Episode 165: The Bethnal Green Disaster

Based on Devin's reaction to us doing it last time, I think we should probably do a sync point.

Were they pleased that we did that?

Yeah, yeah, they were.

So I think, Justin, if you'd count us down three, two, one, mark, and then Liam and me like clap on the word mark.

Okay.

Three, two,

one,

mark.

Beautiful.

That's something.

All right.

I believe.

Four years in, baby.

Yeah.

We're finally.

It's five.

It's like five years.

I do this on the other two podcasts and that knowledge has not disseminated I'm like those one of those like really low technology spread regions in fucking Europa Universalis like I this is why what I've always done when when I was editing the podcast I would just make sure that the the point where the Zencaster started was on screen

so that I can sync everything there, right?

It's the other thing Everyone does 321 Mark, but I never hear anyone do 321 Luke or John or Matthew.

That's the best gospel.

Yeah,

I like the mark thing because it makes me feel like a submarine captain, you know, and it reminds me of Hunt for Red October, like, you know, on my mark.

Mark Twain and then clap 12 times.

That's right.

Hello and welcome to, Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I guess you wrote the slides, so you introduced it, yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

I did.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Okay, go.

Hi, I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

It's thrown you so badly.

I'm sorry.

Do you want to go again?

My pronouns are he and no, it's too late.

We must press on.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him.

I'm the person talking right now.

Okay, that's it.

This is, I've fucked the vibe so badly by just like commentaring.

I apologize profusely.

The next one, I'm just, you know, you're back in the driver's seat.

It's just, I wrote most of this episode, not all.

And what you see on the screen before you is a staircase, and it's not supposed to look like that.

No, it's upside down.

Oh, boy.

He was missing the risers.

Yeah, you would be hard-pressed to like you know use this staircase um and we're going to talk about how it got

i guess so we're going to talk about why mc esher put this this staircase he would still have difficulty with it because he only made pictures of non-euclidean spaces he could not exist in them because he was only a man

it's a skill issue you know like

It's like when someone has like one of those like impossible fetishes, like somebody who's like, it's like a real giant S thing.

It's like, you can draw it, but it's never going to happen.

happen

now it's a real real shame yeah um we're gonna explore why mc escher cannot exist within this space at bethnal green tube station only way you can get off is to go visit a paul bunyan statue what the fuck bros

why are you telling the people my secrets why why this like klein bottle is pouring into itself forever

um

but first we have to do wait no i'm gonna give this back to you this is uncomfortable justin please yeah before we talk about why this memorial is here at Bethnal Green Tube Station, we have to do the goddamn news.

I feel so much better.

So I think it will be

an update for anyone who's interested in cycling in Philly and the mayor's opinion on it.

Oh, hell yeah.

A developing story.

Exactly.

So this is in the wake of the death of Dr.

Barbara Freedz,

hit by a drunk driver on

Pine Street.

I think, I forget which, it was Spruce or Pine anyway.

You know, there was a big protest by the bicycle coalition in front of City Hall, and they collected, you know, 6,000 signatures on a petition

to hand deliver to the mayor asking for concrete protection in these major bike lanes in Center City.

This is one of those protests that had been, you know, formally arranged a while back, right?

And they were going to deliver the petition to the mayor.

Anyway, so you know, they all got there.

They did the big protest, and then

they went to the gates of city hall to, you know, hand deliver this petition as they had arranged.

And security stopped them.

And then they saw local news was there.

And then they led them up to the second floor.

Very begrudgingly, yes.

Yeah.

And then they stopped them again.

And all they could really do was like, okay, we're going to read a statement and then leave the petition on a table.

This is a major, major snub by the city government here.

It's just weird that they would, you know, make that

all you had to do was accept the petition and not do anything.

As I understand it and put a pin in this sentiment, because there's going to be some developments on it and sort of my professional life soon, every mayor in America is a kind of like incredible Nixonian tyrant.

Oh, yes.

I think that's cool that you just have like a whole layer of municipal government that is just filled with kind of like little Napoleons.

Yeah, I mean,

this has been sort of a weird just saga so far.

Mayor Parker, the administration believes they were elected on a platform of like,

you know, being

sort of anti-safe streets, sort of, or at least indifferent to them.

The reality is, I don't think Mayor Parker was elected on anything.

She got a commanding majority of 32.6% of the vote.

Yeah, you just kind of like vote habitually for, I guess, more dangerous streets, like more dead pediatricians or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

This is just, this is just weird.

It's weird to look at.

It's weird that,

you know, she is continuing the general legacy of not doing anything as mayor.

But, you know, which is traditionally what the office is for is just keeping a seat warm.

It's just that she's being very, very aggressive about it.

Sure.

So I don't know.

This is, this This is the status of cycling in Philly: is that if you want to do it and you get murdered, who cares?

The government, you know, the mayor is going to come and piss on your grave.

Right.

It's your fault somehow.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah,

everything's miserable still.

Nothing's going to get better.

Everything sucks.

At some point, you got to start doing some like, you know, cycling-based direct action.

You know, you got to do some like critical mass shit.

That too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And hopefully the next election cycle, you know, either we have one candidate to rally around who's not Parker, or more likely, there'll be 400 candidates again.

And yeah.

I love to split the vote.

I love left politics.

I especially love left electoral politics.

To me, this is good.

My sympathies.

On a plus side, all gender restroom in City Hall.

So hey, but that's that's pretty cool, cool, you know.

That's because gendered restrooms are illegal if they're single occupancy in Philly.

It's just like the all-gender restroom behind a line of security is like itself a kind of like, you know, little comment, I guess.

Yeah.

Speaking of all-gender restroom behind a line of security.

Oh, boy.

Let's check in on the Democratic National Convention.

Must we?

I don't know what's happened here at all.

I just saw fucking letting Bill Clinton speak.

God damn it.

I know a lot of people who've been like, you know, following this with rapt attention, and you couldn't, you, you, you, you'd have to put me in like the clockwork orange chair

to look at any of this.

Well, they, they, they gave Joe Biden his like happy ending, right?

Where they kind of like did the ego thing.

Okay, Grandpa.

Yeah, yeah.

He got to do a speech.

And to be fair, like, they dialed in the like cocktail of amphetamines.

