Before 1890 – before, that is, the opening of the first deep-level Tube – the District had reached what remain its westerly termini at Richmond, Wimbledon and Ealing Broadway. A couple of years later the Metropolitan had reached its own most northerly point, Verney Junction, which was as bucolic as it sounds. (Branches to Uxbridge and Watford would be completed a little later.) The projection north of the Metropolitan begins with the two Baker Street mouseholes previously mentioned. In 1868 those lines had reached as far as Swiss Cottage. By 1880 Harrow had been reached, and during the 1880s the push continued, to North Harrow, Pinner, Northwood … In 1892 the Met reached Aylesbury, 40 miles from London. What, the reader might ask, is a so called metropolitan railway doing wandering about in the Buckinghamshire countryside? I will answer with reference to Julian Barnes’s novel Metroland, published in 1980 but set in 1968. On page 35 the adolescent schoolboy narrator, Christopher, meets ‘an elegiac old fugger’ on an Underground train at Baker Street.
What do You think about Underground, Overground (2012)?
