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Adventures in space and time
Feb. 20th, 2022 11:19 amBook Review: Commuters - The history of a British way of life, by Simon Webb
This had been on my to-read list for a year or two, and it arrived as a Christmas present. Given the Covid-related changes to working patterns for many - on which pressure is growing from above to revert to the previous behaviour - there was always going to be a question of how well this would hold up in terms of any predictions it might make.
There is some interesting history in here about the earliest days of commuting, generally coinciding with industrial revolution and urbanisation. The well-to-do did not wish to live side-by-side with the plebs or their increasingly unclean factories. Walking a couple of miles from home to work was the initial solution to escape the growing slums. Although Pascal apparently ran the first service we might recognise as a bus in the seventeenth century, the "omnibus" didn't really catch on until the nineteenth century, and despite its name, was a distinctly middle-class affair owing to its expense. The steam-powered omnibus was an experiment that did not survive, horses being more convenient. Then came the railways - initially intended only for long-distance travel before being cajoled into offering affordable tickets for short journeys within neighbouring districts. Trams were a distinctly working-class mode of transport; the eventual transformation into trolley-buses, the reinvention of the bus, and the usurpation of all by the car, come later.
Or at least, that's how Webb tells it. My doubts spring from the chapter on "Death and the Commuter", which contains a couple of schoolboy errors. Webb repeatedly refers to Edgware station when he means Edgware Road station, in the context of terrorist attacks not only in 2005 but also in the late nineteenth century. Writing about the Moorgate train crash of 1975, he states the journey started at West Drayton, which he inexplicably states (correctly) is in the environs of Heathrow airport yet (incorrectly) states is a journey of about three miles to Moorgate. In fact the train started at Drayton Park on the Northern City Line. This is at best sloppy in its research, editing and proof-reading.
I also had a feeling of being talked down to. Webb conveys opinions (which may or may not be his own) about the unattractiveness of railway viaducts, about which I disagree (there are many attractive examples, and even less attractive examples can be architecturally striking). He discusses the stereotype of the commuter as obsessed by punctuality, which has truth to it but his acknowledgement of the consequences of lateness is itself deferred and makes the writing feel unbalanced. He is very fond to describe the disdain for suburban life and the commuter from the 1960s onwards. This feels lazy: it chooses to overlook the necessity of that lifestyle for many, dismisses the desirability of it for some, and doesn't really consider the possibility that it may be just part of the frequent generational rejection of what has gone immediately before. His evidence is based on The Good Life and Terry and June, which obviously do poke fun at suburban and commuter life, but in a gentle way; and the former clearly has other motivations as well, which any historian of the period wouldn't have to look very hard to find.
Acknowledging the rise of the car, it seems to be quite an omission not to discuss the rise of industrial estates or business parks. The final chapter is full of contradictions - we are all commuters now, but we are no longer commuters thanks to gentrification, with upwardly mobile people returning to city centre locations. There's no discussion of technology and the ability to work from home, which would certainly feel like a pertinent topic for inclusion even pre-pandemic.
This had been on my to-read list for a year or two, and it arrived as a Christmas present. Given the Covid-related changes to working patterns for many - on which pressure is growing from above to revert to the previous behaviour - there was always going to be a question of how well this would hold up in terms of any predictions it might make.
There is some interesting history in here about the earliest days of commuting, generally coinciding with industrial revolution and urbanisation. The well-to-do did not wish to live side-by-side with the plebs or their increasingly unclean factories. Walking a couple of miles from home to work was the initial solution to escape the growing slums. Although Pascal apparently ran the first service we might recognise as a bus in the seventeenth century, the "omnibus" didn't really catch on until the nineteenth century, and despite its name, was a distinctly middle-class affair owing to its expense. The steam-powered omnibus was an experiment that did not survive, horses being more convenient. Then came the railways - initially intended only for long-distance travel before being cajoled into offering affordable tickets for short journeys within neighbouring districts. Trams were a distinctly working-class mode of transport; the eventual transformation into trolley-buses, the reinvention of the bus, and the usurpation of all by the car, come later.
Or at least, that's how Webb tells it. My doubts spring from the chapter on "Death and the Commuter", which contains a couple of schoolboy errors. Webb repeatedly refers to Edgware station when he means Edgware Road station, in the context of terrorist attacks not only in 2005 but also in the late nineteenth century. Writing about the Moorgate train crash of 1975, he states the journey started at West Drayton, which he inexplicably states (correctly) is in the environs of Heathrow airport yet (incorrectly) states is a journey of about three miles to Moorgate. In fact the train started at Drayton Park on the Northern City Line. This is at best sloppy in its research, editing and proof-reading.
I also had a feeling of being talked down to. Webb conveys opinions (which may or may not be his own) about the unattractiveness of railway viaducts, about which I disagree (there are many attractive examples, and even less attractive examples can be architecturally striking). He discusses the stereotype of the commuter as obsessed by punctuality, which has truth to it but his acknowledgement of the consequences of lateness is itself deferred and makes the writing feel unbalanced. He is very fond to describe the disdain for suburban life and the commuter from the 1960s onwards. This feels lazy: it chooses to overlook the necessity of that lifestyle for many, dismisses the desirability of it for some, and doesn't really consider the possibility that it may be just part of the frequent generational rejection of what has gone immediately before. His evidence is based on The Good Life and Terry and June, which obviously do poke fun at suburban and commuter life, but in a gentle way; and the former clearly has other motivations as well, which any historian of the period wouldn't have to look very hard to find.
Acknowledging the rise of the car, it seems to be quite an omission not to discuss the rise of industrial estates or business parks. The final chapter is full of contradictions - we are all commuters now, but we are no longer commuters thanks to gentrification, with upwardly mobile people returning to city centre locations. There's no discussion of technology and the ability to work from home, which would certainly feel like a pertinent topic for inclusion even pre-pandemic.