"No room, no room!" The cry was heard over the roaring din of the thousands of people gathered at the railway stations for the opening of the world's first underground-the Metropolitan Line. The gloomy chant had a dark effect on those assembled, matching the dark, echoing tunnels that led the trains under the earth. In spite of the cries that the trains were full, the crowds of people who came out to experience riding under the city remained in line, hoping for a ticket. It was Saturday, January 10, 1863, and at 6:00 A.M. the rides began. The public had been anticipating this opening day for twenty-one months, and they refused to be daunted.

The idea for a metropolitan underground railway was first suggested in the 1830s by Charles Pearson, the City Corporation's Solicitor for London. As overseer of the city's corporations, he recognized the desperate need for a new type of public transportation. A railway with up to eight tracks running under the New Road was proposed. It seemed to have numerous economic and social advantages. The demand for this type of transportation was so great that there was no need to doubt its financial value. Traffic in the inner city would be relieved, all markets would experience an increase in business because they could be more easily reached by the public, and it fit in with the city's improvement scheme by clearing out the unsanitary slum areas with railway lines. However, the proposal failed. It could not get the necessary financial backing and was refused by Parliament.

In 1852, the City Terminus Company was formed, and the proposal was again placed in front of Parliament. Once again, it failed because of a lack of support. Parliament was extremely conservative about passing such expensive projects regardless of the great advantages which proponents argued would be gained. Finally, in 1853, the Bayswater, Paddington, and Holborn Bridge Railway Company put forth a new proposal for an underground railway which was to run in a different area than proposed by the City Terminus Company's line. It would cost less than half as much to construct ( 300,000 pounds), and would incur no costly purchases of land or great land demolition. These were the types of promises Parliament was looking for, and the line was approved in 1853 under a new title the North Metropolitan Railway. The total cost of one million pounds was raised by December of 1859; in February of 1860 the first shafts were sunk.

The first trial run of the completed line was on May 24, 1862, but it was not until January 10, 1863, that it opened to the public. 38,000 people rode the Underground its first day in operation and thousands more waited in line. The crowd was described as "the crush at the doors of a theatre on the first night of a pantomime." The trains were overstuffed to accommodate those who absolutely had to experience the Underground on the first day. At 12:00 noon, there were enough people waiting to fill four trains in succession and for an hour, no further tickets were sold in order to decrease the crowds. The London Times described the experience of the Underground as, on the whole, pleasant. A different source, however, described the atmosphere in the tunnels as extremely bad and said breathing the sulphurous fumes was "much like the inhalation of gas preparatory to having a tooth drawn ... By the time we reached the Gower Street, I was coughing and spluttering like a boy with his first cigar!"