Boring matters

Things that we know in principle how to do (put a man on the Moon, decode the human genome, make smaller microchips) are usually achieved ahead of schedule, while declared objectives for things that we don’t really understand (fixing the economy, creating the semantic web) take much longer than projected, or get shelved indefinitely. What is possible theoretically is often do-able now, and we’re impatient creatures. Transport is one such candidate. In principle we know how to build railways, high speed ones and underground ones, and while in recent months we have read of UK rail proposals estimated for completion in a couple of decades or so hence, we need these facilities – or sensible versions of them - now. So I hope the tendency to unexpected earlier achievement, as described above, will pertain.

Building new lines will be the easy part; agreeing on them will be less easy. What we don’t appear to have is joined-up thinking, a national integrated transport infrastructure plan that can consider all the options - the country-wide, regional and local ones, the schemes for roads, rail and air travel - and put them all together, rationally and synergistically. I’m sure it isn’t easy, even without financial, political and environmental constraints, and I’ve no doubt that some very able minds are addressing the issue. Meanwhile, what we have currently are lots of proposals that don’t add up, that don’t sit comfortably together, that compete with, conflict with, and laugh at each other.

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the absurdities of the initial HS2 proposals and their apparent aversion to connectivity with the rest of the rail network, and to city centres and airports. At the moment HS2 is certainly creating a great deal of comment and complaint across considerable swathes of our green and pleasant, and I hope in due course a better alternative will gain in prominence and favour. HS2 has national implications, but now, I want to highlight a particular issue that threatens to hinder rail developments within the capital. Here, we’re talking split personalities and the deeply boring.

When the various railway companies wanted to bring their lines into London in the nineteenth century, in most cases they were banned from entering the central area, or found it too expensive or disruptive to do so, giving us a peripheral ring of termini as their legacy. This meant that anyone wanting to reach destinations within the centre, unless within walking distance, had to change to another mode of transport, often the Underground, to complete their journey. Similar situations afflicted many other cities, and have been partially resolved in some places by funneling suburban rail services through the centre, as with the S-Bahn systems in Munich and Berlin, and the RER in Paris. Crossrail, due to open in 2018, will do the same for London, as will the eventually upgraded Thameslink, within the scope of their respective geographies.

So far so good, but there is a potential problem. Debate still rages about how far out of town Crossrail should go; should its western terminus, for instance, be at Maidenhead or Reading? Whatever the answer, there are benefits for the exurban commuter while the in-town section – say that between Paddington and Whitechapel – is threatened with additional congestion. Crossrail - its tunnels bored to main line diameters and the RER its immediate inspiration - is thus attempting to be both a main line railway and an urban metro.

Evidently, the Crossrail philosophy is starting to have an effect on thinking about future projects. Thanks to projected estimates of passenger flow, fears about the capacity of Waterloo and other factors, Crossrail 2, formerly the Chelsea-Hackney line first proposed well over half a century ago, is transforming into something originally not intended. The clichéd new name is itself a giveaway. The original idea was that it would serve areas of inner London (King’s Road, Chelsea, and the Dalston-Hackney area) as well as providing another useful link across the centre and beefing up services along the District Line tracks between Fulham and Wimbledon. Now, it’s seen increasingly as doing all of those things but also of relieving suburban services out of Waterloo and Liverpool Street. Can it meet both objectives? Do they necessarily conflict, or do they complement each other? Who knows, but the implication is that tunnels large enough for main line trains will be necessary. It’s no longer being thought of as a tube line. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, and it’s extremely important that the added complexities, beyond the original scope, all the myriad permutations involving locations such as Clapham Junction and Tooting Broadway and Euston are considered fully. Whatever the final decision, one hopes that it won’t follow a protracted period of dithering. We need something like this right now.

