The map of the tube on the wall
I studied the map of the London Underground hanging on the wall. Multi-coloured lines sprawled outwards, branching off from one another with no apparent logic. The whole thing was more like a diagram of an electric circuit than a map of a transport system. A thick, light-blue line made its way, in a jagged fashion, across the bottom of the map. The line stood in for the River Thames, anchoring the strange assortments of lines in a geographical reality. I located the tube stops whose names I had heard in films and television: Notting Hill Gate, Baker Street, Wimbledon. My fingers traced the puzzling right-angle corners of the Circle Line. I scrutinised the many tube lines converging at Moorgate, attempting to comprehend the morass of transport there.
The map was pinned to the wall of my friend’s bedroom where we grew up together in the outer suburbs of Tāmaki Makaurau. As a teenager, she was obsessed with London; for her fifteenth birthday, a few of us chipped in to buy her a wall decal of the London skyline—black silhouettes of Big Ben, the London Eye, and the Gherkin—and a Lonely Planet guide to the city. She had no plans to travel there at the time, but she loved the gifts. They added to her small collection of city memorabilia, which at that time was just the one large poster of the London Underground map, designed by Harry Beck in 1933. Together, my friend and I liked to marvel at the scale and detail of the map, and we tried to imagine a city so big as to necessitate such a complex system.
For her birthday the following year, we bought her a fancy 365-page journal, with a red, leather jacket and an attached silk-ribbon bookmark. She had requested it so that she could practice her Spanish by journaling about her day in the language on each page. She was taking NCEA Level 3 Spanish; I was taking Level 3 French, but was far less committed. For the same birthday, her parents gifted her Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in Spanish—again, her request. I grew envious of her gifts; why couldn’t I be so aspirational, so industrious? She was the most outward looking of all of us, always preparing for a future abroad.
*
I burst out my front door, still tugging on my coat’s sleeve and throwing a knitted scarf around my throat. Bounding down the stairs of my block of flats towards the street, I check my phone for the time. I woke up late again, so my morning must start, as always, in a mad rush. I have under half an hour to somehow make the forty-five minute journey to work. No matter: I have come to know London’s transport system intimately; I can make a miracle out of this time paradox. I rent a Lime bike to haul myself down the road to the tube, forgoing my usual ten-minute walk there. After leaping off the bike outside Bethnal Green tube station, with my Apple pay ready, I beep myself through the barriers. If I see even the hint of someone dallying by the ticket barriers, I sigh loudly, letting them know that this sort of disorganisation is unacceptable.
Once through the barriers, I feel a gust of wind, which tells me a tube is approaching, so I run down the escalator, weaving in and around other commuters. The tube grinds to a stop as I make it to the platform. Its doors open and, muscling my way past some fellow commuters waiting, I step onto the carriage. I have convinced myself that my purpose for travel is far more important than any of theirs—I am late for work, can’t you see? So it was my right, in fact, to get on the tube before any of them. Evoking Jean-Paul Sartre in her book On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant wrote that ‘it’s other people who are hell, not you… it’s a relief to admit it.’ As Berlant has described, I don’t need to experience a direct incident with my fellow commuters to feel inconvenienced by them; the mere idea of their closeness—the notion that they could delay me on my way to work, as they fumble for their credit card, or as they hesitate at the tube doors—can feel like a grave assault. But I take great satisfaction in this performance, the disgruntled local.
At the other end of my journey, I leap off the tube and hustle down the platform. Some tourists who, I think with annoyance, have the gall to use the tube during rush hour, stand and look around in confusion, not knowing which of the many exits to take. I am well past them, knowing my optimal exit is via the staircases second from the left. Once I emerge onto the street, my dance continues, as I dodge and whirl around the flow of pedestrians on the footpath, towards my office a few hundred metres down the street from London Bridge station. The scene is similar to what urbanist Jane Jacobs affectionately calls the ‘intricate sidewalk ballet’ where individual dancers ‘miraculously reinforce each other’ and ‘compose an orderly whole.’ This is a certain rhythm of life that Jacobs argues is only found in the urban environment—a rhythm in London that I at first felt overwhelmed by, which I now easily conform to. I’ve practiced the steps well; I get to work on time.
*
A few months ago, I took the train up to Manchester for a night. I was visiting my friend from home with the tube map on the wall, who now lived there with her fiancé and her dog. We spent the evening at a Charli XCX concert, followed by a harrowing walk in a temperature two degrees below zero to a gay bar. We both wore short skirts with chunky boots—little to keep us warm. We danced for a few hours with people we were disturbed to discover were about ten years younger than us—we whispered this observation conspiratorially to each other on the dance floor, feigning devastation, then giggling as if we were getting away with something. We used to go dancing regularly at clubs on Queen Street, but that was ten years ago.
The following day, on my return home, I switched at Euston Station from my Avanti West Coast train to the Northern line in the Underground heading east. As I stood in the tube, holding the handrail above me as the carriage shuddered its way to Old Street, I was troubled by a tickling sensation in my throat. I was coming down with another cold. The fourth time in a row in a matter of months! I would soon complain to anyone who would listen. This streak of bad luck included one confirmed chest infection and a suspected one. When I called to arrange an appointment with the doctor about the first infection, my pronunciation of ‘chest infection’ confounded her, so I adopted RP to flatten out my ‘e’ sounds, and she booked me in to see a nurse. I was prescribed antibiotics. The second time I came in for what I suspected was a recurrence of the chest infection. They were unconvinced, and I left empty handed.
