‘Correct,’ he replied.
‘Okay, your turn.’ There was a moment’s pause. ‘Oo, West Ham?’
They seemed to be entertaining themselves on some long tube
journey, perhaps as many as eight stops without a change, possibly from Green
Park to the western wild lands of Hammersmith.
Testing each other on which lines interchange at different tube stations
is not strange. Well maybe it is a
little. Every Londoner does it, even if
they don’t consciously make it a point-scoring game, they’ll do it, a little
bit, in their heads. For those of us who
have moved to the city, having innate underground knowledge, navigating around
efficiently without having to consult the map as you whizz into the station,
helps you feel as though London is accepting you.
I have a love-hate relationship with the Tube. I suspect everybody does and always has done, ever since the Metropolitan Line first opened up in 1863. Those earliest days brightened up the city from the rat warrens of vice, crime and dubious sanitation where only a generation earlier arming yourself before strolling in Regent’s Park was common practice. From the slums of Whitechapel and the affluence of Notting Hill and Marylebone it became feasible to commute down from the village of Willesden; the city opened its arms and the scum flooded out and only to come back with the commencement of the working day.
The early cut and cover lines were designed as extensions of
the existing novelty railways into the city, springing out from termini at
Paddington, Waterloo, London Bridge, Bishopsgate (now moved slightly down the
road to Liverpool Street) and Fenchurch Street.
They were mainly operated by the railway companies in a case of
Byzantine confusingly inconsistent pricing and lack of cooperation until comparatively
late in the twentieth century and so they, logically, ran their existing steam
powered rolling stock. The tunnels were
fugged with the discharged soot and grime making the complaints about today’s
claustrophobia and dirt seem ridiculous.
Pharmacists and apothecaries made small fortunes prescribing nerve
tonics to help ladies cope with the mess and having to mix with the lower
classes as the crowds of urchins pushed up against them.
These days whilst you’ll easily see a rat scurrying between
the electric lines the platforms are usually immaculately clean and so are the train
interiors. The instances where someone,
late at night, has discarded the remnants of their McDonalds on the
neighbouring seat stand out because they are few and far between. Most of us understand that in order to
survive down there, we need to work together.
This collaborative effort lends the Tube a certain romance. Sure, striking up conversation with another
passenger will get you worried looks and there is little pleasure to be had
crammed against someone’s sweaty back in a July rush hour, but the sense of
being able to go anywhere, of drifting underneath the city, of being conveyed
through its self is undeniable. How can
anyone be totally cynical about a system which was originally designed so that
illiterate working-class travellers would recognise their home station by its
own unique design? Some of the tiling is
obviously modern – the patterned black on red leaves at Green Park, for
example, or the etched silhouettes at Baker Street - but look at many of the
coloured patterns, especially on the Leslie Green designed Piccadilly, Bakerloo
and Northern Lines; they’re all different.
The network built up steadily through the Victorian period. Lines were
added and extended North of the river interlinking disparate villages formerly
independent of the city with factories burning along the Thames, government and
finance. The East London line took over
Brunel’s foot-tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe converting it for rails
and became the first to cross – or rather to go under the Thames – linking the
East End with New Cross. It’s former
life as a pleasure stroll explains the insanely narrow platforms at most of the
older stations, something which I’d ceased to notice until I tried to take my
bike on the train late on a summer’s night only to discover that it didn’t fit
across the platform. Getting through the
doors was a challenge. Forays south were
scarce, though the District built a bridge to get down to affluent Wimbledon,
the Northern, less enthusiastically, headed to less affluent Elephant and
Castle and then down, and out further all the way to Morden via Clapham and
Tooting, but that was about it.
Slowly the system began to find its way into popular
culture, and although Sherlock Holmes always preferred a Hansom Cab, fiction
has loved the underground world and metaphorical potential of the tube. Neil Gaiman was a bit cackhanded with
Neverwhere’s notion of a fantasy alternative reality (an Earl and a Baron
sitting in court in West London, an actual Angel underneath Islington, woo,
spooky), but Tobias Hill’s Underground showed the rhythm of the trains
trundling under our feet as the city’s pulse and the interconnection for people
from all the diverse glory London has to offer at least reflects how life
really works.
Everything about it is iconic; from the red tiled buildings
dotted around the city, to the green arched balustrades marking entrances
around the centre, at Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, the red and blue
circle on a white background the majesty of Harry Beck’s linear design map,
even if it does move central London several miles to the north-west making people
think I live in Kent.
