Dérive on the London Underground
Little Willem takes himself on a few journeys
I don’t quite recall at what point the obsession started, when exactly I found myself so taken by the London Underground, but I do recall, still, my first few journeys on it after moving to London in 2011, sitting quietly on the Circle Line through Chelsea and Kensington, looping over towards Paddington and through Kings Cross. The yellow line on the map. I don’t remember where I was going.
The low purr of the announcer’s voice: “This is South Kensington. Change here for the District and Piccadilly Lines.” And, as ever: “Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.”
To begin:
The dérive, French for drift, is a crucial factor in understanding the Situationist concept of psychogeography, the study and practice of understanding the emotional and behavioral effects the urban landscape has on a person moving through it. The dérive itself is defined by Guy Debord as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences […] one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”
Crucially, the Situationists’s dérives were almost exclusively practiced via city walking. This makes sense: the spoke-like streets of Paris (where most of the Situationists practiced) were ripe for exploring, for zig-zagging through at one’s own pace; Paris, too, is a city with the psychic energy to pull one here or there in a way that feels instinctive to the walker, pulsing with people and buildings and things, enough for one to explore for years, if not the rest of a life.
Let us extend, though, towards London. And let us extend past the streets – although I spent day after day exploring those, too, that is for another essay – and move underground, into the deeply-nested train stations, tunnels layered over one another, platforms cracking with wind as trains barrel in at a rapid clip. Enormous stations with four-five-six different train lines passing through, change for this, this, this, this, and this line, says the announcer’s voice, and National Rail Services. White-paneled circular tunnels branching off in different directions, northbound platform on the left and southbound on the right, God forbid you take the wrong train, you’ll end up who-knows-where.
Again – when did this obsession start? And with which particular facet? Was it the map, a knot of colored lines bunching in the middle and slowly expanding, tentacle-like, towards the suburbs? Was it the trains, tiny cylinders with fabric seats barreling and screeching from station to station? The stations themselves, each one wildly different, some old and tiled, some sharply Brutalist, some nothing more than cement platforms in the middle of a business park? I don’t know. It’s been a while, too long, now, to recall.
What I do recall, though, is that soon after my relocation to London I found myself taking trains just for the sake of it. Sometimes I had a specific destination in mind – London was far too big to explore entirely on foot – but the destination itself was never the sole point: the journey, too, was deeply important, a large focus of the outing in its entirety. A series of steps – touching my Oyster card at the fare gates; descending into the great pit of the station via escalator or stairs; waiting on the platform and taking in the people around me, the station’s shape and size and smells; and then, yes, the train ride, no cell phone service (too deep underground), often enough I’d have my headphones in, sometimes I’d write in my notebook, sometimes I’d read, perhaps there’d be some good people watching – I recall passing through Arsenal Station after a football game and the train carriage suddenly glutting full of drunken revelers, men drinking beer out of their shoes, covered in sweat, chanting “ARSENAAAAL” with the energy of pure victory. But an empty carriage was just as good: it felt like a snug, personal space, and sometimes I’d kick my feet up.
The map soon began to become a concrete reality in my mind, a three-dimensional terrain, my understanding of how it looped into itself coalescing, and eventually I didn’t have to look at it at all. Hackney Central (home) to King’s Cross St Pancras (school) was via the Overground and the Victoria Line, yes, but the shape of it, the journey itself was also there: the slow trundle of the Overground towards Highbury & Islington station, where I’d descend below-ground towards the snugly nested platform of the Victoria Line, the train shrieking out of the station southwest towards King’s Cross, then a great wending journey through tunnel after tunnel towards, at last, an escalator that deposited me above-ground right at the foot of the hill that led towards my school.
This blossoming familiarity with the various facets of the Tube soon pulled me outwards, towards stations that held no real importance in my life. When, really, did I ever need to go to Stratford? –But there I was, disembarking from the Jubilee Line (its eastern terminus), great paneled glass-and-metal ceilings arching high above me, should I take the DLR maybe, loop back towards inner London on the Central Line, head directly home on the Overground? I knew what each journey would be like, and would pick based on whichever particular energy I wanted to immerse myself in in the moment. I knew the various energies well, eventually. “Vibes-based” journeys, if you will.
Soon – sooner than later, really – my explorations began to become more structured. I began by setting myself the goal of journeying to the end of every line, even ticking off which ones I’d visited in a notebook:
Though I never managed to visit all of them (I did miss a few stops on the far-reaching Metropolitan Line and, for some reason, Morden), my journeys to the ends of every line were uniquely rich, each station on each journey wildly different, the views through the windows of the train fluctuating with each station: ancient tiled walls, neatly partitioned rows of suburban backyards, and eventually, if you went far enough, pure forest. I recall one day deciding at random to take the Central Line all the way to Epping, watching with glee as the train passed through the golden Essex countryside, dappled with sheep. One more stop ticked off the list. But the list in and of itself was simply a framework. What happened outside of it, off of the page and into real life, was the point.
Some days I would be tempted by a single line and ride it as far as I felt like, disembarking at, perhaps, a station I liked the look of, or a part of London that I felt like exploring on foot that day. Some days I would simply pass through the stop I was meant to disembark at and wend on for a little longer, only to backtrack once I was going to be late. Some days I’d set myself a little puzzle and see how complex a route I could take over a short journey; other days, the simplest route for a long one. Dérive: “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences.” I’d pick the ambience, I’d dérive through it. It brought me such a simple joy.
–And what was the last train journey I ever took before I left London for good? I can’t remember now; truthfully, it hurts a little.
I know I took a cab to the airport. Maybe it was Nunhead to King’s Cross on National Rail? A final random journey, maybe, on one of my favorite lines – the Victoria Line, or the Jubilee Line through London Bridge?
I do know, though, that I came back eventually, just for a week, but, god, something about the trains in New York never hit me quite the way the Underground did, and once I could eke out some time to myself I rocketed right back into my old habit – not just of riding the trains, but of structuring out a specific journey, of immersing myself into a particular energy of my choosing. A little goal for while I was there: take every train line, not to the end, but just to try them each out once more.
A dull misty morning in King’s Cross, with nothing to do that day. A descent, once again, into the Tube station – memories of long days in the school library, exhaustedly hauling myself home – and a realization that I still hadn’t tried out my two favorites, the Victoria and Jubilee lines, and a quick stratagem: the Northern Line to London Bridge; the Jubilee Line to Green Park; the Victoria Line back up to my original starting point. A decent loop, and one that I enjoyed immensely, packed in with late-morning commuters paging through their free copies of Metro.
As phenomenally dorky as it all is – and I’ve read this essay over a few times now, I know it really is dorky – my train dérives, my personal Underground psychogeographies brought me an immense amount of… well, not just joy, but a form of peace, the train carriages’ slow trundles back and forth rocking me into a gentle complacency, my various destinations opening up entire new sections of London that I could meander through at my leisure. London is a very good city to explore, and I grasped at my opportunity to do so for all four years I was there.
–And I’m sure there’s a host of psychological reasons why I haven’t taken up my little habit in New York City (though I do like the trains here too). I was certainly in an odd headspace when I was living in London, one of avoidance and dissociation from various problems at hand, and perhaps taking trains was a way of immersing myself in this. All the same, I enjoyed myself immensely. I had my little games, my cozy interiors, my routes and explorations. I built myself my own personal version of the city, my own personal London that existed as much in the city proper as it did in my head.
In the end, I wrote my final-year dissertation on psychogeography. I put time and love into it, and received the second-highest grade.
dudes love trains
'train list yay' has broken me. Lovely!