Daily battleground

The crowd of passengers anxious to board the world’s first underground railway was like “the crush at the doors of a theatre on the first night of a pantomime”. It was January 11 1863, on the Metropolitan Railway from Paddington to Farringdon – a Saturday. Workmen made up the early crush, then from 8am first-class and secondclass passengers rushed to the City. A daily or twice daily rush hour has never been dispelled. The same goes, in varied ways, for commuting outside London. Now Transport for London says that since the decline of Covid the rush hour has resumed later in the day. Working from home has for many proved to be less than the acme of social existence. But if commuting was nasty, brutish and crushed before the pandemic, the daily war of all-against-all shows no sign of reaching a peaceful resolution.