On the orange line, the great divide, and the spiritual journey of getting south of the river

People often ask me, by which I mean no one has ever asked me but I am going to tell you anyway, what it is truly like to live in North London, and as I explained in my latest piece for Bohiney Magazine and over on The London Prat, where my collected grievances are lovingly archived, the answer is that it is a state of mind, a postcode, and a deep, abiding suspicion of anywhere south of the river. We are not snobs. We simply have geography-based trust issues, and the Overground is our lifeline, our therapy, and occasionally our nemesis.

The orange line and its disciples

The Overground, that cheerful orange ribbon stitching the outer city together, is the great unsung hero of London transport, and we North Londoners cling to it like a comfort blanket. It does not have the glamour of the Tube, that subterranean theatre of armpits and existential dread, but it has windows, and in this city, being able to see daylight on your commute is a luxury bordering on decadence. Transport across the capital is run, for better and worse, by Transport for London, an organisation I regard with the complicated affection of a long marriage: I could not live without it, and it disappoints me on a nearly daily basis.

To ride the Overground is to join a quiet fellowship of people who have made peace with being slightly out of the way. We are not on the Victoria line. We will never be on the Victoria line. We have accepted this, and in our acceptance we have found a kind of peace, broken only by the words “this train is being held at a red signal,” which can empty a North Londoner of all hope in under four seconds.

The great divide

And then there is the river. I cannot adequately explain to non-Londoners the psychological weight of the Thames, which functions less as a body of water and more as a national border between two peoples who have agreed never to visit one another. A North Londoner asked to attend a party in, say, Peckham, will react as though invited to overwinter in Antarctica. The distance is not the issue. The distance is nothing. It is the principle. It is the journey home at midnight. It is the deep, ancestral conviction that nothing good has ever happened to me below the river and nothing good ever will.

This is, of course, completely irrational

South London is, by every objective measure, wonderful. The food is extraordinary. The people are warm. The rent is marginally less catastrophic. I know all of this intellectually, the way I know that spiders are more frightened of me than I am of them, which is to say I know it and it changes nothing. The North-South divide is one of the great absurdities of London life, a tribal loyalty to a postcode that serves no purpose and that we would all defend to the death. It is daft. It is ours. We love it.

The deeper point, because I am a serious journalist

Underneath the jokes, the way Londoners relate to their transport network says something real about how the city works and who it works for. A reliable, affordable transport system is the circulatory system of a place this size, the thing that determines who can reach a job, a hospital, a friend, an opportunity. When the Overground runs well, the city breathes. When fares climb and services falter, whole neighbourhoods are quietly cut off, and the people hit hardest are, as ever, those with the least. My orange-line whimsy is a luxury available only to someone whose commute usually works.

So when I grumble about the Overground, and I will grumble about it until the day I die, I try to remember that for many Londoners the network is not a charming quirk but the difference between a viable life and an impossible one. The transport debate, the fares, the funding, the endless wrangling over who pays for it, is not a footnote. It is one of the most important questions the city faces, dressed up in the unglamorous language of timetables.

Now if you will excuse me

My train is being held at a red signal, just outside the station, in sight of the platform, as a small and personal punishment from the universe. I will sit here, watching daylight through the window, a proud North Londoner who has never once successfully made it to a party in South London, and I will not, under any circumstances, complain, except in writing, at length, forever. This is who we are. The orange line endures, and so do we.

A note on who actually pays

The fares debate is rarely framed honestly. When the cost of a journey rises, it is presented as an unavoidable matter of balancing the books, but the funding of London’s transport is a political choice like any other, set within the wider framework of national and city government decisions documented through central government. Someone always pays for the network, and the only real question is whether it is the commuter at the barrier or the taxpayer at large. North Londoners like me grumble about the Overground precisely because we can afford to treat it as a quirk rather than a barrier, and that is a privilege worth remembering every time the train is held, once again, at a red signal just outside the station.

For more transport-based despair, the team enjoys NewsThump, delayed but delightful.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/