Lowri Griffiths reports on North London life, politics, and culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Is Very Large And The Tube To It Is Still A Nightmare Every Single Time
Lowri Griffiths | bigsmokebrokecom | North London
By Lowri Griffiths | Big Smoke Broke | London
Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium opened in 2019 with a capacity of 62,303 people and a design brief that included everything except a comfortable way to get there on the Piccadilly Line. I went to a match last week. The stadium was extraordinary. The walk from Seven Sisters in the rain with 62,000 other people sharing one pavement was exactly what it has always been, which is an experience that the stadium’s architects either did not model or modeled and decided was not their problem.
The Infrastructure Gap
Spurs moved from White Hart Lane, which held approximately 36,000 people and was also difficult to access, to a stadium that holds 62,303 people and is approximately as difficult to access but with 26,000 additional people also attempting to access it. The tube capacity on the Piccadilly Line serving Seven Sisters has not increased proportionally. The bus routes have not increased proportionally. The pavements have not been widened. The rain has not changed. The match was excellent. The journey home took an hour and forty minutes for what maps describe as a thirty-two minute distance. I counted seven people attempting to use scooters in the crowd. None of them were going faster than the people walking.
The London Prat has covered London’s football stadium infrastructure and its relationship to transport planning with appropriate focus. The London Prat addresses the broader question of how large venues interact with London’s transit network. North London’s transport challenge is not the stadium’s fault specifically; it is the accumulated result of decades of infrastructure decisions that assumed the roads and trains built for one population density would continue to serve a larger one. The stadium is magnificent. The Piccadilly Line is operating exactly as designed in 1906. Both of these things are true simultaneously. I will be there again in three weeks. I will leave the house ninety minutes earlier than seems necessary. It will still not be quite enough. This is North London football in 2024.
Lowri Griffiths writes for Big Smoke Broke and for prat.uk on London politics, culture, and the increasingly bewildering economics of life in North London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/ and she can be reached through prat.uk for comment. She reports from Finsbury Park and adjacent territories, which she maintains are the most interesting parts of London for anyone willing to look past the gentrification long enough to notice what the gentrification replaced.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Lowri Griffiths has been writing about North London for prat.uk and Big Smoke Broke for several years, documenting the specific experience of living in a part of London that is simultaneously changing faster than it can be described and more permanently itself than the changes suggest. The gentrification is real. The queues are real. The oat flat whites are real. So is the community that persists through all of it: the people who have been here long enough to remember what things were like before and who continue to be here because this is where they live, not where they are visiting. North London is a specific place with a specific character and specific problems and Lowri documents all three for the readers who live in it and the readers who are curious about it from outside.
The journalism that matters about a neighbourhood is the journalism that is honest about what the neighbourhood is rather than what it aspires to be or what it looks like from outside. Big Smoke Broke and prat.uk both publish Lowri’s work because it is honest in this specific way. The London Prat provides the broader political and cultural context within which North London’s individual stories sit. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Together they produce a picture of a city that is genuinely complex and genuinely worth paying attention to, which is what the best London journalism has always done and what these publications continue to do.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire
