During rush hour, the London Underground is as populous as Glasgow. What happens to us when we travel on the tube, and how is this linked to its strange absence from film, TV and novels? John Lanchester investigates
The first District line train out of Upminster in the morning is the first train anywhere on the underground network. It leaves the depot at 4.53, the only train anywhere in the system to set out from its base before 5am. That's a kind of record: if you catch that train, you might be tempted to say ta-dah! – except you probably wouldn't, because nobody is thinking ta-dah! at seven minutes to five in the morning; certainly nobody on this train. People look barely awake, barely even alive. They feel the same way they look; I know because, this morning, I'm one of them.
I've lived in London for more than quarter of a century now, and this is the first time I've ever been on the day's first train. It's something I'd often wondered about, though, from both a practical and a romantic point of view. The practical question was a simple one: if the transport network isn't running in the early morning, how do the people who operate it get to work? How does the driver get to the train, if there are no trains to take him there? The answer is prosaic: they get there by minicab. The cabs travel a prescribed route to the various depots on the District line, picking up staff en route as they head to Upminster, Earl's Court, Ealing Common, Barking and Hammersmith. Of these postings, Upminster is the most popular, because a large number of drivers live nearby – that's one of the reasons it is, as I was told by a District veteran, the "senior depot". The first train out from Earl's Court in the morning is at 5.21, but to get there, allowing for multiple pickups and some waiting around at the depot, the minicab from the East End starts as early as 2.30 in the morning. That's an early start to a working day.
The romantic side of the first train is harder to define. It's something to do with the secret nightlife of the city, the London that is carrying on while the rest of London fidgets in its sleep. There's a romance attending on those jobs, the ones that keep things running all night long: it's part of the fascination of big cities, the sense that something is always going on somewhere, even in the smallest of small hours. Bakers and police and nurses and cab drivers and market porters all belong to that secret city, the one which rumbles along so late it starts to get early. Once or twice, carrying on a long evening by going to the place after the place I started, and then to the place after that, I've ended up in versions of this super-late or super-early London. I remember once, back in the days when journalism was wilder than it is now, ending up in the place-after-the-place-after-the-place with a group of sports desk colleagues: a packed Greek taverna, surrounded by people howling for more retsina, waiters swerving between tables carrying platters of burnt meat, the room not merely loud but roaring, and looking at my watch to see that it was a quarter to four in the morning – and the point that struck me was that everyone around seemed to regard it as perfectly normal.
This was my romantic version of the first train: that it was populated by inhabitants of this Baudelairean secret London. The truth is more banal, and it becomes clear, not so much at Upminster – since, after all, Upminster is a relatively posh suburb, out past the East End where things are starting to feel vaguely, suburbanly rural. No, it's a few stops before you realise who these people getting on the train are, bone-tired but indefatigable. By Dagenham East, a few minutes after 5am, the first train on the network is already packed, up to standing room only, and the people with whom it is packed are cleaners on their way to work. That's the unromantic truth about this version of the secret city. Once you get past Temple, the throng starts to thin out again, because the people who live in the east are going to work in the financial district; the trip to work goes from out to in. Nobody commutes from Sloane Square out to Hammersmith, or from Westminster to Richmond. Once the District line train gets past the City, it's practically empty, the emptiest it's been at any point on the journey so far today. Then it gets to Richmond and turns around to head back the other way – except this time it's carrying not poor people who are going to clean offices, but much richer people on their way to early-starting jobs in the financial sector.
More people use the underground to commute than for any other single purpose. If there's one activity that sums up people's experience of the underground – I would argue that there isn't, but if there were – it would be commuting. This, like "tube", is a word that has been on a journey. "Commute" in its original sense means to give something in exchange for something else, or to change one thing into another. A criminal sentence might be "commuted" from, say, hanging to life imprisonment. The word crossed over to use in a railway context in the US, where regular travellers began to swap day tickets for better-value season tickets; they "commuted" their daily tickets into season tickets. The Oxford English Dictionary locates the first instance of the modern, dragging-your-weary-bones-to-work sense in the American magazine the Atlantic Monthly, which defined a commuter as follows: "one who purchases a commutation ticket". A commutation ticket was the American term for a season ticket. Commuters commuted "commute".
This kind of travel, commuting in the modern sense, was a new thing: travelling a considerable distance, there and back every day, in order to work in one place while you lived in another. It was to be central to the growth of the modern city, with London as the first and biggest example of its importance: the modern map of London, the modern city, was created by commuting. One of the consequences of it, gently hinted at by Christian Wolmar in The Subterranean Railway, was that people had more sex – they moved to bigger houses, where they could sleep in separate bedrooms from their children.
Commuting is interesting and important for another reason, too. It was a new kind of time in the day: an interstitial mental space between home life and work. Companies such as Starbucks talk about, and try to position themselves in, what they call the "third place", between work and home. Commuting can be a mental form of "third place". It can be when people get some of their most sustained reading or thinking done, their most extended daily period of introspection or of listening to music. In order to be that, though, the commute has to be sufficiently reliable and sufficiently comfortable to not introduce extra difficulties into the day: if your commute is a source of stress and hassle, then you aren't likely to accumulate any benefit from it. My first commuting days were on the District line – Parsons Green to Earl's Court and then Earl's Court to Euston Square – and one of the things I remember most vividly about it was the sense that it was a new thing, different from any other travel I'd ever done. My own experience was that commuting was two entirely different things: a packed, unpredictable, airless standing trip to work, during which it was impossible to read because there wasn't space to hold a book in front of my face; then, at the other end of the day, a calmer, more reliable, often seated, reading-friendly trip home.
That less pleasant form of commuting has attracted attention in the growing field of happiness studies. People have all sorts of fantasies about what might make them happier, most of them centring on the theme of what they might do if they had more money, or had some specific material possession or other (a Porsche, a nose job, a holiday in Ibiza). By and large, these beliefs aren't valid. You quickly get used to the new state of affairs and start wanting the next thing up: having that extra £10,000 makes you want a further £10,000 on top, the Porsche makes you want a Ferrari, the nose job a boob job, the Ibiza holiday another, longer Ibiza holiday. This is called "the hedonic treadmill": we're all hamsters running on a wheel, chasing a notion of happiness that is permanently just out of reach. One of the things this finding implies is that there is something innate about people's level of happiness, a "set point", as it's called, which varies from person to person. The hedonic treadmill means that most of the things we do don't move us far from our set point.
There are exceptions, though, and one of them concerns commuting. Modern economics bases much of its analysis on the idea that people "maximise their utility". The idea is that everything we do makes sense in some material way or other: the economic view of commuting would be that although people don't necessarily enjoy it, they do it to earn money, which makes up for the effort in other ways. So you commute, which is a drag, in order to have the house and holiday and lifestyle that makes you happy – yes? Well, no, according to happiness studies. Cutting down on the commute is one of the few things people can do which genuinely makes them happier. According to one academic paper, "people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective wellbeing". In other words, a difficult commute makes people miserable in ways for which money doesn't make amends.
This is an academic finding that hasn't crossed over into the wider world. I've never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners' lives; if it comes to that, I've never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London's underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely underrepresented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than 1bn underground journeys take place every year – 1.1bn in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still. That's an average of nearly 3m journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about 600,000 people on the network simultaneously, which means that, if the network at rush hour were a city in itself, rather than an entity inside London, it would have the same population as Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK. The District line alone carries about 600,000 people every day, which means that it, too, is a version of Glasgow.
