Squeezing the Tube

Anybody forced to use the London Underground will know that its glory days are long gone. It will on most occasions get you from one place to another, but there is little pleasure to be had from the experience. Its service, frequently marred by inexplicable delays, is also usually excessively crowded.

This makes the latest series of posters for Art on the Underground, which are all over the Tube network, even more inexplicable. The “art” appears to repose in the quotations they carry. A poster of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance (click to see it more clearly), bears the caption: “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

Is this some subtle ploy to calm passengers infuriated by the slowness of the service, the idea that their fury at so much of their life being wasted in a metal tube going nowhere will instantly evaporate upon seeing the photograph of Gandhi and its accompanying quotation?

What about the other poster in the same series, carrying a quotation from Bliss Carman: “The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man”?

When passengers are being crowded into carriages so tightly that it would be illegal if they were cattle, they might agree with the sentiment, but it’s hardly likely to improve their feelings towards London Underground.

The only rational explanation we can think of is that this is a subtle ploy by the bicycling-loving Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. With another Tube strike looming, perhaps he’s trying to get as many people as possible to abandon the underground, lessening the impact of any future industrial action.

In the meantime, we hear that London Underground’s lawyers are gunning for The Underground Restaurant in Kilburn. Claiming that there are grounds for confusion, they have ordered the owner, MsMarmiteLover – as she is known on twitter – to change her establishment’s name. Or else. Given that this is based in somebody’s home and that potential diners must resort to the sort of subterfuge not seen since the end of the Cold War to arrange to eat there, it is hard to see where the confusion might lie.

Does London Underground believe that diners will somehow expect MsMarmiteLover to transport them to other parts of London, something she cannot of course do unless her mushrooms are really magic? Maybe they are worried that London Underground staff will be assailed by hungry passengers demanding to be served food at their seat. What a silly idea. Particularly the notion that many Tube passengers can ever get a seat.

It reminds us of the story of the store of stores, Harrods, which is obsessively concerned with protecting its name. A few years back, a restaurateur in New Zealand by the name of Harrod was astonished to be ordered to remove his name from his long-estabished “Harrod’s Family Restaurant” or face prosecution. So outraged were the other residents that they changed the town’s name to Harrodsville. Harrods’ lawyers went away and never bothered them again.