Before the
Industrial Revolution, everyone lived within short walking distance of their
workplace. However, all of this has now changed and many people commute large
distances to work, often taking around one hour in each direction. We are now
used to being stuck in traffic, crammed onto a train, rushing for connecting
trains and searching for parking spaces close to the station or our workplace.
Commuters explores both the history and present practice of commuting;
examining how it has shaped our cities and given rise to buses, underground
trains and suburban railways. Drawing upon both primary sources and modern
research, Commuters tells the story of a way of life followed by millions of
British workers. With sections on topics such as fictional commuters and the
psychology of commuting; this is a book for everybody who has ever had to face
that gruelling struggle to get to the office in time.
The commute completely transformed Britain. Is it
over for ever?
Commuting
It helped create the suburbs, with countless towns
thriving due to good transport links. Now it is under threat, with potentially
huge consequences for our cities and social lives
Sam
Wollaston
@samwollaston
Mon 24 Aug
2020 06.00 BST
It is 7.45
on a Monday morning and I am heading for the office. It is my first visit to
the Guardian for more than four months, but the prime minister wants us back at
work. Commuters are reliable, law-abiding creatures of habit, cogs in a greater
machine; I am doing what I am told.
On the way
out of the house, I pass a 1910 Underground poster in the hall, extolling the
merits of my particular suburb. “Live in a New Neighbourhood,” it reads, under
a picture, by the artist Alfred France, of a brown country mouse welcoming a grey
town mouse to a semi-rural idyll. “24 minutes from Piccadilly Circus, including
change at Baker St. 6d per day for season ticket.”
One hundred
and ten years on (and for a bit more than 6d), I am living that same dream. But
at Dollis Hill station, now on the Jubilee line, there are very few other
commuters waiting on the platform. Before Covid-19, in the rush hour, you would
often have to ruck and maul just to get on to a train. Today, there are only
three people, masked and well-distanced, in the carriage. It does not get much
busier as the journey continues. A couple more at Willesden Green, once a rural
area with a few grand houses – until about 1870, when the builders moved in and
began turning it into a working-class suburb for a new breed of commuter.
At Finchley
Road, I change on to the Metropolitan line, which brings commuters in from the
more affluent (and further afield) mock-Tudor suburbs that became known as
Metro-land and were celebrated by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and Orchestral
Manoeuvres in the Dark. But, again, there are very few commuters today. The
capital – normally the lungs of the country, sucking in workers in the morning
and exhaling them in the late afternoon – is breathing like a hibernating bear.
The tube
has never been a place for striking up friendly conversations. With masks and
distancing, it is more eyes-down-make-no-contact than ever. Social media is an
easier space to approach strangers. My eye was caught by a tweet from a
passenger on the 8.08 from Surbiton to Waterloo, usually one of the busiest
commuter trains in the country, with a video clip showing the empty carriage.
Surbiton, AKA Suburbiton, is quintessential commuter belt, home to Tom and
Barbara in the 70s sitcom The Good Life and likely the inspiration for the
fictional Climthorpe, where the salaryman Reggie hit his midlife crisis in The
Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
“The 8.08’s
usually pretty busy – I’d be standing in the door somewhere,” Charlie Deacon,
who posted the video, tells me on the phone. He did not chat to his fellow
commuters. “I recognised the same people most days, but I didn’t really know
anyone.”
Deacon, who
works for a renewable energy company, worked from home throughout lockdown, but
he has started coming in to the office once a week. “I’ve always been a
proponent of flexible working, but it is also nice to have that one day in the
office, to see the whites of people’s eyes.”
Team
meetings and complex projects are better dealt with in person than via video
calls and endless emails, he says. But Deacon never wants to commute five days
a week again. “I’m a lot less stressed, I don’t have to deal with the train,
I’m saving lots of money; I’m getting more sleep, more time to exercise, with
my partner, to do other things in the evenings … It’s totally positive.”
The
journey, when he makes it, is a breeze, with seats available and space to
breathe and distance, as his video shows. “This is about as busy as it gets,”
mumbles a woman wearing a hi-vis jacket, a mask and a visor as she directs a
handful of people in and out of King’s Cross station, where I emerge on my
journey to work.
This is
reflected in the government statistics monitoring transport during the
pandemic. Although the numbers are not broken down by the purpose of the
journey, the use of national rail and London Underground services so far in
August is about 30% of what it would be normally. Bus journeys are well down,
too: about 40% outside London and 50% inside. Only car use is back to somewhere
approaching normal (about 90%).
Even if there are very good reasons why people
should commute less, that’s not how people engage with the world
Once upon a
time, people walked to work, which tended to be in a field near where they
lived. But the Industrial Revolution changed all that. You know the story: with
industrialisation came urbanisation. Cities grew: Birmingham, Manchester,
Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, as well as London. People flocked to them for
work that was better paid than the work in the field and not seasonal. The
downside was that these cities became filthy, overcrowded, polluted and
diseased places.
So, from
the latter part of the 18th century into the Victorian era, those who could
afford it started to move out to new suburbs and even the countryside beyond.
