Underground, Overground (32 page)

The assailant was Ken Livingstone, who has done more for public transport in London than anyone since Frank Pick, or at any rate since that earlier embodiment of municipalisation, Herbert Morrison. Like Morrison, Livingstone was born into a working-class family in Lambeth. His father was a merchant seaman, his rather beautiful mother a music-hall performer, an acrobatic dancer who performed in music halls – also in circuses, where she would balance on elephants. When Livingstone took power at the GLC in 1981, a journalist wrote that Herbert Morrison ‘would be turning in his grave'. By then Morrison was being looked back on as the embodiment of Old Labour pragmatism, but in his time he, like Livingstone, had been the frightening ‘New Man'.

Livingstone the firebrand is slowly becoming the patrician elder statesman. Such contradictions are his stock in trade. Livingstone is the phlegmatic controversialist, the self-deprecating self-publicist. When he first came to prominence, this former lab technician and breeder of newts and other amphibians was depicted as an ascetic loner and nerd. It later became apparent that he liked a glass of wine, that he was quite the ladies' man and that he appreciated good food. The earliest pictures of the boy Livingstone in
Citizen Ken
(1984) by John Carvel show him riding bikes, but he was never a transport romantic. Unlike Frank Pick, he does not combine an aesthetic appreciation of transport with his desire to use it for the social good. For Livingstone, transport is
all
about the social good – and the aggrandisation of
Ken Livingstone, of course. (So he would phase out the beautiful Routemaster bus in favour of the sinister but supposedly more user-friendly ‘Bendy Bus' in 2005, which may in turn have been a factor in his defeat by Boris Johnson in the mayoral election of 2008. Johnson
is
a transport romantic, albeit with a romanticism not confined to public transport – the last time I looked, he was the motoring correspondent of
GQ
magazine – and he has commissioned a new Routemaster for the twenty-first century. But he is not steeped in transport, as Livingstone is.)

London politics is very largely concerned with public transport, so any aspirant in that arena had better become interested in it, and Livingstone has been engaged right from the start of his career.

In the early Seventies the Conservative administration of the GLC campaigned for four orbital motorways to be built in London: the London ringways. The scheme was at first supported by the Labour grouping on the council, but in 1973 Labour won the GLC election on a platform that included opposition to the ringways, which were already partially built: hence, for example, the lovely Westway. Stephen Joseph, the director of the Campaign for Better Transport, told me, ‘I say that's a turning point. If London had had the ringways, it would have looked much more like Los Angeles than it does now.' That vision had real momentum behind it in the early Sixties. In her novel
The Heart of London
(1961) Monica Dickens paints a portrait of a community called Cottingham Park – actually Notting Hill – that is becoming excited about rumours of a ‘Transurban Expressway'. One character asks, ‘Don't you think it's time somebody did something about getting traffic in and out of London?' and the new road is seen by some as likely to bring an end to the shabby parochialism of the area. The building of the ringways would have been the fulfilment of the vision of the Buchanan Report, which was published in 1963 and set out a plan for the civilised accommodation
of cars in city centres by means of flyovers, underpasses and pedestrianised zones. According to Stephen Joseph, the Barbican gives us a taste of it. ‘That was the look: walkways with cars underneath. The lower level is for the cars, the upper level is the pedestrian.'

Ken Livingstone was elected to the GLC in 1973, representing Norwood in south London. He opposed the ringways and was perhaps elected because of the plan to build them. As he writes in his memoir,
If Voting Changed Anything, They'd Abolish It
(1988): ‘My own campaign in Norwood was greatly helped when the Tory GLC member made the mistake of voting in favour of a last-minute change in the motorway plans, which would have re-routed them through the middle of the constituency he was asking to return him to County Hall.' In allying himself against the road-builders, his even more left-wing colleague ‘Red' Ted Knight suggested to Livingstone that he was consorting with ‘middle-class environmentalists', but then ‘Red Ted' attended a number of meetings with ‘Red Ken', and he saw the popularity of the anti-car cause. In 1977 they would both disrupt the inquiry into the plans for widening the Archway Road, a proposal strongly opposed by Red Ted, who had become Parliamentary candidate for Hornsey.

