I’ve just travelled on the London Underground for the first time since lockdown. It was poignant to see the playful diamond-shaped superscript dot of the Johnston typeface being pressed into service on posters urging ‘social distancing’. Johnston, after all, is the most sociable of typefaces, being designed for universal legibility in crowded circumstances.
My footsteps echoed as I walked towards the ticket gates at Bank during what used to be the evening rush hour. I was the only person in that corridor, and when I passed through the ticket barrier, I noticed for the first time that the presentation of a valid Oyster card causes the word ‘Enter’ to flash up. It had a sinister connotation, as though Vincent Price were cackling in the background.
At the time of writing, ridership is a little over 10% of the normal figure, even though as many as 90% of the usual number of trains are operating at peak times. Whereas I hear “Wish the flipping pubs would open” all the time, I’ve never heard, “Can’t wait to get back on the Tube”. In the time of Covid-19, a trip on the Tube seems to be just what the doctor didn’t order, and the disease might have been designed to underline all those associations of the Tube with interment, the underworld and death.
When writing a history of the Underground, I discovered that Bank station was effectively built in the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth church, which still stands, looking slightly affronted at the proximity of the station. In The Wasteland, St Mary Woolnoth ‘kept the hours’ as the commuting crowd flowed on (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’).
In the first half of the 20th Century, avant-garde writers were much concerned with the Tube as a symbol of modernity. Most took a baleful view. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote that, for one character, “descent into the Tube was like death. We were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that seemed to roar down there like desert boulders.” And there was an imbalance, in that the writers more favourably disposed to the Tube tended to find it interesting rather than straightforwardly pleasurable. “I travelled by a tube train,” wrote F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist, in 1912, “I got what I wanted – not enjoyment, but a totally new idea of motion, of speed.”
I myself have always enjoyed the Tube, possibly because I have never had to commute. I subscribe to what might be described as the official line, which is that it is a beautiful, humane system, doing its best to mitigate the unnaturalness of the subterranean environment. This might also be described as the Frank Pick view, and my purpose in outlining it here is to commend it to anyone stuck with using the Tube right now.
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SubscribeI’ve been using the underground throughout this lockdown to come home from work (I usually go in by bus) and it’s been absolutely fine albeit mostly empty, but then I’ve not been gripped by the ridiculous mass hysteria destroying our society
I’m an Australian, and every time I’m in London I look forward to travelling on the Underground. And the more I ride it, the more I like it. I also love its history and engineering. (Yes, I have your book.) If I had my time again, I would pursue a career on the Underground. What’s more, in this time of lockdown when people are being encouraged to do jigsaws, I’m actually doing a jigsaw of the Underground map.
(Proof reading my comment, I realised I must come over as a bit of a nut.)