East-West Read online

  Penguin Underground Lines

  EAST-WEST

  What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube

  The 32 Stops

  The Blue Riband

  Drift

  Contents

  What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  The 32 Stops

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  The Blue Riband

  The Born-again Tubist

  The Blue Riband

  Boiling Mayfair

  The Bling Ghetto

  Design for Living

  Heaven SW7

  Terminally Tacky

  End of the Line – Is this Cockfosters?

  Drift

  Penguin Lines

  Follow Penguin

  Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company Mind the Child

  The Victoria Line

  Danny Dorling The 32 Stops

  The Central Line

  Fantastic Man Buttoned-Up

  The East London Line

  John Lanchester What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube

  The District Line

  William Leith A Northern Line Minute

  The Northern Line

  Richard Mabey A Good Parcel of English Soil

  The Metropolitan Line

  Paul Morley Earthbound

  The Bakerloo Line

  John O’Farrell A History of Capitalism According to the Jubilee Line

  The Jubilee Line

  Philippe Parreno Drift

  The Hammersmith & City Line

  Leanne Shapton Waterloo–City, City–Waterloo

  The Waterloo & City Line

  Lucy Wadham Heads and Straights

  The Circle Line

  Peter York The Blue Riband

  The Piccadilly Line

  John Lanchester

  WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE TUBE

  1

  The first District Line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the Underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5 a.m. That’s a kind of record: if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say, Ta-dah! – except you probably wouldn’t, because nobody is thinking Ta-dah! at seven minutes to five in the morning, certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I’m one of them.

  I’ve lived in London for more than quarter of a century now, and this is the first time I’ve ever been on the day’s first train. It’s something I’d often wondered about, though, from both a practical and a romantic point of view. The practical question was a simple one: if the transport network isn’t running in the early morning, how do the people who operate it get to work? How does the driver get to the train, if there are no trains to take him there?1 The answer is prosaic: they get there by minicab. The cabs travel a prescribed route to the various depots on the District Line, picking up staff en route as they head to Upminster, Earl’s Court, Ealing Common, Barking and Hammersmith. Of these postings, Upminster is the most popular, because a large number of drivers live nearby – that’s one of the reasons it is, as I was told by a District veteran, the ‘senior depot’. ‘When a driver gets to Upminster,’ he said, ‘they don’t leave it except in a box.’ That’s putting it a little melodramatically, because most of them don’t leave it in a box, they just retire: but the point is, once drivers are based at leafy Upminster, they don’t leave to go and work out of another depot. The first-train issue is a part of it: one of the drivers I spoke to lived near Upminster for family reasons, but was working shifts from the depot at Earl’s Court. The first train out from Earl’s Court in the morning is at 5.21, but to get there, allowing for multiple pick-ups and waiting around at the depot, the minicab from the East End starts its pick-ups at 2.30 in the morning. That’s an early start to a working day.

  The romantic side of the first train is harder to define. It’s something to do with the secret nightlife of the city, the London that is carrying on while the rest of London fidgets in its sleep. There’s a romance attending on those jobs, the ones which keep things running all night long: it’s part of the fascination of big cities, that sense that something is always going on somewhere, even in the smallest of small hours. Bakers and police and nurses and cab drivers and market porters all belong to that secret city, the one which rumbles along so late it starts to get early. Once or twice, carrying on a long evening by going to the place after the place I started, and then to the place after that, I’ve ended up in versions of this super-late or super-early London. I remember once, back in the days when journalism was wilder than it is now, ending up in the place-after-the-place-after-the-place with a group of sports desk colleagues: a packed Greek taverna, surrounded by people howling for more retsina, waiters swerving between tables carrying platters of burnt meat, the room not merely loud but roaring, and looking at my watch to see that it was quarter to four in the morning – and the point which struck me was that everyone around seemed to regard that as perfectly normal.

  That was my romantic version of the first train: that it was populated by inhabitants of this Baudelairean secret London. The truth is more prosaic, and it becomes clear, not so much at Upminster, since, after all, Upminster is a relatively posh suburb, out past the East End where things are starting to feel vaguely, suburbanly rural. No, it’s a few stops before you realize who these people getting on the train are, bone-tired but indefatigable: they are cleaners. By Dagenham East, a few minutes after 5 a.m., the first train on the network is already packed, and the people with whom it is packed are cleaners on their way to work. That’s the unromantic truth about this version of the secret city. Once you get past Temple, the train starts to thin out again, because the people who live in the East are going to work in the financial district; the trip to work goes from out to in. Nobody commutes from Sloane Square out to Hammersmith, or from Westminster to Richmond. Once the District train gets past the City, it’s practically empty, the emptiest it’s been at any point on the journey so far today. Then the train gets to Richmond and turns around to head back the other way, except this time it’s carrying not poor people who are going to clean offices, but much richer people on their way to early-starting jobs in the financial sector.

