© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground
This article explores the attraction of underground railways as a setting in film through the detailed analysis of several films from the second half of the twentieth century. Opening with a discussion of the way the London Underground is used in the 1997 Ian Softley film, The Wings of the Dove, the article examines the cinematic spaces of the London Underground in both fiction and documentary film and television. Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967) is discussed as an example of the one of the most common underground tropes, the eruption of horror from below ground, and this is contrasted with documentary films which present the tunnels of the underground as a place of work. Films discussed here include Philip Donellan's The Irishmen, Ralph Keene's Under Night Streets and Molly Dineen's Angel. It is suggested that the spaces of the underground are in some ways more analogous to cinematic spaces than has hitherto been recognised and that, for a public space, it is often represented as surprisingly private.
The 1997 film The Wings of the Dove (USA/UK, Iain Softley), opens, unlike the 1902 Henry James novel on which it is based, with a scene set in the London Underground.1 The dancing reflected lights of the titles resolve themselves into the headlights of a tube entering an underground station. Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), wearing a large brimmed, becoming, hat, sits waiting for the train, which she then boards. The train is crowded, mainly but not exclusively with middle-class men, and Kate initially does not find a seat, strap-hanging as she gazes down the compartment. Her gaze meets that of the seated Merton Densher (Linus Roache), who rises from his seat, indicating with a meaningfully directed gaze that she should accept it. She moves down the carriage and brushes close to him as she accepts his seat, over which he stands (figures 1–3). Their proximity permits a comparison of their status. In addition to her grand hat trimmed spectacularly with blue ostrich feathers, she has a fur trimming to her costume and a silver fox around her neck. He wears a thin jacket, not a coat, and his shirt collar is a little threadbare. Because she is sitting and he is standing over her, his jacket flaps at the level of her face. With the very slightest of movements – slowly shutting her eyes – and facial expression, she seems almost to swoon into the flapping jacket.
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In the next shot, she has left the train and walks along a crowded platform, looking back to him, who we see following, some way back. As she turns a corner to ascend the stairs, she looks back again, her face framed by the curve of the rounded tunnel.
They mount the stairs in tiled underground corridors, and, against the stream of other passengers, find their way to an empty lift, which Merton – as far as we know, a stranger – closes. Here the punctuating device of a frontal shot of the two strangers standing in the lift is used, the doors in front of them reading ‘Stand Clear of the Doors’. Until this point, the camera's viewpoint has been naturalistic, the camera too waiting for the train, in the carriage and back on the platform. Now its viewpoint is more obviously privileged, the lift rising through several floors to give an intermittent image of the couple in the lift, just like the strip of images on a piece of film. First they stand unmoving, then he takes off his hat, and then, when the next floor passes, we discover them kissing passionately (figures 4–6). He embraces her strongly and sexually, pulling her to him, his hand caressing her body: ‘Kate’. She stops him with an abrupt, ‘Merton, no’.
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In this powerful, erotic opening to the film, the two central characters are, as we later learn, meeting each other for the first time after a period of enforced separation. The eroticism lies in the absolute contrast between the two modes of behaviour shown. The rigorous observance of the codes of silence on the tube followed by the wordless, passionate embrace in the temporarily private space of the lift is shocking in a way which is accentuated by the use of a period setting. At the same time, we are sufficiently familiar with wordless, frantic sex in the grinding lifts up to New York loft apartments in films like Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) to believe in sex-in-lifts. The Victorian space left behind, still present in costume, reminds us constantly that they are behaving deeply scandalously in a private space that is really still a public space.
The film was shot at Shepperton Studios, where the train lines for this carefully researched opening scene were laid out in the car park.2 On close – perhaps pedantic – examination, the scene has its own historical implausibilities. It is unlikely that Kate would have had to stand for long if gentlemen were sitting – she would not have needed to wait for Merton to give her a seat.3 Then, as now, the chances of being in a lift alone were slight, and certainly managing to negotiate a lift without an operator whilst everyone else is being directed to a different lift is unlikely. These elements, though, are the very stuff of the encounter between Kate and Merton in which the private drama is played out in public. The accomplishment of the scene, the way in which we the audience are also rendered slightly breathless in the lift, lies in the shift in point of view. We are initially placed just as an observant fellow traveller, except that we see, through the camerawork and editing, the exchange of looks, the slight gesture of the offered seat, and Kate's almost imperceptible swoon into Merton's jacket. It is the last moment, above all, which is comprehensible only retrospectively. Only after our viewpoint is radically shifted to that of privileged voyeur through the lift grille do we reconsider the scene of the seat-giving. Kate and Merton may be breathing hard with passion – but for the audience, it is the revelation that they are not strangers at all which causes the gasp.
