The final conclusion of this tale was garish 1972 British B-movie Death Line, in which the mutant descendants of Victorian workers sealed in an Underground tunnel hunt passengers for food.
Urban myths about the network, popularly known as the Tube, are rife, notes Ashworth.
"Because it's under the ground, and there's this air of mystery and secrecy, people are absolutely convinced that there are things there, which patently are not," he said.
"Particularly after World War II and into the 1950s, when there was a degree of official secrecy about what was down there, all sorts of strange legends grew up."
Perhaps the most common is that of a secret tunnel underneath Buckingham Palace, ready to whisk the royal family away from peril.
It is undermined somewhat by the fact that the one route that goes anywhere near the palace, the Victoria line, was not built until the late 1960s, long after the legend originated.
Even more exotic is a long-established rumor that a secret line runs from the center of London to the Burlington Bunker, a vast post-war underground government complex in the countryside built to house the government in the event of nuclear war.
Again this story seems somewhat unlikely, given that the construction of a deep tunnel the 124 or so kilometers from London would be not only prohibitively expensive, but hard to keep a secret.
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