Two London women, late twenties, friends, two contrasting views on personal hygiene and the London Underground. This is not about moquette preferences. It’s about something even more important. More emotive. More elemental. It’s about dirt. Tube dirt. It’s about how much of it there is, how much it matters and how to appropriately respond.
Let’s call one of the women Florence. She described taking the subterranean railway home from work, getting into her flat and immediately blowing her nose. She is horrified by what comes out. The muck! The dust! The dirt! She puts the clothes she has been wearing in the washing machine. She takes a shower. Only after every speck of Underground contaminant has been purged from her person can she relax.
Let’s call the other woman Freda. She listened to Florence in a state of wonderment, verging on awe. She too gets the Underground to and from work. She too has a routine when she gets in at the end of the day. It involves going to her bedroom and lying down. Under her duvet. In her work clothes. Tube dirt and all.
This is Freda’s way of unwinding, of shedding the strains and stresses of the day, of making the transition from work and travel mindset to one of recovery and repose. Florence’s equivalent ritual is about purification – of body, of garments and, I would deduce, anxiety. Tube dirt anxiety. Oh my God!
For Freda, the same goal is achieved though a kind of spiritual letting go, and that means not worrying about Tube dirt, not thinking about it, perhaps not even acknowledging its existence. Its presence or otherwise is simply not a post-work wellbeing factor for her.
All of this raises important questions. How dirty is the London Underground, exactly? How much is it rational or reasonable to care? Transport for London, of course, prides itself on its Tube cleaning regime, but there are variations in intensity. Where trains themselves are concerned, the Piccadilly line’s get the least attention, followed by those used on the District, Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City. Then comes the Central line, and so on.
A mayoral answer in November 2023 said stations are cleaned daily including “touchpoint” sanitation of escalator handrails (which, come to think of it, can sometimes feel a bit sticky). Go back another year and find a detailed defence of a “robust cleaning regime” across the whole of the city’s public transport network.
But what about air quality? “Multiple studies have shown that air pollution levels on the Underground are higher than those in London more broadly, and beyond the World Health Organisation’s defined limits,” said yet another study of the matter, this one from Cambridge University. Little bits of pollution are wafting everywhere, even as you stand on a quiet platform. They’re in your ears. They’re in your eyebrows. They’re in your hair.
I don’t plan to get between Florence and Freda on this one. After all, they are still friends and their discourse went on to hilariously embrace, for example, how best to get a sponge between your toes when in the shower. I will, though, observe that cities are, by their crowded, cluttered, human-infested nature, often grubby places. If you don’t like it, you have to find your own best way to live with it.
Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist here .
OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.