is something that has fascinated me for at least eleven years.
Brixton is the Southern end of the Victoria Line, and south of Brixton, London Underground is sparse. The Northern Line, ironically, ventures further south; my nearest Underground station is Clapham South.But the bus service is crap and walk, no thank you.
Brixton is in the hustle and bustle of the Metropolis. Vibrant and diverse, deprived and prosperous, seedy and glamorous. All bus routes converge on Brixton, many terminate. In peak times buses traverse Brixton Hill on average every minute and generally arrive in Brixton Standing Room Only. At which point, even if the bus isn't terminating, most people get off. To go to work in Brixton, to change buses, or more likely to go to the Tube station. I was told that other than the Mainline termini and the Zone 1 interchanges (Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Green Park etc), Brixton is the busiest London Underground Station.
Thousands of people disgorge.
A recipe for chaos. It's London, where everyone is rude. It's Brixton, where cultures clash, where Respec' is demanded, not earned or given, it's often violent, Darwinian, intimidating.
And yet there is this amazing system. Typically, the stairs are one-third of the way back, so two queues form, one from the rear and one from the front. Right and left. And more often than not, a lot more often than not, we take turns. Rear. Front. Right. Left. Rear. Left. A parent and child classes as one. Rear. Front. Right. Left. Sometimes it gets broken, someone jumps their turn and is glared at. Sometimes someone is too polite, lets through too many from the other side.
This is an organic system coming up from the street (well, technically, going down to the road, but a paradoxical metaphor can work, can't it?). There are no signs to suggest it - unlike the self-regulating escalator rule of 'stand on the right' - and I have never seen a reference to it in writing. Who invented it? How does it pass from one generation to the next? Eleven years I've been doing it. some of my fellow commuters were still at Primary School then, many of the schoolies were still in nappies. And yet it perpetuates, because it makes sense, because people feel comfortable with it, people sense that it is fair.
Sometimes it is too easy to find the bad in people, individuals or collectively. And yet a collective of people male and female, all ages, many ethnicities and nationalities, all classes, trades and professions, thousands upon thousands of them, year in year out, understand, obey and enforce the Brixton getting off the bus routine. I think it is quite a profound experience.
Course, having wrote this, next time I'm getting off the bus, I'll be barged and pushed by an unholy alliance of a posh black Jamaican pensioner, a male Polish chav with a disability, a gay Portuguese teenage boy, and a English male manual worker with a buggy.
