East-West
Page 19
The historic motor of transients, the great Deco-ish lump of Earl’s Court, the exhibition centre and music venue on Warwick Road (I can remember seeing Bowie back there in the seventies) has acted like a railway terminus for years – it’s got its own entrance to the Tube station. It’s driven the cheap hotels and the little restaurants and the fast food. But now it’s under threat. The plan is to demolish everything on the enormous site and replace it with a new development by another star architect, Sir Terry Farrell. Apartments, of course, plus shops and restaurants. There’ll be multiple operators with the kinds of covenants developers like. So there goes the neighbourhood.
End of the Line – Is this Cockfosters?
One of the great pre-war Cockney comedians Max Miller’s (him of the loud check suits) routines went roughly like this:
Lady on the Tube: ‘Is this Cockfosters?’
‘No, madam, the name is Miller.’
It adds something to a pretty vacant place.
Cockfosters is the Northern end of the Piccadilly Line, technically in the London borough of Barnet and nine miles from the centre. It’s another of Charles Holden’s thirties Modernist stations, but surprisingly, not much to look at externally – a low, wide, single-storey brick building across the overground railway bridge. There doesn’t seem at first to be any there there at Cockfosters. No sign of a town centre, of anything more than a patchy suburban parade and turnings off to the usual kind of twenties-through-thirties semis. But walk down to the right and there’s a bit more, a couple of stretches where there’s starting to be a sort of proto-Chigwell, Birds of a Feather sort of modest luxury. Several quite expensively got-up big hairdressers. Several kitchen and bathroom-fitting shops with glitzy room sets – all with greys and glass and high-shine black. The Essex/New Jersey look. And nice cafés for the Cockfosters’ equivalent of Ladies who Lunch. Latter-day Lesley Josephs. From the names and the looks there’s a fair bit of Greek/Greek-Cypriot here, and a fair few sleek, prosperous-looking, non-specific brown people too. The local-authority (Barnet) population breakdown identifies roughly nineteen per cent Asian overall in 2007, with Indians roughly nine per cent.
I went into an estate agent. There’s just one pretty girl there, and I’m doing the usual English thing of wondering where her family are from. She explains Cockfosters’ sense of impending wealth and glamour. It turns out that Cockfosters prices are a fair bit higher than Oakwood or Southgate, next and next down the line, because Cockfosters is next to Hadley Wood. And Hadley Wood, while not exactly Weybridge, is a place for second-tier celebs and entrepreneurs. There are, she says, footballers and all sorts there. Hadley Wood, like Notting Hill or Mayfair, has its own shiny, free property magazine, with a picture of the harbour at Cannes on the front. And a lot of advertising for cosmetic procedures and dental veneering. So Cockfosters is special by proximity. Nadia asks me where I live. ‘Pimlico! You must go and see my dad. He’s the talkative Algerian in Café Mignon on Warwick Way.’ She shows me the details of a minute flat; it’s in Betjeman House.
Uxbridge, at the Western end of the line, is another Charles Holden station that doesn’t look much from the street. But inside – and I’ve got the photographs to prove it – the long hall and concourse, the unlikely, set-back, stained-glass windows, the late thirties arcade of shops and the elegant ranks of raw concrete pillars supporting the platform roof could be in Germany or Sweden. It’s that good.
Outside, Uxbridge is incredibly mainstream South-east. Unlike Hounslow – too poor, too ethnic – or Cockfosters – too small and odd – it’s got the whole range of the retail UK on offer, a high street and a shopping centre. It doesn’t warrant a John Lewis, but it’s got everything else. It’s Anytown South-east, and is even tolerably historic – the odd, marooned-looking Georgian house. The whole thing looks miles more secure than any of the hard-scrabble-feeling centres on the Northern extension of the line. I could quite imagine that, say, Sue Barker grew up in one of Uxbridge’s nicer roads (she didn’t), or one of those TV weather people.
Terminal 5 at Heathrow is enormous: the largest free-standing structure in the UK. It’s got something of the future-proofed scale and shine of the super-sized steel-and-glass hyper-stations on the Jubilee Line: Southwark and Canada Water. The Piccadilly Line station below fits into it seamlessly – they’re part of the same composition. You surface in big stainless-steel lifts, you walk over glassy walkways with views of glass roofs going on forever, held up by great, white-painted, Richard Rogers guy-rope columns – modern flying buttresses that dramatize twenty-first-century engineering and massive stress factors.
Airport terminals are in a global bidding war for scale and shine as national statements. I remember my first sight of the new (2007) Hong Kong airport as looking even bigger and more statement-y than T5 (by another star British architect, Norman Foster, this time.) But even by my modest ‘only English’ lights T5 is still quite something. And it’s nice to know I can go there any old Saturday morning just to watch the dress codes at the first-class check-in for the nicer destinations (Basle, Phoenix, Cape Town, Tokyo).