When I first came to London, I shunned the Tube. Brockley didn’t receive the East London line
extension until 2010 and whilst New Cross had recently become better integrated
by the Jubilee Line meeting at Canada Water, if I wanted to go into the centre
of town a direct over-ground train to Charing Cross and then to walk made more
sense. My first office was in
Docklands, which meant using the Tube’s sibling, the one it is slightly
embarrassed of: the Docklands Light Railway, riding the driverless trains from
Deptford Bridge to Crossharbour, getting off before the picture perfect future
of Canary Wharf. The advantage of not
travelling everywhere in the dark was that I came to understand how the city
fit together and didn’t, unlike many of my fellow early twenties immigrants,
start evenings out with rendezvous points in station foyers or get the tube
from Leicester Square to Holborn to walk halfway back into Covent Garden. I only used it when it made sense; I wasn’t
beholden to it and yet I still felt like a poor, disadvantaged cousin consigned
to the Lewisham wilderness.
In the early noughties wannabe anarchist group Space Hijackers
ran parties on the Circle line, back when you could still drink on London
public transport and when the Circle Line was actually a circle. These days the revised track layout mean that
termini exist at Hammersmith and Edgeware Road and whilst the points are
probably still there to make it technically possibly to while away a broke
afternoon going round and round people spotting, none of the trains do. It’s all stop-start in the twenty-first
century. The parties were fun though,
not least for their novelty but also because they worked a bit like an adult
version of musical chairs. Party whilst
the music played in the tunnels act as nonchalant as possible in the silent
light of the stations even if party popper streams are hanging from your hair.
Slowly, over the years, from the ornate globes which track
the escalators at St John’s Wood, to the bleak dystopian future of Westminster,
drunken decisions at Camden as to which of the two southbound platforms would
be the best bet, racing the lifts down the Caledonian Road stairs, the wind
funnel at Maida Vale that whips down the stairs and across the foyer like the
arctic trying to calm hell down and the near-mythic status of Mornington
Crescent, a station at which few trains stop with little purpose and the name
of a game with no rules or reality - the Tube nestled into my subconscious; as
it does with everyone who lives here.
There’s a reason why the jacket to Craig Thompson’s superb oral history,
Londoners, wraps itself it the colours of the different lines; it binds us
together. It helps us meet people, to
see all of life, including that which we don’t necessarily want to see, like
Kim Wilde drunkenly singing to a select and only mildly interested audience.
Regular readers of this blog will know my penchant for
dropping in snippets of overheard conversations, from people’s sex lives, to
heading to New Cross to “re-up” your drugs stash, people breaking up and making
up, cutting business deals, a solicitor declining to meet a pro-bono client at
a police station because he had theatre tickets on his anniversary, from the
drunks to the weirdoes, from those in a mess to those being unbearably smug, I
miss hearing London living around me now that I cycle to work. I’m sure on many occasions I have been one of
those people myself, but one incident sticks in my mind. I was running late for a business meeting,
this would have been about 2005 back when I still had business meetings. I think I was changing from the Piccadilly
Line to the Northern at King’s Cross which is a quick clatter down the
escalator, especially if you can hear the train in the station, and swing out
onto the platform. As I darted through
the corridor, I heard the beeps signalling that the doors were about to
shut. Without thinking I leapt and,
feeling the breath of the doors whisper at the back of my neck, landed in the
middle of the carriage, grabbed the silver upright to steady myself and somehow
made spinning around it seem deliberate.
I stopped and straightened my suit jacket.
I tried that again the other week. It didn’t work out so well. For my trouble I
got a sore chin and the echo of customers being reminded that the doors will
close at the sound of the beeps as my head rattled.
One of my favourite things about the Tube are the little,
surreal, incidental details. The genius
that was the magazine Smoke highlighted in its, I think, first issue on the
mysterious Caution, Void Behind sign on a door, as though on the other side
lurked a gigantic Jack Kirby imagined vortex into a microverse. Open the door and a black infinite space,
with just the tiniest hints of golden life on its periphery, step inside and be
cascaded inside out.
Embankment station, on the District and Circle line
platforms, has doors marked Private Rod, as though a Underground super-enforcer
sleeps waiting for a time when he must be awoken and set to work. “Quick,” they yell, “send for Private
Rod. And Major Charles too.”
