That was the year that the first London Underground line opened, running from Paddington in the West to Farringdon in the East. It had been a long time in the digging. The idea of an underground railway to reduce the congestion of carts, carriages, cattle and hawkers on the roads had been discussed by engineers since the 1830s. It was given new impetus in 1851 when Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City Corporation, proposed a 100-foot-wide tunnel beneath the city laid with eight sets of tracks. Pearson was an indefatigable campaigner for new working-class suburbs outside the city, replacing the old slums and rookeries and connected to the centre by railways. He joined forces with the Bayswater, Paddington and Holborn Bridge Railway Company, which proposed an underground line connecting the western suburbs in Bayswater with the City. The tracks would run from Paddington Station, opened in 1838, to Farringdon.

Permission for the scheme was granted in 1854, but not so much as a clod of earth had been excavated when the Crimean War brought the company close to bankruptcy. The unflagging Pearson, celebrated by his biographer for his "gadfly" energy, lobbied the City Corporation and successfully persuaded it to subscribe to shares worth £200,000.

Digging, carried out by navvies working in shifts, began in 1859, overseen by the engineer John Fowler, who would go on to build the Forth Bridge, west of Edinburgh. The new Metropolitan Line ran along what are now the Marylebone and Euston Roads, with a turn to the south-east beside Farringdon Road.

The line had its grand ceremonial opening on January 9, 1863. Six hundred of the great and the good assembled at Paddington and the party proceeded in two trains to Farringdon for an "elegant dejeuner", as The Times put it. It was served on the station platform, which had been draped for the occasion in scarlet and white flags and banners. There were toasts and speeches. The chairman called on Robert Lowe MP to give a rousing address.

"The traffic of London," Lowe began, "has long been a reproach of the most civilised nation of the world, and the opprobrium of the age. Dr Johnson used to say that if you wanted to see the full tide of human life, you must go to Charing Cross, but Dr Johnson would have to raise his estimation of the full tide, or rather of the close jam of the full tide of human life, many hundred per cent before he could arrive at the state which the traffic of London has now reached." This congestion, he argued, has become a "growing evil".