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120 facts, every one sourced

Every fact on this site in one list, each linked to its source. Our build stores the source text and checks that the key words and figures in each fact really appear in it; see the sources page.

  1. 1 The world’s first underground railway opened in London in 1863, to ease the congestion in the streets. LT Museum, short history
  2. 2 The first section of the Metropolitan Railway opened from Paddington to Farringdon on 10 January 1863. LT Museum
  3. 3 The Metropolitan line is the oldest underground railway in the world, named after the Metropolitan Railway. LT Museum, Met line
  4. 4 London had about 1.7 million people when Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837, and the main-line railways of the 1840s and 1850s brought in even more. LT Museum, Victorian
  5. 5 Crossing London could take an hour and a half: five miles from Paddington to Bank by horse-drawn omnibus. LT Museum, Victorian
  6. 6 In 1846 a Royal Commission ruled that new railways should be kept out of the City and the West End. LT Museum, Victorian
  7. 7 Charles Pearson, Solicitor to the City of London, championed an underground railway to link the main-line stations. LT Museum, Victorian
  8. 8 Britannica says Pearson proposed it as part of a plan to improve the city, soon after the Thames Tunnel opened in 1843. Britannica
  9. 9 Pearson’s plans and a rival group’s merged, and the Metropolitan Railway Company was formed in August 1854. LT Museum, Victorian
  10. 10 Objectors feared the tunnels would collapse under the traffic and that passengers would choke on the fumes from the engines. LT Museum, Victorian
  11. 11 The £1 million needed took five years to raise. LT Museum, Victorian
  12. 12 Work began in 1860. LT Museum
  13. 13 It was built by ‘cut and cover’: a trench about ten metres wide and six metres deep was dug along the road, lined with brick walls and roofed with a brick arch, and the road was rebuilt on top. LT Museum, Victorian
  14. 14 Building it took nearly two years and caused huge disruption; one complaint said a great street had been ‘turned into a builder’s yard’. LT Museum, Met line
  15. 15 The London Transport Museum’s line history gives the first line as 5.6km long. LT Museum, Met line
  16. 16 The museum’s story of Victorian transport says it ran for three miles under the New Road. LT Museum, Victorian
  17. 17 Britannica says Parliament authorised 3.75 miles (6km) of underground railway. Britannica
  18. 18 The London Transport Museum says it opened with seven stations, from Paddington (Bishop’s Road) to Farringdon Street. LT Museum, Met line
  19. 19 Transport for London says it opened between Paddington and Farringdon, serving six stations in between. TfL
  20. 20 The first trains were pulled by steam locomotives burning coke and, later, coal. Britannica
  21. 21 Engines were fitted with water tanks to condense their steam, but the smoke and fumes stayed a problem. LT Museum, Victorian
  22. 22 Despite the fumes it was a success, carrying 9.5 million passengers in its first year. Britannica
  23. 23 Metropolitan locomotive No. 23, of 1866, is the only steam engine from the 1860s to survive, and is on show at the London Transport Museum. LT Museum
  24. 24 A second underground line, the District, opened five years later, in 1868. LT Museum
  25. 25 The two companies fell out, and the Inner Circle linking the main-line stations was not finished until 1884. LT Museum
  26. 26 The District first opened on Christmas Eve 1868, between South Kensington and Westminster. TfL
  27. 27 The name ‘Metro-land’ was coined in 1915 to sell homes along the Metropolitan’s lines. LT Museum, Met line
  28. 28 Marc Isambard Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, the world’s first tunnel under a river, opened between Wapping and Rotherhithe in 1843. LT Museum, Victorian
  29. 29 James Greathead’s tunnelling shield was pushed forward through the clay, and the tunnel behind it was lined with cast-iron rings to make a ‘tube’. LT Museum, Victorian
  30. 30 London’s Underground is often called the Tube because of the shape of its tunnels. Britannica
  31. 31 The City & South London Railway, the world’s first deep-level electric railway, opened in November 1890, between King William Street in the City and Stockwell. LT Museum, Victorian
  32. 32 Every journey on it cost the same fare of twopence. Britannica
  33. 33 Its carriages had tiny windows near the roof, as it was thought passengers would not need to see out; they were nicknamed ‘padded cells’. LT Museum, Victorian
  34. 34 It was so busy at rush hour that Punch magazine called it the ‘sardine box railway’. LT Museum, Victorian
  35. 35 The two-station Waterloo & City opened in 1898; it was nicknamed ‘the Drain’. TfL
  36. 36 The Central London Railway opened on 30 July 1900, from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush, for a flat fare of two old pence: the ‘Tuppenny Tube’. TfL
  37. 37 From 1900 the American railway magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes built more tube lines and electrified the older ones. Britannica