There are quite a few novels and films and TV programmes about Glasgow. Where are the equivalent fictions about the underground? New York has any number of films about its subway – The Warriors, the John Carpenter movie from 1979, is one of the best of them, and explicitly celebrates the network's geographical reach across the whole city, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island. New York also has Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 123, an all-subway-located thriller, among many other cinematic depictions. Paris has the Luc Besson film Subway, and plenty of other movies. London has next to nothing. (Let's gloss over the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors – though not before noting that the crucial moment when she either does or doesn't catch the train is on the District line, at Fulham Broadway. Spoiler alert: in the version in which she rushes and successfully catches the train, she dies. A District line driver would call this a useful reminder that this isn't the national rail network, and there will be another one along in a minute.) There's a wonderfully bad Donald Pleaseance movie from 1972 called Death Line, set entirely in Russell Square underground station; there were some episodes of Doctor Who in the 60s, which seemed scary at the time, about the tube network being taken over by robot yetis. To a remarkable extent, though, that's it. London is at the centre of innumerable works of fiction and drama and TV and cinema, but this thing at the heart of London life, which does more to create the texture of London life than any other single institution, is largely and mysteriously absent.
Skyfall is a welcome addition to the filmography not just of the underground but of the District line itself. The station through which Bond chases his love interest, played by Javier Bardem – sorry, villain, I mean villain – is clearly identified as Temple, on the District line, and the crowded train he gets on is shown as a District line train, too. Except it isn't: that isn't Temple station, and that's manifestly a train from the deep tube lines rather than the sub-surface network. They're easy to spot because they're a different shape – the tube trains are rounded, tube-shaped, for obvious reasons. And there is another, more important unease in this part of the movie. Shortly afterwards, a tube train crashes through the floor of the network and nearly kills Bond. But we can easily see that the train is empty, and nobody's life is at risk except that of the driver, who is clearly seen flinching and ducking but unhurt. Moments before, the underground was packed, but this train is empty? It makes no sense. The film-makers, having evoked the routine crowdedness of the tube, obviously felt uneasy at the prospect of killing off hundreds of commuters just for a special effect. The audience would have found it too disturbing. They wanted the crash-bang, but they needed also to signal that it was fake. The whole sequence is a fascinating exercise in the limits and difficulties of depicting the underground on screen.
So why are there so few cinema tube scenes? It's difficult to get permission to film on the underground. With getting on for three and a half million people riding on it every day, there just isn't time and space and logistical capacity for film crews to budge ordinary Londoners out of the way for long enough to do their thing. As an ordinary Londoner, I appreciate that; sometimes, in a city with so much disruption of so many different types, it seems as if the last people anyone remembers are the ordinary citizens trying to go about their ordinary business. But the restrictions on filming on the underground do contribute to its relative absence in film and television.
There's also perhaps another, deeper reason. Londoners spend a lot of their time and energy performing themselves. The city is a kind of catwalk. I don't mean for everyone, all the time; I don't mean that's the only thing it is. But Londoners do act out versions of themselves in public, and wear uniforms, and signal that they belong to particular tribes. Not all of this activity is conscious, but quite a lot of it is, and even when it isn't, a lot of it is easily legible. You can stand in a queue at a Starbucks and see in the line in front of you a City boy, a Sloane who has a job doing something arty, a guy working on a screenplay, a mother just back from the gym, three tourists and two policemen (mind you, they're the easy ones to spot, since they're literally wearing uniform). Everybody stays in character. The city spaces are performative spaces: people are acting out versions of themselves.
It isn't like that on the underground. Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we're on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don't overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is "sneak". They don't look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people's attention is inward. They go into themselves. Or they go into the world of whatever entertainment they're carrying. Once upon a time, that would mainly have been a paid-for newspaper – but nothing has disappeared as fast and as completely from the world of the underground as the paid-for newspaper. A couple of decades ago, you would often be in a train carriage in which most of the people present were reading a paper they'd bought. Now, there won't be a single person. Many people will be reading the paper, mind you: it's just that they'll be reading free papers, the Metro in the morning and the Evening Standard in the afternoon. The old distinctions of who reads what have disappeared. On the District line, there used to be a split between the City workers, travelling west to east, who would be reading the Financial Times, and the East Enders, travelling east to west, who would be reading tabloids. Now it's all free papers. Drivers get a clear view of that. "When I walk back through the train at the end of the shift," a driver told me, "I used to see all the papers." I asked him if he ever saw the paper I was writing for at the time. "Not a single copy in the last two years," he said.
