Don’t let fear stop you going underground

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/07/underground-leytonstone-stabbing-tube

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I used to write a column about the tube, and a woman I knew couldn’t bear to look at it. In 1975 she’d been about to board the train that smashed into the wall at Moorgate, killing 43 people, but decided against at the last minute: “I don’t know why, maybe I’m a witch.” She became a tube-phobic person, and I suppose a few more have been created recently.

On Sunday a man was charged with attempted murder after a stabbing at Leytonstone station. It’s being treated as a terrorist incident. Early last week it was reported that “fat-shaming” cards had been handed out on the tube, an instance of social media-type nastiness going 3D, like the monster that crawls out of the television screen in the Japanese horror film, The Ring. Then a man was allegedly pushed under a train at a station in north London. The stuff of nightmares indeed.

Related: Man charged with attempted murder over Leytonstone tube station attack

Whether in Glasgow, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo or New York, an underground railway does seem an outrageous, counter-intuitive idea. We go to these beautiful cities and are directed straight down into the basement, but millions around the world comply every morning.

In London, where the concept was pioneered, there is a permanent ambivalence about the tube. In 1939, underground stations provided shelter from bombs. Today, people might think they’re venturing on to the frontline by venturing below the surface, especially those who recall the attacks of July 2005.

The logo for London Underground, the roundel, can represent a rising or sinking sun. On first moving to the capital I took comfort from the fact that those descending with me on the escalators seemed respectable types. On a plane I have always been heartened that among my fellow passengers are people who look too self-assured to die in an air crash – but as with a plane, the noises of the conveyance bothered me: especially the desperate-sounding roar of what I came to know as the air-brake compressor of a tube train. Then there was the claustrophobia. The carriages themselves seemed too tightly confined, and surely the tunnel clearance would eventually prove too small, and my train would rock, and bang into the wall?

The Metropolitan, the first underground line, was disliked for being not only claustrophobic but also polluted, since it was served by steam trains. In 1890, came “electrivisation” and the first deep-level “tube”: the City & South London Railway, which had a generating station at Stockwell. But this remote power source was in itself sinister. As expressed in an HG Wells story, The Lord of the Dynamos, passengers seemed at the mercy of this arbitrary and god-like mechanism – and the tiny, airless carriages of that first tube did frequently stop in the tunnel for no apparent reason.

A film of 1928, Underground, climaxes in a vertiginous chase across the roof of the Lots Road power station. Death Line (1972) and Creep (2004) present zombified troglodytes on the underground, which is often depicted as a kingdom of the dead. I once had a cab ride along the Piccadilly line at rush hour, and everyone on the crowded platform edges looked like a potential corpse.

About 50 people kill themselves every year on the tube, but the number has not increased with increased ridership

But if there is darkness in our underground lives, there is also unquestionably some light. About 50 people kill themselves every year on the tube, but the number has not increased commensurately with the vast increase in ridership in recent years, perhaps because people don’t want to jump in front of a crowd. The chances of any given tube journey resulting in a fatal accident are one in 300 million and that figure will go down when driverless trains are introduced, in tandem with glass screens along the platforms. Meanwhile we have a pretty stunning instance of mass mutual trust.

The tube is generally used in the altruistic spirit in which it was conceived. Here was a means of distributing people away from the inner-city slums of 19th century London; a railway that is beautiful and humane (especially those Edwardian stations designed by Leslie Green that have unique tiling patterns designed to be recognised by illiterate passengers).

The tube is democracy in action, a function of consent: people let the passengers off first, stand on the right, move down along the cars. What is known in the trade as “passenger flow” is enabled by a million such accommodations every day. The Edwardian underground system was promoted with the slogan “Take the Tube and Avoid All Anxiety”. I don’t know about avoiding anxiety, but – ambivalent or not – we have made the rumbling underground a soundtrack to our lives.