  This is one of the realities of the District Line: the immense social and geographical and demographic range of its network, from far out in the poor East of the city to far out in the rich West. The very rich West. According to the Department of Work and Pensions, Richmond, at one western end of the line, is the most affluent borough in London. It looks like it and feels like it, too – airy, leafy, parky, rivery. Richmond has more of the richest London wards than any other borough. Mick Jagger lives there and Zac Goldsmith is the local MP. It’s even too posh to be south of the river; it’s the river which goes south instead, and Richmond is to the east of it. At the other western end of the District Line is Wimbledon – now, that’s not much less fancy than Richmond. It has villas, it has the Common, which isn’t in the least bit common, it has the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and the world’s most famous tennis championships. Like Richmond, it is a suburb which is sufficiently posh, sufficiently grand, that it can also regard itself as a free-standing, desirable destination of its own: people who live there can choose between saying that ‘I live in Richmond/Wimbledon’ and ‘I live in London’, and both sentences would be true.

  At the other end of the line, that’s not the case. The East is visibly poorer, poorer in ways you can see out of the train window: blocks of flats instead of houses, and the t
rain, rather than riding above them as it often does out in the leafy West, is mostly at their level or slightly below.

  I’ve never lived in East London – North, West and South, yes, but East, no. If I were twenty years younger that probably wouldn’t be true, since London has taken a big step eastwards, not just in financial services, but also in the creative industries and the demographics which follow them. That’s mainly to do with property prices, whose effect reminds me of those maps we used to look at during the Cold War, when everyone was terrified of the prospect of nuclear annihilation. They used to show maps of cities with a bull’s-eye in the middle to show where the bomb had dropped, and then circles radiating outwards to show the effects of the bomb: everyone here killed instantly by the blast, everyone there fried by radiation, everyone there getting sick and dying weeks later, everyone here feeling a bit peaky and upset by the end of the world and everything, but apart from that, fine.

  The effect of the rise in property prices in London has been a bit like that. The people who used to live in the middle – in places like Knightsbridge or Fitzrovia or Chelsea – now live some distance from it, in places like Clapham or Islington or Notting Hill. The people who used to live there now live further out, in places like Tooting or Hackney or Willesden; and the people who used to live there now live at almost unimaginable distances from the centre of the city, in, I don’t know, Croydon or Arnos Grove, places where the Zone 1 and 2 people in the middle of the city will never avoidably go. If it’s carried on for long enough, this process risks eventually turning London into Zurich, a boring and antiseptic city where everybody works in finance and there is no social variety, no diversity, no crunchiness. In some areas, in the rich parts of town, that has already happened – but that’s by no means true everywhere, and it’s certainly not true out in the East. The East is where immigrants tend to go, and has been since the Huguenot weavers first arrived there, to be succeeded by the Jews, the Bengalis, and all the other new arrivals. In a sense, the young creative types who are now colonizing the East End – the nearer, inner bits of it anyway – are the latest manifestation of this process. They are internal immigrants, driven east at first by the fact that they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, but then so many of them went there that they started to become a gravitational mass of their own, exerting their own attractive force, and now those bits of the East End – in District Line terms, I’m talking about Whitechapel and a few stops further out – have undergone a partial arts-led gentrification. No, that’s the wrong word, since this part of town doesn’t feel gentrified: artsification, maybe, since so much of the art business has now located out East too. (Make no mistake, in modern London art really is a business.) Add the younger section of the finance community who like to live close to work, and the section of the advertising world which has moved out East, first for reasons of cheapness and second for reasons of cool and critical mass, and then add the internet professions who are there for the same reasons, and then add to that the vast impact of the new developments at and around Canary Wharf, an entirely self-conscious and deliberate attempt to move the centre of gravity of London out towards the East, and it all adds up to a whole new London out beyond Whitechapel. (And this is before the impact of the Olympics, which wags in other parts of the city call the Stratford Olympics.)

  But that’s not what strikes me most about the East London you see from the District Line – it’s not the new, artsified, moneyfied East that you see. To me, the East seems like the oldest bit of the city. Perhaps this is a way of talking about the fact that this is the part of the city where you feel most strongly the presence of the white working class. There’s such a huge amount written and spoken about London as a city of diversity and immigration, of twenty-first century newness, of London as a capital of fashion and finance and football, that you forget that its largest demographic is still what it always was, the indigenous white working class. That fact is made easier to forget by the geographical displacement I’ve just mentioned: the indigenous working classes, more than any other group, are the ones who have been displaced by the money bomb which landed on London in the last few decades. They have been pushed out from the centre of the city by the force of money, but they’re still here, further out, and especially so when you head out further east past the new moneyfied/artsified East End. This part of the city hasn’t yet been airbrushed by money like so much of the rest of the capital, but I don’t think that fully explains that sense of oldness, something Angela Carter remarked when she wrote an amazing paragraph, in the course of reviewing Iain Sinclair’s book, Downriver:

  I never went to Whitechapel until I was 30, when I needed to go to the Freedom Bookshop (it was closed). The moment I came up out of the Tube at Aldgate East, everything was different to what I was accustomed to. Sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban than what I was used to. I felt quite the country bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec. People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it. They focused their sharp, bright eyes directly on you: none of that colonialised, transpontine, slithering regard. The streets were different – wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys. Cobblestones. It was an older London, by far, than I was used to. I smelled danger. I bristled like one of Iain Sinclair’s inimitable dogs. Born in Wandsworth, raised in Lambeth – Lambeth, ‘the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife’, according to William Blake – nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End.

