The Creation of Culture on London's Transportation

INTRODUCTION

One night while I was in London, my friend and I were riding the tube from the West End to Shoreditch. The train was far from full, just us and a few other passengers spread out within the car. Across from us were two men, one of whom was eating a container of Isu soup that had an aroma that was filling the train. An older passenger enters the train a stop after we had, and makes a comment acknowledging the soup and it’s delicious scent. This begins a lively conversation among all of the passengers in the car. The man eating the soup responds in an American accent, which inspires my friend and I to interact with him and find out where he is from. When we discover he is from the east coast as well, we further marked our identities on the train as Americans in England. Our creation of  a smaller group within a larger culture (Americans living in London), or a subculture, on that train marked every other passenger as an other (not an American living in London), and forced them to self-categorize as non-American in juxtaposition to our category of American. In response to our creation of subculture on the train, different passengers shared stories of their origins and some younger English passengers spoke of their travels to America. 

Social scientist Goffman’s civil inattention rule of behavior, which is generally followed in the space of shared transit, states that “people show that they have noticed each other, but immediately afterwards they draw their attention away to show that they don’t see the other person as weird or special” (Soenen 2006, 3-4). The civil inattention rule is explained further in the Audiopedia video attatched in the following section. While the older gentleman first broke the civil inattention rule, the conversation quickly became one among the younger generations on the train, creating yet another subcultural group within the confined space of the train. Once we exited the train at our stop, the private relationships that we had formed briefly on the tube ceased to exist and remained just a singular experience on the tube, but an important one that allowed us to participate in and shape the culture of London during our brief trip to Shoreditch.

Recently, there’s been a push in England towards modes of active travel. These consist of methods of transportation that are better for both the body and the environment, such as walking or biking. In recent years, active travel has been preferenced by various political policies. For example, “successive Mayors have launched initiatives both to encourage cycling (e.g. a bicycle sharing system)” as well as policies to “discourage driving (e.g. the introduction of a 'congestion charge' for cars entering central London)” (Goodman 2013, 1). Additionally, England has implemented a Cycle to Work scheme that provides a tax-free bicycle to workers with savings between 25 and 39%. This scheme has been utilized by hundreds of thousands of workers (Busca 2016). The amount of people who cycle to work more than doubled between 2001 and 2011 (Office for National Statistics 2014, 3), so clearly the policies pushing for increasing active travel are being met positively.

If I had been walking or cycling to Shoreditch that day, would I have been able to participate in and produce the same cultural encounters? How will an increase in active travel (walking or cycling) in England affect the cultural encounters that occur in the space of shared transportation?

PRE-PRIVATE ENCOUNTERS ON LONDON’S SHARED TRANSIT

Not only does identifying one’s subculture through private interactions in the public realm of shared transit create the aforementioned pre-private atmosphere, but so does the public’s response to these private encounters. Goffman’s civil inattention rule can be broken in response to a change of routine or a positive conversation starter. In Soenen’s research about the space of transportation in the western world, she found that the factor most likely to force strangers within range of one another to break Goffman’s civil inattention rule was the presence of children or dogs (Soenen 2006, 4). Likewise, issues with transit or disorganization may force copresent strangers to work together, a rude or negative person on the transit could encourage strangers to exchange knowing looks, or other small eruptions on the confined space may also force copresent strangers to interact. For example, “the conversations of small groups can also cause laughter amongst strange bystanders and create a temporary social atmosphere” (Soenen 2006, 5). This is how the civil inattention rule was broken on my train ride to Shoreditch. 

Since the civil inattention rule is always followed with the potential to be broken, the shared transit spaces always have the potential to become social and create private relations and thus always exist in a pre-private state. In addition to the creation of relationships when the civil inattention rule is broken, the private and public realms also interact when people bring their personal and private encounters onto the shared transit (Soenen 2006, 4-5). When a couple argues, or expresses public displays of affection, or marks themselves as a couple in any way in the shared space, they are displaying their private life. If a mother calls her daughter and recites a grocery list while on the bus, she is redefining the boundaries of the public space through virtual interactions with her private life. 

LONDON’S SHARED TRANSIT AS A BRITISH EXPERIENCE

Furthermore, the experience of shared transit in London is unique to London. Each city interacts with their shared transit in a different way. Despite different backgrounds and subcultural groups utilizing London’s transit, all must do so in a British way in order to not cause a small disruption within the space. While the conversations between friends or couples on the phone or in person on shared transit define the intersections between private and public life within the shared space, they would, in my experience, be unwelcomed in the quieter transit of Paris. 

The public performance of private lives and those accepting it as a cultural norm marks each passenger as a member of British culture at the time of the transit ride. In research done on well educated Taiwanese people traveling to New York City, they were shocked at the norms of transit in New York, asking “How could the subways in the Big Apple, presumably the pinnacle of Western modernity, be so shabby and disorderly?” (Lee 2007, 38). The answer, of course, is that the acceptance of the norm and the consequential performance of that norm is entirely culturally dependent. Therefore, the entirety of shared transit culture marks a British identity to all those who use it, creating an important subculture simply through its existence.

