by Unknown
What she’d really like to do would be to get out, just to get out of the home for a day, even half a day. She’d like to look around. She’d like to go on the tube. She’d like to know where she was, what kind of a neighbourhood this was. She’d like to have something other than the Mirror or Mail to read at weekends. She’d like a different set of people at supper time for conversation or at least just a little different conversation. She didn’t really want much.
It was a lot of money, £20.30, to spend on a child each and every week. They’ll be spoilt, she thought. Someone used to come and get her and drive her to vote when there were elections, but that hadn’t happened for years now. She’d always voted. She’d voted Labour in her first election, just like everyone else. She’d been 21, just after the war, just old enough to vote. They didn’t know about the war, most people.
South Woodford, 9.00 p.m.
She put the magnifying glass down on the table and carefully placed the bookmark in the pages. She put the book next to the glass.
Getting out of the chair was the hardest part. Everything was easy after that. She had two sticks. She was very careful to ensure that they were placed within reach where they could not be knocked over. If she knocked one over she was stuck, possibly stuck until Tuesday. She didn’t like to think about that. She could crawl and find it, she thought. She wouldn’t be stuck. Not if she were not hurt.
Slowly she levered herself out of the chair. It would have been easier if it were firmer. It had been a firmer chair long ago.
She liked having her old things around her. Even her commode was old now. Her most treasured possessions were the photographs. She thought the paper faded more quickly in the more recent photographs, a little like her memory. Maybe it was how they were printed nowadays; the paper was not the same. She had photographs of all her relatives. Last year they had all turned up for her 90th birthday party, but no one came for her birthday this year. At least things are better, she thought, better for the children.94 But nothing had happened today.
Slowly she made her way across the room, two legs and two sticks. To balance, she always had to have at least three points touching the floor; one foot or one stick could move at any one time. Falling hurt, much more than it used to hurt.
The woman who came on Tuesdays to wash her was from Woodford, the assigned ‘carer’. Her carer complained of not having enough money. At least that is what she thought the woman was complaining about. Her hearing was so bad and the woman spoke in a foreign accent, but she got to better understand it over time. She had to. Or maybe her carer was speaking more clearly, learning better English, becoming more confident, becoming less foreign.
Now she couldn’t see so easily it was hard to read for long, but she had nothing else to do all day. When the carer told her of her aches and pains she joked back that aches and pains were how you knew you were still alive!
Sometimes she wished it was not so hard, although she wondered how people coped before and she didn’t complain because of that. What did they do before stairlifts? What happened before there were any assigned carers? What had happened to her grandparents and great-grandparents? She sat and thought.
She would have liked to have had some more company, liked to have lived with relatives. But maybe they would just argue.
It took another 15 minutes to get from the stairlift to her bed. It then took another five minutes to get into bed.
She prayed and then, with some difficulty, went to sleep.
Woodford, 9.30pm
‘Grandad’s asleep,’ she said.
Grandad lived with them. His money had made it possible for them to live here. The deal was that they gave him some company.
‘Don’t forget the baby,’ he said.
How could she forget the baby? The baby was the reason she’d had no sleep for the last three months. The baby was the reason they’d moved here from down the line. The baby was the reason that they were living with her grandad. They’d moved for the baby, for the extra room, for the future. The baby was much more important than the census form. The form had been sitting by the kitchen sink for a week.
‘People always forget to add the baby,’ he said. He worked in town, in Islington, he changed at Bank, but in May the office was moving to Pimlico and then he’d change at Oxford Circus.95 That was the great thing about the Central Line: it didn’t matter if you changed your job or if your job changed its offices – everything was always the same distance away.
They’d moved here because it was safe and getting safer. Crime in the ward was the lowest for miles around, just five crimes for every 1,000 people a year (it would drop by another 15 per cent this year). What crime there was there was mostly petty antisocial behaviour. More of it took place in sub-ward ‘E01003746’ than anywhere else.
