I had already decided not to vote for Zac Goldsmith as London mayor on the simple, if no doubt unreasonable, grounds that he inherited between £200m and £300m from his father. So it was not decisive for me that he could not answer the following question about the Central line of the London Underground when it was put by a BBC journalist, Norman Smith: “What’s next in the sequence: Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road …?” But it does perfectly encapsulate the disconnect between this son of a multi-millionaire and the diverse city that he seeks to represent.
The answer Smith was looking for was “Holborn”, although a real show-off’s answer would have been, “Holborn – but it was British Museum until that station closed in 1933.”
I don’t think many people would have expected Goldsmith to know the next station in – for example – the sequence, “Hanger Lane, Perivale, Greenford …” (It’s Northolt). But Tottenham Court Road and Holborn are at the very centre of the Central line, and a Londoner’s eye runs over them every time he or she looks at the tube map.
The implication is that Goldsmith doesn’t look at it very often. Rich people do not tend to use the underground; they prefer taxis (and indeed Goldsmith was being interviewed in a cab when the Central line question was put). This is why Down Street station in Mayfair lasted only 25 years after its opening in 1907: it was underused. It’s true that the least well-off don’t go by tube much, either. They prefer buses, and they used to prefer trams, which is why York Road station, opened in the poor part of London just north of King’s Cross, was closed in the same year as Down Street (1932). But London Underground is central to the life of mainstream Londoners, so you’d expect a London politician to know about it, and to use it.
In a sense, the tube is London. The expansion of its lines in the 1920s and 30s, enabled by cheap government loans, with the aim of promoting house building and job creation, made London the commuter city it is today. If this is the central fact about London, it is also a mixed blessing. Londoners riding in the overcrowded tubes of rush hour are “all in it together” in an uncomfortably literal sense.
In other respects, though, the tube is an unalloyed boon. It was the aim of Frank Pick, the interwar second-in-command of the underground, to teach Londoners about their own city. He commissioned beautiful posters showing the nearest stations to, say, the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, or the dog track at White City. One poster just showed people drinking in a raucous West End pub. I once asked a curator at the London Transport Museum what it was promoting, and he said, “Oh, you know, just … going to the pub …” But going there by tube. Pick had ensured that the underground offered a more beautiful journey than the streets above (because let’s face it, London is not a consistently pretty town).
Look at the brass, teak and marble fittings at Piccadilly Circus; the stylish, humane modernism of even far-flung stations like Arnos Grove and Tooting Broadway. Or, from an earlier time, the steampunk fantasia of the smoke-smudged (even today) Metropolitan line, as it enters the brick canyon east of King’s Cross, with the river Fleet going overhead in a huge juddering pipe.
Harry Beck, who created the underground map, kept a copy of it under his pillow, just in case a solution should occur to one of his perpetual bugbears: for example, where exactly to place Mornington Crescent so as to reflect the complicated subterranean reality. If Goldsmith wants to bond with Londoners, I suggest he keeps the map equally close, and learns at least zone one off by heart
• Andrew Martin is giving a talk, Confessions of a Railway Romantic, at the London Transport Museum on Tuesday 12 April.