With a completely new line there should be nothing to stand in the way of doing the right thing, of balancing the options and coming to the best decision, whether a compromise or a move that firmly excludes alternatives. With an existing line, it isn’t so easy. For a long while there has been  a suggestion that the Bakerloo should be extended southwards from its existing terminus at the Elephant & Castle. Rumour has it that an appropriate stretch of tunnel already exists beneath the Walworth Road. Obvious additional stations, according to conventional Underground thinking, are Walworth, Camberwell Green and perhaps Peckham Rye. But now Bromley, Hayes and other traditional “Southern Region” destinations, places much further out,  are mooted ambitions for trains that will have to negotiate the small bore tube tunnels of the existing Bakerloo Line. Camberwell and the rest may suffer in consequence, and may miss out altogether, perceived as insufficiently lucrative, regardless of their social needs and habitual traffic congestion. Likewise the DLR to various proposed destinations – Euston, Oxford Circus, Victoria – in central London. What exactly is this amphibious Dockland creature trying to morph into?

While it’s good that these sort of suggestions are being made, sometimes we appear to be trying to do several things at once, the right hand unaware of what the left hand is doing. As with HS2 and national airports policy, someone needs to sit down and think it all through properly. Let’s get on with it, deeply boring though it ….zzzzzzzzz

Marlow: douze points

Working on the absolutely final revision, the third so far, of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, I thought it would be revealing to put some of its ideas to the test. “Tourist” is my projected book on “the subjective geography of everyday life” (a wider take on the subject than ‘psychogeography’ as commonly understood). So last weekend, coincidentally the weekend of the awesomely imbecilic Eurination contest, I visited somewhere “new”, to see how some of the principles played out.

The town in question was Marlow, on the north bank of the River Thames, in Buckinghamshire. I’d visited it three or four times previously, very briefly, and mostly while on my long distance saunter along the Thames Path in stages from Goring Gap to Westminster, but this was the first time I’d actually stayed there. What happened, as so often, was that I completely failed to explore Marlow, but used it as a base for visiting places nearby. However, I can report several observations.

Part of the town, especially that towards the railway station, looks slightly miniaturised, like a 75 per cent scale model. The houses are low and squat, the roads and pavements unnaturally narrow, so that neither cars nor pedestrians (all of normal dimensions, as far as I could tell) are well catered for. The street map I had printed off prior to the visit showed the thoroughfares as being narrow, but I assumed that was just a cartographic anomaly. Not so; they really are. So, this was a noticeable first impression, not an outstanding feature overall in the greater scheme of things, or Marlow in particular, but a comment-worthy one. In terms of the subjective appreciation of places, first impressions are important.

Another interesting aspect of subjective geography consists of those things that the locals no longer notice because they’re so all-pervasive. Well, perhaps they do, but what struck me as an outsider was the constant aircraft noise from the flightpath out of Heathrow, the ambient roar of traffic on the bypass, the sight of red kites soaring and wheeling and swooping, the cheerful bunting across the High Street and, it has to be said, the friendliness of everyone.

Hereness and thereness are important subjective geographical qualities. We’ll skip hereness, as in this context it’s a little pretentious. Thereness, though, is more interesting, can be manifested in several ways, and helps to contextualise places. One artificial technique for enhancing thereness is official twinning. I failed to notice where Marlow is twinned with but, most unusually, it is “bridged” with a major European capital. Marlow bridge, the suspension bridge across the Thames, was designed by William Tierney Clark, who was also responsible for the design of the very similar though larger Széchenyi chain bridge - built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark (no relation) between 1839 and 1849 - which spans the Danube in central Budapest in a single 1,250 feet span. A plaque on the Marlow bridge commemorates the “bridging” of the town with Budapest. I don’t know if there is a similar plaque in the Hungarian capital, but I hope to find out later this summer.

Orientation: absolutely no problem finding my way around, but some intriguing dog-leggy passages near the weir.

The weir: weird.

Cultural associations: Mole, Ratty, Badger, Mr. Toad. There may be others.

Unusual names: Higginson Park, the sort of name that should be Oop North rather than in the Home Counties, but a delight all the same.

Adjacent places: Henley, Bourne End, Cliveden. Disappointed that ye Cliveden gifte shoppe didn’t sell replicas of that chair. After all, it is the half-centenary this year.