  38. 38 The Bakerloo opened on 10 March 1906, and more than 36,000 people used it that day. Its name, a nickname for the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, was made official in July 1906. TfL
  39. 39 The Piccadilly opened on 15 December 1906, from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith. TfL
  40. 40 In 1908 the separate companies began promoting the system together under the name ‘Underground’. LT Museum, short history
  41. 41 In 1933 all of London’s buses, trams, trolleybuses and Underground railways came under public ownership. LT Museum, short history
  42. 42 The Northern line was formed out of two railways, the City and South London and the Hampstead line, and got its name in 1933. TfL
  43. 43 The Victoria line opened in stages from 1968 to 1971, the first new line across central London for more than 60 years. TfL
  44. 44 It was the world’s first automatic passenger railway: at the press of a button, the train closed its doors and drove itself to the next station. TfL
  45. 45 The Jubilee line opened on 1 May 1979, and was extended to Stratford through the Docklands in 1999. TfL
  46. 46 The Tube reached Heathrow Airport in 1977. LT Museum, short history
  47. 47 Heathrow Terminal 5 station opened in 2008. TfL
  48. 48 In 2021 the Northern line was extended to Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms, the first big Tube extension of the 21st century. TfL
  49. 49 New Metropolitan line trains of 2012 were the first on the Underground with air conditioning and walk-through carriages. TfL
  50. 50 All-night weekend services began on some lines in 2016. LT Museum, short history
  51. 51 Since December 2009 the Circle line has not been a closed circle: it runs from Hammersmith to Edgware Road via Aldgate. TfL
  52. 52 The name ‘Circle line’ first appeared on a poster in 1936, and the line got its own line on the Tube map in 1949. TfL
  53. 53 Amersham is the highest station above sea level, at 147m. LT Museum, Met line
  54. 54 The longest gap between neighbouring stations is the 6.2km from Chesham to Chalfont & Latimer. LT Museum, Met line
  55. 55 Steam passenger trains ran on the Metropolitan beyond Rickmansworth until 1961. LT Museum, Met line
  56. 56 The Hammersmith and City Railway opened on 13 June 1864, as a branch feeding the Metropolitan; it became a line in its own right in 1988. TfL
  57. 57 Transport for London says the network has grown to 272 stations and 11 lines. TfL
  58. 58 Generations of Londoners have called it ‘the Tube’. TfL
  59. 59 In 1919 the Metropolitan Railway began building houses itself, through Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited. TfL
  60. 60 Metro-land was the subject of a 1973 BBC TV documentary presented by the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman. TfL
  61. 61 White City took its name when the Central line was extended to the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, which drew 8 million visitors. TfL
  62. 62 Rumour has it the Bakerloo was built after businessmen complained they could not get to Lord’s Cricket Ground quickly enough. TfL
  63. 63 The Waterloo & City became part of London Underground in 1994, making it, at the time, the Underground’s 12th line. TfL
  64. 64 The Underground now has 11 lines covering 402km and serving 272 stations. LT Museum, short history
  65. 65 It handles up to five million passenger journeys a day. LT Museum, short history
  66. 66 At the busiest times more than 543 trains are running, and the busiest line runs 40 trains an hour. LT Museum, short history
  67. 67 Britannica says it had about 400km of track and some 270 stations at the start of the 21st century, carrying more than a billion passengers a year. Britannica
  68. 68 In 2016/17, 1.37 billion journeys were made, more than two and a half times the post-war low of 498 million in 1982. TfL
  69. 69 London Underground became part of Transport for London in 2003. TfL
  70. 70 An automatic announcement warns passengers to ‘mind the gap’ between the train and the platform. Britannica
  71. 71 The Underground’s 150th birthday in 2013 was marked with a steam locomotive and 19th-century carriages running through central London. LT Museum, short history
  72. 72 In 1933 the private companies were nationalised into one body, the London Passenger Transport Board. TfL
  73. 73 The first maps showing the whole Underground were produced in 1908, as posters and folding pocket maps, with colour-coded lines over a simplified street map. LT Museum, Beck
  74. 74 Harry Beck, a draughtsman for the Underground, designed a new kind of map in his spare time in 1931. LT Museum, Tube map
  75. 75 Beck had worked as a draughtsman for the Underground since 1924, and drew the map during a spell out of work in 1931. LT Museum, Beck
  76. 76 He used only horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines, enlarged the crowded centre and squeezed the outer ends. LT Museum, Beck
  77. 77 The map gave up geographical accuracy so that passengers could understand the network more quickly. LT Museum, Tube map
  78. 78 At first the Underground’s publicity department rejected it as too revolutionary. LT Museum, Tube map
  79. 79 Beck made station names bigger and swapped round ‘blobs’ for the now-familiar ‘ticks’. LT Museum, Tube map
