolitan and the District.
The Hammersmith & City is an annoying railway â an anomaly or distracting complication, like a hair in the gate of a cinema projector. For example, that connection to west London would allow trains of various operators to run from north to south London in complicated ways. And although built by the Met and Great Western, it was initially owned by a third company: the Hammersmith & City Railway Company, and the line only exists because two of its directors owned land along the route, which they could â and did â sell back to the railway at vast profit.
The line would feature on Underground maps as part of the Metropolitan, and was therefore coloured purple along with the rest of the Met. But in 1989 it became pink (âWhy do I got to be Mr Pink?â says Steve Buscemi in
Reservoir Dogs
), the colour denoting a line running from Hammersmith to Barking. From 2008 its original westerly stretch also doubled as part of the Circle service â an âextensionâ of the Circle Line, like a piece of Sellotape pulled away from the roll. And one further complication: the original Hammersmith & City Railway was built on the high level.
It has its charm, though. Royal Oak is like a country branch line dropped down amid the main line approaches to Paddington. Itâs as if two very different train sets got mixed up in the same box. Westbourne Park is also countrified, with valanced canopies and fancy ironwork (which is painted a dingy yellow). West of here, it ascends to its viaduct where, 20 foot off the ground, the Westway seeks to emulate it: two scruffy reprobates shouldering their way through a not very pretty streetscape: the one a railway built by corporate buccaneers, the other a road constructed as part of a discredited plan to girdle London with motorways. A lot of streets and squares, built speculatively with the coming of the Hammersmith & City, failed to go âupâ as expected. Christian Wolmar notes:
The squares near Ladbroke Grove station ⦠never managed to attract the kind of people for which they were designed and sank rapidly into multiple occupation, becoming almost as bad as the nearby rookeries of north-west Kensington. It was only with the gentrification process which started a hundred years later, in the 1970s, that these squares started to attract the class for which they had been built.
People whoâd been with me at university in the early Eighties were part of that gentrification process, and I associate it with the smell of dope smoke floating through the shabby-genteel house bordering the H & C.
As for Hammersmith itself, thatâs now a transport hub, but unfortunately cars were invited to the party, so the centre is a roaring roundabout. There are two Underground stations. That serving the District and Piccadilly is on one side of an un-crossable road called Hammersmith Broadway; that serving the Hammersmith & City is on the other side. Whichever exit you emerge from, at whichever station, you are immediately lost.
Before moving on to the Metropolitanâs painful encirclement of central
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