This is all in the air: a new kind of future for London transport
The 2020s have served us a different flavour of Future. And in cities like London, the air tastes like hope as well as fear.
I serendipitously encountered Montague Black’s delicious bit of 1926 futuring on the same week that Sadiq Khan announced plans to make London more cycling and walking friendly as London’s Corona lockdown eases.
Black’s poster was created for the London Underground company in 1926 and is a typical example of The Future as imagined in the early 20th Century. Modernity coursing through the veins of city-dwellers as skyscrapers burst upwards in America and commercial flight was tentatively taking off. These new spatial dimensions ruptured the urban self-image, promising transcendence of the sooty grime of city streets and subterranean tube systems.
A publicity poster for a public entity epitomising the progress of the city, it’s of course optimistic. A golden-hued dusk softens the scale and speed of this vision of London. We can imagine, even looking back just twenty years later in 1946 this image could be tinged with chilling echoes of blitzkrieg and aerial warfare.
In 2020, the image is eerie and a little nostalgic. A reminder of the type of progress-optimism that came back to bite us with toxic air that affects and kills so many Londoners today. The title reads strangely in the mind of an agitated Londoner during this pandemic. Did we ever imagine that travelling above ground would be a health necessity? What’s “in the air” today are invisible pathogens and paranoia you could cut with a knife.
It’s striking that our urban visions are so transformed by the urgency of climate change and the imagination-through-scarcity of this pandemic context. The future now is radically simplified, grounded, slower, more spacious. The cutting edge of urban mobility now is pedestrianisation and adequate cycle lanes. The discourse of urban progress shifted trajectory from higher to smarter to cleaner.
Montague Black’s 2026 vision contains within it a kind of egalitarian hopefulness. The notion that the Underground system would be translated to the skies precedes the post-war ambition that high rises would lift the working poor from the scum of slum buildings. The distribution of progress in London didn’t turn out to be so equal. Housing prices push Londoners further out and public transport prices keep increasing, worsening with the government’s TFL bailout deal.
Khan’s plans to create more space to walk and cycle might prove to be a temporary measure. But, as with so many of these pandemic adjustments, the experience might prove to be sticky. Already I hear friends talk about cycling through the empty streets of central London where the air is “somehow sweeter”. The experience of living out a future, trying it on for size, user testing its lived reality can be powerful. Technology companies do it all the time. This is a unique opportunity for cities to innovate with what they have. Responding not to technological possibility and expansion but to an almost charmingly basic restriction — the distance between bodies. As users of systems it’s almost impossible to break out of our assumptions and cultural framing, which is why our future imaginaries are populated with flying cars, spaceships and post-apocalyptic scorched or flooded landscapes. Images of the ‘now’ displaced and dramatically amended in the future. It’s hard for us to imagine more mundane and lateral notions of progress. These new proposals for travelling through the capital are almost disarmingly simple but a few months ago they would have seemed radical.
London is an unequal, anonymous, spontaneous and diverse bricolage, and its transport system has long been its ultimate cultural microcosm. What kind of cultural microcosms will be revealed by these new street-level journeys? What kinds of divisions and boundaries will be recalibrated by these new maps? All this is in the air, and ready to be breathed.
