It may seem unthinkable to people who were born after the year 2000, or who came to the area later, but Bermondsey used not to have its own Tube station.
That made Bermondsey and Rotherhithe one of the worst places in inner London for getting to the West End and other parts of the city centre, according to Sir Simon Hughes, who was MP for the area for more than 30 years.
“You had to go by bus, it was very slow and congested, it took ages often,” he said. “And therefore effectively, the job opportunities for people were limited to going further out south-east, or more local.”
Adding: “It wasn’t a realistic option to go and work in the West End.”
Although it is worth pointing out that for those people living in Bermondsey at least it was a short bus ride or walk to either London Bridge, Borough or Elephant & Castle tube stations to the west.
In the 1980s, an opportunity came along to change this. With the redevelopment of the Surrey Docks and Canary Wharf areas by the London Dockland Development Corporation (LDDC) under Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, Margaret Thatcher’s government launched a plan to extend the Jubilee Line south-east.
There had been other plans to extend the line before, stretching as far back as 1949, as well as a plan to build it out as far as Thamesmead that lasted much of the 1970s before being scrapped, according to a study by UCL.
At that point, the line ended at Green Park. The plan was to extend it down through Charing Cross (later changed to Westminster), Waterloo and London Bridge, before going fast to new stations at Canada Water and Canary Wharf, serving those two new financial and residential developments. There would be no stops in between, meaning the Bankside area and Bermondsey would remain without stations.
As Sir Simon put it: “It seemed the flaw in that was there was going to be mega disruption without any great advantage necessarily to most of the people who already lived here.
“From the beginning I took the position that we should support the idea of the line but only on the basis that it also stop at stations particularly in Bermondsey, but also in the Bankside area.”
That would not come cheap. Each of those stations was estimated at the time to cost £25 million, according to Sir Sir Simon. The UCL study said that the contract cost for Southwark and Bermondsey stations was actually £70 million and £69.6 million respectively.
He said that he was told at first by the people planning the line and supporting it politically that “it was unrealistic in engineering terms” to include the Bermondsey and Southwark stations.
Parliamentary tactics
Because it was a piece of infrastructure that affected only part of the country, the extension needed a private bill to be approved in both houses of parliament, as well as going before separate committees of MPs and peers.
The bill was first put to parliament in 1989, six years after Sir Simon came to the House of Commons as MP for Bermondsey.
He set about blocking it in order to get his way. “My tactic was to block the bill and delay it until [Bermondsey and Southwark] stations were included.
“All private bills come on a list, if there’s no opposition, they get put through on the nod. If you oppose them they get put in a queue. Then you can put amendments down. It’s a very effective delaying tactic.”
Eventually, he said, a letter came to light that that said it was going to be cheaper to agree to build Bermondsey and Southwark stations than to have to keep on fending off Sir Simon’s attempts to block the bill.
The two stations were agreed as part of the Jubilee Line extension plan in late 1990, according to the UCL study. The project was finally given the go-ahead from the government in 1993.
In the meantime came wrangling over where exactly the stations would be, especially Bermondsey, according to Sir Simon.
“There was still obviously some opposition because the Keetons Estate lost open space [that became Bermondsey Tube station].
“It was a bit like the infill campaign,” he added, referring to Southwark Council’s policy of building new council flats on open spaces and garage sites.
“People were saying ‘hang on we don’t want a great big thing, you know. And so the negotiations started to try to make it smaller, and less offensive to the eye.”
The light and airy station, designed by Ian Ritchie architects, was meant to have offices on top, but this has never happened.
Other areas of concern were the escape shafts, which had to be dotted at various points along the line. These included Durand’s Wharf in Rotherhithe, which lost twenty square metres of parkland, and Russia Dock Woodland, which lost 1,500 square metres of newly planted woodland. Both of these had some opposition from local people, but surveyors did not consider the loss “a significant impact”.