It was early enough in the sort of afternoon or whatever that, like, he locked the fuck in for this speech.

He was like, it was like watching old Biden.

He was coherent on America gave me a congratulations.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's just like, it just got up there.

I'm old as fuck.

Vote for Kamala Harris.

Congratulations, Grandpa.

You did it.

You killed every Palestinian toddler.

Yep, yep, yep.

Some of his like surrogates were bitching in the press about like how you know wasn't enough time and they weren't getting sucked off enough, whatever, fine.

And yeah, so the the one thing that I noticed that uh right wingers were getting mad at, and they were there looking for stuff to be mad at, Matt Walsh was there in disguise.

Disguise, I saw that.

Fucking asshole.

There were Richard Hanania, the like guy who was going to be the new intellectual light of the, you know, the conservative movement until he got exposed.

Yeah, he was like a hypologetic dog.

Yeah, and the guy who got exposed for being like a like an open fool Nazi.

That guy was talking about how like

Kamala Harris's like stepdaughter, Ella Amhoff, looks weird.

And she doesn't.

She looks like every young person in Brooklyn at this point.

And like, they're reaching.

They're reaching so badly because there's nothing here.

Like, it's just...

The Democratic Party have like turned on the lights and like hit the thing of like, there will be some more politics.

We are excited to be your next government.

And it's like trying to punch smoke, you know?

I like how they've just decided we're not going to talk about any policies until after the election.

It's weirdly starmer, isn't it?

Yeah, it's very

international starmerism is spreading.

I mean, she's going to try and do the starmerite thing of like winning on a kind of like, you know, loveless, loveless landslide.

And then get into office and the approval rating hits like minus 50 the next day.

Like,

I don't know.

What else happened?

Tim Waltz is vice president.

We were still complaining about Shapiro in the last episode.

I'm happy to be wrong.

This is the nice thing about being a political cynic is that if you're right, you get to say, I told you so.

And if you're wrong, you get to be pleasantly surprised.

It's true.

This makes up for the kind of England Euros thing for me.

You know, I was, I was wrong about England winning the Euros, but I was also wrong about Tim Waltz not getting the nomination.

And to be clear, Tim Waltz, like every politician, is also a piece of shit, right?

Like, he's the same guy who sent the National Guard into Minneapolis in 2020.

Like,

like, and all of this, like, oh, he's like my grandpa stuff.

He's not like your grandpa.

All of these people would step over your like bloodied corpse for an inch of power.

But, like, as far as these things go on a, like, a functional level,

like, the best choice.

And clearly he is because all they can really land on him is like, this motherfucker was lying about liking Steely Dan.

And it's like, no, he wasn't.

He demeaned the white race.

Good by

saying he liked

ground beef tacos.

Yeah, yeah.

They did like one of those really like forced, inauthentic bits where they're like being filmed for some reason, where he's like, he makes a self-deprecating joke about how he likes white guy tacos, which...

is actually kind of unfair to him because I've read one of his recipes.

He won a recipe competition and this looks really good.

Like, but a hot dish, yeah.

Yeah, like the

Midwestern food.

They got the spicy calipers, right?

Yeah.

I guess this is the other thing that I always struggle with, right?

Is I think Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz is the first presidential ticket, both of whose cooking I would eat.

They also seem

like personally quite nice.

Like their kids love them and they seem like nice people.

On the other hand, they are like running to superintend, and one of them has been like assistant superintending continued genocide.

And that's just one of the things that I'm getting sick of seeing pictures of dismembered Palestinian toddlers on Twitter.

Yeah, and there's only so much.

There's only so much like, you know, Brat Summer that you can take when you're sort of like when the rest of your timeline is like somebody with their entire head getting exploded, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

I will say this, though.

I stand by the cooking thing, if only because i can't imagine many of the other presidents or like nominees cooking you know like trump's never cooked trump has never cooked a meal in his life yeah trump has no idea what a like a stove is he's never seen one i it might be controversial i don't think obama's cooking's good um

i can see that i think i think w is like 50-50 right it depends which part of his being wins out whether it's like connecticut kind of like silver spoon in which case terrible cooking or like Texas party boy in which case the man may be able to barbecue

Bill Clinton I don't think he can cook is the thing I and I know he was suffering under the kind of tyranny of Hillary's cooking you know okay yeah I could see that I could see that's why he had to go to McDonald's when he went jogging yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

I think the only I had a look about this actually because I was interested the only president I could find whose cooking was described was

Eisenhower, apparently serious barbecue man, like serious, like knew, knew his way around a grill,

would do like a steak directly like on the coals or whatever line.

Oh, hell yeah.

And I believe that.

Like, I'm willing to, I'm willing to, like, go back in time and try Eisenhower's barbecue.

Other than that, culinary wasteland in the Oval Office.

I was thinking of this yesterday.

I think Bill Clinton is the last president who was really a man of the people because he would occasionally give the Secret Service the slip.

I don't think anyone's done that since then.

I've been minding sort of a bonus episode about the Secret Service.

The Secret Service fucking hated the Clintons, like all of them.

Yes.

Sometimes with good reason, often with bad reason, but that was not a happy relationship that they maintained,

which, you know.

Yeah, it's funny and is, I guess, kind of relatable, you know?

Like.

Yeah, yeah.

yeah.

I think it'd be funny that you're just jogging on the national mall and Bill Clinton comes by and says hi.

It's like living in like a European country where the prime minister is just like around, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, AOC sold out.

Yeah, something happened with AOC and I don't know what it is.

Oh, she did the big like endorsement.

There's not much to say about it.

Like she wants to be president and like I say,

I think they've been grooming her to be the next Pelosi for a long time now.

I mean, yeah, and Pelosi, to be fair, maneuvered this one pretty well.

Um, yeah, but Pelosi, Pelosi works some shit happen.

Uh, she's she's like a mob boss, she's not a good person, but she is an effective person.

Exactly.

Um, she's very good at her job, yeah.

I mean, she scythed Bernie off at the knees, another guy who cannot fucking cook.

Like, I promise you, Bernie Sanders cooking food of our people is a rich cultural tapestry, can, however, light a coal wood stove with one match.

Yeah, cool.

