The people of prehistory took refuge in caves, reserving the innermost recesses for sacred activity. At times of warfare in the twentieth century, when death came from the sky, many Londoners sought instinctively for safety beneath the earth.

In the First World War hundreds of thousands of people went down into the Underground system in order to escape the depredations of the Zeppelin airships. This was unofficial activity, not supervised or controlled, and no government shelters were ever provided. It was agreed that people could take refuge on the platforms if an air raid was actually under way, but not in anticipation of an attack. In other circumstances a ticket was always required before entrance was permitted. Some passengers bought the cheapest ticket, and then continued around and around the Circle Line until the likely danger had passed. At the time of most danger, in February 1918, the number of shelterers reached one-third of a million. There were some famous underground refugees. George V and the senior members of the royal family were, at the times of Zeppelin raids, taken into the tunnels near Buckingham Palace.

The experience of the First World War was enough to alert the authorities of a later conflict to the danger of a mass descent into the tunnels and platforms. It was assumed that the underground refugees in the Second World War would hinder the movement of trains carrying the dead away from central London to communal graves. More significantly, it was feared by officials from the Home Office and the Ministry of Health that Londoners might develop what was known as a “deep shelter mentality” and refuse to come to the surface. It was believed, and stated, that the civilian population was likely to suffer “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis” as a result of prolonged and intense bombing. Experts in the psychology of crowds suggested that “people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires.”

That “earlier level” was of course enshrined in the Underground system itself, whereby people would descend into deep levels of the past. A spiritual, as well as chronological, dimension can be found in this flight beneath the earth. The citizens would become children again and “would demand, with the all or nothing vehemence of infants, the security, food and warmth which the mother used to give in the past.” So many of them wished to return to the depths of Mother Earth.

At the beginning of the Second World War, therefore, London Transport displayed posters stating that “Underground Stations Must Not Be Used As Air-Raid Shelters.” But who could thwart the primeval instinct of humankind? Three years before the outbreak of the war a film, entitled Things to Come, depicted hordes of anxious Londoners fleeing for safety from enemy attack into the bowels of the Underground. So the citizens in large part ignored the official warnings; they purchased cheap tickets, and then simply refused to come up again. In a complementary development some Londoners fled to adjacent caves in the tracks of their remote ancestors. The miles of Chislehurst Caves, dug over a period of 8,000 years, became the shelter for as many as 15,000 people. A hospital and a chapel, a cinema and a gymnasium, were built 70 feet under the ground just 10 miles from London.

The government had already taken its own precautions. Various government departments migrated underground. The empty passages and disused platforms of Down Street and Dover Street were pressed into service, while various rooms and passages connected with Hyde Park Corner, Knightsbridge and Holborn became part of the secret world of war management. The Tate Gallery stored much of its collection on disused Underground stations on the Piccadilly and Central Lines. The Elgin Marbles were lowered into an empty tunnel beneath Aldwych. A stretch of the Central Line, a 5-mile section of tunnel from Leytonstone to Gants Hill, was turned into an underground factory for the manufacture of spare parts for tanks.

In the first months of the war the raids on London were light and infrequent, but by the autumn of 1940 they became intense and sustained. In their panic the Londoners went under. They came with their children and bought tickets, costing 1½ pence, that gave them access to the underground platforms. If the first platform was overcrowded they boarded the train, and moved onto the next. Some people came in cars and motor coaches from the outlying boroughs, much to the resentment of the locals. The Railway Gazette reported that “the vast majority of offenders are members of alien races or at least of alien extraction.” The truth of the claim is dubious, but it emphasises the extent to which an underground race might be considered to be “alien.” The connotations of life beneath the surface were still injurious.

The people came with deckchairs, and rugs, and umbrellas; they brought quantities of food with them, some with as much as a fortnight’s rations. They had come to stay. By six in the evening the passengers of the trains had to pick their way among recumbent bodies; two hours later, the platforms were so overcrowded that it was impossible to walk along them. The atmosphere became almost unbearable, and many people were forced to the surface for a few minutes to gulp the fresh air. A plague of mosquitoes, hatched in the unnatural warmth, caused further discomfort. When the electric current was switched off after the last train had passed, some shelterers squatted on the track. They also lay on the steps and the escalators.

When the sculptor Henry Moore descended into the Northern Line,

It is an apt image of a vessel of slaves. In his drawings they become wraiths in the darkness, the pale cargo of humankind helpless in a world that has turned against them.