Overall verdict on Marlow: a thoroughly nice place and I must look at it properly next time. Forget Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ruritania, Outer Slobodia and other back-of-beyond Euro-dribbles: this one is truly worthy of douze points.

Coming out about Lansdowns

When I was about ten years old I was taken – over a short period of a few months - on visits to Cheltenham, Bath and Bournemouth.Yes I know, but I should emphasise that generally speaking my parents were loving, caring, and well meaning people. In each of these places I noticed the apparent importance of the word Lansdown (in Bournemouth it was spelled Lansdowne, and was a major bus destination, obtrusive,  rather along the lines of my comments about Cockfosters in my previous posting). Clustered closely together in autobiographical time as they were, and unfamiliar as I then was with most towns and cities of the British Isles, I wondered at the significance of these observations. Everywhere had a town hall, a parish church or a cathedral, a market place, a Woolies and a Marks, so did everywhere have a Lansdown too?

If so, what would one expect to find there? Crumbling Regency crescents, building societies, solicitors’ offices, art galleries, old folk with walking frames? In Cheltenham even the railway station was named for this Lansdown Phenomenon. Clearly it was not to be taken lightly, but my questions were brushed aside as being essentially unanswerable (along with algebra).

For many years I lived with this troubling knowledge, and it is only recently that I’ve dared to speak about it in public. The Lansdown Phenomenon as I’ve called it, giving it due respect and initial capitals. Over the years I’ve grown to realise that it is only the privileged few places that make much of their Lansdown, that for the most part Lansdowns are not that significant in the scheme of things, and certainly not worth losing any sleep over or seeking counselling. They’re not as important as, for example, Caffè Nero or Pizza Express (though they’re more important than algebra).

However, although I can hardly face the psychological implications of what I’m about to confess, in more recent years I’ve also had to accept the possibility that there might be other types of Lansdowns too, not named as such, in fact entirely unnamed ones, clichés of urban form, features that go together, emerging stereotypes of place, archetypal clumps, nuts and bolts of city form as predictable as eggs and bacon or, er, nuts and bolts. Which means that, unlike in Cheltenham Spa et al, you don’t even know that they are Lansdowns. I mean, they could be anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. They aren’t labelled. Frightening or what?  In fact, this is the first time I’ve raised this suspicion in public, so you’ll appreciate that this is a delicate moment for me. These hidden “other” Lansdowns  resist classification, they have no recognised overall generic name, but with practice one can start to recognise them – conceptual Lansdowns, if you like. At least I hope one can, otherwise I fear I may be entirely alone in this.

Tentatively, I’ll suggest a few possible candidates. How about this one: the scruffy area between the bus station and the back entrance of the 1960s covered market, close to the public conveniences, smelling of fish and slimy and slippery with them, stacked with pallets and parked randomly and untidily with white vans. Sound familiar? Is there somewhere like this in your town? Could this be a secret and novel  form of Lansdown? OK, upmarket a bit: one of those new “quarters” – Manchester and Leeds are full of them, and so is anywhere else currently undergoing regeneration – all orange brick and grey steel, sharp corners, tricked out with a Premier Inn or a Travelodge, and most likely favoured too with a Gregg’s, a Sainsbury’s Local and/or a Tesco Express. Know the sort of place I mean? Repetitive, aren’t they. Likewise the “Docklands” clones – Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, Swansea Marina, Sovereign Harbour near Eastbourne, and so on. You hadn’t got those down as secret Lansdowns, had you. Well, they are. Then, top of the pile, the “iconic” cultural node, designed to draw the tourists, to put a declining post-industrial has-been on the map: the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Baltic in Gateshead, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, Eureka in Halifax, the Ikon itself, in the wonderfully named, the kinaesthetically named, the sphinctertastic Oozells Square in Brum. Oh dear, I knew there would be a psychoanalytical subtext.

There are variants, some of them overlapping. For instance, there’s the much lauded but peculiarly shaped building, geometrically counter-intuitive and functionally perverse, the work of a “signature” architect, one where – since it’s so innovatively designed - you might not be able to find the entrance or be able to afford to go up in the lift. Sarkinesses none of which apply to the Sage in Gateshead (best seen at night, from across the river), that armadillo/croissant thing in Glasgow, the unsettling Libeskind war museum in Salford (which so effectively – and so subtly - makes the point that war is, well, unsettling actually, really quite upsetting …), the Shard at London Bridge (best when the cloudbase is extremely low (50 feet-ish) though not, presumably, if you’re on board an aircraft). Not to mention the art galleries where typically one goes simply to say one has been, to enjoy the view out to sea (Margate, St Ives), to admire the internal spaces and volumes (Walsall, Tate Modern), and to mosey round the gift shop, chuckling quietly. All in their way highly appropriate symbols representative of our time, all quasi-Lansdowns of the present era. Bath, Bournemouth and Cheltenham eat your old-fashioned hearts out.

But don’t take my word for it, for it may of course be an outrageously subjective, entirely redundant and ridiculously overblown idea, an over the top psychogeographical delusion. Better still, go out and find some Lansdowns of your own.

The global pull of Cockfosters

Maybe you’ve been travelling since yesterday from half a world away, long haul from JFK or LAX, slightly longer from Singapore or KL, even longer, now totally time-disoriented, from Sydney or Auckland. Or maybe you got up very early this morning to board a plane in Athens, Vienna or Helsinki. Now you’re at Heathrow, rubbing your eyes, and it’s your first time in London. Perhaps you’re there on business, or as a tourist. You will have heard about the Houses of Parliament, of course, and Buckingham Palace, the Tower, St Paul’s, the Eye.

You’ve also heard about the famous Underground, the oldest such system in the world, this year celebrating its 150th birthday. Now you’re below ground, about to board a Piccadilly Line train. And where is it going? The departure screen above the platform tells you. Cockfosters. You step aboard. Digital displays and aural announcements confirm that this train is going to Cockfosters. No matter where on this shrunken planet you started from, now you’re heading for Cockfosters. In the global scheme of things, clearly Cockfosters is a destination of some importance. Planet Cockfosters. London isn’t even in the running.

Wherever you go in the world, you’ll find that names you’d never heard of before, totally insignificant suburbs and minor satellite towns, Cockfosters analogues, Cockfosters wannabes, take on an unexpected significance. In London, if you use the tube, besides being forced against your will to know about Cockfosters, you’ll soon discover the overweening importance of Morden, West Ruislip, High Barnet, Upminster, and Hainault (via Newbury Park), none of which you will actually visit unless you are (a) terminally sad, literally so, or (b) prone to narcolepsy.

It’s the same everywhere else. In New York you’ll similarly be bullied into an unwanted awareness of New Lots, White Plains, Rockaway, and Woodlawn; in Berlin, hoping for a quiet life of U-Bahn pootling, you’ll find your pootlings seriously influenced by Ruhleben, not to mention Alt-Mariendorf, Pankow and Krumme Lanke; in Paris you won’t get far unless you submit to an understanding of the whereabouts of Balard and Créteil, the Porte d’Orléans and the Porte de Clignancourt, Villejuif Louis Aragon and Bobigny Pablo  Picasso. There you are, art lovers, you didn’t know his first name was Bobigny, did you. That’s the educational value of the Metro for you. In Budapest, home to mainland Europe’s oldest subway and one of its knottiest languages, you’ll need to learn to distinguish your Újpest-Központ from your Köbánya-Kispest or you’re soon going to be in trouble.

Everywhere you go you’ll come across strange but apparently important words, dominant in local geography, like Westheimer in Houston and Hennepin in Minneapolis, the ubiquitous Peachtree in Atlanta. Destinations on the fronts of buses will warp your appreciation of what really matters: Churchill Square in Brighton, Broad Marsh in Nottingham, Chorlton Street or Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Not to mention Plumstead Common and Clapton Pond. If you want to fully appreciate the glories of Glasgow you’ll need to get a grip on a whole load of Polloks. Such are a few of the more subjective toponymic oddities of urban public transport. I bet you wish now that you’d stayed on the train all the way to Cockfosters.