Okay, but like, I believe Bernie Sanders could fuck up like toast, you know, or eggs.

Yeah.

Because, like, he's a recovered hippie.

Like, he's probably done, like, like lentil shit and then just, like, kind of Vermont dad cooking for the rest of his life.

Like, no, atrocious.

I don't know.

Maybe he could.

I think

if he's not going to fuck something up, it's going to be breakfast.

Do you think he makes a good breakfast?

I think Bernie probably makes a good breakfast.

I don't, I don't know, maybe it's very heavy on the granola in a way that I don't like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that could be the case as well.

Yeah, I don't know, we'll have to conduct a survey somehow, but yeah, so so like AOC also doesn't care about you and doesn't see you as human, like she especially doesn't see Palestinians as human.

Um, one of the sadder things uh I've seen was um Illinoma, who I think is one of the like few members of Congress who I would like, you know, never trust any of these people, right?

But who can be like depended on for like stuff like this did say that she was like, you know, what my colleagues are doing is unconscionable.

She said the thing that stuck with me, like working tirelessly for a ceasefire isn't anything.

It isn't real, which she was right about.

Like all of these people are claiming to be doing that and they're not doing that because, you know,

there's like an obvious factor preventing a ceasefire and that's Netanyahu, right?

It's ISRA.

Yeah, as long as the ceasefire deal is give us the hostages and we'll kill you.

There's not going to be a ceasefire.

I wouldn't take that.

The fucking trade offer that is the ceasefire that contains no ceasing of fire?

Yeah, no.

Yeah, yeah, no.

It's a ceasefire where,

yeah, now they just go in and murder everyone afterwards.

Yeah.

We'll stop shooting for one day, maybe.

It's grim.

It continues to be grim.

And like I say, all of these people continue to be complicit, enthusiastically so, in it.

And politics, politics, very bad.

Continuing to be very bad.

Yeah, politics continue to be very bad we're we're presum well actually I don't want to say that because if I predict it then you know that might have an effect on things because of the lathe so the election is

yet to happen and we'll see it really does seem like Trump wants to lose regardless of whether he actually does like at this point

there's there's there's a there the Democrats have a very narrow pathway to losing this

he doesn't want to get pain uh I think he shook from the uh,

he has PTSD for real.

Like, assassinations, attempted assassinations work, I guess, because, like,

you know, obviously, it couldn't have happened to a nicer person, but he genuinely has like trauma from this, you know.

Uh,

I like that I'm calling him a pussy for having trauma from having been shot at, having been shot at, yeah.

Oh, well, well,

yeah, but in other news,

um,

so as at time of recording tomorrow the

uh canadian railroads canadian national and canadian pacific kansas city uh that's the recent merger um

it's not a it's not a great name yeah

they're going to uh they are locking out their employees and their employees are going on strike the entire canadian railroad system will shut down as of midnight tonight.

Whoa.

Okay.

Yes.

That's not a thing that's as we saw when Biden shamefully like broke the rail strike in the U.S.

Isn't that one of the things that has like

such major infrastructure

major

consequences?

Um, no one's going to be able to bring harvests in.

Um, obviously, that shuts down domestic and international uh container traffic.

Um, after a couple of weeks, you know, the water treatment plants run out of chlorine.

Um,

yeah, I mean, everyone gets cholera, you know, it's not a great situation.

Throwback.

Yeah.

The situation, as far as I know,

because this has been even less reported on than the American railroad strike, and that was not well reported on.

Apart from one article in the New York Times, the paper of record.

Well,

even that one, I would look back and make some changes to.

You're languishing.

I think that's the economy of the good, you know.

Yeah.

Very similar issues here.

The Canadian railroads are represented by Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, I believe it's called.

They're looking for sort of better quality of life,

better safety guarantees, all the sort of same stuff that the rail unions were looking for here in the United States.

I mean, you know, you have the same problems with like management retaliation.

You have problems with the railroads relocating employees across the country for like months at a time.

It's the same problems, except it's twice as bad because you got to have them in English and French, you know, like you don't just have management retaliation.

You also have retaliation de la management, you know?

This is true.

This is true.

Although that Teamsters did secure one concession a long time ago that Americans don't have all the locomotives have coffee makers in them.

Huh.

Yeah.

The railroads, I believe, want to go to a more American-style pay system.

In Canada, they still do the old-fashioned mileage-based pay, whereas in the United States, it's hourly.

So if precision scheduled railroading happens to you and you're sitting in a siding for 18 hours, you don't get paid for that.

You get paid for a day regardless, but I believe if you go further than the old rule used to be you got extra pay for over a hundred miles.

I don't know what it is now.

I'm not super familiar

with how it works in Canada right now.

But the railroad's counteroffer is just, look, shut up.

We'll pay you more, even though the job is incredibly dangerous and it's miserable.

If with all these strikes, like anywhere internationally, I feel like you run into a kind of a hard adaptational limit: like, there's you can pay people however much you want to do the thing.

If it's that miserable, they're not going to do it.

They're not going to do it.

Yeah, exactly.

It's this is this is one of the fundamental issues, and we'll talk about this hopefully in the next episode we put out.

Um, you know, the fundamental issues with uh the way the current railroads are currently run is that you have to really amiserate and exploit people in order to do it in ways that just were not the case even 20, 30 years ago.

So, you know,

this is an intractable problem, but it's, I think it's going to shake out differently than it did in the United States just because

Canadian labor law, I do not believe works the same way in the United States, where Joe Biden could swoop in and become the progressive hero by breaking the strike.

You know, I think Justin Justin Trudeau has a lot less power to just force everyone back to work.

I mean, wouldn't it be the first time that

a Trudeau did sort of like extra chartorial powers in order to like maintain the Canadian system of government?

Hashtag just watch me.

Yeah, no, we'll see.

I don't know.

Why do I say hashtag?

I'm turning older and older all the time.

Because the way time works.

We'll see what happens in about six hours and seven minutes.

Unless Devin, Devin can get this off real quick.

Yeah.

We'll see how long I keep you on this one.

Yeah.

Well, there's a lot of slides.

Yes, there are.

Yeah.

Anyway,

that was the goddamn news.

As I said, a lot of slides.