Londoners sleeping on the escalators in 1940 (illustration credit Ill.40)

The government, and the officials of London Transport, soon understood that the situation was not going to be improved by inaction. Seventy-nine stations were designated as shelters for the civilian population; season tickets were issued for those using them regularly, and elementary measures of hygiene and sanitation were imposed. Wooden bunks were installed, to be replaced by metal versions when the wood became infested with vermin. It was determined that six people should occupy 6 feet of platform; three lay in bunks against the platform wall, while three others lay in front of them upon the platform itself. White lines were drawn, 8 feet and 4 feet from the edge of the platform, to designate sleeping areas. A special group of tunnel inspectors came into operation, and before long a refreshment service was introduced. Fifty-two lending libraries were established, and automatic cigarette machines were put in place. Some shelterers produced their own newspapers. The Swiss Cottager, for example, introduced itself to “nightly companions, temporary cave-dwellers, sleeping companions, somnambulists, snorers, chatterers and all who inhabit the Swiss Cottage station of the Bakerloo Line from dusk to dawn.” In its second number it advised that “vibration due to heavy gunfire or other causes will be felt much less if you do not lie with your head against the wall.”

It was perhaps what the authorities had feared, a world beneath the world. It was another city below the surface city. An underground race had been born. Yet it was still a fetid and noisome world, with the forced proximity of tens of thousands of people in barely habitable conditions. It resembled the rookeries of nineteenth-century London, and might have produced a population just as fearful and desperate. It also furnished an abiding image of the underworld as a place of filth and refuse.

There were casualties. When Trafalgar Square station was bombed, seven people died. A similar incident at Bounds Green killed nineteen people. Balham station suffered a direct hit, killing sixty-four. One of the survivors recounted how he heard a massive roar overhead just before all the lights on the platforms went out. This was the nightmare of those living under the ground, with the return of primordial darkness. “Then there was a smell of gas, and the children were shouting out for their gas masks. I got my torch and I flashed it up and saw water was pouring down in torrents.” He managed to open an emergency escape hatch. He still had the scars on his hands where people had been clawing at him. Other bombs penetrated the underground world. One train driver recalled that “I seemed to have a sort of fear of the tunnel—of something coming through the tunnel.” A signalman at King’s Cross recalled “a terrible rush of wind. I stood over the levers and put my fingers in my ears. I remember feeling a rush of wind, and when I woke up I was lying down on the floor.”

So there were the familiar fears of fire and flooding associated with the underworld. The tunnels under the Thames were deemed to be most at risk; if a bomb pierced the tunnel and the water of the river came in, half of the entire Underground system would have been quickly deluged. From Shepherd’s Bush to Liverpool Street, from Hammersmith to King’s Cross, the water would have raged through the tunnels at an enormous velocity. So a sequence of twenty-five flood-gates was constructed, some of which still survive at the entrances of certain vulnerable tunnels. In the event only one tunnel beside the river suffered a direct hit. An old tunnel connecting Strand and Charing Cross stations was penetrated; 200 yards of its length were immediately filled with water but, fortunately, it had been sealed at both ends with concrete plugs.

Crypts and underground warehouses were also in use. Two huge subterranean facilities in the East End, “Tilbury” under Commercial Road and “Mickey’s Shelter” under Stepney, became havens for the local population. Mickey’s Shelter was named after a hunchbacked dwarf, by trade an optician, who organised the 10,000 people taking refuge with authority and resolution. He was one of the kings of the underworld. He had come forward in the face of the inaction of the government. The people had taken over the shelter and ran it for themselves. The administration had to all intents and purposes abandoned them.

In the autumn of 1940 the Tilbury shelter was described as “a dim cavernous immensity” and as a “vast dim, cathedral-like structure.” An observer reported that “the floor was awash with urine.… Some horses were still stabled there, and their mess mingled with that of the humans … The place was a hell-hole, it was an outrage that people had to live in these conditions.” This was the underground world to which the East Enders had fled. No heroism, or bravery, manifested itself; only misery and squalor. Henry Moore also visited Tilbury and in his notes recorded “Dramatic, dismal lit, masses of reclining figures fading foreground. Chains hanging from old cranes.” This could have been the lower depths of the nineteenth century outlined in the engravings of Gustave Doré. Yet misery has no history.

Henry Moore, Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers, 1941 (illustration credit Ill.41)

These conditions underground promoted political radicalism, as if an “under-class” were truly ready to revolt. The Swiss Cottager denounced the government’s “indifference amounting almost to callousness, neglect, soulless contempt for elementary human decencies.” Partly as a result of public anger and concern, the government did begin the construction of eight deep-level shelters beneath existing underground stations, each of them able to hold 8,000 people; they were laid at a depth of approximately 90 feet. Half of them were converted to other uses as the war continued, but certain portals in the form of large Martello towers can still be seen on the surface as troglodytic monuments. That of Goodge Street stands on the corner of Chenies Street and Tottenham Court Road, while that of Stockwell has been converted into a war memorial. These portals could be knocked down, and the deep tunnels filled in, but what would be the purpose? Underground space has acquired the status of dark matter, unseen yet somehow maintaining the structure of the visible world. The portals are the gateways to immensity containing all that is hidden and all that is forgotten.