Albus once joked that he had a complete London Underground map on his knees, but he had never shown it to anyone, so no one knew whether he was telling the truth.
The earliest London Underground line was completed in 1863. At the time, there were railway stations in every direction around London, but conditions within the city were worsening by the day. Typhoid and cholera first ravaged London, followed by the Great Stink of 1858. That year's unusual weather made the River Thames unbearably foul. It even formed a lingering mist-like gas, forcing all of Westminster to take evacuation measures.
When the lives of Members of Parliament were inconvenienced and threatened, "efficiency" emerged. London began its greatest construction frenzy. First came the excavation of a sewage system. Railways accelerated the movement of people, but they also tested the city's capacity for waste disposal. At the very least, the urban planning established after the Great Fire of London was no longer suitable for the world's most populous city.
Many residences were converted into banks and commercial offices. Between Bank station, London Bridge, and Blackfriars, buses and horse-drawn carriages carried commuters back and forth, causing severe road congestion. Someone therefore proposed building a railway beneath London to connect Paddington, Euston, King's Cross, and the City of London. But no one had ever built an underground railway before, so a man named John Fuller adopted the cut-and-cover method. In other words, they first dug a massive trench along the new route, then sealed it with brickwork overhead before filling it back in.
The project was intended to solve traffic chaos, yet the areas involved suffered ten years of traffic chaos instead. Since the Underground did not pass through the existing railway termini, aboveground and underground lines could not connect, and passengers had