  80. 80 The first pocket map was printed in January 1933, with a note asking users for their comments. LT Museum, Beck
  81. 81 Maps were usually printed 10,000 to 20,000 at a time, but the first print run of Beck’s map was 750,000. LT Museum, Beck
  82. 82 Frank Pick called it ‘very convenient and tidy’ and ‘a better map than any we have had so far’. LT Museum, Beck
  83. 83 It was an immediate success with passengers. LT Museum, Tube map
  84. 84 In 1935 the Bakerloo and Central lines, red and orange and hard to tell apart under artificial light, were changed to brown and red. LT Museum, Tube map
  85. 85 Beck thought his 1950 map was his finest; it was the first to show the Circle line separately. LT Museum, Tube map
  86. 86 In 1960 Beck was replaced as the map’s designer without being told, and was deeply hurt. LT Museum, Beck
  87. 87 Harry Beck died in September 1974. LT Museum, Beck
  88. 88 Since 2001 every Underground map has carried a credit saying it is an evolution of Beck’s 1931 design. LT Museum, Beck
  89. 89 In 2006 the map was voted the second-favourite British design of the 20th century. LT Museum, Beck
  90. 90 Other cities’ railways, including New York, Sydney and St Petersburg, have borrowed Beck’s idea. LT Museum, Tube map
  91. 91 Beck even drew a proposal for the Paris Métro, which was not used. LT Museum, Tube map
  92. 92 The roundel first appeared on station platforms in 1908, as a solid red disc with a blue bar across it, used as a station name board. LT Museum, roundel
  93. 93 It made the station’s name stand out from the advertisements around it. LT Museum, roundel
  94. 94 In 1915 the Underground’s publicity manager, Frank Pick, asked the calligrapher Edward Johnston to design a typeface for the company. LT Museum, roundel
  95. 95 Johnston sent Pick the first examples of his capital block letters in February 1916. LT Museum, Johnston
  96. 96 By 1917 the roundel had been redrawn to suit the new lettering: the solid disc became a ring, and it was registered as a trademark. LT Museum, roundel
  97. 97 Johnston called it the ‘bullseye’. LT Museum, roundel
  98. 98 The Johnston typeface is a sans serif: its letters have no small strokes, or serifs, at their ends. LT Museum, Johnston
  99. 99 Edward Johnston was born to Scottish parents in Uruguay, and his family moved to England when he was three. LT Museum, Johnston
  100. 100 In 1906 he published the influential book Writing & Illuminating & Lettering. LT Museum, Johnston
  101. 101 Pick’s aim was to raise fare income by making the Underground better publicised, its stations easier to spot and the system easier to use. LT Museum, Johnston
  102. 102 From 1924 Pick asked the architect Charles Holden to design new stations, and Holden built the roundel into them, on masts outside and in stained-glass windows. LT Museum, roundel
  103. 103 In 1979 Eiichi Kono, a young Japanese designer, revised Johnston’s letters and added bold and italic versions. LT Museum, Johnston
  104. 104 Monotype’s update, Johnston100, has been rolled out by TfL since 2016. LT Museum, Johnston
  105. 105 Transport for London, created on 3 July 2000, uses a family of roundels in different colours for its different services. LT Museum, roundel
  106. 106 The roundel is now one of the most recognised and copied logos in the world. LT Museum, roundel
  107. 107 The first ever air raid on London, on 31 May 1915, sent people into Underground stations for shelter. LT Museum, shelters
  108. 108 In the Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, deep Tube stations sheltered thousands of people every night. LT Museum, deep shelters
  109. 109 At first the authorities did not want people sheltering in the Underground, but the Blitz changed their minds. LT Museum, shelters
  110. 110 People slept on walkways, platforms and even tracks with the power switched off. LT Museum, shelters
  111. 111 A ‘Tube Refreshments Special’ train delivered food and drink to shelterers. LT Museum, shelters
  112. 112 London Transport built eight deep-level shelters, at Belsize Park, Camden Town, Chancery Lane, Goodge Street, Stockwell, Clapham North, Clapham Common and Clapham South, each for 8,000 people. LT Museum, deep shelters
  113. 113 Ten were planned; the two at Oval and St Paul’s were abandoned during building. LT Museum, deep shelters
  114. 114 Their tunnels were dug by hand, 30 metres down and just over 400 metres long. LT Museum, deep shelters
  115. 115 Some opened to the public in July 1944, when V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets were hitting London. LT Museum, deep shelters
  116. 116 Each had eight canteens serving sausage rolls, meat pies and cakes, a treat in a time of strict rationing. LT Museum, deep shelters
  117. 117 Shelterers slept on hard three-tier bunk beds and brought their own bedding. LT Museum, deep shelters
  118. 118 After the war some shelters housed some of the first people from Jamaica to arrive on the Empire Windrush, in 1948. LT Museum, deep shelters
  119. 119 Britannica says that in the wars the unused Aldwych tunnels stored treasures from the British Museum. Britannica
  120. 120 The Aldwych branch of the Piccadilly line closed in 1994, with too few passengers and high costs. TfL