Reading on Trains Number 26: Tube Stairwell Pipes (and a Case of Submechanophobia)

Underground stations with lifts were also fitted with spiral metal stairs, usually in a separate shaft (and the case of the Yerkes Tubes, the stairs were made by the superbly named St Pancras Ironworks Co. Ltd.). Sometimes the lifts were retained even when the lifts were replaced by escalators – as, for example, at Camden Town, Kentish Town and Archway, stations with only two escalators and no fixed stairs in-between.

The spiral stairs are often prefaced with warnings, of varying severity, not to use them except in emergency. The sternest one I’ve seen as at the top of the stairs at Covent Garden, ie it’s read by people about to descend. An arrow grudgingly indicates the stairs with the following notice beneath: ‘It is quicker to wait for the lifts, which run every few minutes. DO NOT use the stairs except in an emergency. This station is 15 floors below ground.’ The notice at the bottom is less hysterical. It simply reads ‘Emergency stairs. This stairway has 193 steps.’ Surely those signs ought to be the other way around.         

What is this emergency that keeps being invoked? A fire on the platform, or anything that would put the lifts out of action, and perhaps one reason to use the stairs is to rehearse for such an eventuality. Where a station is shallow, as at Holloway Road (62 steps) and Mornington Crescent (66), about half the passengers use the stairs anyway, but I like to take on the long staircases, such as Hampstead (‘over 320’). I believe the climbing of many stairs is very good, or possibly very bad, for one’s heart, so I’d have thought it was fifty-fifty whether to have warnings not to use the stairs or encouragement to do so (‘Please do use these stairs. The exercise can be beneficial.’)

And I think it’s fair to say that nobody will gain weight by using the stairs. A friend of mine worked for a publisher housed at the top of a tall building. The firm brought out one of those books explaining why Parisian women are generally thin, and one reason put forward was that they often live in tall buildings with no lifts, so they climb a lot of stairs. At the time of the book’s currency, women (and men) who worked for the firm began spurning the office lift.

If I’m wrong about the beneficial effect, then I suppose I might be found dead on one of the spiral staircases, like Miss Pongleton whose body is discovered on the stairs at Belsize Park in Murder Underground, by Mavis Doriel Hay, whose very name must have dictated a career writing cosy crime. The novel (tiresomely convoluted) was first published in 1934 and was handsomely reissued by the British Library Crime Classics series, albeit with an anachronistic picture on the cover showing a 1938 stock Tube train.

Perhaps Mavis Doriel Hay was inspired by a real-life event. In Rails Through the Clay, Desmond F. Croome and Alan A. Jackson write, ‘On at least one occasion, a dead body has rested undetected in its iron grave for as long as two days, though staff are supposed to undertake a daily check of these staircases.’ The subject of Tube stairs brings out the whimsical side of Croome and Jackson: ‘Occasionally the shafts provide a dry and quiet haven for “bag ladies” and other social outcasts as well as a certain privacy for lovers from nearby offices. The latter soon discover that they will receive a conveniently lengthy audible warning (on the form of other passengers’ footsteps) should they wish to be discreet in displaying their physical ardour.’

I have noticed a certain companionship on the staircases, stopping well short of physical ardour: a nod of sympathy from those trotting down to those toiling up. You see interesting things on the staircases, such as a sign at Holloway Road reading ‘No unauthorised heavy loads’. On the Yerkes Tubes, the tiling that precedes and succeeds the iron stairwells is beautiful and sometimes, I think, original to the station, whereas it hardly ever is on platforms. (You can tell original tiling by the fine cracks and very shiny lead glaze.)

One thing that puts me off the stairs is the enormous ventilation pipe that sometimes runs down the centre of the well like a monstrous dangling elephant’s trunk. I don’t like big pipes generally; you can’t be quite sure what’s inside them, and the contents seem likely to be vomited out at any moment. I do know what’s inside the great black pipe straddling the platforms at Sloane Square station: the Westbourne River, and I won’t stand beneath it, especially on a rainy day, when it is said to shake. And the top of the pipe in the shaft at Holloway Road is crudely patched in a way I find disturbing. (See picture above.)

If you Google ‘fear of pipes’, you’re led to the word ‘Submechanophobia’, the fear of man-made objects immersed in water. So I would never take one of those mini-subs to look at the wreck of the Titanic and nor, I imagine, will anyone else after the accident of last year. Submechanophobia presumably comes up in relation to pipes, because pipes are often submerged, but further probing revealed accounts from people whose fear of pipes is more general, and these I found very triggering: pipes with open mouths emitting a deep moan; the idea of being at the bottom of a cooling tower; the sort of roaring, ancient plumbing you get in Victorian seafront public lavatories. I once stayed at the Renaissance Hotel, Bordeaux, whose lobby is at the base of what had been a giant grain silo. So I had to leave my wife to do the checking in and out.

I thought my phobia might be lessened if I found out a bit more about the stairwell pipes, so I went to Hampstead, where I spoke to Rick Smith, customer services manager.