Hi, welcome.

I and three beers am going to explain to you

a very under-reported disaster, Like, contrary to the thing that I said previously about how my podcast is a machine that turns Wikipedia articles into content, there is not a Wikipedia article, not a whole one anyway, about this.

But it is the largest civilian loss of life in the UK during the Second World War.

And it does have a train connection because it relates to the London Underground.

So in order to understand the Bethnal Green Tube disaster, we must first ask ourselves, what is the tube?

What is the tube?

Why is it like that?

So, I just throw out a little introduction here.

London Underground starts with the Metropolitan Railway in 1863.

This is before the idea of a dedicated metro is a thing.

Metro comes from the Metropolitan Railway.

You know, the idea is you have this underground passenger railroad, and it links all the main railway termines in London together, which means it's not specifically for like local transportation.

This thing is used for like long-distance main line trains.

It's used by goods trains.

It's used by even the big broad gauge trains of the Great Western Railway went through there.

Yeah, and it's a mess of like five or six or 10 or 20 different train companies, each trying to do competing underground railways to get like absorbed and stuff.

And it expands kind of spasmodically as well.

Yeah, and for a long time, there's like, you know, you're buying through tickets on the tube or on the London Underground that go to like Dover.

You know,

they just shoved anything that fit in there in there, which was everything because they were built to full-size mainline standards.

And those are the subsurface lines, right?

Even today, the subsurface lines, which are the bigger trains, on some parts of the underground, they still share tracks with mainline trains.

Not really in the core of the network, though.

So by the late 19th century, this model is showing its impracticalities.

Expansion was difficult because these subsurface lines, they were steam-powered.

They required shallow tunnels, lots of ventilation shaft.

It's cut cover.

You just dig into the street and then you put a roof on it, you know?

Exactly.

Investors moved on to the next thing, the deep level tube.

Yeah, advances in tunneling machinery and like more funding and it being slightly easier to get stuff through a wildly corrupt parliament.

Christian Walmart's history of the tube is not bad on this.

You know, it's a bit kind of chronological, but it gets the job done.

Yeah, I mean, that would be, that would be a good episode for the future, is just talk about the London Underground.

Absolutely.

Someone put that on the spreadsheet.

Anyway,

the deep level tube, right?

So here's a radical idea.

What if instead of building full mainline tunnels, we put smaller trains in smaller tunnels?

This was made possible because they had electric power now instead of steam trains, right?

These deep level tunnels can be built with shields, you know, where there's a bunch, there's like a big metal shield with slats in it.

You remove the slats, you dig out a bit, you put the slat back in, rinse and repeat for miles and miles and miles.

And that, you know, lets you dig the tunnel while leaving street level undisturbed.

Theoretically, you could even build these tunnels underneath occupied buildings, but the first tube line that was the City and South London Railway, which is, of course, now part of the Northern Line, this remained underneath the right-of-way of streets above it to make property acquisition cheaper.

This sort of introduces a lot of ideas that are common in modern metros, you know, dedicated trains on dedicated tracks, flat fares, turnstiles, stuff like that, right?

Electric trains.

The first ones didn't have windows because they thought you didn't need windows if it's only in a tunnel.

Turned out everyone hated that.

It's like get in the box, you know?

Get the box.

They call them padded cells.

I don't know.

It sounds like it could be kind of like sensory.

I don't know.

So this is like the 1890s.

These guys start to show up.

There's various tubes built by various

companies for various purposes.

So there's like the Piccadilly line.

that was built as sort of an express line to complement the district line, right?

You have the central line that just goes straight to central London.

You have the northern line.

I will have a lot to say about the central line specifically, for it is here that our tragedy is set.

Yeah, you have the northern line that was built to confuse and infuriate people because the northern line goes to south London.

This is a southbound northern line train.

What?

Shouldn't that be the southern line train?

It makes sense.

So, another thing that could confuse and infuriate you is, of course, this wonderful flying junction near Camden Town station where any train could take any path.

And for quite a while, they did.

Fuck.

Every tube station like this is like a sort of like incredible maze.

If you're in a good mood, it's a wonderful experience.

If you're in a bad mood, it's a terrible experience, but it's an experience.

This looks like an experience, TM.

I really love this diagram, by the way, complete with the like red brick tube station and the little like buses as well.

This is like beautifully illustrated.

It's really nice.

It's really nice.

They don't make them like they used to.

Now you do this with AI and it would have like extra tubes that go nowhere.

Awful.

But yeah, just as you say, right?

And

these deep level tubes will have like implications going forward.

Yes.

One of these implications is.

Vertical circulation.

How get into and out of station?

Yeah.

How do you get into and out of the station?

This is a big problem when your station is far underground,

you know, as shown by this hilarious parody diagram of the new San Jose extension of BART.

Oh, where's Saddam Hussein going here?

He's falling down every single one of these in sequence, you know.

So in a subway station that has pretty good

service, you know, you may maybe have trains arriving every three minutes or so each direction, and, you know, they're going to fart out about 100 passengers each.

To be clear on the tube, it's way more than that.

Yeah, it's going to be less on the outskirts, more in the center of town.

Those passengers aren't interested in lingering on the platform, so they must be able to travel to the surface as quickly as possible, right?

Lots of options for this.

There's stairs.

Stairs are pretty high capacity, but you get tired.

Disabled people can't use them.

They're just not practical for deep stations.

This does not stop the London Underground from using a few of them.

A Covent Garden tube station, where it's like, you can take the lift or you can take these stairs, and there's a sign by the stairs that's like, there are 500 stairs in this staircase.

Are you sure?

The funny thing is, I believe

that they actually put the same number of stairs on all of those signs in the system, even though they're different numbers of stairs just because

of psychological warfare.

Like you nudge, yeah.

Be like, fuck, that sounds like a lot.

Like, 513 is unusually specific.

You have elevators are an option.

They're fast, but they're low capacity.

You usually need a huge bank of elevators if you're going to try and build a deep-level subway station.

And those elevators have to be extra large and extra fast, very expensive, which is why we have...

the miracle technology of the escalator, right?

Escalators are slow, but they're very high capacity.

You can move a lot of people with an escalator.

