East-West Read online

  83. Such incidents happen all the time. A few months later one was filmed in January 2012: ‘A suspect is arrested after video footage emerges of a woman apparently abusing ethnic minority passengers on a Tube’. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/uk-england-london-16932948. The YouTube clip could be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCtqvOwLUNs&feature=related.

  84. G. Monbiot, ‘Britain is being rebuilt in aid of corporate power’, Guardian, 27 February 2012. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/27/britain-rebuilt-in-aid-corporate-power?.

  85. See chart on child poverty under ‘Bethnal Green to Leyton’, below (p. 117).

  86. See chart of GCSE results shown just before Notting Hill Gate earlier on in this book (p. 50). This station and the next two have the lowest rates on the line, but still much higher scores than entire cities like Norwich, places not benefiting from London’s pull of migrants, London’s diversity of provision, and London’s aggregated human energy.

  87. See the chart of average incomes shown just before Chancery Lane tube stop above (p. 85).

  88. See P. Thane and T. Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-century England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012) and http://www.historyandpolicy.org/research/new-books/newbook_11.html.

  89. She’s right, she’s good with figures; although women do get to live, on average, a little longer. See the chart under ‘Leytonstone to Woodford’, below (p. 129).

  90. Quite where she read it is a mystery, but the story surfaced again a few months later. ‘And there’s been a shift in the nature of that wealth: 15 years ago, 75% of the Sunday Times Rich List had inherited their wealth, and 25% were self-made. Those figures are now reversed’, J. Henley, ‘The new philanthropists’, Guardian, 7 March 2012. See http://gu.com/p/362f9.

  91. Many still call it that, but today it officially goes by the name ‘Queen Mary’, having dropped the less prestigious part of its former title. See http://www.qmul.ac.uk/.

  92. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyton_(ward) as of 22 March 2012.

  93. J. Ball, D. Milmo and B. Ferguson, ‘Half of UK’s young black males are unemployed’, Guardian, 10 March 2012. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/09/half-uk-young-black-men-unemployed.

  94. There was no way she could have known it, but around here just under a tenth were still living in poverty. Only a couple of miles up the line child poverty hit a minimum at Woodford.

  95. ‘ONS moves to new London office’, press release, 16 May 2011. See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/media-centre/statements/ons-moves-to-new-london-office.html.

  96. Metropolitan Police Crime Statistics, Monkhams’ annual crime count, 2008–9, 2009–10, 2010–11: 534, 562 and 505 respectively. See http://maps.met.police.uk/php/dataview.php?area=00BCGN&ct=8&sort=rate&order=d.

  97. These are capped GCSE average point scores for pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 in maintained schools based on ward-level data for 2010 (referenced by location of pupil residence, calculated by the Greater London Authority, 2011). Later he would try to explain the numbers to her with an example: ‘The average child in London is awarded 337 points for their GCSEs. These points are for the eight highest marks each child is awarded. Suppose our child gained A*, A, B, C, C, C, D and E for their best eight GCSEs, that would equal 338 = 58 + 52 + 46 + 40 + 40 + 40 + 34 + 28 points. Now, suppose that D became an A, worth 52 points rather than 34, exactly 18 points extra, a new total of 356! That’s the average at the other end of the tube, for West Ruislip.’ In turn she replied, ‘I thought no child gets both an A* and an E. Isn’t that the point of streaming?’ They then argued a little about what the difference between setting and streaming might be and which side of their respective families might have the ‘better genes’. These were genes that, in his view, would show through in A*s. In her view it was more nurture than nature, as, if it were genes, wouldn’t intelligence be inherited, like skin colour? When Grandad had been younger he’d told them he’d fought battles in the streets of London against people who believed such things, but now Grandad was lying stock still, having just died in his sleep above their heads in the room that would soon be repainted as the new nursery, just as they were forgetting his stories of the East End in the 1930s, of the Blackshirts, eugenics, of fighting prejudice and for a common good. Stories he would never be able to tell to his great-grandchild.

  98. He was going to add that here there was not ‘too much multiculturism’, but he stopped himself. He knew she would disapprove of his prejudice, but he thought that it had an effect on the schools. ‘Only about 11% of the population are from the Black Minority Group’, Census 2001, Statistics and latest data on Monkhams, London Borough of Redbridge, Policy Teams, Strategic Services. See http://www2.redbridge.gov.uk/cms/the_council/about_the_council/about_redbridge/ research_and_statistics/idoc.ashx?docid=abe3083c-55e2-4a23-b2bd-36e02b180f23&version=-1.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Ruth Alexander, Helen Conford, Stacy Hewitt, Carl Lee, Bill Lodge, Bethan Thomas, Mary Wells and Amber Wilson, who all commented on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Benjamin Hennig, who pulled out the statistics used here, to Paul Coles, who redrew the diagrams, to Lesley Levene, who edited the text, to Rebecca Lee, who managed the production, to Helen Conford (again), who commissioned the book, to my agent, Ant Harwood, who persuaded her that this was a good idea, and to the Trust for London, which funded the research project that Ben and I were working on to map the social geography of the capital when the idea of this book was first proposed. I am also grateful to all those individuals who have assembled so many facts about London and published so many of them in online form. A selection can be found in the notes above.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2013