The verisimilitude of the scene is sufficient – the 1910 train, the colouring and texture of the interior and the upholstery, the patterning and shade of the tiling, the proportions of the tunnels, passages and steps, the use of costume with its own class-specific nuances – to allow us to ask the more significant critical question, how does this scene work dramatically in relation to the rest of the film? What is gained by the Underground setting? We learn immediately about the material circumstances of the two central characters. We see, through the physical proximity of their costume and skin, that she is rich and he is poor. We also see that she is modern. She may be wealthy, but she is on the tube not in a carriage, and on the tube by herself. We also see that their relationship is one of sexual passion – she is modern in this sense too, despite being thoroughly encumbered by her costume. Through the masquerade of public and private that the scene enacts, we are also introduced to one of the central themes of the film, the gap between appearance and desire, and perhaps more specifically, the masking of desire in the public world. This is achieved more elegantly through an Underground setting than it would be in a more select semi-public setting, such as a ball or pleasure-garden, for Merton and Kate, initially introduced to the viewer as strangers, have, in these first moments, an equality as fellow travellers which they could not plausibly be shown to possess in a less functional setting.
This scene enacts many of the features that Wolfgang Schivelbusch has taught us to understand as historically specific in his study of the railway journey.4 We see the close physical proximity of the passengers juxtaposed with the necessity of ignoring each other, and the use of reading newspapers as a way of dealing with this peculiar space. However, on the underground, there is of course, no external panorama at which to gaze. Space is not made panoramic, as Schivelbusch shows us with the train journey, but abolished, turned into time, the time it takes for the tube to pass through the dark tunnels to the illuminated, but spatially abstract, platforms of the stations. Narratively, this absence of panorama makes the space more immanent – space in which something is going to happen – and the patterning of movement and glances in this scene, which we can make sense of only retrospectively, is that happening.
Generically, though, the film is doing something else, and is offering us an unusual representation of the London Underground for the late twentieth century, for The Wings of the Dove is costume drama, and rather exquisitely costumed drama at that. The representational terrain of this genre is country houses, large estates, coaches and carriages and women in long dresses. It may extend to steam trains and chirpy cockneys, but does not generally include the Underground. The critic Nigel Floyd made the point economically when discussing this scene. Acknowledging its power, he said that nevertheless what had struck him most was Helena Bonham Carter's costume. We are, of course, accustomed to seeing her in Victorian and Edwardian costume, as a stalwart of heritage cinema, but seeing her dressed like this on the tube, he found himself thinking ‘Is the tube really that old? Has the London Underground been with us since the period when women wore full length dresses?’5 Floyd's question points to the way in which the Underground, in this film, is, unusually, part of a coherent and integrated historical mise-en-scene. The Underground, in origin a Victorian space, is used here to signify the modernity of the young lovers in 1910 and their lack of access to any private space which would be sanctioned for their meeting. They have to make the public private because they have no permitted, shared, private space.
Floyd's question about the age of the tube is an interesting one, though. It is both the modernity of the Underground in this 1990s film, and its integration into the historical setting of the narrative as a whole which is unusual.6 More commonly, the space of the Underground in recent fiction film is very much less modern and the location for psychic or temporal disruption and horror, as we find in films such as Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967), Gary Sherman's Deathline (1972) and An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1979). Alongside this archaic cinematic Underground, there is also a documentary tradition which portrays the Underground as a contemporary place of labour in which, as in The Wings of the Dove, it can be a surprisingly private place. In this article I want to trace some of the different ways in which the London Underground has been figured in the cinema since the Second World War,7 paying particular attention to the complex temporalities of the space and the way in which interiority, privacy and public life are articulated.
I have a dual motivation for this project. Firstly, it forms part of a larger work on London in the cinema. As I discuss below, the setting and iconography of the London Underground is an important element in the construction of cinematic London, and has a more varied history than might first be assumed. Secondly, in a way which is not specific to London, there is an interesting quality to the relationship between Underground space and cinematic space. Iain Softley, in the lift sequence in The Wings of the Dove, makes a vertical visual analogy between Kate and Merton's ascent in the lift and a strip of film. However, this analogy is also present horizontally in the alternation of the dark tunnels with the bright stations and the transformation of space into time. There is a sympathy, or resonance, between these temporal journeys in the dark which makes the Underground a seductive setting for the cinema8 – perhaps sometimes too seductive, as Luc Besson observed wryly in discussing his use of the French métro in Subway (1985):
j'avais une idée forte: le métro. Mais je n'arrivais pas à trouver une histoire aussi forte que ce décor. (I had a strong idea: the métro. But I couldn't find a story as strong as this setting.)9What we might call the ‘strong stories’ of the Underground are mainly about time, but there is also, as I hope to show, a surprising persistence of the relatively undiscussed aspect of the London Underground that we find in Wings of the Dove, its role as a paradoxically private space.