As it was too far to walk to work, spiders’ webs began to appear on city maps –
suburban rail networks. “Up to then, the purpose of the train was to get from
one city to another,” says the author and historian Simon Webb, who probably
knows more about the history of commuting than anyone else, having written a
book on the subject. “As commuting took off, the purpose of railways became to
bring people from one part of a city to another.”
Webb’s
book, Commuters: The History of a British Way of Life, looks at how commuting
shaped our cities and gave rise to suburban railways, buses and underground
trains (the first passengers rode the Metropolitan railway in London in 1863).
From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of commuting was
steady, with the odd surge, such as when buses or trams were introduced. Then,
between the wars, it was like rush hour: one-third of the British population
became commuters, thanks to unplanned development, with new urban areas
springing up on the fringes of cities, and because of the mutually beneficial
relationships that developed between railway companies and builders.
Think of a
commuter and whom do you see? Suited, probably male, takes himself quite
seriously, a little humourless. Or the Reggie Perrin character, trapped in a
railway carriage of hell, somewhere near Surbiton, but going nowhere in life.
But today a commuter is as likely to be a nurse, a security guard, a cleaner, a
cabinet minister or a “super-commuter” jetting in from her place in Nice every
week.
Since the
second world war, one method of commuting has grown to eclipse all others:
driving. In normal times, 60% of all journeys to work are by car or van. In
spite of all their historical associations, trains account for only about 5% of
the total.
Even before
Covid-19, Webb was wondering whether the commuter was dying out, because of the
gentrification and recolonisation of city centres. It is happening to the
centres of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and London – right here in King’s
Cross, to where I have commuted. Until recently, it was dirty and dodgy after
dark. Now it has sprouted shiny towers, desirable vertical urban living spaces.
If I were wealthier, I might aspire to relocate here from my suburb. I can
picture the poster: town mouse encouraging suburban mouse to come to where it
is all happening.
The
pandemic means that, for many, it is no longer necessary to leave home, let alone
your neighbourhood, to go to work. This may have the effect of making people
more insular and isolated, says Webb. He tells me about some people who, during
the Crusades, took off from a village in Gloucestershire; when they reached
Gloucester, they thought they had reached Jerusalem and prepared to fight the
infidel. “Your outlook will probably become as restricted as that of a medieval
peasant,” he jokes. At least, I think he is joking.
A note of
caution from Joe Moran, a social historian and a professor of English and
cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. Many key workers, he
points out, don’t have the luxury of telecommuting “because they can’t do their
work remotely. It’s non-key work that is more likely to disappear into
fibre-optic cables and wireless routes.” Bankers in the City of London may be
able to do their jobs from home, but that is not the case for security guards
or supermarket staff.
As a
cultural historian, Moran is wary of the idea that things change suddenly and
dramatically. “I feel that there is a natural inertia,” he says. “Even if there
are very good reasons why people should commute less, that’s not how people
engage with the world and other people. We often do things that don’t make any
sense, because we are social beings.”
Just as
being at work is not only about the work, so commuting is not only about
commuting, says Moran. While the situationist philosophers of 60s Paris may
have regarded commuting as an unwanted product of capitalism, with its unpaid
labour and alienating dead space, “some people actually quite like the commute,
if it’s not too long. Partly because it’s time alone. It’s a sort of third
space between home and work. Particularly with new technology, you can do lots
of things with that time,” he says. “There is a slightly social aspect to it as
well: you spend time with these intimate strangers; often you see the same
people on the train every day. There is a minimal community to it.”
It is more
than minimal for Anna Horsley, who has a train friend. It started one day when
Horsley got some bad news in a phone call; the woman next to her could not help
overhearing, so asked if she was all right and offered a tissue. They got
chatting. Soon they were taking the same trains every day, the 7.42 out and the
6.30 home. They have seen each other since they started working from home.
“She’s invited me to her wedding,” Horsley says. “She’s gone beyond train
friend – she’s a proper mate now.”
Horsley, a
social researcher, is – or was – a super-commuter. Her journey from Northampton
to Westminster, by bike, train, tube and foot, took two hours. Then two hours
home again in the evening. And she misses it. “I certainly don’t miss the cost
of it, but I miss the routine it gave me. I find it harder to switch off and to
get into work mode – I get out of bed and walk into my office, so I have no
mental preparation for the day. And I tend to work past my hours.”
Moran
concedes that, when this is over: “People will have got used to working from
home and it will be tolerated more. My workplace tended to encourage people to
be present before; presumably, those kind of attitudes will change. I think
there’ll be less commuting, but I’m sure it will still go on. The key is to be
flexible: if people want to go into work, they should be able to; if they can
work from home, that’s great as well.”
This makes
sense. Where does it leave me, though? I know where I am physically: I have
done my commute, from a suburb created by commuting, along the world’s first
metropolitan commuter railway, to a city centre abandoned by all but the poor
that is now seeing the gradual return of the wealthy. I am here; I have reached
the office. But I don’t need to be here. I am not going in – I am off home, to
work.
No comments:
Post a Comment