London River Thames
London Field Notes · September 2015
Foreign LandLearning London Above and Below
The city made sense when I stopped following the blue dot and began connecting river, road, pavement, and Tube for myself.
London had been a collection of famous names. The water taxi turned those names into a place.
The London Water Taxi is another way to get around the city. It may not be the fastest, but today it was certainly the coolest. Seeing the landmarks and place names I had known only from the London Underground became a connect-the-dots experience. The city gained shape.
I also took a few buses. Combined with the water taxi, they added to my relational memory of “Where am I?” spatially. I get London much better now.
Walking from street to street untethered to my phone helped alleviate the “text neck” of looking down at Google Maps and blindly following it all the time.
The River Map
The Thames Connects the Dots
The landmarks stopped being isolated stations and became part of one continuous city.
Below Mother Nature
Oye Como Va the Underground
Below Mother Nature is Mother London herself: the electrified spaghetti of the city’s multilayered infrastructure.
With its roundel, distinctive trains, and user-friendly map, few landmarks of England are as iconic as the London Underground. Until I can navigate the highs and lows, quirks, and anomalies of this system, I could not possibly call myself a Londoner.
I already have a favorite: The Victoria line. It is used by 200 million passengers each year, and today I was one of them. I changed there for the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines.
Today I was at Baker Street, and it seemed so much smaller. The growth of the subway was piecemeal and sprawling. Major Tube upgrades, facelifts, and new stations are simply spliced onto the old system.
This week there was a strike, with some overcrowding, delays, and cancellations on Tuesday.
The City’s Soundtrack
Buskers Below the Streets
The Underground is not only infrastructure. It has rhythm, auditions, and unexpected stages.
I was impressed by the quality and variety of subway musicians, or buskers, who have to audition for the right to play freely in Tube stations. I shot a quick video of one musician playing Carlos Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
Field Ledger
Three Ways the City Became Legible
The Thames linked familiar names into one continuous geography.
Buses and walking supplied the turns, distances, and textures a diagram cannot.
The Underground revealed a living system built by splicing the new onto the old.