In GULliver’s Kingdom

Last weekend saw a delightful gathering in Whitby, North Yorkshire, of goths of all persuasions – proper goths, quasi-goths and trans-goths, ortho-, meta- and para-goths, iso-goths, and camera-wielding non-goths like myself. Clearly I’m not up on the nuances of the terminology, but the chemistry of the occasion was wonderful, colourful and happy. On the way there, at Pickering station, the southern terminus of the North Yorks Moors Railway (NYMR), I wandered along the platform, eager to distance myself from that family that follows me everywhere, you know the one I mean, the one that’s always right next to you whenever you board a train or a plane, the large and dysfunctional one that, despite visual evidence of an extensive and varied genetic input, has missed out on the sequences that code for things like intelligence, deferred caloric gratification, not all speaking at once, volume control, and the oral equivalent of an off-switch.

My evasive manoeuvre had the beneficial side effect that, as I wandered along, I noticed a traditional red phone box adjacent to the fence bordering the platform. With these sort of phone boxes it was always difficult to discover on which side was the door, and in this instance the presence of the fence added further intrigue; was the kiosk enterable from the platform, or from the world beyond the fence? Closer inspection revealed that it wasn’t a working phone box at all, but a museum piece, complete with “Press button A” and “Press button B”, devices for instant nostalgia.

On the rear wall was a further delight, a list of named London telephone exchanges. As many will remember, not just in the days before the incontinent ambient babbling permitted by the invention of the mobile phone, but before that, in the era before the demand for phone and fax lines made a numerical system imperative, many cities around the world used mnemonic names for their exchanges, the first two or three letters being convertible by the system into dialable digits.

Thus in London we had GULliver, which translates into 485, and covered part of Kentish Town, and FREmantle, aka 373, an amused nod to the “Kangaroo Valley” of Earl’s Court. Some of these names were much coveted, like MAYfair or KNIghtsbridge, and some became famous, like WHItehall 1212, the number for New Scotland Yard. They were memorable in a way that purely numerical codes scarcely are (supposedly short term memory fails after about deven digits). Besides chunking data into memorable form, they had character and humour.  TERminus was apposite for the area around Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras; TIDeway was a nice name to give to Deptford, ELGar was elderly, imperial, brown and moustachioed, as (peculiarly) was CUNningham, HOP and RODney were just plain silly, GIBbon was funky, AMBassador had a flavour of its own, as did BAYswater and PADdington, though a different one; GROsvenor, FLEet Street, TEMple Bar and TRAfalgar exuded authority and centrality and Londonness, and so on and so on. So it was a nice surprise to stumble upon the complete list in the unlikely setting of the NYMR.