In London, deep-level tubes, these are typically arranged on like one or two flights of like very steep escalators,

which are like sort of like guarded on each side by a shitload of advertising hoardings for like herbal supplements and stuff.

I have always been terrified of falling down one of these.

And yeah, you should be.

You got to see some of the ones on the Washington Metro because somehow they make that sense of verticality even worse.

When these were brought in, these were like a wood, like wooden stair platforms over like a kind of like rubber track we talked about it in the king's crossfire

episode yep uh which has a lot of tube stuff in it as well uh which saves me talking about it again yes um now escalators are one of those things you know they feel like much more modern technology than they are the first practical ones were installed on cone island in 1896 by the teens and 20s they're very common everywhere um you know but uh still not being put in all new tube stations for instance which we'll talk about.

Absolutely, uh, all right, yeah, so this is a tube map, and it doesn't look like the tube map that you have now because this represents, you know, I said that the tube expands like spasmodically, right?

Um, yes, but in this case, like it's all been centralized under London Transport, but what they do is a series of like five-year plans, effectively, and they have a plan called the New Works program, um, which is meant to run 1935 to 1940.

Um, And you can see the dotted lines are what they're going to expand, right?

So they're going to expand the northern line out up to the north,

and they're going to expand the Bakerloo line up to the north.

And then they're also going to expand the central line, which is the red line in the middle here.

They're going to expand it out into the west, out to Denham, and they're going to expand it out to the, well, like east and then northward out to like Blake Horth or Luperhanal.

So if we kind of, if we can John Madden this a bit,

on the kind of like eastern end, on the kind of corner of the central line, you can see Bethnal Green, which is marked for expansion.

Right.

And, you know, London is like still an expanding city.

It's like doing urban sprawl because there's no like green belt or anything to stop it at this point.

And the idea is that you are going to like create new suburbs.

You're going to induce demand.

You're going to build a station in a village like, you know, Ongar or whatever, or Epping and or boys uh and uh people are gonna like build houses there and move there and it's gonna you know you're gonna expand the city that way i'm gonna have a lovely pebble-dashed semi-detached house yeah exactly yeah um actually some of the metroland suburbs are like really nice um but

some of those like really nice town squares you know yeah like sort of the the art deco architects really good yeah i like those often the the like tube station is like really like beautiful architecture as well some real like it's like and that's like the focal point of the town Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's some like real Art Deco shit happening.

It takes the place of a church.

Yeah.

The central line is, I believe, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, it's like all deep level.

This is going to be like a major problem for it because it runs straight through the center of London.

And Bethnal Green is out here to the east.

It's in the east end of London, right?

Which is,

you know, it's where Cockneys come from.

We'll talk a bit about it in the next slide.

If you notice like places around it, it's like if you go slightly south, you have Wapping, which is on the Metropolitan District line.

That's where a lot of the docks are in London.

And a lot of this area, like Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Bow,

is like industry and like sort of workers' housing, right?

And during the war, which we'll get to, this area, which is called by the Germans target area A of the East End, was like bombed hugely, like incredibly intensively, largely to attack like the docks and factories and all of this.

Like Bethnal Green was bombed from the first day of the Blitz.

Over the course of the war, they had like 80 tons of bombs dropped on them.

Even today, like if you're doing construction, you'll still run into like unexploded German bombs.

If we go to the next slide.

So it's like one building in Gaza.

Yeah,

this is how far we've descended, I know.

Yeah.

So this is Bethnal Green.

I think this photo might even be post-war.

You can kind of take this as representative, right?

Historically, the industry in Bethnal Green was weaving, which is why it's on the shitly named weaver line of the overground now.

Shitly named.

Yeah, like some of the some of the names are good.

The weaver line isn't.

But yeah, so it's poor.

It's crowded.

A lot of this is like formerly considered to be slums.

Oh, yeah, easily.

Like this is, this is currently being like mercilessly gentrified.

And we'll get to sort of like my complicity in that later in the episode.

I have some statistics here.

In 1933,

43% of the population was overcrowded.

17% of it was below the poverty line.

23% of the men in the area were unemployed.

And 28% of the population lived more than three people to one room.

This is like sort of the long post-Victorian

sort of like urban crowding thing.

And if you want a sense of what it's like, I mean, possibly you've seen Rip, you've possibly seen like Peaky Blinders or the superior Ripper Street.

So you've got like

a lot of manual labor, a lot of like organized crime, a lot of immigration, big Jewish community, big Irish community.

A lot of anti-Semitism.

A lot of communism.

Yeah.

A lot of fascism.

Oh, no.

Like, this area saw like huge rent strikes in 1938, for instance.

And right up until the start of the war,

the LCC, the London City Corporation, and Bethnal Green Council were doing like organized slum clearance.

Oh, boy.

If you want a sense of the kind of political contradictions of the British left at this point, Bethnal Green Council was at this time a socialist and communist controlled council.

So they were doing forcible slum clearance in order to build stuff.

And one of the estates that they built was called the Lenin Estate.

Nice.

But they also tried to ban Jews from living in it.

Not

this is assholes.

This is the kind of triangulation that happened amongst British communists in the 1930s.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, what would Lenin do?

Anti-Semitism, apparently.

Apparently?

Yeah,

don't read any of his writings on that, certainly.

But like, as you see, it's a lot of like closely built, like brick-built.

Socialism of fools.

We're pretty dumb.

We might do that.

Yeah, fools like a clown.

Like, it's very amusing.

People like it.

But yeah, like, so closely built terraced housing out of brick,

like you see here.

And Bethnal Green now is a great place to pay 20 quid for a kombucha.

And, you know,

or, you know, if you can't afford London Fields, it's a great place to have a podcast.

I have been to a flat viewing in what I'm reasonably certain used to be the Lenin estate, in fact,

and which was long since like sold off and gated off and is now punishingly expensive.

I couldn't afford the flat, but I could afford to look at the flat, which thank you for subscribing to the Patreon.

If we go to the next slide,

this is just to give trains some trains.

Just so we have some trains.

Yeah.

Love some 1938 stock.

That's right.

As part of the new works program, London Transport buy these lovely new electric multiple units,

which are so good that for several decades they were the like oldest rolling stock still in passenger use.

I had a long retirement on the Isle of Wight.

