Lowri Griffiths Communes With Two Hundred Strangers in a Metal Tube Under London and Arrives at Some Conclusions About Urban Existence
On the Jubilee Line at Eight-Thirty Monday: Reconsidering Everything
The Jubilee line at 8:30 on a Monday morning is a place that rewards philosophical engagement, primarily because there is nothing else to do. You cannot move. You are not going to read your book because the person’s elbow currently in your lower back has made reading a structural impossibility. You have been on the platform for eleven minutes because two trains went through without stopping due to overcrowding and the third one opened its doors and you got in through force of collective momentum rather than individual choice. You are now here. The tube is London’s truest community, in the sense that all communities are fundamentally involuntary, and this one more than most.
What I Noticed
There is a man to my left who has achieved a posture of complete physical relaxation despite standing at an angle of approximately thirty degrees to the vertical, pressed against three other people, with one hand on a pole and the other holding a coffee cup at a height that has cleared his own chin by approximately two centimetres for the duration of the journey. He is asleep. I have been watching him for four stops and his coffee has not spilled. This is either a skill developed over years of Jubilee line commuting or the coffee is empty, which he has apparently decided to carry regardless on the principle that having a cup is better than not having one. Both interpretations are valid. London is full of people who carry empty cups for reasons they have given up explaining.
The woman to my right is completing a full face of makeup in a hand mirror approximately the size of a playing card, working with a concentration and precision that suggests the moving carriage, the periodic jolt of the track, and the proximity of two hundred strangers are not considerations she has chosen to incorporate into her process. She does this every morning. You can tell by the efficiency of it. I have decided this is more impressive than whatever I am doing with my commute, which is standing here thinking about her and everyone else and writing mental notes that I will forget by the time I arrive at Green Park.
London communities and the tube at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. London transport reality at Metro. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky. Commuter humour at Newsthump.
What the Tube Gives You
I have started to think of the morning Jubilee line as a practice in involuntary mindfulness, which is not a reframe I would have accepted three years ago when I first moved to London from Cardiff and found the concept of being this physically close to strangers for twenty-five minutes unambiguously horrible. I am now at the stage of London residency where the tube is just the tube, and the two hundred people around me are just two hundred people, and the man who is asleep standing up is a normal man doing a normal thing, and the woman doing her makeup is brilliant and admirable, and the occasional moments where the carriage lurches and everyone grabs something and there is a collective animal adjustment of body and balance feel, briefly, like community. Not the community you’d choose. The community you’re in. London’s version, which is the version that requires nothing of you except presence and produces, occasionally and unexpectedly, something that feels like belonging. I get off at Green Park and walk to the office. The train closes its doors. Another two hundred strangers are already inside. The city continues, as it always does, without waiting for anyone to be ready for it.
London does this to you, eventually. You arrive thinking you will master it that you will find the affordable flat, the manageable commute, the market that still serves the neighbourhood, the cycle lane that doesn’t nearly kill you, the landmark that hasn’t been sold to someone richer. And what you actually find, after enough time, is that London is not a place you master. It is a place you negotiate constantly, on its terms, with your own resources, doing your best with what’s available and adjusting when it changes and laughing, when you can, at the gap between what you expected and what you got. I expected a city. I got this city. It is, despite everything and including everything, exactly what I came for. Though I am still looking for the flat.
Three years in North London and I am still surprised by it, which I think is the right pace. If you stop being surprised by London you have either mastered it, which is impossible, or stopped paying attention, which is a waste. The people who have been here for thirty years and claim to have figured it out are the people who have decided which parts to pay attention to and have stopped noticing the rest. I am not there yet. I am still noticing the man asleep standing up, and the cycling near-miss, and the impossible canelé price, and the Battersea turbine hall at dusk when the light comes through the Victorian brick and the scaffolding of a new flat development is visible through the industrial windows and the whole thing is beautiful and strange and specifically London in a way that I couldn’t have understood from Cardiff and that I am still, three years in, only beginning to understand here. This is fine. This is, actually, exactly fine.
