London
The elevator is one of the terrifying old-fashioned kind with a metal latticework that clanks across, through which you can see the shaft as you sink below street level into the cavernous unknown. The red and yellow treads of now-unused stairways spiral past like the double helix of subterranean DNA.
There are only two of us in the elevator; both of us wear lab coats, hairnets, and blue plastic bags over our shoes. Down we go, 14 floors below the Northern Line into the heart of Clapham, a London borough south of the Thames. I am on a mission to discover some of the city’s oldest and newest attractions. And it turns out that the place where London’s buried history meets its emergent future is here: deep underground.
Fans whir hypnotically in the arched tunnel we reach, and the pink light and white fixtures conjure science-fiction adventures. We turn into a room with trolleys as far as the eye can see on which rest white plastic trays, like bunks in a submarine. Each tray sprouts a fuzz of dark green leaves. When I am invited to try a leaf no bigger than my thumbnail, it tastes peppery. This is arugula. Next to it are garden cress, cilantro, and baby spinach. We are in a plant nursery that just happens to be hundreds of feet under Clapham High Street.
This is a part of the underground network that was designed but never used for metro trains. In World War I I it served as an air-raid shelter; 8,000 exhausted Londoners huddled down here as German bombs burst overhead. Until recently, these tunnels were moribund, but now they have taken on a new life as London’s first underground farm. Salad is grown hydroponically under LED lights on a spongy base of wood pulp: There is no soil. An economical filtration unit recycles the water and cleans it with ultraviolet light.
Once, such garage growing was the preserve of marijuana dealers; now, it is being tried in London as a solution to the problem of feeding 8.6 million residents in a congested metropolis.
“There are no seasons down here,” Steven Dring, co-owner of Growing Underground, explains to me. “So, theoretically, you can grow anything at any time.”
“Subterranean strawberries?” I tease.
“Well, you’d need underground bees. But it’s not impossible. There are so many advantages to growing here.”
Under my hairnet, I raise an eyebrow.
“Up there,” he continues, “the average house price is ¢500,000. Down here, nobody wants the space. It’s practically pest-free. We can harvest vegetables that are in restaurants within four hours. And it’s a closed system: efficient and carbon neutral.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Horticulturalists mostly want to dig earth in the open air. But we’ve found great employees who like
this environment.”
I can see why. The tunnels are tranquil, even meditative, in their stark geometry. There is something sublime about the infinitely repeating curvature of arches that stretch for miles, where the air itself is still as a library. There may come a time, I ponder, when it is quite normal to see fields of sunflowers in places that have never seen the sun.
Other long-abandoned parts of the London underground network are increasingly catching the eye of developers. Transport for London, the nonprofit company that runs the city’s public transport, last summer invited the public to propose new uses for Down Street Station in Mayfair. It may become a gallery or an exhibition space. Meanwhile, Aldwych Station, just off the Strand, which is no longer used for transporting Londoners physically, is enjoying a second career transporting them imaginatively: It is used as a movie location. Intrepid tourists can also take a tour of the premises.
Built by the controversial American financier Charles Tyson Yerkes and opened in 1907, Aldwych retains its smart terra cotta brick frontage and a ticket hall with characteristic moss-green and cream tiling. There is a wooden-floored elevator with a bench in it for tired Edwardians to rest on; you can even buy your ticket in the elevator. A “modesty room” in the ladies’ toilet provides mirrors for adjusting your dress. You can imagine women here with wasp waists, parasols, and hats that looked like a fight between a bouquet and a parrot.
London built the world’s first underground railway in 1863, and the “tube,” as it quickly became known, shaped the perception of modern life. Dickens used it; Jack the Ripper may have traveled on it to commit his murders. The earliest trains had first-class carriages with carpets and mirrors. But soon this was abandoned and all classes of Londoners were jolted along together.
As we descend the 130 stairs into Aldwych, I am surprised by the dry, musty air. Over 12 million gallons of water are pumped out of the tube network each day, but the smell here is like dry leaves rather than a damp well. We reach a tunnel where the walls are plastered in replica 1940s posters advertising Addington’s Digestive Biscuits and Capital Relish, “London’s Favourite Sauce.” Wartime scenes were shot at Aldwych for Atonement, and more recently for The Woman in Black 2. Our guide points out the tunnel where paintings from the National Gallery and the Elgin Marbles were hidden during the wars, alongside china from Buckingham Palace.
In another tunnel, there are genuine posters from the 1970s, including one promoting the European Union: “Do you know how much farmers will benefit if we join the Common Market?” Everyone in our tour group laughs: Later this year, Britain will hold a referendum on whether to leave the European Union. What goes around comes around.
