Bad men and bad baguettes

How pleasant – and unusual – to be drafting this piece in the garden, the temperature soaring towards 30 degrees, the sky relentlessly blue, and the only immediate negative the baguette at which I take the occasional half-hearted nibble. This Asda product, fancifully labelled a Parisienne Baguette – “chosen by you” (well, we can all make mistakes) – which I have stuffed with Camembert and cranberry sauce, has all the gustatory appeal of the cardboard inner tube of a toilet roll. Nasty indeed.

But not as nasty as some. As publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town” hovers uncertainly, I was again reminded by news stories this week of the chance factors leading to place creation, a theme from an earlier posting, and one for “Tourist”. San Francisco suffered a plane crash, fortunately not as serious as it might have been, and an event which will add nothing to the sense of place which the wonderful city by the Golden Gate already enjoys aplenty. No discernible effect there, then. Unlike Lac-Mégantic - on the other side of the North American continent in Québec province - a small community which, what’s left of it, will forever have its identity imprinted by a runaway train that caused many fatalities. Such are the random and accidental occurrences which may or may not give rise to, or modify, a sense of placefulness.

Maybe someone at Lac-Mégantic was crucially to blame, maybe not; that remains to be decided, but what of those places definitively linked with infamous people or dreadful deeds? We’re not just talking Asda bakery here. Places with evil subtitles, as it were. Recently I travelled on the partially completed high speed main line across Austria, and found my place-association muscles being activated in an unpleasant way more often than was good for them. “Wir erreichen jetzt Linz Hauptbahnhof”. Nice station, good connections, surprisingly large steelworks close by, but what does one really associate with Linz? Anything other than the Führer’s megalomanic plans for rebuilding, revisited repeatedly as the nightmare empire he had created crumbled about him? Anything else? I thought not, except – maybe - nearby Mauthausen and its diabolical quarry.

The train slowed momentarily from its cruising speed of around 135 mph to pass through Amstetten, which as far as I could recall has only one claim to notoriety, but a pretty big one, in the form of Josef Fritzl. One may recall that a few years ago it came to light that for 24 years Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in the basement, raping her repeatedly and resulting in her producing seven children, one of whom died in infancy, the others remaining similarly incarcerated. Josef and his wife – in a sick-making hypocritical charade now in principle nauseatingly familiar (recent cases in Derby and New Addington, for instance) appeared on TV from time to time appealing for help in investigating the daughter’s “disappearance”.

Vienna has of course inflicted its own peculiar spin on psychology; one wonders how that subject might have developed if Sigmund Freud had been born in, say, Barcelona, Brisbane or Bristol, or anywhere less conspicuously knicker-twisted than the Austrian capital. For starters, we’d all be less afraid of rats, horses, and/or sex. Or, the other great what-if, if the aforementioned moustachioed one had succeeded as an artist there or, better still, been born half a century later in Dartford or Liverpool and picked up the guitar. Counterfactuals get you nowhere though, least of all Salzburg.

Upon arrival in Salzburg it was impossible to ignore (but effortless to resist) the announcement of an imminent train departure to Braunau-am-Inn, birthplace of the aforementioned ranting one. Not that he can be avoided entirely. The excellent Panorama tours, which operate out of Salzburg and specialise in “The Sound of Music” for those who like that kind of thing, do a Tour Number 4, to the Kehlsteinhaus, otherwise known as the Eagle’s Nest. Cryptically their leaflet refers to brass elevators of WW2 vintage and “a magnificent view of the surrounding snowcapped peaks of the Bavarian Alps and the surrounding countryside”. The blurb intriguingly makes no mention of whom one might have shared the view with some 70 years ago. In the unlikely event that one doesn’t know, I wonder if the sense of placefulness of this majestic alpine summit is diminished – or enhanced – as a consequence? Place creation, as I say, is all so chancy, so subjective.

Budapest: a lesson for us all

It was liberating last week to arrive in a “new” city, one that I had been looking forward to for a long time, and to see how it fared with respect to some of the principles of subjective geography that I have been describing in recent blogs, and which feature in “Tourist In Your Own Town”.

Budapest enjoys a strong sense of place, due in no small way to its location at the point where the Danube breaks free from the hills to the north and enters the great flat Hungarian plain. It celebrates its mighty river and makes the most of it, the same mythic Blue Danube which its upstream neighbour Vienna so churlishly turns its back on, to its loss, and which last week – after a long period of heavy rains – was greyish-green in colour, swollen, littered with uprooted trees, and flowing fast. As the capital of a country with a language that offers few clues to a non-speaker I was surprised at how easy Budapest was to use, at its eagerness to adopt Western values, and at the frequency and competence with which English was spoken. I found the city welcoming and friendly, fun to be in. It’s somewhere that wants to have a good time and knows how to go about it.

First impressions, when arriving at Keleti station off the RailJet from Vienna, were of a frisson of “foreignness”, of Eastern Europeanness, a feeling exacerbated by the presence of dodgy-looking taxi touts and of the disorder caused by the closure of the main station frontage and its surrounding by construction works for metro Line 4. The strangeness quickly dissipated upon approaching the city centre, and I soon realised I was in one of the great European capitals.

Pest includes the commercial heart of the city, while Buda is more relaxed and touristy, with features reflecting a long history. Subjectively, there is no obvious single central place, although conventionally it would be Deák Ferenc Square, where the three metro lines intersect, a location marked by a big wheel and a tourist information office. However, there is a considerable surrounding area where one feels a strong sense of being close to the centre of things. The Danube acts as a focus through the central area, especially in the vicinity of the chain bridge, near where tour guides congregate.

Navigability is easy, aided on the Pest side of the Danube by broad radial avenues and roughly semicircular connectors, and sometimes by views towards the river and the hills to the west, and on the Buda side by the very obvious topographies of the castle area and of Gellert hill. Many parts of the central city provide a satisfying sense of enclosure, with a high information content in terms of street furniture and activity, the visual and aural effects of the ubiquitous yellow trams, a solid, chunky, dense and stylish urbanity, yet with a skyline free from the visual blight of ugly modern highrise that disfigures so many cities, not least London. Budapest is a city that enjoys itself, knows what it has got, appreciates it and – one hopes – doesn’t want to spoil it by pursuing the dreary diktats of “progress”, as understood by egotistical architects, unimaginative financiers and corporate drones. In terms of subjective similarity to other places, Paris is the most obvious candidate, surely not a bad thing. Many of the major thoroughfares are treelined; the variety in the detail of the vernacular architecture is astonishing.

In an earlier blog I commented on the plaque on the bridge across the Thames at Marlow which declares – in English and Magyar – how that Buckinghamshire town is “bridged” with Budapest, thanks to the work of William Tierney Clark and his (unrelated) successor Adam Clark. I was hoping to find a plaque on the Szchenyi chain bridge across the Danube referring to Marlow but, despite the difficulty of deciphering the inscription in Hungarian at the south western corner of the bridge, I don’t think Marlow gets a mention, although both Clarks are cited. But it’s a such a lovely bridge that I attach a photograph.

Finally, I encountered something so strange and wonderful that afterwards I wondered if I had dreamt it. Having explored the delightful city park in the north east of the city I took Line 1 of the metro downtown. This is the Földalatti, the line dating from the 1890s, the first such system in continental Europe. The station at Hösök tere, aka Heroes’ Square, adjacent to the city park, really is the stuff of dreams, and consequently my description may be a little exaggerated or distorted. Entering the station via a stairwell I went to a tardis-like kiosk and bought a block of tickets, the size of one’s little finger, and had to validate one in a machine, under the eye of guards, before entering the platform area proper which – surreally – appeared not much larger than your average bathmat. The train was already in, and seemed to have a capacity for about eight people, all of them tourists. I’m sure this can’t really be true. At each beautifully tiled station, door-closing and departure were announced by an elaborate sequence of chimes. The whole experience was a dreamlike delight.

