TAKING THE TUBE TO TASK
Gavin Stamp sees the King's Cross fire
in the context of a management concerned with style, not substance
AS I live within five minutes walk of King's Cross I know the Underground station very well. Last week I travelled down those ill-fated Piccadilly line escalators about an hour before the dreadful fire broke out. I distinctly remember noticing two things at the time. One was that the second of the two Victoria Line escalators was working again having been out of action for over two weeks — these are comparatively modern ones which, contrary to general expectations, seem to break down more than the pre-war escalators. The second thing was that there was even more litter than usual at the bottom of the Piccadilly line descent. It was an infuriating and disgusting sight but it did not occur to me then that it was also a potentially fatal fire risk.
Anyone who uses the Underground sys- tem regularly is used to squalor and chaos, but I make note of such things as it reinforces my arguments against the poli- cies of the board of London Regional Transport in a campaign in which I am engaged. This concerns LRT's current programme of 'modernising' its stations. Many people think that my defence of such things as telephone kiosks and Under- ground stations is worthy but eccentric and tangential to wider problems. The King's Cross fire, I think, demonstrates the con- trary. The fire was a consequence of a corruption which is becoming increasingly prevalent in modern Britain, a state of affairs in which new 'design' and cosmetic change is used as a gloss, as a public- relations exercise which acts as a fig leaf to conceal the real inefficiency and degenera- tion underneath. London Regional Trans- port, British Telecom and the Post Office all contribute to the impression that Britain is becoming a nation of superficial mod- ernity and underlying decay, of style rather than substance. It is significant and typical that LRT now has a 'Marketing Director'.
As we now know, LRT has spent little money on improved safety and fire mea- sures during the three years of its existence despite the strong warnings of the 1985 report issued by the London Passenger Transport Research Group. However, although LRT may complain — rightly — that public transport is scandalously under- funded in Britain — both in European terms and in comparison to the budget for road building — the Board has not been tight-fisted. In the last three years, £75 million has been spent on the modernisa- tion programme and £135 million on the ticketing system, and more, alas, is to come. I maintain that a large proportion of this money has been culpably wasted.
Earlier this year the Victorian Society and the Thirties Society — of which I am Chairman — published a joint report on the Underground called End of the Line? This argued that many of London's under- ground stations were of considerable his- torical and visual interest and could be respected without impeding the running of an efficient transport system. It further argued that many of the alterations being made to stations were unnecessarily crude and unsympathetic and what most station interiors and tiled surfaces needed was Merely a good clean and repair. (See my article 'Down the Tube', 13 June 1987). This document was received with a mixture of anger and condescending contempt by LRT's Board, but the justice of many of its recommendations has been endorsed by the listing of many of the famous stations of the 1920s and 1930s — some of the finest British buildings of their time — by the Department of the Environment.
LRT's modernisation programme has two aspects. One is the installation of a new ticketing system. This requires new internal walls both to support new ticket- issuing machines and to create secure accommodation for staff. It seems to me that this system is unnecessarily elaborate and inflexible compared with the ticket systems in other European cities. Worse, it Will still require entry and exit barriers for ticket validation, so continuing those crowd bottlenecks which are dangerous in an emergency. In West Berlin the U-Bahn ticket machinery is in unobtrusive free- standing units and there are no ticket collectors. Honesty is encouraged by the threat of arbitrary inspection by mobile inspectors who can levy a steep fine on a ticketless traveller. Why cannot such a system operate in London?
The second aspect is purely cosmetic: the covering up of old tiled surfaces by new skins of tiling or enamelled metal. Some- times the dinginess of a station may have Justified a lace-lift' but much of the new work is both vulgar and of inferior quality to the old. Many of the changes are pointless, such as tampering with Edward Johnston's classic sans-serif lettering com- missioned by Frank Pick in 1915. If new Signs have to be installed, it does seem unfortunate that none of them say 'Fire Exit'. What is particularly distressing to those who are interested in the station buildings is how destructive and insensitive much of the new work is, often done with excessive speed and by outside designers and sub-contractors. Indeed, the anarchy Which reigned in King's Cross that Wednesday evening is symptomatic of the Whole organisation, in which engineers, electricians and architects proceed inde- pendently of each other, in which money can be found for tasting up but not for repair or maintenance. There is no firm, comprehensive, intelligent control from the top.
It is most important to stress that the expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds has failed to secure any real im- provements. By that I mean the creation of additional escalators, or the replacement of lifts by escalators, or the enlargement of tunnels, passages or concourses. Indeed, the application of new tiled skins actually narrows already constricted passages. This is in marked contrast to the 1920s and 1930s — the heroic age of London Trans- port — when, as part of a massive prog- ramme of capital expenditure, lifts were replaced by banks of escalators and the tube lines were united by rebuilt stations at intersections. This gives us such central London stations as Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, with its elegant oval concourse by Charles Holden.