The tracks in this tunnel are not live, so people are permitted to jump onto the rails and many do, taking selfies of their exploits. Debbie, who works for Transport for London, tells me that she used to hate jumpers—those 80 or so people every year who attempt suicide by throwing themselves on the line. Londoners, famous for their wry and dry attitude to life, are mordant about jumpers because they delay the daily commute. Debbie says that she used to wish there were a separate station for the suicidal so that they could accomplish their goal without holding up traffic. “But you can’t be too angry,” she observes without a hint of irony, “because when you come to think about it, if you’re going to commit suicide, you’re not in a very good state of mind, are you?”
Londoners’ huge, if grudging, affection for the Underground is much greater than most New Yorkers’ love for the subway or Washingtonians’ for the metro. This may be because, for 150 years, it has been so central to everyone’s life: It brings the capital together as dinners bring families together. Or perhaps it is because sheltering here during the Blitz saved so many lives. Some people even choose to host parties in Aldwych’s abandoned ticket hall.
If you wish to dine underground in London, may I recommend the hidden cellars of Berry Brothers and Rudd, an emporium of fine wine near St James’s Palace? They have recently converted some of the cellarage used to keep 100,000 bottles beneath the premises; and in these modern lairs, worthy of a tasteful Bond villain, you can learn about wine and enjoy a subterranean bacchanal. The shop has been trading since 1698, at first selling tea, coffee, and spices. Its proximity to the royal court assisted in gaining it the patronage of the titled and wealthy. Indeed, its ancient wood-paneled rooms give it the feel of a stately home. A set of gigantic coffee scales, capacious enough to weigh customers themselves (a service the shop once provided), wink at the eminent wine bottles, which stand on individual podia as if about to receive medals.
Upstairs is a room where a Texas legation assembled in the 1840s to cement the international standing of their republic. In a corner, a framed letter from 1912 regrets the loss of a shipment of Berry Brothers wines aboard the Titanic. There is a huge vase of lilies on the counter, and the staff includes eight Masters of Wine, whose immaculately pressed navy suits and discreet manner of gliding about are reminiscent of senior diplomats.
It gives me a thrill like that of a child stealing behind a stage curtain to pass through one of the well-hidden doors that conceal stairways leading down to the cellars. Dream of a wine and it is probably here. In the dusty lattice of bottles, in the regions not on public view, I spot claret from legendary vintages: Chateau Latour 1945, 1947, and 1961. The oldest wine is a Madeira from 1790—but this isn’t drunk. They do, however, still drink the 1834 Tokay Essencia, a Hungarian dessert wine that Berry Brothers was the first to import. My guide explains that clarets from the 1870s still have an intense and evocative taste, reminiscent of dried figs and dates. He recently drank a Sercial Madeira from 1803.
It is an extraordinary thing to drink a wine that John Adams or Jane Austen might have quaffed, the nearest thing we have to transfusing history directly into our veins.
These antique wines are not for sale; they are “out of circulation” and shared with special clients. Ordinary mortals can attend a tasting of modern wines. I chose a wine-and-cheese event, which introduced some unusual partnerships. We tried a creamy French Chaource with a New Zealand Pinot Noir, but also with a Japanese sake. There followed Shropshire Blue cheese with a white Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the Rhône, then with a sweet honey-and-apricot Tokay. In each case, the pairing brought out something different in the constituents: The delicate perfume of sake may never have been designed to meet lush French cheese, but the effect is pleasing, like eating ice cream in a fresh sea breeze.
At Berry Brothers you can see how all of rich London’s history is condensed into 26 feet of clay soil. In the ladies’ washrooms, a glass panel in the floor shows a vertiginous drop down to a medieval well. There are Tudor beams and bricks from Henry VIII’s tennis court and a tunnel to St James’s Palace that remains blocked up. (Who knows what dropped jewels may lie in these ancient passageways?) Central London stands above cultural ley-lines that follow the invisible tracks made by men and beasts thousands of years ago.
On my final underground London odyssey, I followed in the footsteps of Alice in Wonderland and was presented with magical containers that read “Eat Me!” and “Drink Me!” I was in the vaults under Waterloo station, a performance space specializing in promenade and immersive theater. This past year, to celebrate 150 years since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s classic, they staged Alice’s Adventures Underground (Carroll’s original title), leading groups of audience members through a warren of elaborate and dreamlike sets.
We were instructed to wear red or black and became playing cards in Wonderland, part of the investigation into who stole the Red Queen’s tarts. We drank tea with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, journeyed through a monstrous nursery in which Tweedledum and Tweedledee were flying, and heard the Mock Turtle’s musical underwater lament. Afterwards, one could relax with a cocktail in the Wonderland Bar, play flamingo croquet, and get lost in a maze with a dodo. Fully booked for weeks on end, the show demonstrates that London’s appetite for underground adventure shows no sign of diminishing.
In a crowded city on a small island, it’s useful to have a gateway to the imagination. Moving on down is definitely on its way up.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.
