For city-dwellers, ‘their’ parts of London can feel close at hand despite being far away

Back in the early 1990s when I used to take an regular train from London to Plymouth, my eye was always caught by a piece of graffiti on the southern wall of the station as the train pulled out of Paddington: “FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE”. This was in the days before mobile phones with their accessible cameras, so I have no record, and the words have been permanently erased following one of the station’s many refurbishments.

As a journalist on my first job at a newspaper some 200 miles from my adopted home city where I went to university, this phrase, slogan, or verse — I had no idea then of its origins — summed up my mood as I put on my Sony Walkman or dived into a book, to emerge some three hours later in Devon’s naval city. Although London was far away in my mind’s eye, there was a direct line between the platforms at Plymouth station and Paddington with little of interest in between. (I have since stumbled across an explanation which makes for an endearing story).

This memory resurfaced as I was thinking about how an individual’s locational conception of a city such as London with an extensive public and private transport infrastructure is formed by their own personal journeys. Someone living near a station at the end of one of London’s long Underground lines, such as the Central, Piccadilly, and (now) the Elizabeth, might commute into their job in the West End, City, or Canary Wharf. During the winter they will probably leave home and work in the dark.

For those travellers, their London will be the entry gate of their Underground station, the exit at their destination station, and the urban landscape between there and the door of their employer’s office, but perhaps also a local coffee bar, sandwich shop, and pub. That is their London, and they know no other part of it other than the area in which they live (and home may indeed be in Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, or Surrey).

Because the majority of their journey will be underground or speeding along embanked cuttings through the city’s industrial backside, they will know nothing of the lives of the millions of fellow Londoners living and working just above them in suburb after suburb. They will be aware of them, of course, just as they are aware of the House of Commons in Westminster and the 02 in Greenwich because they have seen news on the television. But ask someone about The Miller pub in Southwark or the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith — to pick two personal favourites at random — and they will have to pull out their phone and search for both.

Of course, this mental map of London can be extended as they make exploratory journeys, so that each person’s mental image of the city will morph and bend over time. If they go to see shows in the West End, then they will learn where Leicester Square and Soho area (the latter not as wild, sexual and crime-riddled as it once was). But its ambience will still be relatively alien to them. The same applies if they go to see their football team play.

At the same time, some Londoners, perhaps those who always lived in a housing estate in a poorer part of the city or whose mobility is limited by age or disability, will know the streets in their local area in detail and use those facilities intensively but will never make the journey into central London or another borough. Again, drawing on my time in Plymouth, I came across an old woman in rural Devon who had never in her life been to Plymouth: “Why would I want to?”

Mappa Londinii

Over time, a Londoner or regular visitor to the city will build up a mental map of London — their own version of the A-Z Street Atlas that was once the ubiquitous travel aid for the capital. It will include their home and work but also perhaps their own or children’s schools, their friends’ homes, cinemas and theatres, pubs and restaurants, and venues for day-out trips.

This internal map will become their own personal travel guide, as their London morphs to account for the different times that the journey requires. A friend’s home that they normally take 20 minutes to walk to will appear equidistant in their mind as a cinema 20 minutes away by tube even though the latter is some four miles away.

Far away destinations such as Richmond in the southwest with its parks and sports events or Greenwich with its naval and observatory museums in the southeast will appear as elongated strips extending out to the fringes of each “map”, but areas that never seem worthy of a visit will be invisible.

Destinations on new or improved lines, such as the Elizabeth and the six lines that now make up the Overground will bring locations onto people’s maps. Travelling the 11 miles from the Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush to its counterpart takes just 30 minutes on an Overground Mildmay train, compared with almost an hour by car and making far away so much closer at hand.

There is a real reason for suggesting this shift of vision — and one that applies to all major cities — to get a better understanding of the multiple centres that make up London, from Ealing in the West, to Thamesmead in the East; and from Croydon in the south to Barnet in the north. Gaining knowledge about other suburbs will make those far away physically feel closer at hand. And that way lies greater understanding and enhanced knowledge which in the long term will mean more cooperation about the issues that make them all Londoners.