No other city can be said to have turned its mass transit system into a cultural icon so much as London.\u00a0Other cities have fractions, highlights, moments; the stations of the Moscow metro, each a Stalinist\u00a0temple to the dignity of the working class, or New York\u2019s yellow cabs, roving nodes of the American\u00a0Dream, immigration and hard-work, or San Francisco\u2019s trams, surviving remnants of a rare expansionist\u00a0heritage burnt and shaken to the ground many times over. But London\u2019s transport system, (originally\u00a0called London Transport, now known as Transport for London) is remarkable for how it has turned almost every aspect of its technics, mechanics and graphics into an iconic stand-in for the city itself. Almost every part of the network — its red double-decker buses, its its black \u201cHackney Carriage\u201d cabs, its\u00a0distinctive red, white and blue roundels, even the network\u2019s bespoke typeface — is a recognisable image\u00a0of London. Perhaps what\u2019s more extraordinary is the affection doesn\u2019t extend simply to tourists and\u00a0visitors, but to Londoners themselves. It is a collection of design decisions that has knitted itself into the\u00a0subjectivity of a whole city, a sprawling, creeping mass of connections that has metastasised into\u00a0Londonness itself. What is so tempting, so reassuring, about London\u2019s mass transit?<\/p>\n
Part of the allure must lie in a visual presence in public life that is so remarkably consistent. Rebrandings, corporate takeovers and mergers have produced, in the late capitalist city, a sense of visual insecurity that seems to match the constant gentrification and remodelling of the built environment in a city that never seems to be finished. Transport for London, meanwhile, holds a visual identity that pre-dates the First World War, and whose aesthetic and purpose is interlocked with a very British idea of modernism. While everything else changes, the idea of the transport system remains the same, a comforting reminder of one\u2019s childhood, one\u2019s mother\u2019s childhood, and one\u2019s grandfather\u2019s childhood. It was, and remains, both a quotidian visual language and an everyman\u2019s system, associated with London\u2019s middle class, the clerical workers upon whose backs the complex systems of management of city and empire were constructed. Indeed, in the British legal system the phrase used to describe a \u201creasonable\u201d and \u201cright-thinking member of society\u201d against which assumptions can be measured is \u201cthe man on the Clapham omnibus\u201d, a phrase in use since the turn of the twentieth century, when Clapham was a middle-class commuter suburb. It\u2019s fitting, then, that godfather of this visual system was Frank Pick, not a radical or a visionary but a middle-manager, a child of the Victorian lower middle class. As a publicity manager for \u201cUnderground Electric Railways Company of London\u201d (UERL) in 1908 he began a long process of rationalisation in the company, including attempting to increase traffic outside of peak travel hours by use of advertising. The standardisation of advertising for the network brought with it a new typeface designer by Edward Johnston, introduced in 1916 and still the typeface of the network today, and new platform roundels displaying station names in a consistent format.<\/p>\n
As the network expanded, Pick took charge of the architectural design of new Underground stations. He\u00a0was clear that the network\u2019s identity, and hence the architecture, should represent not a mangled\u00a0classicism but a new, modern London. Despite his middle-manager credentials, it\u2019s striking how this\u00a0bureaucrat held a design philosophy remarkably close to the modernists of the period, claiming \u201cthe test\u00a0of goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or\u00a0finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.\u201d Pick also commissioned\u00a0artworks for stations and the company headquarters, including a provocative frieze by the sculptor\u00a0Jacob Epstein. The combination of modern architecture of this period, and the modernist visual design,\u00a0stuck; when London consolidated its transport network in the 1930s, they adopted it, and introduced a\u00a0new schematic map for the underground network, \u201cthe Tube map\u201d.<\/p>\n
The visual identity was only part of the design story that London\u2019s transport network tells. It\u2019s also\u00a0accompanied by the industrial design, not just of tube stations but also of the vehicles themselves, from\u00a0the low, curving lines of the Metropolitan Line trains (designed to fit the Victorian era tunnels: some of\u00a0London\u2019s transport infrastructure dates back to the Industrial Revolution) to the spacious, bulky black\u00a0cabs, specifically built with a turning circle that allows the driver to turn around on the narrowest roads.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most iconic of these designs is the bright red Routemaster bus, with an open rear platform\u00a0allowing passengers to board and alight at any point. Introduced in the 1950s, the bus still runs on some\u00a0heritage lines in the city centre. Yet Londoner\u2019s relationship with this transport network is not\u00a0uncomplicated, as might be expected from such a ubiquitous public service, and even pride in the\u00a0services is a subject of satire. Even in the 1950s the English comedy duo Flanders and Swann gently\u00a0mocked the attitude in their comedy revue \u201cAt the Drop of a Hat\u201d, performing the song \u201cA Transport of\u00a0Delight\u201d in which they took the roles of a driver and conductor of one of the new Routemaster buses.<\/p>\n
\u2018We don\u2019t ask much for wages, we only want fair shares, so cut down all the stages, and stick up all the\u00a0<\/em>fares. If tickets cost a pound apiece, why should you make a fuss? It\u2019s worth it just to ride inside, that\u00a0<\/em>thirty-foot long by ten-foot wide, inside that monarch of the road, observer of the Highway Code, the big six-wheeler, London Transport, diesel engine, ninety-seven horsepower, ninety-seven horsepower\u00a0<\/em>omnibus! Hold very tight please – ting ting!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Other representations are darker; in The Jam\u2019s 1978 song \u201cDown in the Tube Station at Midnight\u201d the\u00a0network becomes a site of social breakdown, anomie and racist violence as the protagonist is attacked\u00a0in the deserted station:<\/p>\n \u2018I felt a fist, and then a kick, I could now smell their breath. They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs,\u00a0<\/em>and too many right-wing meetings\u2026 the last thing that I saw, as I lay there on the floor, was \u201cJesus\u00a0<\/em>Saves\u201d painted by an atheist nutter, and a British Rail poster read \u201cHave an Awayday – a cheap holiday –\u00a0<\/em>do it today!\u201d\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Yet the network\u2019s design remains a point of attraction for many Londoners. Perhaps it is its open\u00a0associations garnered over a century; for some it\u2019s a form of soft-nationalism, a nostalgic Englishness in\u00a0the same mode as the Spitfire and the Mini Cooper, a time when Britain was Great. For others, it stands\u00a0in for a soft-socialist, modernist vision of London as it could be, as it exists in their own imaginations: a\u00a0city that works for the people (if one closes one\u2019s eyes to the city\u2019s transformation into a playground for\u00a0financial capital, and a sausage machine of exploitation for the working class). Perhaps that openness to\u00a0meaning and identification is its strength; London\u2019s transport network is almost a Gesamtkunstwerk, a\u00a0piece of living art whose ubiquity makes it a backdrop from millions of lives, and holds memories of joy\u00a0and death, loss and desire, all carried along by the smell of oil and fumes, and the sooty black residue\u00a0that rests upon the commuter\u2019s skin.<\/p>\n (Features Image: George Rech)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No other city can be said to have turned its mass transit system into a cultural icon so much as London.\u00a0Other cities have fractions, highlights, moments; the stations of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2727,"featured_media":33466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6114],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n