However, it occurred to me later that much of the line follows the route of Andrassy Street, the straight radial sometimes compared (unreasonably) with the Champs Elysées, and therefore must run close to the hideous basement of Number 60, the House of Terror. Here, the crimes of the Nazi and the Soviet occupiers are recorded in grim detail, along with some of the more gruesome artefacts of repression, and offer a stern message applicable to this day to all those – businessmen and politicians in particular - who toady to nasty regimes that still practise exactly the same kinds of thing. Budapest has found its freedom, values and enjoys it, and understands how precious it is. We should take note.

That Codnor Moment

Synchronicity is a wonderful thing, when you can get it to work for you. This morning, I was fretting away at what I really hope will be the very last revision of the “Humour, Stereotypes and Stigma” section of Chapter 3 of “Tourist In Your Own Town : The Subjective Geography of Everyday Life” (forthcoming). I heard a clattering at the letterbox, and went downstairs to investigate.

Among all the usual rubbish from banks and so forth, our postman had delivered an envelope, bearing an oak leaf logo and addressed “To The Occupier”. It featured the question, prominently, in white on red, “When was the last time a place made you smile simply by thinking about it?” My immediate reaction was to wonder how they knew what I was thinking, and to speculate whether this was a veiled reference to Sidcup. Or Slough. Or Scunthorpe, some of the places mentioned in Chapter 3, which I had just been pondering. I’ve also had Catford on my mind recently, but that’s beside the point, and I have seen the doctor about it and had some blood samples taken. However, amazing coincidence or not, since the senders of today’s communication were the National Trust, seeking new members - I’m one already, so it’s nice to know my subscription is being thoughtfully employed - I imagine that this was not exactly what they were referring to. More probably somewhere like Sissinghurst, Stowe or Saltram, if we’re going to ssstay with ssssibilants. Alliteration has allottoanswerfor.

The humour of place names is far too good a subject for a short blog – you’ll just have to wait for the book – but I can honestly say that, until this morning’s facetious interpretations, the last place I visited that made me smile, actually while there, and completely involuntarily so, was Neasden. Yes, I’m slightly surprised at myself too. Over the years I’ve become inured to the humour value of Neasden, so beloved of Willie Rushton, for instance, with his little song, and I’ve passed through it many times without even noticing, let alone giving in to a micro-smirk. On this recent occasion, however, it took me by surprise. Pausing there momentarily, on a train en route from Queensbury to Dollis Hill (don’t ask), it was the intonation of the recorded announcement that got me: “This station is Neasden”. The slightly longer than absolutely necessary pause before the name, which was spoken in a fractionally lower tone - suggesting an adjectival intent, a judgemental one, perhaps something synonymous with, shall we say, “crap”. I almost erupted into a spontaneous LOL guffaw. Not the done thing on the Jubilee Line, I fear.

For a less obvious source of toponymic mirth we have to head north to Derbyshire, and to the delightful small former mining town of Codnor, in the market place of which are the fabulous Cattermole Buildings. Seeing them always makes me smile and, by association, so does Codnor - just by thinking about it. Buildings give character to a town. Rome has its Colosseum, Berlin its Reichstag, Hollywood its Bowl, Codnor its Cattermole. A town with a Cattermole is a town I like. Codnor is famed in the history of television commercials, of course, for “That Codnor Moment”, every pipe smokers’ idea of nirvana, and in a song on Simon and Garfunkel’s classic “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album, namely “El Codnor Pasa”. I  mean, these were boys from New York City, and they certainly had their cultural antennae pointing at where it’s at. So we’re not talking parochial here; Codnor hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed.

Sadly, though, I have to report that neither Neasden nor Codnor feature in the National Trust Handbook (I’ve checked), but then again, all kinds of things make people smile.

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.