There's beautiful like vents on top.

It's like really nice.

They just wouldn't die.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, stupidly reliable.

Um, and again, to, like, sort of set the scene for how close we are to shit popping off here.

This is, as you say, the 1938 stock, right?

And London, London Transport, London Underground are still like, yep, full steam ahead.

We're going to have the shit done by 1940.

Everything's going to be great.

Nothing bad's going to happen.

Next slide, please.

Oh,

this fucking guy again.

Oh.

This fucking asshole and his stupid car, which is not cool and doesn't look good, just to get that on the record, let it just really lay that down now.

What happens behind the paywall stays behind it?

You don't need to acknowledge it, you big dumb idiot.

This is our version of the house.

I'm not acknowledging anything.

It's our version of the discourse hat.

I did nothing wrong.

Okay, well, the important thing is that this guy and his ugly car start World War II.

And one of the things that happens in World War II is the like area bombing of London, which is called the Blitz.

Next slide, please.

And as I said earlier, like the East End of London gets absolutely decimated,

both because it's got a lot of industry in it, because it's got a lot of workers' housing in it that they want to unhouse, and also because if you're trying to attack central London and ship falls short, then it lands in the East End.

This image that I've used for this slide is from a series of four paintings by a London Fire Brigade firefighter at the time called Paul Dessalle.

You can't go and see this painting anywhere because austerity made the London Fire Brigade close their museum.

Oh,

amazing.

Which is a fucking crime towards an institution that I'm willing to get genuinely emotional about.

Like,

you look at this stuff and like, obviously you think, well, if the London Fire Brigade are going to have to cut stuff, it should preserve, you know, the like life-saving activities.

And so why does it need a museum?

Well, it needs a museum because it has an important historical role, which includes stuff like this, where the guy is like fighting fires all day and also paints a painting that anthropomorphizes the fire as Dr.

Fucking Manhattan.

Yes, also, kids like looking at fire trucks.

Also, that's also

as I understand it, they are still like considering reopening in some form, but they need the money to do it.

Not that we as a podcast have clearly any influence over like, like, you know, the government of, you know, of London or of the UK, but like this seems like it would be a good idea, you know, as it is, the only stuff that LFB have to get you sentimental about is like Shortitch Fire Station having the big like love is the running towards over the doors, which is still cool.

Sir Kirish Starmer, your people yearn for to look at fire trucks.

I mean, I know I do.

I do.

It's the thing.

Yeah, let me expand that.

Not just kids like to look at fire trucks.

Everyone likes to look at fire trucks.

autistic adults yes i i if you don't like if you don't like looking at a fire truck i don't know what's wrong with you yeah yeah fully are you really fully human

so like you can't enjoy simple pleasures like look at that cool fire truck

so say for the sake of argument you are a civilian in the east end and you are being like bombed by the luftwaffe how do you survive the blitz well there are a number of possible answers here.

If we go to the next slide, here's one of them.

Exciting new bed from Jahir Insad.

There is nothing new under the sun, really and truly.

This is a Morrison shelter

named for the Minister of Supply at the time.

They gave these out in kits.

They made about a million of them and just distributed them.

And the idea is it's a kind of reinforced table that you like, if you don't have a garden, which again all of these terraced houses you don't um you just use this as a table during the day during the night you sleep under it and there is a whole like three millimeters of steel plate on the top between you and eternity i feel i feel better already yeah it doesn't i i'm just imagining like a big old wooden joist coming down on you and i'm thinking eh this might not work that good no you know you might fall through the floor you know

if the whole like sort of like two or three story like terraced house comes down,

you what you have sort of received from the Ministry of Supply here is a kind of like Ikea coffin.

I mean, granted, it looks not dissimilar from some sleeping arrangements I've had before, but like you and your family shall certainly perish, right?

Like it's not DIY or die or both.

It's not like inspiring confidence, right?

So if you don't, if you don't want to use one of these, next slide, please.

If you are in the kind of like labor aristocracy enough that you have a garden, you could build this, an Anderson shelter.

And now you've gone from like three millimeters of steel plate between you and eternity to as much dirt as you care to shovel between you and eternity.

And it's just a little like corrugated iron.

It's a little corrugated iron, like hemmed dome.

Woody, half a cylinder, that shape.

And like you just shovel dirt on top of it and and go out in the garden.

Now, I might be extrapolating too much from personal experience, but for me, a key part of being a British child is sitting in a reproduction one of these while a teacher tries to like gin up some atmosphere and go, Okay, but now imagine you're being bombed.

Yeah, what do you want me to fuck out with that?

Well, here in America, we don't have bombings, we have school shootings.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

You have to make like little explosion sounds like

oh, yeah.

if the museum has a particularly high budget sometimes they'll like add that you know um unfortunately i quite enjoyed this it gave me the kind of like autism like hugbox sensory thing like that's why all the british boomers think they were in the war because they also did this yeah more or less i mean infer what you like about my childhood that i would rather like have slept in a hole in the garden but yeah i was i was like fond of this um so yeah this is 30 years from now we'll be talking about how we were in the war yeah

when i when i was in world war ii um this thing is is safer in the sense that the house isn't coming down on top of you and provided it doesn't get hit directly you're like reasonably safe from shrapnel and whatever so it's nice if you can get it but if you can a german bomber does a dive bomb and a bomb comes right through the front door

ideal yeah but if you don't have one of these and you don't want to sleep under your table, what do you do?

Well, you know about the deep level tube.

next slide please and so immediately like as soon as uh like pretty much as soon as war breaks out to be honest but like definitely after after the blitz starts people start trying to shelter in the underground um and this is something that um

london transport are very keen to avoid it's something the government are keen to avoid there's this like fixation in british government at the time about uh like bombing neurosis, right?

They think people are going to like psychologically go to pieces

and they have to maintain morale.

It's where all the like keep calm and carry on stuff

put up all the keep calm and carry on posters yeah right yeah literally because the idea is that like people are there was this kind of like existential horror of bombing um born out of like yannuke and like the kind of the bomber will always get through military theories of the time um and the idea was they nobody really knew how civilian populations would respond to being bombed

and people kind of assumed the worst in government and thought well this is going to be like cataclysmic People are going to lose their reason.