LRT's reluctance to proceed with real improvements is inexcusable as two very busy stations, in particular, are clearly inadequate and in sore need of enlarge- ment. One is Victoria, which is often jammed with passengers — a danger ex- acerbated by the idiotic policy of often having only one man checking the tickets of the crowds flooding off the Victoria Line. The other is King's Cross. Here, the now-gutted concourse created for the Pic- cadilly and Northern Lines in the early 1930s was made inadequate by the advent of the Victoria Line in 1971. Also, there is no proper connection with the Circle Line. What is required is a direct escalator connection from the Circle Line to the deep-level tubes and the creation of a much larger concourse beneath the Euston Road.
This, of course, will be hugely expen- sive, but it is necessary and worthwhile. It would be done in Paris, or Berlin, or Munich. It would be done in London if we had a government that faced up to the vital requirements of a modern urban society. Good public transport is an urgent civilised necessity. Even so, LRT might have spent the money wasted on vulgar new tiling on some serious engineering as well as on a few smoke detectors. Instead, it has in- dulged in false economies. Like many second-rate organisations, it assumes that the future will be entirely mechanised. This is as silly as it is inhuman. Stations need to be staffed to reassure passengers — no- thing is more frightening than a deserted tube station at night — and to cope with emergencies. Also, everything made by man needs cleaning and maintenance — and we now know what lack of mainte- nance can lead to, in the build-up of inflammable grease and fluff on escalator machinery.
It was intolerable that, after the fire, a 'spokesman' for London Underground claimed its staff were equipped to deal with fire. Even if this were true, which it is not, uniformed staff were seldom to be seen below stairs at King's Cross. Usually there are a handful of people within the ticket kiosks and a few zombies collecting tickets. It is clear that the staff of LRT are overworked and demoralised. It was not always so: London Transport was once a proud and efficient organisation which was admired and imitated abroad. The restric- tive practices of the rail unions may be partly to blame for the inefficiency but the policies pursued by management since the 1960s seem to me to have done more damage. But not all stations are squalid today. At Southgate, for instance, — one of the Holden classics of the 1930s on the Piccadilly Line — although LRT decline to maintain the building, the station staff still lovingly polish the brasswork on the origin- al Waygood-Otis wood-faced escalators. (These machines, unfairly blamed for the fire, are tough and reliable and — unlike the replacements being installed so ineffi- ciently by LRT — can be maintained by the station staff.) Nothing, of course, is faultless. Acci- dents will occur on any human system so perhaps it is unfair to seek to apportion blame. London Transport once had a very good safety record. Apart from the bomb- ing of Balham Station in 1940, in which 68 people were drowned, the only serious railway accidents on the Underground were at Stratford in 1953— 12 dead — and Moorgate in 1975 — 43 dead. More to the point, in the whole 124-year history of London's Underground and 97-year his- tory of deep-level tubes, no fire like that at King's Cross has occurred before. In my copy of Handling London's Underground Traffic by J. P. Thomas of 1928, I am interested to find that, although every possible accident and contingency is discus- sed, there is no mention of fire. This may demonstrate complacency. It may also suggest that, if stations are kept clean and inflammable materials stored as common sense suggests, then fire is highly unlikely.
In recent years, however, there have been several fires underground — at Gow- er Street, Holborn and Oxford Circus. This suggests to me that something must have changed and what I have observed is inadequate cleaning and slovenly mainte- nance. Why the fire at King's Cross erupted so violently is for the inquiry to establish, but there can be no doubt that the responsibility for slack discipline lies with management. Like so many organisa- tions, London Transport has slowly be- come as complacent and inefficient as it is insular and secretive, but matters have been made worse by political decisions, in the apportioning of public funds and in the setting up of the Board of London Region- al Transport.
In these sad times, it is idle to hope for a new Frank Pick. Pick was an inspired dictator, a man of vision who was able to implement his ideas at a time of optimism and expansion. Good design was, for him, not just a public relations exercise but an integral aspect of a fine and efficient system. It is hard to imagine the chairman of London Regional Transport or the chairman of London Underground — fer- ried around, as they are, in chauffeur- driven limousines — caring enough about design to bother to inspect individual stations to see if the signs were properly positioned, as Pick used to do. London's underground railway system does not have to be a squalid mess, arbitrarily, needlessly and temporarily cleaned up by expensive cosmetic face lifts while the service declines. It could be great and splendid again. And it would help if the men who run the Underground actually respected and understood the history, op- eration and needs of London's transport.
Previous page