On the Victoria Line platform at King’s Cross there’s a
letter box marked “London Underground employees only” as though drivers trapped
on the Walthamstow-Brixton shuffle needing to communicate with a loved one
manning the ticket office at Pudding Mill Lane, might leap out and deposit a
few hastily scrawled lines sealed with a kiss in its box to be distributed
through the system by a special train once the passenger services have closed
down for the evening.
We think of the Tube as a static, Victorian system, but in
reality it is organic, growing and shifting as the city needs. There is
a small map on our kitchen wall of the network in times gone by, most
noticeable are the complete absence of the Victorian line, churned out in the
seventies by, amongst others, my girlfriend’s father, and now home to the
speediest trains on the network able to gather pace due to the express-like
distances between stops. The old
Finsbury Park Northern line branch-line is still there but now operated by Hertfordshire
bound services on their way to Moor Street, but you can still drop underground
to pick up the Over-ground at some of the stops. The Jubilee Line terminates at Charing Cross
rather than cutting eastwards to Stratford, briefly dipping south of the river
and taking in the – then – new Docklands developments. The old station at Charing Cross is used for
training, filming and – bizarrely – busker auditions, as though every facet of
music is now owned by Simon Cowell. The
East London line has now been extended South to Croydon, north to Highbury and
just the other week West to Clapham via Peckham making Brockley no longer
isolated – and corresponding no longer cheap at the time when we’re trying to
buy a house; the Tube, it can be a fucker at times.
In New York, the films of the seventies and eighties, the
comics I read as a child depicted the subway as a nightmare environment
scrawled with gang tags and happy, public knife-point muggings an
inevitability. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire ofthe Vanities tells of an eighties city divided in two between the haves and the
have-nots. His use of the Subway juxtaposes
the two classes, exaggerated by the haves fear for being there in the first
place. The Tube has never quite been that bad, although one presumes there’s a
degree of truth behind The Jam’s Down In A Tube Station At Midnight describing
those who smell of pubs and wormwood scrubs taking the hapless commuter’s money
and takeaway curry for themselves. I don’t
know about you, but I’ve only felt sort of threatened on the Tube once.
It was years ago, as I flew up the Northern Line from London
Bridge to Tufnell Park. We went through
Camden and for early on a Saturday evening the train was strangely quiet. Indeed I was the only passenger in the
carriage but I could hear him coming down the train. He crashed and banged his way between the
carriages – which you never see on the underground, people just stay put – a
late middle-aged man, probably late fifties, maybe younger and aged by life too
hard, in a black suit, with a light grey shirt, open half-way down his chest,
and bright white trainers. His hair was
wild and his stubble patchy, he swore violently and incoherently under his
breath, spit flung from between his teeth as he passed by. The door out of the carriage was locked – or
at least beyond his ability to open it.
He kicked it passively a couple of times and let out a wail of
resignation, before flipping back to furious, turning and punching the clear
plastic divide normally used for the mildly tipsy to prevent themselves from
slipping on top of seated passengers.
Then he stormed back up to the middle of the carriage and, despite the
plethora of empty seats, chose to sit down next to me, still swearing and
spitting. I tried to pretend I was happy
reading my book. He fumbled around
inside his jacket’s pockets before producing an enormous spliff. My memory may be distorting things, but it
insists it was a good six inches plus of packed reefer which he, but of course,
lit. The carriage quickly filled with
sweet fluffy smoke, almost with an aniseed hint, then he suddenly turned and
grabbed my forearm. His eyes were bloodshot and frantic, his upper lip curled
and whilst I believe he was going to tell me something rather than headbutt me,
his grip was firm. At that moment we
swooshed into Kentish Town, the doors opened and he yelled “Fuck-Monkeys”
before leaping to his feet and darting off the train.
And he was gone. Just
another fleeting London encounter with no explanation, no repercussion and no
real point like the bald, tubby and naked man a friend of mine saw last year
running through Leicester Square, looking from side to side, frantically, as
security staff failed to catch him. “Ribbet! Ribbet!” he appeared to be yelling before
disappearing off down the tunnel. My
friend shrugged and headed back up into the light. That’s another good thing about the Tube:
when it goes wrong, there’s always the bus.
“West Ham? Erm
Jubilee? District, Hammersmith and
City.” We rolled into a station, the
doors bleeped open and a world moved around happy in its own business shrouded
in the familiar reassurance to mind the gap.
“And the DLR. Yes!”
And off we all rumbled back into the darkness.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment