ABSTRACT

Chapter 2 underlines the significance of understanding the context in which the ideas about taking trains right through London and Paris – beneath streets and above them – first emerged. It connects railway plans to a range of metropolitan issues during the period c.1830–1860: From street improvements to enlarging food and cattle markets through to slum clearances and the provision of affordable housing and transport for the working and poorer classes. The chapter discusses striking new metropolitan visions as, for example, Charles Pearson advocated when connecting the opening of suburban railway lines to new housing for mechanics and artisans in North London, an embryonic idea of the later garden cities, which it preceded by over fifty years. Among other ideas, it also examines what Fl. de Kérizouet proposed in Paris by reorganising the entire space of the city and its fiscal functions according to a comprehensive vision of new city docks, redistributed tax-collection points along the city wall and an underground line between two railway termini and the market area of Les Halles.