One of the downsides of living out on the edge of the city is that it can be hard to travel home very late at night. My last train leaves shortly before midnight on a Saturday and it’s then seven hours until the next. The hourly all-night bus service which used to serve us now drops me around 4 miles away.
So I tend not to photograph things that happen very late at night, and missed the Circle Line tube party on 31 May to mark Boris’s alcohol ban starting the next day.
I’m not a fan of the ban, though I would like the Underground to be safer for both passengers and staff. The ban will inconvenience tourists and others who occasionally like a cool beer as an antidote to the often stifling heat on the tube as they go from one of London’s attractions to another, or who like to relax a little on the way home from work, while I suspect that travel police will continue to largely turn a blind eye at large drunken groups of football supports and others who can be a real nuisance, whether or not they are actually drinking on the train. There are simply not enough police around to control them and adding an extra area of friction between them and the police is hardly likely to improve matters or manners.
I was reminded about the ban yesterday, as I was at last getting some of my pictures from another Tube party earlier this year ready to go into the stock libraries, something that tends to get on top of me (adding the captions, keywords and so on is a really tedious chore.)
Unless you are a New Zealander you will probably not know about the Treaty of Waitangi, a rather curious agreement signed by some Maori chiefs and British representatives in 1840. We used it to legitimise a takeover of the country, although in more recent years the Maoris have found it a way to claim some limited and belated reparation, and Waitangi Day is now celebrated as the New Zealand national Day.
The main celebration in London over the past few years had been the Circle Line Pub Crawl, starting early at a pub near Paddington and leaving the train at every station along the line for another beer or two, arriving at Westminster and Parliament Square around tea-time (though little tea is in evidence.) There the square is packed with a heaving mass of Kiwis, some of whom strip to the waist and perform a noisy Haka before making for the station and the next stop and pub, although relatively few make it to the official end of the party at Temple station, having mostly by then dispersed to other pubs around Whitehall and Strand.
Despite approaching 10,000 distinctly unsober participants, it all seemed very good-natured, and although a slight inconvenience to some travellers (who might be advised to change to the District line services serving the same stations but totally ignored by the party-goers) does little or no harm while giving a little free entertainment to Londoners. Much of the inconvenience seems to be caused by official over-reaction including the temporary closing of some stations and stopping (or non-stopping) of some Circle line services, when a more intelligent response would be to put on extra trains and work the participants through the system as rapidly as possible. “We’ve got a crowd on the platform, so lets stop the trains and close the station” really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It’s an event that already waves a digit to numerous by-laws, including those on drinking in public places such as Parliament Square, and I wonder if Boris’s tube ban will have any impact on it, other than perhaps to add brown paper bags to the already quite impressive dress code.
By the time you read this, you should be able to buy some of the pictures through Alamy, as well of course as directly from me – and there is a wider range of pictures on My London Diary which takes you through the day telling the whole story of the event as I saw it.
