“Earth hath not anything to show more fair… Any more fares? Any more fares?” Londoners have Flanders and Swann, the piano-playing music-hall duo, to thank for that little gem from a song about London buses — which also manages to reduce cabbies to vermin, “those jackal taxi drivers can only swear and cuss”— but they probably won’t even crack a smile. London doesn’t see much that is funny about its public transport, especially not the Tube, which can be relied upon to generate endless column inches of hate every time the drivers ask for more money or a Northern Line train breaks down.
I, on the other hand, think the Tube one of Earth’s greatest inventions. You can get pretty much anywhere in London by Tube, and where the underground doesn’t go, the buses do, although riding the city’s night buses — which take over when the trains stop after midnight — can indeed make you feel like a failed human.
As a railway that has a section of the world’s oldest underground system — as well as the first to use electric trains, courtesy of the now much-loathed Northern Line in 1890 — the Underground has refined its own folklore and iconography.
It’s difficult to get a sense of that riding packed trains at rush hour, so if you really want to see the story, head for the London Transport Museum, in its glorious former warehouse next to the piazza in Covent Garden.
The museum contains relics from the history of transport in London, from one of the original steam locomotives used on the Underground, on the “cut- and-cover” lines near the surface, before electric trains took over in the early 1900s to horse-drawn trams and classic Routemaster buses — the ones with the open platform at the back, a few of which still run on some routes.
There are cutaway carriages which purport to show just how much the Tube has improved over the decades — grumpy citizens would say not much — along with posters, models, maps, and photographs showing the development of the city’s public transport.
Mass public transport was a product of the Victorian age and it roared into London a bit like a runaway train.
There are wistful looks at the “future” — a satirical cartoon shows passengers being blasted off to Bengal down a pipe of the “Grand Vacuum Tube Company” while a contemporary magazine cover heralds the false dawn of flying trains with George Bennie’s interesting but barking-mad airport-city “railplane”.
It is a fascinating and at times ugly chunk of history, brought to life by quotes and photographs.
And there is plenty of ugliness: the arrival of railways devastated parts of London: by 1900, the city had 15 mainline railway stations, the construction of which cost 100,000 Londoners their homes, without compensation.
And while today’s Tube drivers grumble about wages, they might spare a thought for one of their former brothers, horse-tram conductor George Lovett, who in 1877 said, “The continual standing caused my feet to swell so much and become so tender … You need to have a strong constitution to bear up against the fatigue, cold, heat, wet … It is a pure state of slavery.”
Really, the museum tells a story of the cost, however sentimental that might be, of progress. In his 1857 novel The Three Clerks, Anthony Trollope wrote: “It is very difficult nowadays to say where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways… have turned the countryside into a city.”
That much, at least, is still true
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- See more at: http://www.khaleejtimes.com/wknd/wknd_article.asp?xfile=/data/wkndlifestyle/2013/September/wkndlifestyle_September6.xml§ion=wkndlifestyle#sthash.7BR4g8BN.dpuf
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