MODES OF TRANSPORTATION DISPLAYED IN BRITISH MEDIA

The Britishness of London’s public transit has been long-displayed in the media and thus holds the stake of global representation. The television show that has won six Emmys (Television Academy 2019), Fleabag, started off as a one-woman show in London (McIntosh 2019). Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series has received massive success globally since first airing on BBC in 2016. Despite the inherent Englishness of this series, Amazon opted to co-produce the original UK version instead of remaking the series for a US audience. Amazon’s choice to air the UK version instead of remaking the series, as has been done for the popular UK shows such as The Office and Shameless, signifies a new media connection between England and the United States (Waller-Bridge 2019). 

This connection between BBC and Amazon, which extends to Waller-Bridge’s series Killing Eve as well, proves hopeful for Britain’s long-term goal of expanding its national cinema reputation. The desire for national identity in Britain to be emphasized through its cinematic output is summarized in former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne’s, 2015 tax credit of 25% for television productions that qualify under the government scheme as British. In Osborne’s words, “a key part of [Britain’s] long term economic plan is supporting [the] creative industries that contribute billions to the economy and provide millions of jobs.” Waller-Bridge clearly understands the cultural and economic implications of her deal with Amazon, as she thanks Amazon for “coproducing Fleabag instead of remaking it” in her LA BAFTA Acceptance Speech, crediting this decision as a “real mark of change in the industry, and a bridge between the UK and American work” (Waller-Bridge 2019).

What’s important to the shared space of transit in this global representation of Britishness through Fleabag is the constant display of different modes of transportation throughout the series. An important display of shared transit is conveyed in the series’ first post-theme scene, in which Fleabag, the titular character, is shown reading a newspaper on a bus as she makes her way to a meeting about getting a loan for her small-business in London, England. On the bus, she meets Jamie Demetriou’s character, Bus Rodent, who has stereotypically “bad” teeth (Barlett 2013) and specifically English fashion, which is emphasized by Fleabag’s fashion and the newspaper which she reads. Of course, the bus itself also holds cultural weight as a meeting point for these two characters who later become romantically tied and sexually intimate, thus defining the bus as a pre-private place through this representation. 

Fleabag’s indirect discussion of public transportation, which spans throughout the entire series through plot points about bicycles, cabs, and scenes such as this one on the bus, carry  implications of shared transportation in London. Through the context of this bus scene occurring right before Fleabag has a bank meeting about a loan, in which she doesn’t get approved, this scene works to mark Fleabag as a member of the working class of London. Additionally, when they first speak, Bus Rodent asks Fleabag if she’s “going to work,” implying a further relationship between bus-riders and the working class and re-creating the subcultural group of workers who take busses in this media representation. 

This representation within a series that has been widely critically acclaimed and was written by a native Londoner acts to prove that shared transit carries a pre-private weight to it in addition to connotations about subculture. The pre-private space of busses is implicitly compared to that of taxis later within the pilot episode. Where busses are pre-private meeting places, taxis act as a more sacred and internal space throughout the episode. First, Fleabag chooses to help a drunk girl on the side of the road get home safely in a taxi. Moments prior to putting the unnamed drunk girl safely in the cab, the character sees Fleabag for who she is, accurately calling her “sad face.” However, when Fleabag tries to seek further intimacy with the drunk girl, offering her to sleep at her place that night, the girl becomes offended and rejects the offer, getting into the taxi by herself. While the side of the road, an entirely public place where active travel would occur, lends itself to heavily pre-private encounters, the taxi itself rejects such occurrences and is reserved only for the drunk girl and the driver. This may suggest, then, that active travel better carries a pre-private atmosphere than taxis or cars, which exist nearly singularly in the private realm.

To further the privateness of taxis with the representation of Fleabag, late in the episode the audience follows Fleabag into the taxi her father orders for her in the middle of the night. In this taxi, we are introduced to a confession that is deeply connected to transit and sets the stage for season one. It is within this taxi that we discover the commonly argued cause of Flebag’s underlying sadness: the loss of her best friend and co-worker, Boo, to a darkly comedic cycling accident. Boo, as a pedestrian, was run over by a cyclist in the public space of the street. The confession of this intimate secret in a taxi furthers the argument that taxis and cars exist in a private realm instead of pre-private. 

Another example of British media that often discusses modes of transportation on a global scale is that of The Smiths’ discography. As a band that has “inspired deeper devotion than any British group since the Beatles” (Ian Young 2013), The Smiths have earned their role in the global discussion of England’s mass transit. They regularly rely on allusions to different methods of transportation in their discography’s lyricism. In fact, about 26% of their songs make notable mention of some form of transportation, most commonly cars or general reference to the “streets,” followed by trains, bicycles, walking, busses, and finally general travel. 

Both Fleabag and The Smiths therefore display the cultural importance of different modes of travel. It would be inarguably irresponsible to push for and create policy to prefer active travel over shared transit without considering the cultural weight of such pushes and policies.