Down the tube: Stephen Halliday investigates the murky world of financing London's underground. (Cross Current).(London Tube)

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASY to raise money to build and run the London Underground. The present travails of Robert Kiley and Ken Livingstone echo those of their predecessors, who had to rely upon a mixture of deviousness, dishonesty and, more recently, unemployment to give London the underground railway that it desperately needed.

The problems began before the system was built. In the 1850s Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London, devised a plan to build an `Arcade Railway' beneath the Farringdon Road to connect the Great Northern railway at Kings Cross with Farringdon, in ...

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