Lynda Nead, in her vivid account of the complex temporalities of Victorian London, pays particular attention to the role of railway-building in the transformation of the city.10 Whilst she is concerned with both overground and underground railways, her discussion of the Metropolitan Underground Railway (the first line, which opened in 1863), is illuminating in relation to the representational space of London. She observes that, ‘The building of the Metropolitan Underground Railway wrecked London’ and continues:
The construction of the Underground created visual spectacles that were unprecedented in the metropolis. The cross-section became a favourite technique for representing the railway system. In these images the full wonder of the Underground could be displayed; an apparently normal street above the ground and then, below the gas pipes and sewers, another, parallel world of passengers, locomotives and airy tunnels illuminated by gas. The tunnelling itself summoned images of the sublime, with excavations on an apparently limitless scale and tiny figures dwarfed by massive building works. This was a new urban aesthetic built around the forms of the tunnel, the trench, the vault and scaffolding.11Nead's point about the new urban aesthetic ‘built around the forms of the tunnel, the trench, the vault and scaffolding’ is that it is an aesthetic of modernity, but one which is built upon ruin. The cross-section, in which the revelation of the engineered underground could be displayed, is dependent on the prior ravishing of the surface city. The subsequent representation and deployment of the Underground in the cinema raises both different and related issues. Once built, the Underground is no longer amenable to representation as a cross-section. Instead, a much more clearly Gothic topography becomes characteristic, and it is most frequently within the horror genre that we find the Underground in British cinema discussed.12 Within this tradition, the tunnels of the Underground are not modern, as in The Wings of the Dove or Nead's account, but in some sense archaic. Thus we return to the complex temporalities of the Underground as a space and the way in which, as David Pike suggests, different times characteristically co-exist therein.13
Cinematically, the co-existence of different times is constitutive of what, following Besson, we might call the two ‘strong stories’ of the underground, both of which involve time play. One, which I will discuss below in both feature and documentary versions, is a story about something forgotten, repressed or unknown emerging from the dark tunnels underground. The second, often rather literal, and perhaps sometimes overly seductive for the film-maker, is a set of urban narratives structured through the ‘too late’ of closing doors, ticket barriers and just-missed trains. Cities worldwide have underground transport systems, and their use as cinematic locations provides both local specificity and an easy and plausible setting for chance encounters, pursuits and chases. Many a villain or intended victim in films set all over the world has tried to escape by running through subways and up and down stairs, endeavouring to leap on a train just before the doors close, from Regina Lambert (Audrey Hepburn) in Paris in Charade (Stanley Donen, 1966) to Spiderman in Manhattan in Spiderman II (Sam Raimi, 2004). Romances and romantic encounters too are enabled and impeded by just catching or just missing trains, as in the 1998 London-set Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt), which used the device of ‘the train not taken’ to elaborate a double ‘what if’ time scheme for the whole film.14
Rather than survey just-missed and just-caught underground trains in the cinema, I want to look in some detail at two contrasted British films of the mid 1960s which feature the London Underground. The first, Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967), is an example not of the chase, but of the other type of ‘strong story’, in which the underground reveals something of what lurks in its depths. This colour feature film from one of the most distinctive British studios opens with a group of workmen labouring at a major excavation in a fictional London Underground station. The second film, The Irishmen (Phillip Donnellan, 1965), made for the BBC, is a black and white documentary which includes footage of Irish labourers working on the tunnels of the Victoria Line. In each film, the Underground proves to be a complex temporal space, whilst in The Irishmen it is constructed as a more subjective and private space than might be generically anticipated. I conclude with a discussion of another group of Underground workers who can be spotted in a range of films made since World War II.
Quatermass and the Pit is the third of the Hammer films based on the BBC Quatermass serials and was scripted by Nigel Kneale.15 As the particular horror unearthed in the pit of the Underground excavation is a Martian space ship, generically the film is most properly seen as science-fiction, and is discussed as such by Peter Hutchings, in his essay, ‘We're the Martians now’.16 However, the topography of the film is Gothic, and the aliens are Martians five million years old. The film, set in the present day, is located in and around a fictional London Underground station, Hobbs End. Hobbs End station is introduced in the opening sequence as a police constable, on his night rounds, pauses to investigate the partially open station gates, reading a London Transport notice about the regretted inconvenience caused by the current extension to the Central Line (figures 7 and 8). The unclosed gate – a Pantograph grille not fully expanded – detains this guardian of order for a moment or two, and introduces the next scene for the viewers, when, with a sharp cut, we descend into the tube station to see the work that is being undertaken on the extension. However, this shot of the three-quarters-closed Pantograph gate to the Underground, very early in the film, also condenses what will become its key narrative, the wilful human disturbance of the boundary between the overground and the underground.
