Презентация Метро Лондона. Подготовлена Глоовой Ангелиной, ученицей 10 класса МКОУ СОШ №1 ст. Преградная при прохождении темы Метро Лондона. История и современность

The London Underground is a metro system serving a large part of Great London and neighbouring areas of Essex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire in England. It is both the world’s oldest underground railway and the oldest rapid transit system. It was also the first underground railway to operate electric trains. It was, on the face of it, a stupid idea. Running trains, and steam trains at that, in tunnels underneath the London streets. In 1862, the Times described it as an ‘insult to common sense’ and it was probably right. But the London Underground turned out to be one of the great engineering feats of modern times, the world’s only steam-driven underground railway and the first electrified underground railway. A socially egalitarian and liberating phenomenon, it helped drive London’s rapid expansion and got people to work on time, while providing the city with a bold new identity through impeccable branding that incorporated iconic typography, cartography and architecture. The story began with Charles Pearson, the first in a succession of underground visionaries. It was he who first proposed the notion of ‘trains in drains’ in 1845, when the railway was a relatively new invention (the first steam passenger service only opened in 1830). Pearson, instrumental in the removal of the anti­Catholic inscription on the foot of the Monument, was a progressive and a pioneer – his persistence helped persuade the House of Commons to approve a bill in 1853 to build a subterranean railway between Paddington and Farringdon.  World War II  The bombing of London during the war and especially The Blitz led to the use of many tube stations as air­raid shelters. Closed stations and unfinished sections of new line were also used. The shelters were well suited to their purpose, but some stations could still be breached by a direct hit; a small number of attacks did result in serious loss of life, most notably at Balham and Bounds Green in October 1940 and Bank in January 1941. A still worse disaster was a crowd crush accident at the unfinished Bethnal Green in March 1943.  As well as public shelters, stations and sections of line were given other similar uses:  An unfinished stretch of the Central Line extension, between Redbridge and Gants Hill, was turned into an underground aircraft factory. The closed Brompton Road station was used as an anti­aircraft control centre. The closed Down Street station was used by Winston Churchill until the Cabinet War Rooms were built, after which it was used by the Railway Emergency Committee.