You can't win votes on a road-building platform in London. Too many houses have to be knocked down. In the late Seventies it was clear that, as Stephen Joseph says, ‘the focus had to go back to public transport', and it would do so when Labour won the GLC again in 1981 and Livingstone replaced Horace Cutler as its leader.

Livingstone introduced the policy on which Labour had campaigned: ‘Fares Fair'. Bus and Tube fares were cut by a third, with the aim of increasing the use of public transport from its static level, and of counteracting the fares increases of previous years. It was partly paid for by an increase in the surcharge levied by the
GLC on the London boroughs, but the Conservative-controlled borough of Bromley, where there was no Tube station (Bromley-by-Bow on the District Line is not in Bromley), objected all the way to the House of Lords, which ruled in their favour. In March 1982 the GLC was obliged to double fares, and whereas the reduction had increased use of buses and Tubes by half a million, the fare increase reduced it by a million. In 1982 a compromise was reached, resulting in a net fare reduction of 25 per cent, and this together with the emergence of the economy from recession and London's increasing attractiveness as a tourist destination marks the point at which Tube use ceased gently declining and became a steeply rising curve.

London Underground managers were wary of another part of the Livingstone package: the system of zoning that would allow the introduction of the Travelcard for use on bus, tube and main line – a ‘coarsening' as they saw it, of the existing and more numerous fare gradations, and one that would simply lead to a reduction in revenue. They were wrong. According to Stephen Joseph, ‘The argument that simplification drives growth was not accepted by the Underground people, and when Livingstone was proved right, he became sceptical of transport models that extrapolated past trends into the future.' In other words, Livingstone's tremendous boldness – his cockiness, you might say – comes from that victory. Are we to blame Livingstone for Tube overcrowding? In part, yes, but as Sir John Eliot had observed in 1955, while Chairman of the London Transport Executive: ‘They're not crammed in. They cram themselves in.'

The system of zoning would lead logically to the introduction of the modern ticket barriers from 1987 (the Underground Ticketing System, or UTS), in that it allowed the software in the ticket gates to be relatively simple. Although the widespread introduction of automatic barriers was an innovation, Underground stations have always been screened off by some sort
of gate where tickets are checked. You have never been able to just saunter onto the platforms and look at the trains, or meet someone off a train. That's a shame, but at least the determining logic is infallible: you can't check passengers' tickets on an Underground train. But now barriers are being introduced on main-line inter-city stations, and Richard Malins, a consultant in railway revenue protection, campaigns against this. ‘It is extending an urban railway principle into inter-urban railways, and it's not necessary,' he says. Automatic barriers are not civilised, and there is always a moment of tension when you approach, although if you push the paddles (as the ticket gates are called) they will open as easily as a curtain.

To continue with barriers for a moment … at first, the ones on the Underground were only in Zone 1, where most journeys start or end. Gradually they spread to those places where manual ticket checks were being evaded, and if you found ticket barriers in your local suburban station soon after 1987, then, yes, an aspersion was being cast on your area. The barriers were in turn a necessary precondition of electronic payment; in other words the Oyster Card, which was introduced in 2003, when my son was nine. He immediately insisted I start using the Oyster, but I didn't trust it. With typical boldness, however, Livingstone bullied middle-aged technophobes like me into using Oysters by making the cash fares sometimes twice as expensive, with the result that Oysters are now used on 85 per cent of public transport journeys in the capital.