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The second scene in the film shows the labouring navvies excavating the tunnel extension. Their labour is shown to be hard and heavy, hewing out with pick-axes great chunks of rock and clay which are then carried away from the excavation on a motorized belt. There are clear affinities here with the representational terrain of the The Irishmen, which I discuss below, and indeed the name of the Irish construction firm, Balfour Beatty, is discernible on the sides of the conveyor belt being used in Hobbs End tube station. However, although the referent – the tunnel-digging labour – may be the same, the construction of narrative space is quite different. In Quatermass and the Pit the construction of the underground set is dominated by the necessity for it to be clear, narratively, where people are. This means that the set is also rather abbreviated because it needs to contain both the relative safety of the station platform and the excavation site which eventually becomes filled with the mystery space ship. Quatermass and the Pit is an instructive example of the aesthetic of the underground as a Gothic place in that it displays the two key structuring oppositions of this aesthetic within seconds of its beginning: the overground/underground opposition and that between the platform and the tunnels. As is generically predictable, we do not spend long with the workers digging the extension before one of the lumps of rubble sent up the moving belt turns out to be something horrible – in this case, a skull, which is then followed by more skeletal remains. The workmen find these tokens of ‘what lies beneath’, and are shown, in different ways, to be strongly affected by them, but the explanation of their finds is entrusted to others.
Throughout the film, what is found in the excavation at Hobbs End is subject to competing explanations, each associated with key characters. A palaeontologist, Dr Roney (James Donald), is at first convinced that the skull is ‘pre-pre-historic’; his assistant, Miss Judd (Barbara Shelley), recruits Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) to her investigation of a history of trouble, horror and apparition at the site, seemingly connected to ‘the disturbance of the earth’ through activities such as tree-felling and well-boring; the Army are convinced that it is German military propaganda from the last war. The older, folk knowledge investigated by Professor Quatermass and Miss Judd is the most resonant, but does not fully explain what is found in the tunnel. What first seems to be an unexploded bomb is excavated to reveal a futuristic spaceship-type pod which is made of a substance unknown to man and contains a hidden compartment. This vehicle embodies the generic hybridity of the film – buried deep below ground, it nevertheless seems to have come from outer space. The horror of the film lies in the eruption of an archaic future – the awakening of a former invasion from Mars – and it is the disturbance of the earth in the proposed extension of the Underground which excites these hidden temporalities.
In a metonymic scene which condenses the spatial relations of the film, the space pod is revealed to be a bad and powerful place when entered after hours by a workman returning to collect his tools. The workman, who had previously been employed to (unsuccessfully) drill through the impregnable secret compartment, has been shown to be a cheery, competent fellow who boasts how much better he feels knowing that he has insurance. In his second scene he enters the deserted station insouciantly, joking, as the lights go out, ‘Where was Moses when the lights went out?’ and answering himself, ‘In the dark’. He tries drilling again inside the pod but it seems to become sentient and angry, shaking and rumbling. The workman, his tools and other bits of equipment inside the pod are tossed around, looking partly as if they are in the gravity-less atmosphere of outer space. He part flies, part tumbles, is part tossed out of the pod, and, with other debris, is swept up onto the platform – just as rubbish can be by an approaching train. He is thrown out of the station gates, past the waiting watchman and Miss Judd and is accompanied by exactly the sort of animated litter that flaps against tube station gates. The empirical detail of his possession is precisely the detritus of everyday tube travel: great gusts of litter made animate by approaching trains.
Possessed, or, as Professor Quatermass theorizes, with an archaic part of himself re-awakened, the workman crashes into a tea kiosk. Bad space has emerged from the Underground somehow in his body, and as soon as he touches the stall, cups and plates are swept off their hooks and shelves. It is both hurricane and a very contemporary imagery of gravity-less movement. He is swept on to a church yard, grabbing at gravestones and finally coming to rest on asphalt. However, the disturbance in the Underground has abolished the distinction between above and below ground and the very ground on which he is lying begins to ripple.
Peter Hutchings, who discusses Quatermass and the Pit in the context of 1950s and 1960s invasion fantasies in film and television, points out that this 1967 film is ‘something of an anachronism’17 when compared with both the earlier BBC Quatermass serials and Hammer films. ‘Quatermass's Britain is visibly weak and vulnerable, caught as it is in a kind of collective post-war doze’.18 The film does, however, offer three interesting 1960s contemporary referents in addition to the references to space travel. The first is the significant, 1960s presentation of the female lead, Miss Judd (Barbara Shelley), who, while she still wears gloves with her short-skirted Chanel-style pink suit, also wears smart, fashionable boots and a cape. Miss Judd, although always an assistant, is evidently extremely competent and can be relied on not to succumb to horror or fear at the discoveries made in the pit (although she does prove particularly sensitive to Martian life). In many ways she takes the interpretative initiative as it is she who mediates between Roney and Quatermass in researching the history of the area. She is very much a modern, mobile 1960s woman, both in this mediation, and in the way in which she races about the set. The second 1960s referent, rather literally, is the relevance of London Underground expansion, as this film was made during the excavation and building of the first post-war tube line, the Victoria line.19 The third contemporary referent, which is much more developed in the earlier BBC version, and here persists only in a residual manner, is the oblique address to Commonwealth immigration in the inclusion of a black workman in the labourers' team.20 In the Hammer version, in the film's climax, some humans attempt to kill others ‘just because they are different’. In the television version, made shortly after the Notting Hill ‘race riots’ of 1958 there is explicit reference to a ‘race war’ between Martians and humans and a rather more explicit analogy. Thus the film's narrative space and time is complex, combining as it does the vocabularies of alien invasion and gravity-less space travel with modern young women, architectural finds, a changing London and the drilling and boring of the expanding space of the Underground. Excavating the Underground does not just send workmen mad. It muddles time, producing a space which is past and future, contemporary and archaic.
