Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough

Author:Oliver Bullough
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

7

DOWN THE TUBES

When Boris Johnson – the journalist-turned-politician who is, at the time of writing, still prime minister – was Mayor of London, he used to hold regular public events where ordinary Londoners could ask him questions. They were billed as exercises in transparency, which no doubt they were, but they also gave a man who liked performing an opportunity to perform. The mayor made people laugh with his tousled-hair posh-boy shtick, which he probably hoped was enough for many of his constituents.

In July 2009, however, his bluff was called. At an auditorium in Croydon a man called Ajit Chambers, a smooth-cheeked former banker with close-cropped hair turning silvery at the temples, rose to ask a question. He had, he said, identified forty disused London Underground stations, and he wanted to transform them into tourist attractions. ‘San Francisco has Alcatraz; Paris has its catacombs,’ he said. ‘I have a proposal. I have been trying to get it to TfL.’

Johnson jumped in. TfL – Transport for London, which oversees the capital’s trains, buses, taxis, trams and other modes of public transport – is one of the few bodies that the mayor runs, so this was something he could theoretically do something about. And it was the kind of unusual idea that would catch the eye of any journalist, not least one as successful as him. ‘It is brilliant. I love it. London Underground. OK, we are going underground,’ he said.

The mayor asked Chambers a few follow-up questions about these ‘ghost stations’, which Johnson appears not to have heard of, although they’re pretty well known among people who travel on the Tube. If you know when to stare out into the darkness, you can even see the old platforms as they flash by. Johnson promised that his staff would evaluate the proposal and follow up. This was great news for Chambers, who had been trying to interest the mayor’s office in the plan via more official channels but had struggled to get it past City Hall officials. His peculiar business idea finally had the chance to break through.

There is undeniably something romantic about the ghost stations, about the idea of space which once thronged with people and bustle but is now abandoned to mice and dust. I have a recurrent dream about opening a door in my house and wandering through room after room that I have for some reason never been into, and the old stations have that same appeal: free space thick with history and ripe with potential. And there is undeniably a business case for opening up old transport infrastructure; the High Line in Manhattan is just a long walkway to nowhere in particular, but people love the chance to stroll where the trains once rattled along, and do so in their thousands.

That does not of course mean Chambers’s business idea was necessarily a viable proposition. For one thing, although dozens of stations have been closed over the years, there aren’t forty actual ghost stations in the sense of places you could walk into and convert into something new.

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