Fares Fair was a popular policy with Londoners, but Livingstone barely had time to take a bow before Mrs Thatcher brought the curtain down on him. She had fought the General Election of 1983 promising to abolish the GLC – in other words, to abolish Ken Livingstone – and she duly won, whereupon the functions of the GLC were distributed across a range of obscure and undemocratic bodies. In 1984 something called London Regional Transport was established as a quango, with something
called London Underground Limited a quango within it. As a result of the policies of Livingstone, passenger numbers continued to rise, paradoxically enabling reforms more to the liking of a Conservative mindset. Staffing levels were reduced, through the extension of one-man operation of trains and the contracting out of aspects of the business. The next set of modifications were caused by disaster.

On 18 November 1987 a fire that started underneath an escalator at King's Cross killed thirty-one people. It was caused by a dropped match, probably by someone gasping for a fag, having endured the penance of not being able to smoke on any of the trains, and many of the platforms. (I have often wondered whether the person who dropped that match knew that they had dropped it.) After the fire, the smoking ban was made total. The wood was stripped from escalators, and wooden fixtures generally were taken out of the system. Where they survive, as with the wooden benches on the otherwise charmless Victoria Line platforms, they seem like a touch of old world luxury. The management structure was also rationalised – it has been said that the Underground had been run by ‘baronies of engineers' – and a culture of ‘safety first' was implemented. The frequently heard and ungrammatical mantra reporting that any given station is closed ‘because of the London Fire Brigade in attendance' is a legacy of the King's Cross fire. In previous years any suspicious smouldering would have been investigated by station staff. Another legacy of the fire.

Between the late Eighties and the late Nineties the Underground received fitful bursts of proper funding from the government, in part to make the changes required by the Fennell Report into the King's Cross fire. Meanwhile rising passenger numbers and increasing traffic congestion made the Underground a deserving case for sustained investment, preferably from the private sector. And so the scene was set for another of Livingstone's
wars. But first the story of a line whose Extension represented an early idea of what private money might do for the Tube …

The Jubilee is, to adapt the footballer's phrase, a line of two halves. The first part opened in 1979, comprising the route it inherited from the Bakerloo: Baker Street to Stanmore. There was also a new tunnel from Baker Street to Charing Cross. The second part comprises the extension to Stratford, opened in 1999. The line is like a man who wears a scruffy tweed jacket, but with expensive trousers and shoes by Armani, because the Extension is determinedly glitzy. It was well funded and ran through an area where there was room to build, so the stations are ‘future-proofed': that is to say, big.

The older half has its charms, mainly left over from the 1930s: the lovely, lambent station at St John's Wood, with its cosy, recessed wooden benches, and the forest of uplighters on the escalators. (It was not designed by Holden, but is in the manner of Holden.) Beyond Finchley Road there's a pleasant sleepiness about it: the creepers growing over the backs of the houses at Dollis Hill, the overgrown embankments leading up to Kingsbury, the cottage-like charm of the stations at Stanmore and Queensbury.

Baker Street and Green Park feature experimental decoration characteristic of the late Seventies and early Eighties, in which some stations were given motifs reflecting their particular locations: at Baker Street, scenes from the Sherlock Holmes stories appear; Green Park has vivid orange tiles on which black leaves are superimposed. Charing Cross Jubilee platform had images of Nelson's Column. I say ‘had' because when the Jubilee was extended, Charing Cross was not invited. The new line would run directly from Green Park to Westminster, before proceeding
to Waterloo and points east. When it became clear in the late Nineties that this would happen, I received anxious letters to my ‘Tube Talk' column from Charing Cross Jubilee users, and I raised the matter with a press officer. ‘It's not possible to run new tunnels between Charing Cross and Waterloo,' she said. ‘Why?' I asked. ‘There's just too much stuff below the ground,' she replied, not completely convincingly. So the Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross were closed to passengers and opened to film-makers, including those responsible for the above-mentioned horror film
Creep
, in which a lot of blood is spilled on those platforms, a very fitting metaphor. Christian Wolmar has described the abandonment of the Jubilee Charing Cross as ‘a shocking waste of money', given that it had been opened only a decade before.