‘That’s why we didn’t choose to live there,’ he said.96
He liked statistics. He worked for the Office for National Statistics. On the tube it took him exactly 21 minutes to do The Times crossword, leaving precisely a minute to sit down in his seat and precisely a minute to get up.
‘People don’t know that this end of the line is better value,’ he told her. She had wanted him to mortgage them to the hilt to secure them a premier postcode in West Ruislip (at the other end of the Central Line), a place where the average GCSE score was only 356 points.97
He had tried to explain it all to her when they were looking at possible semis there. ‘But our child won’t be average; our child will be very clever. Here, in Monkhams, the average is a whole 8 points higher!’ He had lost her attention.
‘Babies get left off census forms all the time,’ he had said that morning. ‘I told someone at work yesterday, someone who lives in West Ruislip. But here’s better for schools.’98
‘We shouldn’t be choosing where to live because of statistics,’ she said.
‘No,’ he agreed, and then spoilt it. ‘Exactly two minutes down the line at South Woodford, the GCSE point average is 351. Slipping by more than a whole grade in one subject,’ he said, as she rolled her eyes at him.
‘Hasn’t Grandad been asleep a long time?’ he asked.
Leytonstone to Woodford
Even though child poverty is lowest along this final stretch of the line in London, life expectancy is not particularly high. There are a large number of old people in London, but mostly in outer London. Older people tend to get out of London altogether if they can and most get out at least as far as Essex. Those that are left within the Greater London boundary tend, on average, to live a few months or years less than the residents of many places to be found a little further north and west. More importantly, there is no great influx of life’s more elderly and established winners into this part of the line. People who have won in the short term are here, but far fewer of the offspring of wealthier families, far fewer who began life on the winning sides. Here are far more who are still on a journey.
Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/
Migrants and their offspring who have secured a toehold in London often end up moving towards this part of town, as well also as people who think of themselves as being more ‘London’ than others. They are often more ‘London’ because they have to go back three or four generations to identify the first immigrant in their family history and can find no university graduates more than just one generation ago.
The very highest longevity on the line is found as it cuts through the heart of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, just north of the royal palaces. But almost as high are the rates on the Central Line in the financial heart of the City. Three tube stops in the graph above have the same life expectancy. This is because more precise figures for the immediate areas surrounding them are not available.
The drop in expected length of life from Bank to Leyton is ten years in just 14 minutes spent on the tube. It would be hard to find anywhere else within Europe where such large populations live so near to each other and yet one group gets to e
njoy, each on average, an extra decade of a far more pampered life. If London divides more in future we will measure it in the number of extra breaths taken by those who bring home an even greater share of all the wealth that the capital corrals.
The Central Line doesn’t end at Woodford. It continues out of London. It splits. It loops. And it merges into the worldwide network of metropolitan, national and international arteries.
No single transect from one edge of an urban boundary to the other can summarize the gradients that sustain and subvert people’s cooperation. The working of the metropolis, this collective human organ, is made up of millions more people. Carry on out and the furthest-flung commuter villages enter its workings. Continue further out and you get to the supporting hinterland, to the places from where monies are raised by London firms, to areas where those deemed to have failed in London are rehoused.
London is one of the cities at the peak of a global metropolitan hierarchy so dependent on financial reassurance that ultimately that hierarchy, and its hinterlands, allow people in London to live like they do. From the broadcasters in the west to the bankers in the east, from Holland Park mansions to Mile End maisonettes, from the impoverished slums in every corner of the earth to a few shimmering office blocks holding extraordinary influence and power, the Central Line runs under the heart of it all.
Endnote, 10.00 p.m.
When were you last on the Central Line? Many Londoners have their stories of the line. For huge numbers of people, significant parts of their lives have been spent commuting along it. Within London, population turnover is so high, and commuting so extensive, that millions think on themselves as commuters or former commuters on the line. Millions more have used it to go shopping, to see the sights, to visit friends. Many people visiting from abroad have travelled on it and millions more have used it in past decades.
Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/
To add colour to this story of the human geography of one part of the tube, local facts have been added. All these are referenced in short notes listed below. Government and local authority press releases and news-sheets have been perused. Local ward ‘neighbourhood news’ reports are well worth reading and are also referenced below. Very often these are deposited on the Internet. Each of the 32 tube stops along the Central Line that lie within the Greater London boundary either falls within a ward or is most closely associated with a particular ward or, only very occasionally, a small group of wards. These are the places this book has been about, these wards by the tube stops, and the people who sleep in them, who live by the line and wake up along it: nearly half a million individuals, a population similar to that of the City of Sheffield, but stretched out to be living alongside London’s most striking line, the red one, the one that looks like a heartbeat.
Notes
1. Life expectancy in West Ruislip is reported to be 81.1361 years; in Northolt Mandeville ward it is 79.9763 years. Travel time is seven minutes. To be precise, that is one day and 11 minutes of life lost per second spent moving east on the train. The source of this data is ‘Ward level life expectancy estimates for the period 2005–2009 (data combined)’, Greater London Authority, 2011. See http://data.london.gov.uk/.
2. All the sources used in this book are freely accessible on the web. Although I use it sparingly here, by far the best source of all is Wikipedia. Like all sources, you have to cross-check Wikipedia. Unlike others, you can correct it and then others can correct you if they see fit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_in_the_United_Kingdom.
3. ‘ONS moves to new London office’, press release, 16 May 2011. See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/media-centre/statements/ons-moves-to-new-london-office.html.
4. This is in sub-ward ‘E01002535’, according to the Metropolitan Police. Google that nine-character code to find out more and to see where people like us quantitative social geographers get some of our information from.
5. Metropolitan Police Crime Statistics, West Ruislip annual crime count, 2008–9, 2009–10, 2010–11: 928, 807 and 690 respectively. See http://maps.met.police.uk/access.php?area=00ASHC&sort=area.
6. Capped GCSE average point scores for pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 in maintained schools (referenced by location of pupil residence) based on ward-level data for 2010 (Greater London Authority, 2011). For more details of the fascinating world of GCSE scoring, turn to the conversation taking place later on in the semi-fictional day that this book describes, in Woodford at 9.30 p.m., and the footnotes to that.
7. West Ruislip Ward Profile, Hillingdon NHS Primary Care Trust. An update is due once the 2011 results are released in 2013. For now, as published in July 2007, table labelled: ‘Proportion of Ethnic Communities: 1991 and 2001 West Ruislip’ (wrongly implying 90 per cent of residents have no ethnicity – we all have an ethnicity). See http://hillingdon.nhs.uk/uploads/Ward%20profiles/West%20Ruislip%20July%202006R.pdf.
8. ‘A focus on Manor Ward’, Hillingdon Policy Team, January 2010 (the nearest tube stop to Manor is Ruislip Gardens): 5,203 of the 10,797 residents of this ward are said to be in the ‘Acorn’ groups labelled ‘post-industrial families’. See http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/media/pdf/3/0/Manor_10.pdf.
9. ‘A focus on Manor Ward’, as above. ‘Table: Educational Attainment of Pupils’, 2007, 2008, 2009.
10. ‘A focus on South Ruislip Ward’, Corporate Performance & Intelligence Team, April 2011, map on p. 15. See http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/media/pdf/2/e/South_Ruislip_2011.pdf.
11. ‘A focus on South Ruislip’, Policy Team, January 2010. See http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/media/pdf/5/b/South_Ruislip_10.pdf.
12. HMRC, 2007–8, ‘WTC 1 – Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit: An introduction’. See www.hmrc.gov.uk/pdfs/wtc1.pdf.
13. Shelter’s estimate of the drop in allowances to help pay the rent for a three-bed property in Hillingdon in April 2011: p. 9 of their table here. See http://england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns/housing_issues/local_housing_allowance.