  That’s it. The East feels different. That might be to do with the fact that this part of London is the one which most directly bears the impact of the Second World War. The East End was very heavily bombed during the Blitz, and a large section of its population was moved further out eastwards to this further-flung part of the East – and maybe that’s the thing which gives this part of the city its character: it’s the last part of London where you still strongly see the impact of the war. Out and beyond Dagenham East the other ends of the line at Richmond and Wimbledon, and the version of London they exemplify, feel a long way away.

  I asked TfL workers about the demographic difference between the two ends of the line. ‘Put it like this,’ one of them said. ‘If they’re annoyed about something, at this end of the line’ – we were at Dagenham – ‘they yell at you. You know about it straight away. At the other end,’ he said with a shudder, ‘they write letters.’

  2

  People sometimes say that London is a city of villages. A less genteel way of putting it is to say that London is a city of suburbs. The truth is somewhere in the middle: London is a city of suburbs which prefer not to use the term. That’s for reasons to do with class, I suppose, and the idea that there is something inherently semi-provincial, something ineradicably lower-middle-class, about being suburban. But places like Clapham (where I live), and Notting Hill and Islington and Stoke Newington are certainly suburbs, even if they prefer not to think about themselves as suburban. The other way of looking at them, though, the old-fashioned idea that London is a city of linked villages, is not entirely wishful thinking, and you experience it in particular if you do a kind of walk that people in London, in practice, don’t often do: a longish one in a straight line.

  If you go on one of those walks, you notice the way the city clusters and then spreads out. It’s a pattern you see all over town: large number of houses, couple of estates, cluster of shops, blank bit, more houses and estates and shops, another blank bit, repeat as before. One of the simplest ways of registering it is to do with pubs: the residential clusters have pubs, then you’re in a publess middle stretch, then you’re back in the world of houses-and-pubs. From where I’m sitting here, if I walk into the middle of the city, I go through Clapham, Stockwell, Kennington and then Waterloo, and all of them have that rhythm of cluster-and-gap. This is where the village nature of London is still present, in that rhythm of places, and then the spaces in between the place
s. It’s part of what Iris Murdoch was capturing in her deathless line from her first novel, Under the Net: ‘some parts of London are necessary, and others are contingent’.

  The single biggest influence on that rhythm of place and space was the Underground. Not all of the suburbs were created by the Underground, but many were, not just in the famous Metro-land of the Metropolitan Line, but in places such as West Kensington, which was an Underground station before it was a place; or Morden, say, which was built, according to London’s Underground Suburbs by Dennis Edwards and Ron Piagram, for ‘great housing estates’ which didn’t yet exist. The Underground’s historic role was to make these non-places into real places, to give them extra mass, to make them one of the centres of the new, spreading, densening city.

  There is a little-known law on the statute books which makes it a legal requirement for every single thing ever written about the Underground to mention Harry Beck’s map of the network. The fame of this map is well deserved, since it is a wondrous piece of design and a masterwork in the visual delivery of complicated information; but the map’s fame has also led to it being, in a subtle but consequential way, misleading. The iconic map looks as if it is something placed down on the city from above: you can sense the city underneath it; the city, which is, as everyone knows, inaccurately represented in the clear colours and sharp angles of Beck’s diagram. That makes it seem, subliminally but powerfully, as if the city was there before the map. It implies that London was an underlying reality on which the map was superimposed.

  But it wasn’t like that. Instead of the map being something superimposed on the city, the map created the city. Or rather, the Underground did. That’s the point to stress: that London as it exists today would not be the same place without the Underground. The Underground is what gave the city its geographical spread, its population growth, its clusters of spaces and places. The new Underground stations became the places around which the city grew: they were the first gravitational mass, like the clusters of debris in the nascent solar system, which agglomerated and grew and thickened and became the planets. The Underground stations in the early years of the network were these initial clusters of mass. A 1907 photograph of Golders Green – today a thrivingly busy suburb, a traffic perma-jam and a transport hub – show next to nothing around the single-storey Underground station, except, tellingly, a couple of forlorn horse-taxis waiting to take travellers the last mile or two home. These early commuters had a journey to work which involved taking first the horse-and-cart to the station, and then the train to work. The suburb of Golders Green itself – what we today think of as the place – doesn’t exist. The growth of the city created the need for a new transport network; and the growth of that network became fundamental to the growth of the city. London created the Underground, and then the Underground created London.