While films such as Quatermass and the Pit, Deathline or the later An American Werewolf in London show or refer to labour in the Underground, they do so generally within an aesthetic informed by key oppositions between the surface and the underground, and, symmetrically, once underground, between the safe, illuminated platforms and the dark gaping tunnels. One of the narrative tensions in Quatermass is the question of whether it is safe to go down to the excavation and whether the public can be allowed in. The most dangerous activity in Deathline is standing on the edge of the station platform and peering into the tunnel. The horror genre does penetrate the tunnels, but only to discover horror. In Deathline we do enter the dark, dank lair, decorated with suspended human limbs, where the last survivors of a nineteenth century engineering accident have lived, just as, in Quatermass, people who return to the spaceship in the tunnel become possessed. In documentary, the tunnels are treated differently, not as places of horror, but as places of labour. I want to discuss this in relation to a 1965 film, The Irishmen (produced and directed by Philip Donnellan, shot by Michael Williams), made during the building of the Victoria Line, and in relation to a group of workers known as ‘fluffers’ who appear in glimpses in several documentaries about underground London.
The Irishmen is about the lives of the Irish emigrants who came over to Britain to work as labourers after World War II. It is one of a group of films Donnellan made in the 1960s on aspects of contemporary life, the best known of which is The Colony (1964) about Birmingham. The Irishmen was made in 1965 for the BBC, although it was never shown.21 The immigrants are shown working on two major projects, one of which is the motorways and the other the Victoria line, London's first post-war tube line. Both were built using a labour contract system called the Lump, which is non-unionized casual labour. The film starts with men waiting to be picked up for jobs in Camden Town, and then interweaves work and leisure sequences, with one of its concerns being to show the relative isolation of the labourers outside their work companionship. The canteen-like bar on site in which they are shown to drink after work in one scene is thus contrasted with the family life left behind in Ireland, while at the same time, the inevitability of exile for the young is set up early on, with a young man, whose journey we follow, musing, ‘What's it to be, England or America?’
The film has several simultaneous temporal structures: the working day (finishing with a drink), the working week (including hurley at Wembley on a Saturday), generational migration from Ireland to England and the particular journey of this one young man who arrives at a London terminal as the film finishes. The four-and-a-half-minute sequence I want to analyse juxtaposes the young man's ferry trip across the Irish Sea with the labour of tunnelling under London. As with much of the film, Donnellan and Charles Parker (the radio producer, credited as tape editor) use song as soundtrack. In this sequence, the song is not diegetic, but is used to structure both space and exposition. The fiddle music begins as the traveller is shown on the deck of the ferry with the seagulls circling. This is the song of the ‘London Clay’, a traditional melody arranged by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, which has lyrics which counterpose the beauty and freedom of country rhythms in Ireland, the trout, the salmon and the wild geese, with the team commands of the labourers, ‘Up with the shield, jack it, ram it, driving a tunnel through the London clay’.22
The juxtaposition is one of loss, the loss of the life of the countryman: the hares run free and the curragh rots because no-one is there to trap and fish, to live off the land, because the men have gone to London. The song is precise in its invocation of both the plenitude of the Irish country and the locations from which the emigrants leave – Connemara, the Wicklow mountains, Armagh – offering possibilities of identification for any migrant listener and creating an elegiac narrative space to which the first two minutes of the sequence are cut. The montage juxtaposes the emigrant on the boat with increasing flashes of tunnel labour contrasted with seagulls, mountains, fishing boats and an abandoned curragh. Whilst it is the space of the man's journey, it is more significantly a space of exilic consciousness; the labour of the tunnelling overwhelming rural origins, while the flight of the wild geese is recalled while underground. The song is absent for the second part of the sequence, which is all underground with the harsh diegetic sound of tunnelling. The cramped, quick shots to which we have been introduced earlier are now sustained in a way that emphasizes the constriction and heat and dirt of the labour. We see a section of tunnel roof being installed, the men working alongside the mighty shield, their sweaty skin and the whites of their eyes the lightest part of the image. The melody returns more urgently as the sequence concludes with the spoil being carried out of the excavation on a conveyor belt, and now that we understand the labour that awaits our traveller, we return to the ferry.
