Leaving the art-deco Clapham South underground station designed by Charles Holden and opened in 1926 and walking along Balham Hill past the food shops, cafes and restaurants, it is easy to miss the white rotunda which looks like an architectural feature in a new development, much less the hidden door at the side that opens to reveal a tiny lift and a small spiral staircase of 179 steps leading downwards the equivalent of 11 storeys. Recently opened by the London Transport Museum, the deep-shelter built during the Second World War beneath Clapham South underground station is an amazing engineering achievement at a time when labour and materials were in short supply due to the war effort, and is a fascinating piece of social history.
During the Blitz of autumn 1940, underground stations were used as improvised air-raid shelters, but a few received direct hits, resulting in serious casualties and, in response to public pressure, the Government ordered the construction of ten deep shelters to house around 100,000 people, which would be connected to existing underground stations using plans prepared previously for an express line which had not been implemented (and has never been completed). The plans were that each shelter would be formed of two 1,600 ft long tubes with an internal diameter of 16ft 6in, creating accommodation on two levels located below the existing tunnels at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell, Oval, Goodge Street, Camden Town, Belsize Park, Chancery Lane and St. Pauls.
Construction began in 1941 and eight of the shelters opened in 1942. Two were abandoned – the Oval due to poor ground conditions and St Paul’s due to concerns about the potential impact on the foundations of the cathedral.
The shelters were used in earnest in 1944 when the V1 flying bombs (doodlebugs) rained down on London. After the war they provided cheap cheerful accommodation for military and other groups, including short term emergency accommodation for migrant workers from Jamaica in 1948 and hostel facilities for visitors to the 1951 Festival of Britain at the South Bank. The residential use ceased in 1956 after which seven of them found a new use as archive storage, while Chancery Lane became the Kingsway telephone exchange.
In 2014, the Clapham North shelter became a sustainable underground farm for salad crops. Located under the bustling streets of Clapham, Growing Underground installed the latest hydroponic and LED technology which uses 70% less water than traditional open-field farming, has less wastage as the crops are not subject to the vagaries of the British climate and has substantially less transport carbon as the crops are grown in the heart of London – an imaginative sustainable use for these old tunnels.
Visiting the Clapham South shelter, the visitor might stand and ponder whether this engineering achievement, while quite simple, could be achieved today, given the time that infrastructure projects now seem to take, unless all planning, environmental health and other rules could be dispensed with. There would no doubt be a debate about privacy and whether it was appropriate to have so many people sharing accommodation, even though it was a temporary shelter to save lives, and there would be demands for en-suite facilities which would cut down numbers and increase costs.
Could the construction industry construct these facilities in the same or less time than in the 1940’s? While there are modern boring machines which would improve on hand digging, would there be enough machines in London to tackle eight different shelters at once? With all the advances of modern technology, it seems questionable that if it became urgently necessary to create such shelters (which hopefully it never will) then the industry could match the achievements of the 1940’s.
