Off Topic: Happy 150th Birthday to the London Underground

So last week the London Underground celebrated 150 years since the first train travelled from Paddington to Farringdon which means a bonanza of fascinating trivia and awesome variations of that iconic map.

When my dad moved to London to study for a year in 1973, he initially bought a tube season ticket but decided to change it to a bus ticket because (to paraphrase) he found himself climbing down into one hole in the ground and reappearing in another with no sense of where he was. With a bus pass travelling was slower but he could start to remember where things were.

With me it's been almost the opposite (although the line I take most often is the above-ground DLR so I suppose I get the best of both). I remember where things are primarily by their proximity to a tube station and if someone tells me where they live or where their office is based, my first thought is to try and locate it on a tube map.

The Underground is the nervous system of the city and the passenger numbers alone are staggering, over a billion passenger journeys are made each year with 57,000 people passing through Waterloo underground alone every morning rush hour. We complain when trains are delayed, when there's a signal failure or when the Circle line has to stop for five minutes at every. damn. stop making it quicker to walk. But the fact that a patchwork system, assembled over 150 years in fits and starts somehow manages to work as well as it does is surely a minor daily miracle.

And it's becoming more of a miracle as time goes on as London's population rises.

The tube network has been undergoing upgrades for the entire time that I've lived in London (just over 3 years if anyone's curious) to make the service more efficient and ultimately carry more passengers.

But it's hard to see them ever keeping up with demand and at peak times on major lines there are already trains every 2 minutes. Will there ultimately be a train arriving as soon as the previous one leaves, using up every minute of the hour? What happens when even these are full? Do we use longer trains which require longer platforms at every station? How long will it be until the platforms of one station almost join those of the next station?

The problem is that the UK is such a London-centric country that the city will likely continue to grow putting further strain on the system and there seems to be little private sector incentive for companies not to move here. From my own (limited and I suppose also London centric) vantage point, most of the clients my company works for are based in London and most of the companies they work for seem to be based in London. So many people that I know moved to London during the great recession because it was the most likely place for them to find work.

It's like a black hole, sucking more and more people and money in and in a round about way this is why I've always been in favour of public organisations like the BBC moving North. The UK is far, far, far too London centric. Is it any wonder nobody cared about the police commissioner elections because there wasn't one happening in London and therefore the London based media barely covered them?

If there's little chance of the private economy balancing the country a bit then organisations which are at least slightly less susceptible to market forces should be helping to move money and talented people away from places which have no trouble attracting replacements. That's the only way we'll stop the apparent drift toward city statehood that London has been on and ultimately that's better for everyone, particularly those that live here.