PHOTOGRAPHY|PHOTO ESSAY|WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING
Shooting London
Inside the belly of the snake
For the last few weeks I’ve been commuting to west London. Most of my cycle training assignments have been in the Notting Hill/Little Venice area. This is the reason why both my trusted Brompton and I have found ourselves on the London Overground almost every day.
The London Overground is an orbital network that has served the capital since 2007. Whilst some stations existed before then, they weren’t linked to each other the way they are now. Immortalised in Iain Sinclair’s London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line, this cluster of stations serves almost 190 million people annually.
There are two features of the Overground I love. Hopefully you’ll be able to see them in the photo above. First it’s the light. Unlike its counterpart, the London Underground system, the Overground runs… well.. above ground (interestingly, 55% of the Tube’s network runs above ground, and yet we call it Underground). You get plenty of light coming through the carriages windows, even on dark days. By contrast, both the Piccadilly and Victoria Lines, although brightly lit inside, travel through dark, cavernous tunnels, until they reach the sticks, when they come out.
The second eye-catching element for me is the lack of coach-dividing doors. Again, on the Tube, each carriage is separated by a door one is advised not to open and walk through. Peer down the aisle on the Overground and you might be forgiven for thinking you just got swallowed up by a metallic anaconda slithering along.
On the day I took this photo there was the usual morning crowd getting on and off. The late-night shift cleaners clocking off from whatever office they’d scrubbed up in the City. My fellow Bromptonians, our bicycles folded down to a two-wheel ball and resting between our legs. The tech guys, laptops flipped open and mobile phones glued to their ears. The on-the-spot, white ear-budded DJs, music filtering out of their noise-cancelling, wireless devices. And the “mad heads-down soliloquists” (Iain Sinclair again, but from The Last London this time), clutching their Samsungs, iPhones or Sonys firmly and talking to friends or relatives loudly.
What you don’t see in the photo is the families doing the school run (this is mainly because I don’t like photographing children without their parents/carers permission). The — never-ending —questions being asked, the theories about the world being thought up (if the rail track ends, will this train grow wings and fly, daddy?), and the bickering between siblings. A nest of tweeting goldfinches. That’s how it all sounded to me. A glorious commuter morning song. The sound of a city that was stirring awake, one station at a time. And us, lucky to be in the belly of the beast.
You can buy me a coffee here.
