LITMIR.BIZ

      Before it had anything to do with station buildings, before it was a city-wide enclosure under the Earth’s surface, the nascent Underground was another form of architecture, a different kind of a hybrid. Few people notice this trajectory, but you will be able to follow, even if you haven’t heard of arcades before. You understand the Underground, or so I’m led to believe.

      I started exchanging letters with your father soon upon my arrival in this city, despite the context of my visit. Perhaps he suspected who I was, or imagined me to be. He shared his knowledge with me in any case, and everything I know about the history of the Underground I stole from him. In his first letter – which I read in that odd niche by the staircase – he wrote that to have a railway run under London had first been conceived by Charles Pearson in a pamphlet published in 1845. The initial idea was for a railway to run down Fleet valley to Farringdon, covered by glass. An arcade, of sorts; remember that.

      There were other types of schemes at the time, all following the notion of arcades. William Moseley had proposed a railway that would run twelve feet below the surface, more or less following the route of the Central Line later in the century. It would be surrounded by shops, houses, hotels and a walkway above. ‘The second scheme for a ‘Grand Girdle Railway and Boulevard under Glass’, suggested by Sir Joseph Paxton,’ your father wrote me, ‘was even grander, a twelve-mile railway built above ground but within a glass arcade and, like Moseley’s scheme, also containing houses and shops. It too broadly followed the route of what would eventually become an Underground line, since the aim was to link London’s railway termini, as forty years later the Circle (which fortunately escaped the fate of being called the Girdle) was to do. Paxton’s scheme, for which he sought public funding and which he cannily called the Great Victoria Way to curry royal favour, was quite liked by the committee but was ultimately rejected on the grounds of cost’ (Wolmar, 2005: 24).

      It was to run down the route of what would become the Circle line in the 1880s once again, and, most importantly, be constructed of the prefabricated units that the Crystal Palace had been made of. A hugely stretched version of the Palace, shops and houses lining its sides, with a colossal arcade connecting the railway stations with the Palace of Westminster. Its width was that of the transept of the Crystal Palace exactly: 72 feet. It would have been one hundred and eighty feet high. It was to have two railway tracks. And a road above them. And then, there was a double wall, the supposed guarantee of acoustic separation between the two realms: that of the railways, with their noise and steam, and the shops and houses. Epic madness, no less.

      But that was all the information I got from your father, in that first of many letters I’d receive from him. You see where this is going: an extended Crystal Palace was to house a railway line, then insinuate itself into the urban environment. An object as much as a mere tunnel, and a passageway as well.

      A manifold conductor of movement, that thing. And then, while the Palace might have been about the geometry of the line in part only, this one would cut through the existing composition of objects. A line, a cut; a never-ending gesture that could go on for ever. Exactly like our Underground tunnels.