14. When riots did take place in Ealing that summer most of that rioting occurred within a few hundred metres of Ealing Broadway tube station, on the spur of the Central Line not included in this transect. Of the 137 people arrested in Ealing, 122 were male; some 39 were ‘young’. Half of those lived in the borough. See ‘The Ealing Riots: the Council’s Response & Recovery’, 13 September 2011. And for more detail see also http://www2.ealing.gov.uk/ealing3/export/sites/ealingweb/services/council/committees/ agendas_minutes_reports/ward_forums/northolt_west_end_ward_forum/_april2011-march2012/_13_October_2011/Ealing_Riots_-_Briefing_Note.pdf
15. The speed of the trains varies on different lines, on different parts of each line and at different times of day, as well as when there are more or fewer trains. But speed is hard to gauge when there is almost nothing to see out of the windows.
16. Everything matters, even that cigarette, the one the man from South Ruislip finally had at 9 a.m. this morning, when our tale reaches Hanger Lane. Everything is influenced by everything else, but nearby things are more related than distant things. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler’s_first_law_of_geography.
17. See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/ for the data sources for these charts. They were drawn with the help of Benjamin Hennig, who created that website with me for the Trust for London, and then redrawn by Paul Coles.
18. ‘Greenford Green Ward Priorities’, Greenford Green Neighbourhood News, Issue 1, January 2011, p. 2. See http://www2.ealing.gov.uk/ealing3/export/sites/ealingweb/services/council/committees/ agendas_minutes_reports/ward_forums/greenford_green_ward_forum/_april10-march11/28_October_2010/Greenford_Green_newsletter_Jan_2011.pdf.
19. ‘What matters to you in your ward?’, Perivale Neighborhood News, Issue 2, January 2009, p. 1 (box). See http://www2.ealing.gov.uk/ealing3/export/sites/ealingweb/services/council/committees/ agendas_minutes_reports/ward_forums/perivale_ward_forum/_sept08-may09/_26jan09/Ward_Newsletter_-_Perivale_Jan_09_to_print.pdf.
/> 20. ‘Deterring anti social behaviour in Bilton Road and beyond’, Perivale Neighbourhood News, Issue 1, December 2010, p. 1. (Note that Issue 1 comes almost two years after Issue 2!) Read all about it at http://www2.ealing.gov.uk/ealing3/export/sites/ealingweb/services/council/committees/ agendas_minutes_reports/ward_forums/perivale_ward_forum/_april10-march11/_5_October_2010/EC2627_Ward_Newsletter_Perivale_web.pdf.
21. Presumably they don’t welcome people with open arms who would like to see the social landscape become a little less uneven: Ealing Central & Acton Conservatives, ‘Introduction to Hanger Hill Ward’. See http://www.ealingactonconservatives.org.uk/your-area/hanger-hill.
22. In fact, some parts of the Conservative Party pay London Letterbox Marketing to deliver its leaflets as the party cannot find enough volunteers willing to give up time but it does have enough money from just a few of its wealthy donors. On how paying companies to deliver political leaflets can cause problems in London see http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/9652399.Political_war_on_streets_of_ Bromley_over_leaflet_delivery/.
23. All these conversations took place on 2 April 2011. Just a year later the idea of £9,000-a-year university fees had become widely accepted. People often quickly adjust to the circumstances they find themselves in. Few people thought of the imposition of such high fees on the young as a form of antisocial behaviour. However, once ‘interest’ is added the amount to be paid back is far higher than £27,000. And the future interest rate can be changed at any time, by the relevant Secretary of State, without any need for new legislation.
24. Down by Ealing and West London College, next to Ealing Studios, or down by the ‘Local’ supermarket on Ealing Green. In other words, where there was rioting later in August 2011. See http://www2.ealing.gov.uk/ealing3/export/sites/ealingweb/services/council/committees/ agendas_minutes_reports/ward_forums/northolt_west_end_ward_forum/_april2011-march2012/_13_October_2011/Ealing_Riots_-_Briefing_Note.pdf.