They're going to start like bashing each other's heads open and like sucking on the brains.

As you do.

Yeah, exactly.

And so for a while, they were like, well, absolutely not.

Like, don't use these as shelters.

This is like illegal.

It's, it's like dangerous.

And most importantly, it's dangerous to morale.

Go out there and get bombed.

It's your duty to go out there and get bombed.

Get under the fucking table, you know?

Ultimately, this did not hold right largely as a as a result of like sheer like popular force behind it like you just couldn't stop people from doing it um by the end of the war like this was completely formalized oh no i missed the last train what will i do

get my cozy bed ready this was unlike the tube the deep level tube is like remarkably easy to adapt into shelters and it hadn't been designed that way at all but like They had like a kind of a late night train that would come and like restock all of the like refreshments and stuff.

you had like in some cases organized like sleeping bunks and stuff um

and uh like various services installed in these uh there was this kind of weird situation space yeah exactly there was this kind of weird situation where like every shelter was like technically run by three different bodies at once um because the like london transport had a hand in it um it was technically it's the like london passenger transport board or whatever um civil defense and then also the local council, who are usually the ones like shelling out most of the money for like outfitting it.

But like

these became like very, very popular.

If we go to the next slide,

if it gets like really crowded, as it often does, you end up sleeping on the escalators and blocking them.

This is Bounds Green rather than Bethnal, Bethnal Green, but like sort of similar vibe, right?

You can see the sort of 1940s Well Woman advertisements and stuff.

And if we go to the next slide, So Bethnal Green was part of the New Works program and it wasn't finished yet.

Like the line didn't get that far by the time the war starts.

They had built the station, they had dug the tunnels, but there's no track in it.

So it could only be used as an air raid shelter, but it was also kind of like perfect for that, right?

Like you have a lot of space.

I was just wondering from

the two pictures ago, like, okay, did they like keep one track in operation?

Or did they have to clear everyone out every morning so the trains could run?

Yeah, they literally did.

Like, what would happen is they would like shut down the traction current.

People would sleep on the tracks getting covered in like brake dust and rats or whatever.

They would, and then so in the morning, they would kick everybody awake and like kick you out of the station and then turn the traction current back on.

I don't know if anyone got like electrocuted doing this, but like I wouldn't be surprised.

I would imagine there probably were a few accidents yeah

um but yeah because there's no tracks in this you can just sleep in the tunnel uh the like uh bethnal green council can install bunks um and they install in fact 5 000 of them um and there's this like it's a high capacity shelter it's very very safe um and they install various amenities they put in a library uh because Bethnal Green Library gets destroyed by bombing on the first day of the Blitz.

They put in a theater.

They put in like an interfaith worship room, which makes that, by the way, a sort of like an older idea than

fucking people complaining about woke, would have you say,

and a sick bay.

And so this is kind of like a absolutely routine focal point for the community, right?

It's like when the sort of air raid sirens go off, you go to the tube station.

that is not yet a tube station you go and find a bunk and you sleep overnight.

However, the Blitz doesn't last forever, does end.

Like the RAF win the Battle of Britain,

and things, the war progresses.

And the war progresses in a direction of the next slide.

This guy.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, this is

Bomber Harris.

So

Germany can, like.

He's the guy who did the plagiarism video, right?

Yeah, this is this is this is

a guy to pretend to himself.

It's it's Air Marshal Harris bomber guy.

And

so

although Germany can credibly bomb Britain until more or less the last days of the war,

Britain starts bombing Germany back more and more credibly, right?

Under the auspices of this guy and Bomber Command.

And so they start doing that.

And as the, you know, as Bomber Command is hitting the big war crimes button all over like Germany,

all Germany can really do about it is retaliatory bombing, right?

And the tactics kind of change.

The sort of like massed bombing raids of the Blitz kind of become

like sort of like impractical.

And so, and so instead, what you get is smaller, faster,

like hit and run raids, which give people a lot less warning.

And so, there establishes this kind of rhythm where the RAF will like destroy some German city, not quite yet, but they'll like bomb some German city.

And then Britain will expect to be bombed back just to kind of like show willing.

So next slide, please.

So 1st of March 1943, this is a date, but it's not the date.

The like Berlin is bombed by the RAF for like the heaviest sort of like and the heaviest raid of the war yet.

Kills like 486 people, apparently.

This is actually kind of like table stakes for bomber command.

Like at this point, as I understand it, they're like mostly working in the Ruhr.

Like the big Berlin raids wouldn't come until November of that year.

But like, it's still, it's still something, right?

It's actually quite difficult to find much information about this specific raid, but like it happens.

And so consequently, everyone's like expecting a retaliation.

Next slide, please.

So love this whole aesthetic.

Very excited to be going to a LARP about this next year.

Yeah, I'm actually, yeah, it's going to be great, I hope.

So Britain has for the time, like maybe the best early warning system in the world,

thanks to

Air Marshal Dowding and like winning the Battle of Britain.

And so it has a system of like air raid wardens and air raid sirens and known shelters

for people to go to

if there is a raid and you know observers and radar and all the rest of it, right?

You got those guys in the tiny armored train on the coast there yeah exactly yeah cross-dressing um and the point of all this is that like it's it's very very vigilant maybe too much so um particularly when it's already primed to expect it and the detection is largely based on besides radar looking at the sky and seeing if you see something right um and so like this is like primed for it uh next slide please some context i i've been meaning to talk about this guy for fucking ages

Billy Brown of London Town.

I hate this horrible rhyming cunt.

Yeah, as you say, Billy Brown of London Town.

So Billy Brown of London Town was a pre-war advertising campaign for the tube, for London Transport, right?

Where this guy, this comic figure who looks like the most annoying prick in the world

with his bowler hat and his umbrella,

tells you some important like loading screen tips on how to use public transport in London in rhyming verse.

No thanks.

Infuriating.

And so, like, so much of this during the war is focused on safety during the blackout, right?

In order to make London a harder target to bomb,

there was like a mandatory lights out, like no, no lights, no flashlights,

no like vehicle headlights.

And it was incredibly dangerous.

Like,

as the middle one of these says, like, in awful rhyming verse,

down below the station's bright, but here outside it's black as night.

