HONEYCOMBING LONDON.

Otago Witness, Issue 3117, 10 December 1913, Page 76

HONEYCOMBING LONDON.

The provincial visitor to London is struck by the seeming solidity of its streets. In the days when the "hansom cab drew us swiftly over the polished surface of the roadway it was a matter of wonderment that the tapping hoofs of the horses did not slide their wearers to destruction). To those who were .used to the rougher surface of macadam with its puddles and its dust, the harsh lava asphalt appeared solid, impenetrable, and withal dangerous, while the wooden lining of other streets did not make us forget the concrete below. The hansom, in non-strike periods, is almost forgotten; the horse is being thrust away. The straining animal attached to the old-fashioned ’bus, set in motion like an automaton by the conductor’s bell, has ceased completely to carry us hither and thither; roadways have widened ; buildings have magnified. All that is above surface. Below, the engineer may say that in the past 10 years ho also has not been. idle. —From Ludgate Hill to Aldersgate.— But the task of extending the capital below ground, as well as on and above it, is not merely a matter of the last decade. Nothing could exceed the apparent solidity of Holborn, and yet for 50 years past deep in caverns below it great railway sidings have nestled, and stores for the mammoth population above. Travel some time, 0 country visitor, on a journey of exploration by train from Ludgate Hill to Aldersgate. Past the bridge, across Ludgate Hill itself, where you may catch a glimpse of Paul’s dome, the line burrows into the honeycomb of nether London. Watch carefully, and you will see Haring lights stretching in a far direction, trucks upon trucks, dim figures of porters with their shoulder knots a-creaking with their burdens. Perchance it may happen to you that your train be pulled up in this shrouded region. Then listen intently and you will hear, if you are intent, a faint sound from the roar of traffic up above. You search the murk and wonder how the big solid gateway of Holborn, with all its giant buildings,, can float on top. A world’s wonder in verity! From Aldersgate you may walk to Bt. Martin’s-le-Grand and see where the great Post Office stood. Years since man made an underground passage thence to Paddington—a passage which was lost, for it was discovered with a flare of trumpets only a few years since. From Show’s time onward London’s smaller waterways have been in process of being tucked into aqueducts underground, while the territory of London’s sewers has been well explored. You may walk for miles and miles in the waterways of the sewers known but to the rats who are their denizens. In places these sewers are high enough for a sixfoot sewer man to walk upright, bub this is exceptional. —Honeycomb of Many Levels.— Forty years ago and onwards it was the turn of the railway engineers to try to filch the subsoil from Dame Nature and turn it to account. Central London was encircled by their tunnels, and such roads as the Embankment and Maryiebone road are but the upper crust of long' caverns at one time full of sulphur and steam engines. Even from the Embankment Gardens were clouds of smoke to ha seen arising from the vent holes. It was costly engineering, while the air to bo breathed was thick with foulness. Yet the Londoner of the nineteenth century availed himself of these dirty facilities, and praised the engineers in his heart, even if he grumbled with his lips. Perhaps the flatness of Central Londbn was surprising, hut it was and is a surface flatness only. Take the Strand. Watch an excavation, and it will be found that tihe roadway is built on arches through most of its length. Cortes on the south side, the true surface of the soil is far below the modern roadway. Thus are we honeycombed, Beneath Waterloo place, which is on the Strand level, runs the Embankment. Beneath that, again, is the railway tunnel, and beneath the railway tunnel rims the Bakerloo i Travel westward to the Adelphi, near the theatre of that name. Underneath this district is a subterranean road leading to the electrical works of a big joint stock concern. All this went down to tho Thames tide in its day, before the days of Bazalgette and the Embankment. Go to the crypt of St. Paul’s. Men of the seventeenth century marvelled at this delving into mother earth. Men of the twentieth would dive beneath it all in a steel tube. Nowadays the London clerk arises from his ’basement (he., nndei ground) flat, proceeds by tube ’neath the surface to his lower basement office, lunches in a below-street restaurant, drinks coffee in a cafe outside the great Cathedral wholly covered by streets, sits for his amusement in the pit of a theatre, to reach which ho descends many steps, and sleeps in the same intimate contact with the subsoil. No wonder that'he complains of no sun ! Excavations for new buildings get deeper and deeper. London’s regulations forbid the emulation of New York’s effort* in sky-scraping. The London builder r»-

taliates by striking down into the roots of the city. —Underground. — If man the mole is making progress, the legend UNDERGROUND so familiar to those who travel much in England’s capital remind us, w r ere reminder needed, of the extent to which we have burrowed in the past 10 years. Strange that humanity should travel down below' while the beer barrels roll on top; but the convenience of this strangeness cannot be gainsaid. Diving below rivers, buildings, Earks, and sewers, w r e may travel without ght of day from happy Hampstead, from Highgate heights, or bustling Hammersmith, to Clapham, Bank, or Charing Cross. Passages and corridors lend their aid to interchanges. Old-fashioned architects were content to place their stations aide by side as at Victoria or London bridge, or in the Marylebone road. The twentieth-century designer scorns such waste and piles them merrily on top (or chould it be below?) one another. So Tt is that in different layers at Charipg Cross may be found the frowning keep of S.E.R. Its Metropolitan district little brother nestles in a trench. Below' the latter comes young Bakerloo, while deeper yet is to come the extension of the train from the twin H’s—Hampstead and Highgate. The marvel is that the place survives at all. What pressure must be exerted by the tremendous weight of these miles of brick and stone. Small wonder that the proposal to excavate almost to the foundations of Wren’s great monument itself should have excited feelings of great anxiety among those to whom these things matter. Yet ever and anon fresh schemes are planned to cope with the growing problem of traffic and street congestion. Street-widening is rapidly becoming beyond our means in a city where land is valued by the inch, and at present there seems no limit to the depth to which architects, all honourably since the depths are not of the moral variety, will go! Two difficulties alone make them pause. Of these the first is the obvious one of breath, which seems surmountable. The other is that the weight of earth above the lowest part of the foundations helps to keep buildings stable —remove that, as is being done in all directions, and the strain and weight may prove too much fbr the structure. In the end, apart from tubas and deep-laid tunnels, London is assuming much the position it might have held if sky-scraping buildings had first been built and these road wavs had been oonstrncted on a level w ith the first-floor windows. But where is this rush and haste and depth taking us? London becomes rgpidly a vast congery of cave-dwellers, coming forth from their underground apartments to be put to death or danger bv the motor ’bus. and since he had none of these last efforts, the fate of the oriednal cave-dwellers strikes us as being more happy.