Alexander McCall Smith remembers the Edinburgh Underground

Published on Friday 1 April 2011 12:50

For over 60 years, Scotland's capital had a tube system which was a much-appreciated feature of the city's life. Here, it is fondly remembered by one of its greatest admirers, Alexander McCall Smith

• The old underground station at Scotland Street

With so much attention being given to the ill-fated construction in Edinburgh of a tram system, relatively little has been said of the underground railway system that served the capital so well until 1952.

Few people – apart from a handful of transport historians and a small number of enthusiasts – remember it, and sometimes it seems almost as if it never was. Yet many of the stations are still there, deserted, cobwebbed places tucked away from public gaze, sealed off from passers-by, who think, perhaps, that the gates and descending steps beyond are remnants of something else altogether – bomb shelters, abandoned public baths, stairways to ancient pedestrian underpasses.

They would be surprised if the true nature of these relics were to be revealed: an underground railway? Surely not. Glasgow has one, yes, but not Edinburgh, which has always been less sprawling and less in need, therefore, of an underground.

Yet the Edinburgh underground did exist and for over 60 years was a much-appreciated feature of the city's life. Eventually, at a rather moving ceremony, the last train made the circuit of its stations and the gates were closed by the then Lord Provost. Getting around Edinburgh was now to be by tram, by bus, or by increasingly common motor cars. In due course, on the 16th November 1956, the last electric tram joined that final underground train in a storage hangar in Portobello, and the internal combustion engine began its unchallenged reign.

The underground was missed, of course, by those who used it to get to work, to go shopping, or to visit friends. But it was also regretted by those who appreciated the architecture of its stations – many were designed by Lorimer – and, most importantly, the names and associations that went with these stations. Great stations of this world – Grand Central or Victoria; the Gare du Nord or the Stazione Santa Lucia in Venice – do more than allow people to embark upon journeys; they are icons. A station is not just a station: it is a gateway to a hinterland of meaning, a trigger of the memories and associations of which our lives are composed.

The most moving passages of Coward's Brief Encounter take place at a station in wartime, a metaphor for loneliness and the passing of ships in the night; the final scene of that remarkable prose poem, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, unfolds exactly where the title suggests. Stations, then, have their place in the imagination: they evoke an atmosphere, they are richly suggestive.

The Edinburgh Underground consisted of a central, circular route with two spurs going off to the east (the Musselburgh Spur) and west (the Ratho Spur). The final stations on each of these branches were Honest Lad and Union Canal. During the Edinburgh trades holidays, it was possible to buy a cheap ticket for 1s2d that would take an entire family to either of these termini for a picnic or other outing.

The inner circle started and ended at the system's main station, Enlightenment, which was on the High Street, not far from the Mercat Cross. The name of this station derived from the famous remark on the number of men of genius in the Scottish Enlightenment whose hand could be shaken if one stood at that spot for an hour or two. Enlightenment was not only the principal station; it was the most beautifully decorated, latterly with a remarkable set of murals by Phoebe Anna Traquair depicting the development of political economy (panel 1) and the notion of moral sympathy in the writings of Adam Smith and David Hume (panels 2 and 3).

From Enlightenment the line dipped sharply down to Gallery. As the name suggested, this station, reached from the foot of the Playfair Steps, catered for those who wished to visit the National Gallery of Scotland or the Royal Scottish Academy. Academicians of the RSA were, in fact, entitled to travel free, provided that they boarded at this station, although latterly many of them abstained from taking advantage of this privilege.

Like Enlightenment, Gallery was splendidly decorated. The main platform had alongside it a large, glass-fronted enclosure in which Raeburn's portrait of Neil Gow playing his fiddle was displayed, although in the late 1920s the National Gallery adopted a policy of hanging a number of other paintings there. Particularly popular with the travelling public, it appears, was Sir William Allan's The Murder of David Rizzio, which remained in the station for three years between 1931 and 1934.