So what does this sequence of film document? It shows us something of the building of the Victoria Line, that it was built by Irish immigrants, and how very hard this was, both physically and psychically. The cutting of the sequence, partly to the song, allows us to apprehend the rhythms of repetitive labour. This is combined with quite detailed documentary footage of tunnelling, of the underground as a place of work, which is woven into an evocation of consciousness. Thus we have both a strong sense of physical labour and of the memories and desires – and home – of the workers. This is clearly an example of the exilic consciousness which Hamid Naficy23 has shown has its own internal elsewhere, but it is also an instance of the way in which the very cramped nature of the dark tunnels of the Underground, even as they are being built, offers a strange privacy.24 Just as Kate and Merton found, in the Underground, somewhere to embrace, Donnellan chooses to use the Underground sequence to evoke the exilic yearning of individual labourers.
Donnellan's concern in The Irishmen is not with the Underground as such, although the building of the Victoria line does provide the film with its most memorable imagery, and he uses the visual contrast between the dark tunnels, the sea and deserted rural Ireland to evoke the felt meaning of exile. His skill as a documentarist lies in the way in which he combines film footage, recorded speech, sound and song to reveal not only what the work and the life was like, but what it felt like. In this, he makes an unusual representation of manual labour entailing feelings as well as strength. I have argued that this is partly achieved because, perhaps surprisingly, underground spaces can be particularly amenable to the project of suggesting interiority. More commonly, the London Underground features in documentary film in two formats, the ‘London under London’, in which the Underground is featured alongside underground sites such as sewers, government bunkers, wine cellars and silver vaults, and ‘London at Night’, in which the focus is on the work conducted by postmen, underground cleaners and musicians while the city sleeps.
The world of each type of film is a man's world – only men are found working and it is men who act as guides to the documentarists – with two exceptions. Women working as prostitutes figure briefly – but repeatedly – sometimes just through shots of a swishing skirt above some idling high-heeled feet. Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner's 1957 short film about a night out in London, Nice Time, concludes with the key tropes of the ‘London at Night’ group of films: the tube closing down, the barrow boys wheeling away their barrows and only the police, some sailors and ‘the ladies of the night’ left in Piccadilly Circus. Donovan Winter's The Awakening Hour (1957) also features a prostitute and then porters in Covent Garden as typical workers of the night. City After Dark (1955) has a two-shot prostitute sequence, the first shot of a high-heeled woman, standing against a shop window, tapping her foot, framed from just below her shoulders, the second of a man's legs and feet apparently approaching her. However, there is also another group of women who can be found in several post-war underground documentaries, and they too have a curiously transgressive presence.
Fluffers were maintenance workers who cleaned the tube lines during its night-time closures, and can be found in films of each type. Organized, like most maintenance workers, in gangs, the fluffers used knives, dusters, brushes and any other suitable implements to clean, particularly, the rails and the ‘chairs’ in which they are set, of dust, human hair, rat excrement and other litter. Under Night Streets (1958), a twenty minute British Transport Film which has been selected by London's Transport Museum as one of the films available to the public on its web site, concentrates on showing the myriad safety activities going on in the Underground ‘while you're pressing the mattress’ (figures 9–12).25 Workers are shown climbing and cleaning the ventilator shafts under a deserted Piccadilly Circus station, and then the ‘big gang boys’ undress on the platform to go down into the tunnel. The camera then switches to a group of women in overalls on the platform, and introduces them saying, ‘Fluffers, that's what they're called. They're VIPs, they are, for this is fire prevention work’ as the women move down into the tunnels to start work. There is a hint here, in both the tone and vocabulary of this introduction, of a difficulty about the status of, and attitudes to, the fluffers.26 When the women are shown working in the tunnels, in the next scene, they are represented in the tradition of the representation of working class women doing manual jobs as jolly, cheeky and potentially bawdy. This is achieved through the interaction between the working women and their foreman/boss, who rides past them on a strange tricycle-like vehicle adapted to run along the train rails. As he glides past the women who are brushing and scraping, he greets them familiarly and they quip back. The introduction, though, tries to set up the fluffers slightly differently. Referring to the women as ‘VIPs’, and specifying that their labour is ‘fire-prevention work’ (which it undoubtedly is) insists on both the status and the significance of the labour in a way which amounts to a disavowal. The tone of the narrator argues against dismissing the women as insignificant, but to call them VIPs inscribes within the narration the very opposite: that these were extremely poorly paid women, working night shifts in filthy and dangerous conditions, who presumably only took the work because they also had households and families to run – and possibly day jobs.
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The fluffers also appear in City After Dark (Ian K. Barnes, 1955), a nineteen minute film which deals with ‘another world’ that lies ‘beneath the quiet paving stones of the city’. Once again starting with Piccadilly Circus, this film shows night life closing down and then goes underground to reveal the labour of the sewage workers, underground maintenance, post-office sorters and the BBC. This film is keen to stress the precision of the timing and execution of underground maintenance work, showing the last Bakerloo tube leaving Piccadilly Circus and observing:
A dead city needs no transport. The time is 1.32 am. But by 1.52 am, the night gangs have taken over. Every foot of every mile must be checked. The tubes never rest. Every night when the last train has passed, the ghostly tunnels witness men, and women too, checking, cleaning, tightening ...‘And women too’ recognizes that the employment of women in this type of work may surprise an audience, just as ‘the ghostly tunnels’ suggests that a Gothic topography haunts documentary as much as fiction film. The women are shown wearing dark overalls with their hair tied up in pale headscarves. With their sleeves rolled up to show bare arms, the women also wear earrings visible under their headscarves. Holding lamps, they wield a variety of implements to scrape and brush the line.