Despite having spent the previous chilly evening pressed up, at first, against a great crush of Charli XCX fans, and then later, against our young dance companions, I suspected, like on every other occasion, that the tube had made me sick. Each time I catch a cold, I scrutinise my movements in the days up until then, scouring my memories for the moment of viral transmission. Borrowing a friend’s bubblegum-flavoured vape for a puff? Nope. That one time some guy on the street coughed into my face as I walked past? No way, and neither is it from leaning in to hear a snotty-nosed friend’s story about her failed job interview over the din of a busy pub.
The Central Line uses carriage stock from 1992. Two-and-a-half-metre by two-and-a-half-metre metal boxes designed to fit snuggly through the narrow tunnels of London’s deepest tube line. Each car has a capacity of 103 people and can gain speeds up to 100 kilometres per hour. I stand in these a few times a week during rush hour, with what I am sure is way beyond the prescribed capacity. Half of East London appears to join me on my journey, and I shrink in the crush of bodies. These rides feature in the days leading up to each chest infection, head cold, asthma flare-up, and flu. I consider the tube the single perpetrator of my perennial illness in London; I am endlessly inconvenienced by Londoners and their germs.
Virginia Woolf described the experience of walking London’s streets as both ‘multitudinous and minute.’ She felt herself ‘shrink’ beneath the city’s swelling crowds and towering infrastructure. To escape this sense of confinement, she would retreat into St Paul’s, where its vast interior allowed her mind and body to ‘widen’ and ‘expand’ in the open space. I experience the inverse when I take the tube.
*
On my first day of work at my new London job, my manager asked about my commute. Although I had been overwhelmed by the crowds during rush hour, I suspected he wanted a glowing review of my tube journey, especially from a foreigner, which I dutifully provided. He declared the London Underground his personal eighth wonder of the world, for ‘where else would you have to wait only four minutes—at most—for the next train?’ Many of my colleagues were born and bred Londoners, and talk of the tube with the same reverence. I even spotted, in the background of a Zoom call with a colleague working from home, the tube map farmed and hanging on their wall. Evidently, the map is not just for kids in another country dreaming of a far-off metropolis.
I asked a few London-based friends about their favourite tube line. Answers came pouring out of them, as if they had already given the question due consideration, and had been waiting for some time to be asked. After most prefaced their answer by discounting the Elizabeth line and Overground as being too obvious to choose (these lines are the newest and most pleasant to ride), they were all game to consider the knottier, uneven quality of the traditional lines. One friend named the District line, which opened in 1868, as her favourite, as it took her from the east into the centre in ‘not a miserable way,’ while another friend favoured the Docklands Light Railway, or the DLR, a newer line, since its aboveground, driverless carriages made her feel like being on a rollercoaster. We all nodded our heads in agreement, familiar with the sensation. Two friends chose, to my amazement, the Northern line. Established in 1890, the Northern Line is the network’s busiest tube line. Despite its notoriously polluted atmosphere and its pokey size (its carriages are from 1995, like the Central Line), one friend named it as a favourite due to its access to ‘all the best stops’ and the other friend, my childhood friend living in Manchester, said it made her feel nostalgic for when she first visited London. Although she lives in Manchester and I in London, I still hold her up as the city’s expert. She loved London long before any of us.
I agreed that these were all worthy choices, but I have a soft spot for the Waterloo & City Line. The majority of the line runs under the River Thames, and it shuttles its passengers from one single location—Bank—to another—Waterloo, or the other way round if you are heading east, with a total journey time of four minutes. It is the least used tube line of the entire network. Taking the Waterloo & City Line is a peaceful reprieve from the typical Underground experience; there’s no way of getting it wrong. It will not split off from its main tracks in Zone 3 to take you to a strange destination you have never heard of before like Hainault or West Ruislip, and you can close your eyes for a brief rest without missing your stop. On one journey, heading towards Waterloo, smoke started to curl out of a vent behind a seat a few feet away from me. I looked around in alarm. What is happening? Should we be worried? A few people who were closer to the smoke stood up and moved to a seat at a comfortable distance away. Others lazily looked up, and after a beat, returned to their newspapers and phones, indifferent. This was just a quirk of the Waterloo & City Line to be embraced, I gathered, and the hazardous air and my ailing lungs were the consequences of its convenience. I did as the Londoners did and returned to scrolling on my phone, ignoring the smoke.
*
I don’t find solace in the tube, but like Woolf’s visits to the cathedral, I am seeking something when I am down there. To complain about the tube, to know its peculiarities, feels like a triumph of some kind: I know what it really means to live in this city. You can’t tell that I’m not from here. I imagine pinning this up on the wall next to my friend’s tube map in her childhood home in Auckland twenty years ago. To stand back and marvel at it, of the ways I might have caught up with her.
Julia Craig is a writer and public servant from Tāmaki Makaurau, based in London. She has an interest in creative nonfiction and has written for The Spinoff, Ensemble, The Pantograph Punch, Art News, and The Art Paper.