Sir Simon said that another “little battle” he and other supporters fought, and lost, was to have Canada Water station named ‘Canada Docks’. “The LDDC thought it was more attractive to sell it as ‘Water’ rather than ‘Docks'”, he said. Nearby Surrey Quays station on the East London Line (now the Overground) had also been hastily renamed from Surrey Docks a few years earlier without much consultation, he said.
Building delays and money troubles
Building work began on the Jubilee Line extension in December 1993, once funding had been secured. The total outlay on the extension was nearly £3.5 billion, up from initial estimates of about £2.1 billion. At first, about £400 million of that was supposed to come from Olympia & York, the developers of Canary Wharf. But they went bankrupt after the 1989 property market crash.
Their cut was paid for by a consortium of Canary Wharf bankers, with the government covering much of the rest, other than £25 million from British Gas, and £2.4 million from another Canary Wharf developer. The project was delayed by nearly two years because of the funding gap caused by the collapse of Olympia and York.
At one point during the delay, a banker called Lord Rogers complained about the “dangerous principle” of seeking private sector funding for the extension. He called on the government to “stop dithering about the Jubilee Line and talking nonsense about getting landlords to pay when the nation as a whole will be the beneficiary of its completion.”
The line was eventually opened fully in December 1999, although some parts had opened earlier that year. It was eighteen months behind schedule and more than £1 billion over budget.
Transforming the area
The new station at Bermondsey “transformed” the area, according to Robert Hulse, the former director of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe.
“When we moved here there was nothing in every direction,” he said. “There was the east London line as was, which is now part of the Overground, but it was a very short line and the surface was irregular, and unreliable.
“Whenever we came home we’d get the Northern line and hope to find a bus, rather than rely on the East London Line. It’s made a huge, huge change to have the Jubilee Line.
“They used to say -‘build a bridge, you build a town’. In other words, a crossing point becomes a focus for community and so forth. That’s true of Tube stations as well, and train lines. The first example was the Metropolitan line.”
Not all of that change in Bermondsey has been positive, of course. Rising property prices have been one result of the extension, and some feel that developers who benefited from the radically improved transport links in Bermondsey were never made to pay for it, which meant that essentially the taxpayer was supporting private profits in the property sector.
Technological innovation
Mr Hulse also said that it was appropriate that part of the extension of the Tube south of the river came past the site of the Brunels’ tunnel underneath the Thames.
“Brunel built the first tunnel boring machine, or TBM. This was the tunnel that changed the shape of London. He used the technology that for the first time, enabled these tunnels.
“Not by digging a trench and covering it [the so-called ‘cut and cover’ method] but by burrowing a hole like an animal.”
Of course, Brunel’s TBM was made up of 36 men all digging away manually in a specially-built frame that was slowly and laboriously inched forwards under the river.
Mr Hulse said: “Today’s TBMs are simply an automated version of that – they don’t have men in cages or bricklayers, but it’s the same principle. It’s the tunnel that changed the shape of London, and it’s the technology that brought the Jubilee Line south of river… So it is kind of full circle business in a way.”
Could the possible new TfL deal mean the Bakerloo Line Extension is revived?
Changed forever
The Jubilee Line has changed the character of the Bermondsey and Rotherhithe area forever, and with the Canada Water masterplan set to bring in thousands of new residents with the promise of quick access to central London, that change will continue to deepen in the years to come.
For both Sir Simon and Mr Hulse, the positives more than outweigh the downsides. “It did bring up house prices, but the benefits of putting us on the map are transformational,” Sir Simon said. “Both stations have enormous use – millions and millions of people coming in and out every year.”
The Bakerloo Line extension could possibly be in with a chance of getting revived by a new Transport for London funding deal – although Sir Simon recalled that it was one of the first campaigns he worked on in the early 1980s.
If the extension does happen, it will be interesting to see how the area changes, as Bermondsey and Rotherhithe have – and if developers can be enticed to pay their share.