This film then gives us a very unusual representation of the Underground through camera placement and movement. A shot of the women working in the dark of the tunnels, the only lighting visible their individually held lamps, transforms into a very eerie view of the platform as the camera, without a cut, pans right, away from the fluffers and up to the brightly lit, deserted station platform. The shot becomes eerie because of the revelation of concealed space and depth. While we are with the fluffers in the tunnel, the camera is appropriately placed to allow us to observe their work. Only with the pan and tilt is the height of the platform – and our own lowly position – revealed. While in horror films, the horror lurks in the tunnels, in this documentary it is the light, bright, deserted and elevated platform which seems uncanny.
The fluffers transform underground space again in Molly Dineen's 1989 television documentary, The Heart of the Angel, which was made at the Islington tube station, Angel, before it was redeveloped.27 The Angel is the deepest station on the London Underground, and was built with the two lines running on either side of a central platform island, rather than in separate tunnels, which means that the underground part of the station is a unified space. The film follows a fairly standard ‘day in the life’ structure, with a central fourteen minutes concerned with the invisible, underground, night-time work. It is a poignant portrait of an enclosed world, the first outside shot occurring nineteen minutes in. The workers at the station are demoralized by their deteriorating working conditions and the film opens with the clearly regular failure of the lifts and the streams of commuters labouring their way up the long stairs. The staff's inability to give the travelling public a satisfactory service is just one element in their low-grade dissatisfaction and dreams of elsewhere. These are differently expressed by different workers, from the hard-line ‘I hate work’ of the man in the ticket shop, to the lift operator who would rather try farming, to the man who would rather return to Yorkshire and observes that ‘It's not the same London’. The topography of the film emphasizes the vertical-ness of life in the station, the same faces going up and down, with nothing of the Islington outside. However, there is a horizontal dimension to space, but only deep underground. The linesmen appear on the platform from the tunnels and Dineen asks, ‘How far have you just walked?’ ‘From Camden Town’, comes the reply, and they are going on to Bank. Yet it is once again the fluffers whose use of space is most transformative. Unlike the 1950s representations of these workers, where we see them already in the overalls and ready to work, here Dineen films the women as they prepare for work, and interviews them directly. What we learn poses the question of where the women in Under Night Streets or City After Dark changed – and suggests one of the sources of the awkwardness of tone in which these workers are discussed – for in Heart of the Angel, in 1989, the women change on the platform. Indeed, we first see the fluffers as they start to change on the deserted station platforms, stripping to their underwear to put on their overalls, using the benches daily sat on by commuters to store their clothes. In an extraordinary reversal of the public and private space staged in The Wings of the Dove with which we started, here the wooden benches polished and worn by millions of commuting bottoms are used like bedroom chairs or dressing-table stools. The empty public space of the station is rendered both intimate and unfamiliar. Their clothes neatly folded on the benches, the women climb down onto the tracks and enter the tunnels with their dusters and scrapers.
It is clearly still a filthy job – possibly filthier in 1989 than it was in 1958 – and there is still something that is both incongruous and shocking about the labour of these women in the tunnels, on foot, performing a hidden, public housework.28 That is perhaps the scandal, for the work has all the attributes of housework: invisible, repetitive, directed at maintenance not production, dealing with the detritus of everyday lives – and is, like housework, unrecognized. Yet it is also conducted in the middle of the night in dark tunnels, with women working in gangs, and both maintains and makes strange the spaces of the London Underground.
These documentary films, revealing the hidden labour which has built and maintains the London Underground, provide a kind of negative of the ‘strong story’ of what lurks in the tunnel. It is not horror, or monsters, but labour, which is realized very precisely through the way in which underground space is rendered in these films. Deathline recognizes this relationship, for the cannibals who haunt the tunnels are the descendants of nineteenth-century labourers, abandoned by the entrepreneurs financing the building of the Underground after a fatal accident, but I suggest that the spaces and labour of the fluffers are perhaps stranger because they are less generically familiar.
So the cinematic space of the London Underground is both a surprisingly bodily space and also a space to which the lack of an outside or a view lends a curious privacy. It is an internationally recognizable national space which signifies London, but also an international narrative space which prefers certain kinds of stories about the forgotten, the repressed, and about pursuit and chases. It is a space which is constantly made and remade in different times, and stories, and films. If the strong stories of the Underground are all about time, and space transformed into time, just like the cinema, we can also find there surprising intimacies.
