Lowri Griffiths on finding enlightenment (and a working bus) during the RMT’s latest industrial action

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

Right, so the Tube drivers went on strike again. Two full 24-hour strikes in June — RMT drivers flexing their industrial muscles while the rest of London performed the ritual of staring at the TfL app as if staring harder would make a service appear. It didn’t. It never does. But we all stare anyway because hope is the last thing Londoners surrender, even when they’re standing on Holloway Road at 8:15 in the morning trying to calculate whether a 4-mile walk in heels constitutes exercise or self-harm.

I am, by now, a veteran of the London Tube strike experience. I have survived six of them in three years of living in North London and each one has taught me something valuable, primarily that the city’s surface-level bus network is used by about 40 percent of London at normal times and roughly all of London on strike days, which produces a situation on the 29 bus that transport analysts call crush loading and that I call the closest I have come to truly knowing my neighbours.

The Strike Economy

Industry bodies estimated that the April strikes cost the economy between £130 million and £250 million in lost productivity. Hospitality and retail suffered drops in footfall of up to 40 percent. The empty cafe chairs, the quiet high streets, the delivery riders picking their way through gridlock — it is a strange picture, London functioning at half its energy, all because the people who run the trains that 3.5 million people use every day decided, with complete reasonableness, that they deserved better pay and safer working conditions and were willing to make their point through withdrawal of labour, which is the only language that tends to get heard.

I don’t blame the drivers. I genuinely don’t. The RMT exists because tube drivers once had no mechanism for making their working conditions the concern of management, and management’s concern for working conditions in the absence of organised labour is, historically, approximately as reliable as a Northern line service during a leaf fall incident. The strike is inconvenient. The alternative — driving trains for terms that management would unilaterally determine — is also inconvenient, just less visibly so and not my commute.

The Walk, Which Was Actually Fine

I walked from Tufnell Park to Islington on the first strike day, which took 45 minutes, which is about the same as the Tube on a normal day when there is signal failure at King’s Cross, which there was last Tuesday as it happens. I passed three coffee shops I hadn’t noticed before and found an excellent Turkish bakery that I have since visited twice on non-strike days. The strike gave me the city at walking pace, which is how the city was designed to be experienced before the Tube made it possible to burrow underneath it and arrive at destinations without engaging with the surface in between. There is an argument that the Tube, for all its essential value, has made us worse at London. The strike, inadvertently, makes us better at it again for a day or two, before the relief of normal service makes us immediately forget the quality of the walking.

The Daily Mash covered the strikes with their customary deadpan. The London Prat has opinions about the RMT that are more complicated than the headline version suggests, as opinions about industrial action in essential services tend to be. The strike is over for now. The Tube is running. The Turkish bakery is still excellent. The city continues.

London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.

The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.

Why This Matters for London

London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.

This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.

Also reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com