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  ISBN: 978-1-84-614561-2

  Peter York

  THE BLUE RIBAND

  The Born-again Tubist

  When I started this book I hadn’t been on the Tube for twenty-five years. Or more. Very early in my working life, in my first and only job (in the seventies, 44 Lower Belgrave Street, next to Lord Lucan), I managed to get half a secretary – that was the word then – and access to the taxi account if I had a pretext. Over the next decade I worked up to a whole PA and unlimited taxis. I wound down my basic commutes – variously from Bayswater, Queen’s Park, Sloane Square and South Ken, since you ask – over the years and became privatized. The man in the back of the cab.

  By the mid eighties I practically never stepped on anything run by London Transport. But I had developed a massive working InterCity rail habit, mainly ‘Go North!’, plus a fortnightly trek to West Country clients, Bath or Bristol from Paddington. When clients were paying I went first class, otherwise n
ot; my version of Keeping it Real.

  So I was almost completely out of touch with the Tube. I’d missed most of the Tube’s great decline – I turned over those pages in the Evening Standard – and then its nineties revival. So I was surprised to find just how fit most of the Tube seems now – spectacular new stations, assiduously restored old ones, clean new trains – and just how much I actually enjoyed my rides, as I called them.

  When I started Tubing again I was like the Bateman character who asked the bus driver to take him to Sixty Eaton Square. I didn’t know how to use the ticket machines and I didn’t know what an Oyster card was – I thought it was like a Nectar card (call yourself a social commentator?). I didn’t want to learn on the job, backing up an angry queue, so initially I bought tickets for journey X to Y at the window each time. Then my PA said that was idiotic, got me an Oyster card and everything was wonderful. I came to love the Tube.

  In his brilliant Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube, Andrew Martin describes himself as ‘a person who regards a Tube journey as an end in itself’. I’m getting that way. Certainly in the first few weeks I became a positive Marie Antoinette of the Underground. I was forever telling people who turned out to have been taking the Tube five days a week over the last so many years that there was this marvellous system with conveniently placed stations everywhere you could want (‘Russell Square, can you imagine!’). And you only had to slap this Oyster card thing down at either end.

  I’d start retailing the last Amazing Tube Fact I’d read – about abandoned stations, deepest lines, all that – and mortifyingly learnt that practically every man I knew was a Pub Quiz Champion in Tube questions. Everyone, I learnt, was fascinated by the Tube, and everyone knew more than me. There’s something there for every kind of nerd and wonk. And fogey (fogeys particularly like the Tube’s inter-war Modernist architecture).

  Not only that, I realized that the Piccadilly Line was special. It owned, in its central stretch, some places that’d been extraordinarily important to me but that I’d lost touch with. Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell, Leicester Square. Covent Garden and Earl’s Court too. I’d go round them or near them now but not quite to them any more. And I’d be going for different reasons. To BAFTA or to a blockbuster opening at the RA, to Jermyn Street – I never shook that habit – but not to the Circus itself. Not the Dilly, not Eros, none of that. And not the giant first-run Leicester Square cinemas or the lovely vanishing cheap food places all round it.

  Covent Garden too, an absolute centre of my world from about ’75 – the opening of Zanzibar in Great Queen Street, Blitz further down the road in the early eighties – to ’85, the opening of the Groucho Club in Dean Street. Or South Ken and Gloucester Road. I was there from ’79 to ’89 – I lived about equidistant from the two stations but almost always went to South Ken. South Ken/Gloucester Road/Earl’s Court and Baron’s Court had all been material over that decade because so many of the happy tribal sterotypes I wrote about – Sloanes and Mercs and Thems – lived in those stucco cliffs (but not so much in the next-along bourgeois bits of Hammersmith, which like, say, Barnes, is somehow more ‘Home Counties’ than deep London).

  Once I started on my Tube crawl round the Piccadilly Line’s fifty stations – the minimum foray was up to the main concourse, one phone photograph, façade ditto, down nearest high street, talk to estate agent, get house details – I realized the Piccadilly Line station was often the most interesting thing about the place. It’s the escape route, the embassy of Modernity, the outward and visible symbol of an inner world completely different from the overground suburb or the bleak transitional stretches of, say, Caledonian Road.

  And the most thought-through too. My clever, economic-history, know-all friends have pointed out the ramshackle entrepreneurial origins of the Tube network – so many companies, so little master planning, so different from Paris or Moscow. No Haussmann above or below. But my design and architecture ones all know how it came together so brilliantly later, with what American fundamentalists call Intelligent Design. The Tube was so much more than the sum of its parts.

