If you look at a normal tube map, you might think that the lines provide a good coverage of Greater London. However, when looking at the true geographical locations, you easily be able to notice a large gap about here. And here is Southeast London, a typically overlooked part of the city that deserves to be put on the map. A great source of consternation for many Southeast Londoners is that their commutes are indirect. For example, to get into central London from my home buyer of Bromley, I have to get a stopping service to Victoria or London Bridge and then take a long walk through either station to get to the underground platforms before continuing with my commute. It might only be an extra 15 or 20 minutes a day, but Southeast London really deserves to have tube chains. It's just as part of London as anywhere else. So how did we get into this situation? This 1572 map by Brown and Hoganberg is the first printed map that we know of, and comes from a time where the only river crossing was London Bridge. Covering an area that combines black frights in the city of London, you can see that there was a big fat nothing just south of the river. A plan of London before the Great Fire shows that in nearly a century of growth, the only significant development below the river was Savak. There was some minor expansion into Westminster, but apart from that most of modern London was just fields. We can see parts of the modern city take shape in the 1746 map, including Hyde Park and Green Park, Oxford Street, and a new river crossing at Westminster Bridge. While South London still looks like a collection of villages rather than part of the nation's capital. It's really in the years following the industrial revolution that we see massive expansion into areas both north and south. A population boom resulting from overseas and domestic immigration meant that soon enough London was congested. The first census in 1801 recalled a population of 1 million. A century later, this had risen to a whopping 6.6 million, but still most of it was concentrated in the north. At the start of the 19th century, the only type of public transport that existed was provided on the terms by small boats called Waries, while on land there were the horse drawn hackney carriages, although most people preferred to walk because both were expensive and most things were reachable within half an hour. The hackney's had a monopoly on public transport until 1832 when Omni buses were introduced by George Schillabir. These larger horse drawn carriages ran up and down the fixed route like the buses of today. An improvement came with George Francis Train's trams, where carriages ran along smooth iron rails to make it easier for the horses. Three different companies built trantracks to Peckham, Grinnich, Brixton and Kennington in 1870. Eventually by 1915 all horse trams were replaced by electric vehicles with overhead cables. The very first underground line was built in 1860 in response to complaints from people coming into London, though once they had arrived the streets were too crowded to get to where they wanted to go in a reasonable time. This problem of course didn't apply to South London, or instead 124 miles of railway was being rapidly developed to transport people into the crowded parts of the city from Kent and the South Coast. That's not to say there wasn't any development in the South. Firstly, there was the bank branch of the northern line, which opened in 1890, running between King William's Troutin and Elifton Castle, before leaving extending to Clapham Junction just before World War I. The Bakerloo line between Baker Street and Elifton Castle opened its carriages to passengers in 1906. During the interwar years, instead of new lines being built, there was a series of extensions across the network, such as the northern line terminating at Morden in 1926 and extensions to other lines north of the river. But for reasons unknown, there was no appetite for anything past Elifton Castle on the Bakerloo line. However, instead of any more tube lines, the demand for transport in the South was being met by the extensive tram network that had been developing for some years above ground. Most city planners during the interwar years believe that this network would still be around the future, and that they would only need to consider drawing up plans for a tube line when the existing public transport use was high. The trams were an effective way of transporting workers until the network ran into problems during World War II. There was a national steel shortage during the war, making maintenance difficult, and the companies operating the networks turned away from trams and towards the cheaper trolley buses. Duanodling passenger numbers, owing to higher car ownership, sealed the fate to the tram network, and the last of the trams around the morning of the 6th of July 1952. However, the tram network has had its triumph for return to the boroughs of Croydon, Merton and Bromley in 2000, and has been a massive success. It would appear that there was no hope left for the boroughs of Greenwich, Lewisham and Sullak, which was a shame because there were some serious planning going on before the war. Southern Railway was experiencing high passenger numbers, and there were ideas creating new line that used both this and underground congestion between Liverpool Street and Marble Lodge. When the plans were picked up again in 1949, the government and the London passenger transport board woke up to the cost of such a railway and decided to hold off until steel prices decreased again. The plan was passed around London transport's chambers until it was scrapped in 1953 in favour of developing the Victoria line. When the Victoria line finally got underway in the mid-60s, thoughts turned to the construction of the next railway scheme. In 1965, London Transport and British Rail presented a railway plan of London, as a preliminary report for the construction of the new line named the Fleet Line. The route was to wiggle through central London between Baker Street and Fenshurt Street in order to alleviate the congestion on the desperately overcrowded Bakerloo and central lines before continuing further southeast and terminating at Lewisham. Potential extensions were either to connect with the mid-Cantline all the way down to Hazen Adeskim or to the Bexley Heathline. Honestly, sort of been f***ing fantastic. Parliamentary powers and Royal Assent construct stage one of the Fleet Line between Baker Street and Sharring Cross were achieved in the 25th of July 1969 and it was looking as though the whole Fleet Line would soon be built shortly after. However, the cost of £86m was slightly worrying to London Transport who needed help to fund the line to Lewisham. The Greater London Council agreed to fund 25% of the project conditional on the government meeting the remaining 75%. While an application for funding was formally made in July 1970, it wasn't until a year later that the Secretary of State for the Environment responded, granting the 75% required, but only for the 35 million pound costs of Stage 1. And that is the closest that the southeast ever got to a tube line. The rapid decay of industry in the Doctrine's area convinced the government to focus on development in the east closer to the river. By the 1970s, it was quickly being realised that London no longer had enough space to accommodate various shipping vessels and that the 19th century docks would vastly outdated. Shipping activities were already being transferred to Tilbury and soon enough, the 8.5 square miles stretching from Tower Bridge to Bechton were going to be utterly derelict unless something was done. In 1973, a new line called the River Line was conceived, stretching from Fenshurch Street to Thamesmead. Amusingly, the London Rail Study map still shows there was the option of building the southeast Fleet Line, but the report recommended the construction of the River Line. The report's words were, we believe that there is a strong case for providing this new link to join Thamesmead and Doctrine's to Central London at as early a date as possible because of the beneficial effect would have on Doctrine's development. Construction should not await the completion of development. There was barely a mention of the Fleet Line in the report. Since then, there have been a few fleeting attempts to revitalise plans, but ultimately it was too little too late. For example, a rail study conducted in 1989 considered resurrecting a Bakerloo line extension in the same breath as introducing a second Doctrine's line. Nothing came of either a proposal. It was simply far cheaper to extend existing lines towards the north and west, and besides, the conventional train network in the south wasn't seeing passenger numbers extreme enough to warrant urgent development. The thing that really bothers me at the moment is that there is a strong case to build a line here. The population figures alone should provide enough of a justification. A consultation was sent out in 2015 to gather opinion on a Bakerloo line extension to Lewisham, as various plans that recommended in the 70s and 80s. The report is due to come out later in 2020, and if there is strong public support, the earliest we might see the tube in the southeast proper is the mid-2030s. For now, we can amuse ourselves with this south London centric tube map. Perhaps it isn't all a bad thing. After all, anywhere a tube line is built has seen masses of urban growth and has spoilt the once plenty of green space that we get so much of in south east London. The great irony of certain posters from the 1920s depicting the places in the countryside you could reach by the district railway was that the tube line actually ended up destroying the idol. Just think what it would be like if the same thing had happened for 20 miles in every direction.