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In this quietness, in the willingness of people to cram in at a total sacrifice of anything that might be termed defensible space I find something rather moving. To me it is not a terrible thing, not at all a terrible thing that we should, for brief periods of time, tolerate conditions we would not impose on cattle. When Mumford captions one of his illustrations (of people going down into the subway) "Beginning of the typical metropolitan day...Descent into Hades" I don't understand him. (How much happier a classical allusion is the statement, in Latin to boot, by Fulgence Bienvenue, the classicist and engineer who built the Paris Metro: "Per erepto fulmine per inferno vehitur promethei genus": "Prometheus's children are transported in the underground inferno with the power of Jupiter"…by which he meant electricity.)

The Underground: what we are seeing here is the Social Contract (transport division), the temporary and voluntary submission to a greater good. I like to feel one of a crowd. I enjoy the utterly tenuous, lowest common denominator that occasions our promiscuous travel arrangements. That it takes place at all is not uncivilised, it is civilised. It is nonetheless a strange
feature of city life, one that George Steiner recognises in the Death of Tragedy. He points out that only relatively recently, in the last 150 years, have humans found themselves in the novel circumstances of being face to face with strangers for significant periods of time without speaking or at least without having to speak. To do so is a metropolitan skill and it is strange and shocking to people not used to it. There is the idea that we should all be laughing and joking, swapping anecdotes, making friends; but that is not how the city works.

We all recognise that moment when onto the tubes lurches the man with the six pack of Tennents in his plastic bag. The one who sings Strangers in the Night and who staggers about trying to shake people's hands ("Put it there pal"). When people don't respond then we are likely to get: "What the fuck's wrong with you, why does no-one fucking talk to one another in this fucking city?" And for a moment you think, conventionally, yes this lone, mad voice must be the voice of sanity in a world gone mad. But no; the silence in the underground is not, repeat not evidence of some sinister urban anomie. For me anyhow it is the sound of civilisation, evidence of a tacit urban social contract. In the 1820s Hazlitt wrote:
"In London there is a public; and each man is part of it… We have a sort of abstract existence; and a community of ideas and knowledge (rather than local proximity) is the bond of society and good fellowship."

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