Advisory: this absurdly overlong post will only be of interest to you if you’re fascinated by the London Underground network, or you’re a keen follower of the astounding mismanagement of public services. Or, I guess, if you’re an alien psy-leech who feeds off the misery of others.
So, Bank/Monument Station is on of the most important – if not the most important – interchange stations on the London Underground. Amongst other things, it’s one of only three places that the Central Line and the Circle Line connect; it’s also the Central Line interchange for a whole branch of the Northern Line; and it’s the major central London terminus for the Docklands Light Railway, which serves a huge number of passengers heading to and from the ever-growing residential and financial areas of East London. It is, to put it tersely, fucking important.
Which is why they’ve just decided to shut down all interchange at the station for over a year.
The reason they’re doing this is so that they can upgrade the escalators. Yes, on the London Underground, it takes 16 months to put new escalators in.
I don’t have a problem with them doing important maintenance work. I’m glad they’re doing it. I’d be more glad if they were doing something to actually improve the capacity of the station, which is a hodge-podge of make-do design, twisting awkwardly around bank vaults and other underground obstructions so that you sometimes feel you’re trapped in a giant M.C. Escher lithograph. They aren’t doing that, but hey – shiny new escalators.
But exactly why they chose to shut them all down at the same time is something of a mystery. They’d already had rolling elevator works going on, where they’d shut them down one at a time. It caused overcrowding, discomfort and hassle, but you could live with it.
For DLR passengers (like me), who rely on Bank/Monument to connect them to the Tube network every day, the timing is particularly brilliant – coinciding, as it does, with the complete closure for a year of Tower Gateway, the other DLR terminus in Zone 1, and with the multi-year closure of the East London Line, which connected to the DLR at Shadwell. With a click of their fingers, essentially every single way of getting onto the Tube network in the direction of central London has been shut off.
If that sounds like maybe the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing (the answer in both cases being “wanking”), then further evidence of the superb planning that’s gone into this comes from the fact that the effective closure of one of the most important stations on the network was announced a mere eleven days before it happened. The first announcement appeared on March 20; on March 31, lights out.
This was all build-up. Today, we got to see the actual effects at rush hour… and it’s a bloody disaster zone. At the height of the rush hour this evening, there was actual gridlock in the Bank ticket hall – nobody could move, because nobody else could move. Small children being crushed. That sort of thing. As I was macheteing my way through the crowds, they announced that they were shutting down the Central Line platforms, because of overcrowding. The staff had, through little fault of their own, completely lost control of the situation. One staff member just stood there, repeatedly shouting at a woman “Don’t cut across the motorway!”. It turned out that what he meant was that she shouldn’t cut across the line of moving people next to him (which she had to do to get where she, and hundreds of others, were being routed by the station’s incomprehensible new routes), but that rather, she should move three feet to her left, and cut across the line there.
I don’t blame him. If it’d been me having to deal with such an ill-conceived mess, I’d have been ranting about dragons and the end of days.
The most astounding thing is that they have kept one set of escalators operating; the ones they’d been renovating for the past six months that connect the DLR to the Central Line. But at the top of those stairs, you discover that – bafflingly – the corridor that connects to the central Line is shut off (pictured above). The crucial point here: there aren’t any fucking escalators there. It’s just a corridor, with some stairs up and down. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever I can conceive of why this passageway should be shut, forcing all the DLR passengers up into the tiny Lombard Street ticket hall, with massive overcrowding being the – duh – result. Furthermore, only the up escalator to Lombard Street is working, meaning that the only way to actually get down to the DLR from Bank is via a set of lifts or stairs which go to the Northern Line (are you following this?) This wasn’t exactly flagged up in any of the advance publicity, which explicitly stated that “Exit and entry are unaffected”.
The upshot of this is that a) I’m giving serious thought to moving, rather than having to put up with a nightmare commute for the next year-and-a-bit, which I don’t want to do because I love living where I am now, and b) I’ve written what I think is the first honest-to-goodness Disgruntled Letter to Authority of my life. You can read a copy of it here; I told them I’d blog about it, so I’m fulfilling that promise. (It was written before we actually saw what would be shut down, which is why I refer to the DLR-Central escalators being out, which it transpires they aren’t.)
And if anybody from London Underground or Transport for London happens to read this, here’s two practical suggestions on how to carry out the escalator works without making everybody’s lives quite such a misery. 1) Open the damn passageway at the top of escalators 8 and 9 so that there can be interchange between the DLR and the Central. 2) Consider making the station exit-only, allowing you to operate one of every set of escalators, going up. This would allow for a greater degree of interchange; it would still allow people to exit the station to get to work in the morning. Yes, it would impact on people trying to get in on the commute home, but this is a less time-pressured situation for most people.
As it is, they’ve managed all of the over-crowding, inconvenience and discomfort with none of the functionality. Everything about this smacks of a badly-planned rush job, with a woeful effort to inform the public and little thought given to the practical consequences. And we’re stuck with it until next August. Buggeration.
More on this, naturally, at Annie Mole’s excellent Tube Diary (which includes this interesting text of advice to staff; notably, it doesn’t mention most of the key issues that caused the scenes at Bank today, and its rationale that they had to impose a one-way routing system which prevented interchange to prevent overcrowding didn’t make any sense on a first reading, and looks simply laughable in the face of the disastrous overcrowding it caused today.)