The stop immediately after Gallery was Milne's Bar. This served not only Milne's Bar itself, a bar enthusiastically frequented by poets, but all of Rose Street, with its numerous pubs. This station served beer between the hours of six and nine in the evening and at times there would be more people interested in lingering on the platform than there were in boarding a train. The late Christopher Murray Grieve, who wrote as Hugh MacDiarmid, refers to this station in these lines from one of his Scots poems, The Unnergrund Train: "Oh, auld feres wha thrang the muckle platform straucht/And wait for trains frae southern pairts…"

From Milne's Bar the line went to Scotland Street, following briefly the route of the disused railway line that climbed by tunnel from the Scotland Street Marshalling Yards up to Waverley Station. Scotland Street underground station, like Milne's Bar, had literary associations, being mentioned by Sir Compton Mackenzie in more than one of his novels and also referred to by the poet, Sydney Goodsir Smith, who, like the author of Whisky Galore, lived in nearby Drummond Place.

Then on to Academy, the entrance of which was more or less opposite the gates of the Edinburgh Academy. All traces of this station have now disappeared, the portals having been altered to make the commodious fish and chip bar that now occupies the site. The main hall of Academy was decorated by an anonymous hand, although there are those who believe that the artist William Crosbie was involved in the painting of the large and colourful mural that dominated the station. Crosbie was born in China, to Scottish parents, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art and in Paris, where he was a pupil of Lger. Although he executed a number of murals, including an important one for the Festival of Britain in 1951, he neither confirmed nor denied the suggestion that he was responsible for the large-scale work in Academy.

He was, however, quoted as once referring to "my underground picture".

Schoolboys entering the system at Academy would be conveyed within a minute or two on the short section of track to St Stephen Street, a station that occupied the site now used by the Baillie bar. This bar was popular with antique dealers in the 1970s and 80s, many of whom were unaware of the fact that the impressive circular mahogany bar was in an earlier incarnation the ticket desk of this station.

Ruthven Todd, whose haunting collection of poetry, Acreage of the Heart, captures so well the threatening atmosphere of the 30s – that "low, dishonest decade" as Auden described it – mentions St Stephen Street Station in an essay on his Edinburgh childhood. "What a feeling of anticipation there was," he wrote, "when on Sunday mornings we were bundled into the underground train that would eventually disgorge us at the Enlightenment station just behind St Giles. I counted the stops on the fingers of my hand; from the age of four or thereabouts I knew the names of all the stations – including those on the spurs – and would recite them in order. Later, when I was working on Mull, I used to climb a hill looking out towards the distant shapes of Rum and Eigg, towards Skye, and those names would come back to me – Enlightenment, Gallery, Scotland Street and so on – a litany of a different world, the world of home, the world that I had lost."

A short section of line links St Stephen Street with the next station, Moray Place. This station had a particularly fine entrance, in keeping with the grandeur of that egregious example of Georgian architecture, but unfortunately no trace of it remains today. The station was entered from the corner of Moray Place and Doune Terrace, near the premises currently occupied by the Association of Scottish Nudists.

From Moray Place the line headed directly to the evocatively-named Ice Factory, which was behind the Caledonian Hotel. No mystery surrounds the name of this station, which served the large ice plant that in its heyday employed over 100 people. The station was useful for these employees, as it was for the somewhat larger number who worked in the Fountainbridge breweries, a short distance away.

Further to the south was King's Theatre, a large, echoing station immediately beneath the fine Victorian premises of Bennets Bar. The onset of Morningside, a district synonymous with quintessential Edinburgh respectability, was marked by Holy Corner, a station known for its elaborate ironwork gates of Art Nouveau design. These gates came from the Thomas Bogie workshops in North West Circus Lane; further examples of his work were to be found in Moray Place and Gallery.

The two final stations before the line returned to Enlightenment were Hospital and Sciennes, close to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, and Surgeons' Hall, which served the university area and the Cowgate.

The relative prosperity that Edinburgh enjoyed from the 1960s onwards tends to obscure the memory of the poverty and deprivation that existed in the insanitary tenements of the Old Town. Right up until the closure of the underground, it was not uncommon to see children from areas such as the Cowgate travelling on the trains barefoot, not from choice but because they had no shoes. When, in 1946, the underground authorities installed a small escalator in the Surgeons' Hall station, it was deemed necessary to have a large warning notice at the head of the moving staircase: Watch your Toes.

That was the Edinburgh underground, and those were its stations. Sometimes, when I walk across the Meadows, I pause and close my eyes; and imagine for a moment that I hear, down beneath my feet, the passing rumble of an underground train – which is strange, perhaps, as no trains went that way.

• The deputy executive chairman of the Edinburgh tram company, Tie, Dr Alfi Lorpos, is now looking at extending the new tram network on to the old Edinburgh Underground line.