Lowri Griffiths on the great British refusal to acknowledge that public transport has become a slow-cook oven, and what it says about us

I’m writing this from a 35-degree carriage between Tufnell Park and Camden Town, and I have made peace with the fact that the linen shirt I put on at 8.12 this morning is now, technically, part of me. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I am here, dear reader, to file what may be my last newsletter as a recognisably human-shaped person.

The Theological Question of TfL Cooling

The Northern Line, as anyone who has ever ridden it in August can attest, is not so much a railway as a slow-cook oven on rails. The trains are not air-conditioned, on the technical grounds that air-conditioning the trains would require boring new ventilation shafts the entire length of the line, which would cost approximately the GDP of a medium-sized European nation, and on the spiritual grounds that Londoners have always suffered on the Underground, and to remove that suffering would be to sever us from a tradition that runs from Victorian sewage workers to whoever it was who invented the phrase ‘mind the gap.’

The Mayor’s office has, to its enormous credit, made some progress on cooling. The newer trains on other lines have proper air conditioning. The deeper Tube lines, however, run through tunnels so old and so narrow that retrofitting cooling systems is roughly equivalent to threading a hosepipe through a drinking straw. According to The Evening Standard, TfL has, over recent years, deployed a substantial array of mitigation strategies including industrial fans, chilled-water tanks, and what one engineer described to me, off the record, as ‘just sort of hoping for the best.’

The Rituals of the Sweltering Commuter

There are, I have observed, three types of person on a hot Northern Line carriage. There is the Denier, who is wearing a wool blazer and a tie and is, against all visible evidence, refusing to acknowledge that his body is mostly water and that water is currently leaving him. There is the Performer, who has dressed for a beach holiday she is not on, and is fanning herself with a free Metro newspaper while loudly soliciting the carriage’s sympathy. And there is the Stoic, of whom I am one, who has resolved to look serenely out of the window into the black tunnel wall, while internally calculating whether the linen shirt can be salvaged or whether it must be respectfully buried.

The Stoic is, of course, a fiction. The Stoic is, in fact, the Performer with better PR.

What This Says About Us

I have written before, in my previous columns on London infrastructure, that the British relationship with public discomfort is essentially Calvinist. We believe, somewhere in our bones, that suffering on the Tube is character-forming. We do not, in fact, want air-conditioning. We want the option to refuse air-conditioning, in the manner of a Victorian who turns down a glass of water on the grounds that thirst makes him morally superior to the French.

This is, you will note, completely insane. It is also, I think, the reason I have lived in this city for fourteen years.

The Climate Considerations

None of this is funny, of course, when you consider that London is going to keep getting hotter. According to The Guardian, recent climate modelling suggests that 35-degree summer days will, by the 2040s, become substantially more common. The Tube, as currently engineered, is not built for that. Neither, frankly, are the linen shirts.

I have been thinking, between Belsize Park and Chalk Farm, about what proper Tube cooling would actually require. It would require, as a starting point, a substantial public investment in ventilation infrastructure, which would in turn require a political class willing to make the case for expensive long-term capital projects whose payoff lies a decade in the future. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider whether such a political class currently exists.

The Walking Alternative

For the past three weeks, I have, on the truly diabolical days, been walking from Highgate to Holborn. It takes ninety minutes. It is, in many ways, lovely. You see foxes. You see joggers who have made even worse life choices than you have. You see, around Camden, a man who has been performing the same plastic-bucket drum solo for what I am increasingly confident is the entire decade.

The walk does not, of course, scale. London cannot have eight million people walking everywhere. But it has reminded me that the Tube is a privilege that I had stopped recognising as one, and that even on the worst Northern Line morning, I am moving, in air, through a city, faster than my grandmother would have believed possible. This is a useful corrective to the shirt situation.

What I Am Doing About It

I have, dear reader, done the only thing a self-respecting North London journalist can do in these conditions, which is to buy a small handheld fan, the kind that runs on a USB charger and looks, in all honesty, slightly ridiculous. I deploy it openly. I have made my peace with my dignity. I would rather arrive at work cool and slightly absurd than arrive at work melted and serious.

If you see me on the Northern Line, fanning myself with what looks like a small purple plastic helicopter, please do not say anything. I am a journalist, not a celebrity, and the social contract between us is that you let me do this in peace.

Coming Next

Next week, I will be writing about the curious phenomenon of North London estate agents who have, in the past eighteen months, started describing studios as ‘compact statement homes.’ If you have been shown round one of these by a young man named Jonty, please do get in touch.

For more of my dispatches from this overheated, overpriced, and yet obstinately beloved city, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.

For satirical takes on British-public-transport-as-cultural-question, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/