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Acknowledgements |
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I acknowledge with thanks the London Transport Museum, all those who provided film copies and Tom Hughes and Nic Pillai for the illustrations.
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Notes |
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 TOP Notes |
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Currently completing a book on London in the cinema. She is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick
1 The film is set in 1910. Peter Matthews observes ‘The film-makers have updated the story to 1910, presumably to take advantage of the lifting of Victorian repression’ Review, ‘Wings of the Dove’, Sight and Sound, vol. 8, no. 1 (1998), pp. 55–6. 
2 Advice was taken from the London Transport Museum curators and archives about the Underground set and scenes. Thanks to Simon Murphy, Film and Photography Curator, London's Transport Museum, 11 December 2003.
3 The film Underground (Anthony Asquith, 1928) opens and closes with play generated by the offers of seats to women on the tube.
4 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1977).
5 Nigel Floyd, interviewed on Back Row BBC Radio 4, 14 March 2003.
6 In the early part of the twentieth century, the London Underground did signify modernity, partly because of the promiscuous mixing of classes it permitted. The plot of Underground is structured through encounters on the tube. See Amy Sargeant, British Cinema: A Critical History (London: BFI, 2005), pp. 98–9 for a discussion of the film.
7 See Brunsdon, ‘The elsewhere of the London Underground’ in C. Berry et al. (eds) Electronic Elsewheres (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) for a discussion of the London Underground as a space of shelter in the 1939–45 war.
8 See Lynne Kirby for a discussion of early cinema and the railway journey. Parallel Tracks: the Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
9 Luc Besson in Film Francais, no. 2029, March 1985, p. 8, quoted by David Berry in ‘Underground cinema: French visions of the Métro’, in Myrto Konstantarakos (ed.) Spaces in European Cinema (Exeter: Intellect, 2000), p. 21.
10 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), part one, ‘Mapping and movement’.
12 Nick Freeman, ‘London kills me: the English metropolis in British horror films of the 1970s’, in Xavier Mendik (ed.) Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002), pp. 193–210. Marcelle Perks, ‘A descent into the underworld: Deathline’ in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds), British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 145–55.
13 David Pike ‘Modernist space and the transformation of underground London’ in Pamela K. Gilbert, (ed.), Imagined Londons (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002).
14 For a broader discussion of the film's use of London, see Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), ch. 8.
15 The 1959 BBC serial (written by Nigel Kneale, who also wrote the screenplay for Hammer), which opens on the street sign for Hobbs Lane, with the earlier, differently spelt sign visible underneath, does not use an Underground setting. The excavation is instead of the Baldoon House development in Knightsbridge.
16 Peter Hutchings, ‘We're the Martians now’, in I.Q.Hunter, British Science Fiction Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999).
19 Trench and Hillman observe that during the excavation for the Victoria line, ‘Six fossil nautiloids, fifty million years old, were discovered near Victoria, and a plague pit was discovered near Victoria when a drum-digger began to churn up ground bones.’ Trench and Hillman, The London Under London (London: John Murray), 1984, p. 159.
20 Played in the BBC version by the filmmaker Lionel Ngakane.
21 Lance Pettitt discusses the film at more length in Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 85–8.
22 The songs are credited to MacColl and Seeger as ‘songs to traditional Irish melodies’. The credited singers are Paul Lennihan and Joe Heaney, although many individuals are featured singing diegetically. Other non-diegetic songs used include ‘The Rambler from Clare’ and ‘Jack of all Trades’, both of which share precise reference to the different parts of Ireland which might have been home to the singers or the audience.
23 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
24 Marc Augé's, In the Métro, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 [1986]) discusses the psychic space of the metro.
25 Directed by Ralph Keene, produced by Edgar Anstey for British Transport Films. The film was given a theatrical release in the West End in 1958, and the London Transport Magazine publicised it as ‘A Film You Should See’, observing ‘The content of facts and figures has been judged well. Not too much to overwhelm the general cinema-goer, but sufficient to hold the interest of the transport man himself.’ London Transport Magazine, vol. 12, no. 5 (1958), p. 16.
26 This difficulty of tone is also apparent in Trench and Hillman's classic study where they refer to ‘that esoteric body of workers in the Underground: the fluffers. The fluffers are a small group of stalwart ladies who work in the tunnels in the small hours ...’ Trench and Hillman, The London Under London, p. 130. See also Stephen Smith, Underground London (London: Little Brown, 2004), p. 274.
27 The Heart of the Angel, An Allegra Film for the BBC. Camera, Editing and Producer: Molly Dineen. Producer for the BBC Caroline Pick. Transmitted in the 40 Minutes slot, BBC 2, 26 November 1989.
28 Stephen Halliday Underground to Everywhere (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003) suggests that the fluffers were mainly replaced in the 1970s by the ‘big yellow duster’, a five car cleaning train (p. 195). Clearly not at the Angel. London Transport records on this group of workers appear almost non-existent.
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