There will be roughly as many people on some form of portable entertainment device or music player as there are reading the paper. I would say the split is broadly as follows: about a quarter reading a free paper, another quarter on their handheld (mainly phones and music players but the occasional game console, too), fewer than a quarter reading a book and a few more than a quarter staring into inner space. While they're doing that staring, they usually look down, to make it unmistakably clear that they aren't staring at other people in the compartment. People are very careful about what they do with their eyes on the underground.
Again, that's because the underground is not a performative space. People don't go there to be on show, to act themselves in front of other people. They also don't like it when people do act up and act out – when somebody does that, you can feel it, the disapproval and resentment, the pulling back. (My favourite fictional version of this is in Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Swimming-Pool Library, when the train stops in a tunnel, and silence descends, broken by the narrator's friend loudly asking: "Could you ever get into spanking?")
Not everybody is scared of the underground, but I would argue that many people, perhaps even most people, find the experience to one degree or other to be what psychologists call "aversive". It's not necessarily the tunnels: it's the whole business of being crammed into such an enclosed space with so many strangers. Looking at a full train, you sometimes think: how on earth do people manage to do that? How do they talk themselves into believing that this degree of crush, of proximity, is something normal? Research into our sense of personal space suggests that the normal radius for personal distance is between arm's length and about four feet away. Closer contact than that is an intrusion into "intimate space", which is reserved for close family members and lovers. On the underground, though, when it's busy, that intimate space is also reserved for the sweaty man with his arm on the strap over your head, and the young woman in a tracksuit listening to dubstep through iPhone earbuds about six inches from your face, and the two suited salesmen types who, you can tell, while also wishing you couldn't, have just eaten a curry washed down with cider, and a worried and unhappy-looking middle-aged woman trying to brace herself against the compartment wall whose head is directly under your armpit. Even without being jolted along in the dark tunnel – even without coming to a halt in a dark tunnel, for an unspecified reason, for an unspecified length of time, as the heat mounts – this is a profoundly unnatural condition for human beings. We react to it by going somewhere else in our heads.
This, I think, is the reason there have been so few depictions of the underground in visual narrative form. Orson Welles once said that the only two things that could not be filmed were sexual intercourse and prayer. I take him to mean that they were the two human activities whose significance was entirely internal: they were happening to the people who were experiencing them in a manner that could only be experienced, and not depicted. The underground is like that – not exactly like that, because there are significant differences between travelling on it and either having sex or praying, but it is on the same continuum, because its significance for us is internal. It's a going in, a turning in, not exactly a mystical state, but one that we know deep down inside ourselves is not an ordinary or routine condition. We escape it with distractions, or we try to switch off, but we can't entirely hide from it. That internal state, central to tube travel, is very hard to put on TV.
Kim Stanley Robinson, in his SF novel Forty Signs of Rain, has a character float a theory about why this business of being underground connects so deeply with something inside us. "He descended the Metro escalator into the ground. A weird action for a hominid to take – a religious experience. Following the shaman into the cave. We've never lost any of that." And that, perhaps is why people go quiet in the underground. It's the only time we experience a combination of 21st-century technology (the trains), 19th-century technology and vision (the tunnels, the network) and our paleolithic deep self. A person on the underground is experiencing the rare chance to be a 21st-century Victorian caveman. She is doing something we don't value enough, in the contemporary world: she is travelling in a direction we don't prize. She is going down and in. Down under the ground, and down into the self; into the city, into the world, into the streets and also into herself. That, finally, is what the tube does most and does best. It takes us down and in.
The Underground Lines series, published by Penguin, is out this week. To order the box set of all 12 titles for £38 (RRP £60), visit guardian.co.uk/bookshop
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