Abstract
The modern London commute: a panting dash to the station to join the shuffling columns of tired and anxious fellow passengers waiting on the platform to be siphoned through the sliding doors in the hope of securing a 15-centimetre-radius space to stand with a scrunched-up Metro.
Metro, the garish, rather crass but somewhat non-committal right-wing tabloid that dominates the commuting life in contemporary Britain. Slightly scandalous and loosely constructed around parochial news, throwaway factoids, novelty headlines (“Shark shares kennel with dog”), key stage 2 science and TV and celebrity drivel, it nonetheless contains some not wholly unintelligent book, arts and restaurant reviews. It seems confused, a bit slapdash, noisy and not very nice. It shifts 772,824 copies (ABC figures June 2013) every morning in London alone. That's to say, it is given away more than three quarter of a million times.
What does the commuter's favourite newspaper tell us about the contemporary commuter? What does it tell us about modern life? Compare the Twenties, an age of certainties, when the commuters picked up their dailies without fail. Richard Cobb, in his memoir Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (1983), paints a picture of city gents scanning the Daily Telegraph in the morning and each other's school ties in the evening, while on board the 5:50 “liquid train” out of Cannon Street. Everyone knew who everyone else was.
Factory workers helped turn the Daily Mirror into the UK's first mass-circulation newspaper. On double-decker buses and trams and in bicycle baskets, a daily was sported as a symbol of literacy and class identity. During the Second World War, it was a direct line of contact with friends and colleagues on the front.
But the intimate relationship between the commuter and his newspaper might also be down to factors more subtle and insidious than merely keeping up with the news and doing what is expected of your peer group. In his (sadly out of print) memoir Notes from Overground (1984), Roger Green (aka Tiresias), notes the Pavlovian nature of the morning's newspaper purchase: “We rush to buy newspapers in the morning, feel disoriented if they cannot be obtained, yet at the end of the journey many of us abandon them, and the unscrupulous can, and do, walk the length of the train gathering enough palliative pulp to last them through the working day.”
Green, who commuted for two decades between Oxford and Paddington, notes how the content of The Times – the dominant newspaper on his route and of those times – insidiously feeds the commuting life, with quizzes and crosswords, daily reports on the crises in British Rail, letters of complaint (perfect for a carriage full of people who yearn to complain) and cultural commentary that likes to caricature the commuter, invariably as a middle-class cipher.
Such were the elementary psychological tactics employed by editors and circulation bosses to get the good men of Tunbridge Wells, Tring or Twickenham to part with their change. But the commuter has needs too. Newspapers can serve as a sort of shield – to hide behind to avoid looking at other people or being looked at – as well as a source of succour. Perversely, it is celebrity breakdowns and child abuse scandals and suicide bombers and war reports that provide the latter. As Alain de Botton writes, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), “These accounts, so obviously catastrophic and demented, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and blessed by comparison.”
Really bad news makes a 20-minute delay seem trivial. It puts things into perspective. But if, over the decades, commuter newspapers have been a source of edification, entertainment and consolation, what is the raison d'être of the Metro? After all, it is a commuters' newspaper par excellence, launched in London in 1999 precisely to target those men and women who are on the move through the metropolis.
You have to live it to know. I commuted from Surbiton to Waterloo to work at Time Out magazine between 2008 and 2012, a period in the capital's media history when everyone seemed to want to give you a freesheet. I saw The London Paper holler and die. I saw London Lite panic and die. I swerved to avoid City AMs, Sports, Shortlists, Stylists, and some seeming cod-publications, including the hilariously bad London Weekly.
But, I confess, I sometimes fell for the Metro. It was easy. It was free. It was there. I picked it up unthinkingly. I browsed news that was already well known to anyone who listens to a radio. I half-read its consumer items. I groaned at its “funny” syndicated snapshot. I disliked it, disdained it, but I still sat with it for half an hour every day.
I could have bought a newspaper. But generally I didn't. Isn't it even a little bit astonishing that a commuter often pays thousands of pounds to travel for home to an office in the capital, and joyfully parts with twenty times the production value to obtain a horrible cup of coffee, day after day, and yet chooses to pick up a free newspaper?
Is it to save money? To save time? Is it that the modern commuter only flicks through the headlines and then goes back to his novel/poetry/accounts/diary/computer game? No, the freesheet represents a new stage in the relationship of the city commuter and his/her newspaper. Just as the 21st century suburbanite no longer expects space, a seat, fresh air, a conversation, a view through a window, a place to store bag or briefcase, so he no longer expects news of any quality. The sheaf of paper he grabs in a morning is merely a means of killing time. It is a badge of absolute anonymity, of existential nothingness. It's not democracy or levelling; it's more a kind of giving up. The commuter is knowingly accepting that he is viewed not as a reader with opinions, values, gaps in his knowledge, current affairs to consider – but, rather, as an advertising category: the commuter, middle-class or thereabouts, too rushed to reflect, too worn-out to question.
A poetical take on the demise of the commuting experience would be to say that TS Eliot had it spot on when he penned those famous lines in The Waste Land (1922), about the suits of his own day: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought that death had undone so many.” Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the privileged American poet's take on the commuter isn't in part responsible for the general Hancockian, Pythonesque view of the commuting city worker as a kind of zombie. Or, to appropriate Betjeman, that other bard of the commuting life, everyone has given up on the electric dreams of Metro-land and resigned themselves to the scant offerings of Metro-land.
There is a poetical symmetry to my own commuting history. I lost my job in March 2012 when Time Out became, what else, a flyer for the “transactional website” – that is, a freesheet. So Metro has ever more competition for that mulchy corner of the carriage where all freesheets go to die.