On the buses

Red Routemaster buses in Oxford Street, London, in 2002
Roitemasters in Oxford Street

The Routemasters are like jellied eels or Hawksmoor Churches or those people who swim in the ponds on Hampstead Heath. They’re eccentric and they say something about London’s weirdness and complexity and also its attachment to worn-out ideas and things. History tells us we won’t miss the old buses as much as we think we will, though. They’ll go the way of smoking carriages on the tube (or that pub on the platform at Sloane Square tube). In a few years they’ll be a folk memory – and besides, the bendy buses are already acquiring their own myths which will smoothly replace Routemaster stories over the next decades (they’re so huge: they’re like two tennis courts joined together. You could film an episode of Strictly Come Dancing in one half easily).

Like most people, what I’ll miss most is the conductors and not only because both my parents were conductors on Routemasters in the 50s. In those days the conductor was very much the junior crew member. Lots of drivers from that period were war-scarred veterans who’d learnt to drive in a tank or a military ambulance or a truck and joined the buses on demob. These men were worldly and full of stories and they often took their young conductors under their wings. My parents still talk with a lot of affection about their various drivers from that period, men who brought the wisdom and stoicism of the battlefield to the buses and weren’t really bothered what jumped-up inspectors and managers had to say, what with having seen off the Nazis and all that.

They’re not all Routemasters, you know. We call them Routemasters now like we call vacuum cleaners ‘hoovers’. Stick your hand out and stop the next bus geek and he’ll tell you that there were loads of other brands of double-decker, half-cab, open-platform buses on the road back then and that, whichever one you worked on, they were all hard work. No proper heating, no power steering, no automatic transmission, nowhere to stow a pram or a suitcase.

Fifteen years ago I went down to the London Transport Museum and bought my Dad an old conductor’s ticket machine for his birthday. It was a thing of beauty: made from shiny aluminium, worn smooth by years of service. It was heavy and had a satisfyingly chunky action (“whizz-whizz-clunk”). Of course, when I gave the thing to him he said: “Never used one of these. This is a model G. Very unreliable. We used the D in my garage”.

Holiday diversions, part 1

The letters Q and N plus an RAF roundel painted on the sillver, riveted side of an old RAF plane at the RAF museum in Hendon, England
Insignia on the side of an old RAF plane at the museum in Hendon

The Royal Airforce Museum at Hendon is a top day out with the kids – especially now that, like all national museums and galleries – it’s free. It’s a pretty sobering experience too – war is not glorified here (although the ejector seat display is pretty exciting).

The most striking thing is how flimsy these aeroplanes are – not just the stiffened linen and bent wood of the early warplanes but the dodgy looking riveted aluminium and steel of the modern fighters. I’m sure the pilots and engineers know better but some of these crates bring to mind nothing more solid than the creaking plywood holiday caravans of my youth – only with nuclear missiles hanging under them.

Nothing invulnerable about these machines – and nothing trivial about getting in one and setting out over enemy territory…

Building Magazine on why construction needs migrant workers

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Gordon Brown’s announcement of a larger quota for desperately needed overseas construction workers is cue for a good piece from Building magazine about migrant workers on UK sites. The article focuses on the experience of workers on the huge Paternoster Square development, next door to St Paul’s Cathedral in The City – from Italy, Hungary, Zimbabwe and Germany. This is the kind of access only a prestige trade title like Building could get but it’s crying out for a longer treatment – five workers from four nations on one well-run site is hardly an in-depth survey.

The magazine’s coverline sums up the UK building trade’s attitude to migrant workers: “The indispensibles: why construction needs migrant workers”.

And watch out for those pea-soupers…

Strange ‘insider tips’ from The Economist’s London City Guide that came through my letterbox the other day, apparently cut and pasted from a 1950s travel guide:

Table manners are keenly observed as a sign of good breeding. Never talk with your mouth full; never reach across the table; do not wave cutlery around or yell “I’m done” to the waiter. The British are less politically correct than their American counterparts. Wittiness often means an agility with sexual innuendo, with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The woes of public transport are a sure-fire way of reviving a flagging conversation.

Ironic? Out of touch? You decide.

A quiet city

Ticket for the 19 March 2003 performance of Tosca at the English National Opera in London

2023 UPDATE: I’d forgotten that the invasion of Iraq, which, when it began, had been so well-telegraphed, filled us all with such dread. I mean we all knew the exact day and time it would happen, weeks in advance. And London – other cities too – was in a state of alert (maybe not so weird, we were all still basically hysterical about 9/11). The bleak irony of the fact that we Londoners were all freaking out about the risk to our own lives as the invasion that produced almost two decades of chaos and suffering in Iraq was about to begin is, well, bleak. Anyway, what did I do that night? The night the coalition forces were gathering at the Iraqi border and getting ready to deliver what we would learn was called ‘shock and awe’ on the people of that other city? I went to the fucking opera. Original post follows:

Yesterday was my 40th birthday. Juliet and I went to the Coliseum to sob through the ENO‘s Tosca (a City in turmoil, gripped by fear – torture, love, war and betrayal). We stayed at a hotel practically next door in St Martin’s Lane. The hotel was half empty and there were plenty of empty seats at the Opera (Americans staying at home, apparently).

Our cab driver this morning made a cheeky u-turn by Trafalgar Square and jumpy, armed police practically arrested him (British police don’t usually carry guns). The streets of the West End are Sunday Morning quiet (and it’s not just the congestion charging).

No panic, no bulk buying, no drama at all really – just the barely tangible signs of a City’s building anxiety. It’s this kind of tiny shift in mood that slows an economy, trips up a recovery. Watching the rolling news in our hotel room, the empty streets of Baghdad echo and amplify London’s barely noticable slow-down.

(here’s an excellent Ten things you never knew about Tosca from the University of Chicago Press, by the way).

Phil Gyford has done a wonderful thing

He’s stretched the weblog model to accommodate a day-at-a-time presentation of an 1893 edition of Pepys’ diary. There’ll be a new beautifully annotated and cross-referenced entry every day and there’s enough background information and context to keep anybody interested in Pepys, London or the period happy. It’s a brilliant application of Movable Type and really does illuminate the text – readers can further annotate the text by adding comments. I hope the historians and biographers are paying attention – this is a twist on conventional historiography that could change the rules completely. Phil writes about the project at his own weblog. “I’m looking forward to reading it myself, and I thought this would be a good way to have lots of people read it with me” he says, disarmingly.

Tily in the gloom

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The questionable low-light capabilities of this Ericsson cam-phone (have you wondered why the TV ads all seem to be set in the Sahara or Southern California in high summer?) and the sepulchral gloom of Blacks in Dean Street produce interesting results. Here’s Stuart Tily, another.com‘s new capo, looking like a Rembrandt merchant (you might need to adjust the brightness to see him at all).

Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide

One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan’s wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I’ll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though.

If I’ve got this right, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth’s extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).