  Anyone expecting all fifty-three Piccadilly Line stations – actually four serve Heathrow so they don’t count – and their hinterlands to be covered here will be disappointed. Other books exist for that, masses of them. There are Tube porn books with photographs of every Tube station going. There are books about every Tube station ever, dead or alive. All by men. (Down Street, Mayfair and Aldwych/Strand are famous ghost stations from the early Piccadilly Line development.) David Leboff, who works for Transport for London, has written reams on the Tube stations and could clearly win Mastermind on the subject. And sociologists – real ones – have written depressing reports on the decline of the more ‘ordinary’ inter-war suburbs, the kind the Piccadilly Line goes through to reach Cockfosters, Uxbridge or Heathrow.

  Instead I’ve focussed much more narrowly on just some of the central places on the line that I know. Places so singular or important they define the line and its character, rather than the other way around. Green Park is at the very centre of Piccadilly world – Mayfair out of the North entrance, St James’s to the South. It’s Ancient and Modern. Knightsbridge is the centre of a new Global Plutocrat culture. South Ken is central to a certain kind of English life, one the French have bought into. All of them places so apparently familiar and touristic, so gazetteered that, if you live in Big London, you’re constantly surprised to realize friends in Muswell Hill or Shepherd’s Bush – serious types who don’t get out in luxury land – have lost touch with the extraordinary changes in these places over the last ten to fifteen years (I’m thinking patronisingly about lovely people at the BBC or the Guardian here).

  When I say I know these places it’s because I’ve either lived there (or nearly), worked there – or just hung around there when I did a lot of that. Or I’ve got spies there. So I think I recognize the tribal signs in those areas – the smells and the textures. I know the look of the people – the percentage of Richard James to Paul Smith suits by postcode. I know the look of their houses, the uptake of easy contemporary art and Hamilton Gallery Big Photographs within packaged interiors, just by house type. It’s my sort of thing.

  The Piccadilly Line, at its original core, is full of my sort of thing. So when it comes to tough choices, I’ve chosen not to ferret out the latter-day Abigail’s Party stories down the suburban line. Or the Mary Portas ones – though the high streets around those suburban Tube stations are changing at a lick. I’ve spent thousands of hours in suburbs around the UK and around the world, interviewing people, conducting focus groups and listening to other people conduct them (simultaneous translation). I love good suburbs, but it’s too much like work.

  In any case, I’m beginning to think the place I like best is the Tube itself. There are novels like Keith Lowe’s Tunnel Vision, about people spending a day or a Flying-Dutchman lifetime on the Tube, driven by the ancient literary idea that it’s a living hell. But not for me. Give me an iPad and a notebook – kind Richard Branson has been WiFi-ing up the Tube recently – and I’d happily pootle around all day.

  I’ve been getting bolder. I branched out from the Piccadilly Line. I tried to work out how to go to lunch on the Tube, or to a party (if it was late or I felt whacked I still did the from with an account-taxi home). In a few weeks I was on the Tube practically every day, which meant catching up with my early life. But feeling quite different about it. The Tube had been unquestioned, always there, its structures and textures, noises and smells, its reds, greens and creams, its ‘moquette’ fabrics on the seats, were things I’d known forever. I’d seen it as a London child with my mother and her sisters – even with my grandmother (my father didn’t trust it; he felt safer in his car). There’d always been a Tube where we lived. In Hampstead, most local rumbling and subsidence was attributed to it. And the point of the Tube for me then, in London NW, was always that you were going further in – to the very centre. And underground. It was al
most never about clattering out overground to an outer suburb. I liked being impelled inwards by a benign force and an anonymous crowd.

  But going back, everything about the Tube’s subterranean world struck me as extraordinary. Quite unnatural in the best possible way, with its logic, order and flow. Its complete contrast to the ramshackle madness of overground London. The Good Design simplicity of almost everything (of course there are idiotic sixties and seventies tiling moments, but the basics go from good to great). I found myself thinking the Tube was a Modernist experiment that’d worked.

  I began to look forward to my Tube trips. Anywhere to anywhere. The look of everything and the great windy swirl of it. The delicious gold-plating of the information, where you saw and heard exactly where you were going every two minutes or so. And that nice voice, the completely English, RP, contralto-ish, Radio-4 sort of voice, would even tell you about the connections you could get at each station (‘Change here for the Northern Line’). It’s all terribly rational.

  Part of my own vaguely remembered romance-of-the-Tube had always been that it was nicely classless, compared with the world overground. No first- and second-class carriages. And all human life was there, an unpredictable mixture, enjoying the Utopian Modernist Experience. But going back tells you the Tube is a relatively middle-class experience, and a dig tells you it always has been. London’s bottom tenth, the poorest, unluckiest, most sink-estate people don’t usually go on the Tube. People on the minimum wage or none usually work near home or stay close to it. They see the Tube as expensive and somehow intimidating. London’s army of office cleaners from everywhere usually goes on the buses.