Heathrow is where the new population of the Hounslows, (East, Central and West), has arrived over the last thirty to forty years. The Hounslows are amazingly varied. I’d expected mainly Bangladeshis, but all human life is here. Smart old Sikhs with sharply pressed trousers, North Africans, every kind of Eastern European and even a gaggle of what looked like bemused Tibetan grannies. The Hounslows and Heathrow are hugely interdependent. The whole range of casualized contractors, cleaners and caterers, shop assistants, and check-in-desk girls comes from around there. But cabin crew – more aspirational, even now – probably not. They could live a little further back. The girls married alive in Baron’s Court, the boys sharing in Hammersmith, or off King Street in Hammersmith. Cabin Crew, you see, remain sensitive to the Edwardian middle-class snobberies of London villages and postcodes. They want things nice. Hounslow – any Hounslow – probably feels like a bridge too far for them. The ticket to Dreamland begins, like in 1906, at Hammersmith.
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1. I say him, because it’s usually a him: the last figures I’ve seen are from 2003, when 167 out of 3,000 Underground drivers were women. And that, by the way, was after a recruitment drive targeting them. The first woman train driver on the Underground, Hannah Dadds, only started driving trains in 1978 – on the District Line, as it happens, where she had already worked for nine years, first as a ticket collector and then as a guard. That was the sequence for working your way up: ticket collector, guard, driver. Hannah qualified as a driver at her first attempt, not without encountering a certain amount of sexism en route. Then, at the age of fifty-three, as she had always planned to do, she took early retirement and went to live in Spain. That story, of the girl from the East End who grew up to be a train driver and took early retirement to Spain, is like a short novel about how Britain changed in the twentieth century. Dadds died of cancer in 2011 at the age of seventy, but not before being invited to the first Women of Achievement lunch at Buckingham Palace in 2004.
2. There were some interesting differences when they got round to starting the Paris Metro, most of them in the traditional French direction of increased rationality and systematization. The Metro was a system of lines, a network, right from the start, rather than an opportunistic set of separate ventures. Nine lines were present from the inception; and the idea was that the network would be arranged so that no one in central Paris would ever be more than 500 metres from a Metro station. To this day there are many parts of central London that are far further from the Underground than that. It’s still the case that the Metro feels more coherent and thought-through than the Underground. But it was the Underground which came first, and by a big margin.
3. Marc Isambard Brunel went by the name Isambard in his lifetime, but historians prefer to call him Marc to distinguish him from his son. Bill Gates Sr, the respected corporate lawyer whose son is the more famous Bill Gates, has said that he would give his son a different name if he had the choice over again.
4. The line opened on Christmas Eve because Christmas Day was going to be so busy – a historic irony, since that is now the only day of the year when the whole Underground network is closed. The only people who go into the network on that day now are graffiti artists, who use it to tag areas which would be inaccessible, or mortally dangerous, on days when the trains are running. Many of the tags are in places where only the driver can see them – a driver pointed a few of them out to me when I was travelling in the cab of his train. They were simple signatures rather than more complicated works, and there was something strange and private about the idea that these things would never be seen by anyone other than train drivers and the clean-up crews who eventually come to erase them.
5. In America, train-spotters are known as ‘foamers’, because of their tendency to foam with excitement.
6. Skyfall, which came out just after the proofs of this book came thumping down on my doormat, is a welcome addition to the filmography not just of the Underground but – hooray! – of the District Line itself. The station through which Bond chases his love interest, played by Javier Bardem – sorry, villain, I mean villain – is clearly identified as Temple, on the District, and the crowded train he then gets on is shown as a District Line train, too. Except it isn’t: that isn’t Temple station, and that’s manifestly a train from the deep Tube lines rather than the sub-surface ne
twork. They’re easy to spot because they’re a different shape – the Tube trains are rounded, Tube-shaped, for obvious reasons. And there is another, more important unease in this part of the movie. Shortly afterwards, a Tube train crashes through the floor of the network and nearly kills Bond. But we can easily see that the train is empty, and nobody’s life is at risk except the driver; and the driver is clearly seen flinching and ducking, but unhurt. Moments before the Underground was packed, but this train is empty? It makes no sense. The filmmakers, having evoked the routine crowdedness of the Tube, obviously felt uneasy at the prospect of killing off hundreds of commuters just for a special effect. The audience would have found it just too disturbing. They wanted the crash-bang, but they needed also to signal that it was fake. The whole sequence is a fascinating exercise in the limits and difficulties of depicting the Underground on cinema.
* The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (2001).
* In his London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd gives Piccadilly about a page, and then it’s only about the Circus and the sex; boys and girls having adventures and selling their bodies. And he’s only got a line each for Jermyn Street and Mayfair – more whores – and nothing at all for St James’s. He is a funny one.
* The Buildings of England: London 6: Westminster, Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
* From Blur’s single ‘Girls and Boys’, from their album Parklife (1994).
* And that everyone called them Minnie and Birdie. What could Birdie have stood for? But then my grandmother had another older sister who’d gone to live in South Africa called Ada, so what could you expect?