Down the Tube

Proposals to build the world’s first underground railway came out of the search for a solution to London’s growing traffic problems and the congestion on its streets. By the mid-19th century, Britain’s capital was the largest and most prosperous city in the world. Its success as a port and commercial centre, based on Britain’s rapidly growing empire, led to an unprecedented explosion in the city’s population. This rose from just under one million at the first census in 1801 to more than 2.5 million 50 years later, when the Great Exhibition of 1851 provided London’s first major tourist attraction in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Most of the many thousands of visitors from out of town, whether from elsewhere in Britain or from overseas, arrived in London at a mainline station and then had to walk or fight for a seat on an omnibus in order to reach Hyde Park. There were no railways across the capital, and only the Great Western Railway (GWR) terminus at Paddington,