Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin

suddenly noticed that neither gnomes nor pond were there, so I stopped a platform guard at the station, and said, ‘Can you tell me about the gnomes?’ ‘
What
gnomes?’ he said, testily. He then evidently remembered, and said they’d been put there by a female member of staff, currently off duty. Every Christmas, he fondly recalled, she’d put tinsel onthem. ‘But what’s happened to them?’ I impatiently demanded, and he became testy again: ‘Not a clue, mate.’ I next asked a booking hall attendant, and he said, ‘I don’t know about the gnomes, but you can’t see the pond because it’s winter.’ Do ponds necessarily disappear in winter? They do at Edgware Road.

C HAPTER FOUR
THE EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN AND THE EXPANSION OF THE DISTRICT – AND A PAUSE FOR THOUGHT
THE EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN
    We now turn with relief from the smoky tunnels to the open air, where the Met and the District found it much easier and cheaper to build railways by which passengers could be ensnared and brought into the vortex of the Circle. 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 twoBaker 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. The fugger is a student of Metropolitan history, and he lists the most northerly stations. ‘They were all out beyond Aylesbury. Waddeson, Quainton Road, it went, Grandborough, Winslow Road, Verney Junction.’ ‘If he went on like this,’ Christopher reflects, ‘I’d cry.’ The fugger then explains why the Met operated in such latitudes. ‘Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a Channel Tunnel to the Continent. What a line.’
    The fugger’s account is more or less correct, and this was all the grandiose vision of Sir Edward Watkin, who had promised the Met shareholders that their ‘great terminus’ (Baker Street) would be connected with ‘many important towns’.
    The leap to Verney Junction (which is not only 60 miles from Baker Street, but also a mere 8 miles from
Oxford
, for God’s sake) came about through the Met’s absorption of the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway. That never went to Buckingham, but it did go to Aylesbury. In fact, it went from there to Verney Junction.
    The Met received income from the transportation of manure between London and Verney Junction for the farms round about, thereby gaining some benefit from the horse bus boom that wasotherwise entirely detrimental to its interests. It also built a hotel for excursionists at Verney Junction, which became the starting point of the most glamorous ride it would ever be possible to undertake on the Underground. From 1910, to drum up custom, the Metropolitan would operate a luxury Pullman service from Verney Junction to Aldgate. In other