Billy Brown will wait a bit and let his eyes grow used to it.

Then he will scan the road and see before he crosses if it's free.

Remembering when lights are dim that cars he sees may not see him.

It's also fucking Hilaire Belloc, you know?

Why are people out there driving when it's pitch black?

I thought we were told not to do that.

You're not, but like, you know, these things happen.

You get hit by bus or whatever.

Do you get hit by Winston Churchill personally?

I told you to stay inside.

I also...

Winston Churchill's motorcade is just going and like killing 500 pedestrians.

Entirely plausible.

I do kind of wish.

I've been playing Fallout London recently and I've been having a really mixed bag of a time with it and I wish it had captured something more of this tone

of the kind of like wartime ironic here, maybe to use a German word, like Besser Wisser kind of like smug

like rhyming verse thing.

We had to steal the dashing commuter from the Long Island Railroad.

Yeah.

Yep.

I also really want to draw your attention to

the sort of the poster on the left,

which is about queuing.

And there's this self-perception in Britain, or there used to be, that British people are like very good cuers, you know, like,

and I think maybe the reason why we have this is because it was beaten into the heads of all of our great-grandparents by Billy Brown of London Town.

right um we we see him in the back of a queue with a remarkably sinister expression i was about to say yeah, he's he's about to pull something.

Wild, yeah.

Yeah.

Just like

four NPCs.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then Billy Brown with the fucking rice and umbrella.

He's going to go do some IOM Shinrikio bullshit.

Yeah.

This one ends with an ironic exclamation mark.

Billy's standing in a queue, as we all must sometimes do.

Queuing in these days of rush means you don't have any crush.

And the second saved will lend extra wings to journey's end.

But says Billy, see you choose the proper one of several cues.

I cannot stress enough how unpopular this guy was as a mascot.

Like people were writing fan fiction poetry about strangling him like into newspapers.

Like, um, it's this was like a really unpopular but ubiquitous piece of marketing and like sort of public surface, public safety advice.

Um, but like like the key port, the key point of all this is that you can't see shit, right?

Like at best, you might have like cars or buses with like dipped headlights.

They maybe paint some curbs white so that you can see them.

This is also pre-reflective paint.

So the best you can do for like to make anything more visible is white paint, which is non-reflective.

And so it just like stands out a bit more.

This will this will come back to haunt us.

If we go to the next next slide, there's another piece of context, which is evacuation.

So during the Blitz, the government sent a bunch of children out of London to like, you know, fucking wherever.

Great moments in British child protection to be like, where do we put these kids?

Sent them north, north.

Put them north.

Yeah, we dump a bunch of like random, like cockney, like impoverished children who have like never seen a cow before in like rural Wales.

And this is fine.

Like it stops a bunch of kids getting killed.

But once the Blitz ended, it turns out parents like their kids and want them around, like at least most of the time.

And so people started bringing their kids back into London.

And so you had this huge influx of children like back into a like crowded working class area.

And as we saw, it's all terraced houses.

You're not going to hide under the fucking table like the Dahiran chat thing.

yeah and and people want to protect their kids so like obviously uh the deep level tube is a great idea uh next slide please so uh this is uh like a representative view of one of the station entrances um there's three on the tube station they closed off two um and they used a different one which i'll show next um incidentally um so the neat background view of

um uh St.

John on Bethnal Green.

It's a lovely little church.

Designed by Sir John Soan, the same guy who did Delich Picture Gallery and the best part of the Bank of England.

Wow.

But yeah, so was he the one who had the cool house?

I mean, he was an architect almost certainly.

But probably had a cool house, yeah.

I want to say there's like a Soane house that's really good.

Entirely possible.

Probably.

All of the Bank of England stuff has been demolished.

If you're wondering why the Bank of England looks like a sort of like house built on top of a house, it's because it is.

Oh, yeah,

they did facademy to that one, didn't they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like what you're seeing is the like curtain wall that's that Son's, because he built this whole kind of like palace, like Venetian arsenal kind of situation for it.

And then on top, built on top of that is

the fucking, the other guy.

I don't remember.

Mediocre.

I believe I learned this in architecture history too or so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nicholas Pevna called it the greatest act of architectural vandalism of the 20th century.

So, you know.

There's Pennsylvania station, but, you know, yes, yes.

I mean, there were quite a few.

The crimes of man are many.

So this is, this is a fairly typical tube station entrance.

And throughout the Blitz, this had just been in open air like this.

There's a detail that like they had to have a guy sweeping the bottom of the stairs because of puddles when it rained.

So like, It doesn't matter.

You get into the station and like these steps lead down into a ticket hall with some turnstiles, then down into escalators and then onto platforms.

Right.

So you've got plenty of space.

Reminds me of the theory of operation of the Washington Metro entrances when they were first built, which was that because they opened, when they went, they went into just an open-air pit.

You know, they just emerged from a pit that meant people wouldn't stop at the top of the escalator to open their umbrella.

They'd be forced into the rain by the escalator.

I mean turned out what that did was ruin the escalators.

My God.

That took half a century to fix.

But yeah, so it's this kind of like stepped construction where you like, you walk down a flight of stairs, you're in this like flat ticketing hall slightly below street level, and then you get the escalators down.

So if we go to the next slide,

people get slightly worried about the fact that there's just like an open staircase that potentially, you know, Hitler Hitler might drop a bomb directly down.

The bomb just rolls down in a comical fashion.

Exactly.

So what they do is they build a shack, which is what you see here.

It's not the same entrance.

This is the one entrance they're actually using.

This is definitely going to have people stopping to open their umbrella.

Yes, yeah, very much so.

This is because they're worried about like the entrance collapsing and trapping people inside if it gets bombed.

And yeah, it makes the whole thing a bit more cramped.

The other thing that's changed is when the Blitz ends, because the tactics change, you get less warning.

And during the Blitz, you had ticketed entry, like you would get a ticket to the shelter ahead of time.

And that would be like under police supervision.

There'll be a police officer, as you see here, like stood by the door at the whole time.

And it would be like a steady stream of people down.

Individually greeting you with a what's all this then?

Hello, hello, hello.

What's all this then?

Et Et cetera, et cetera.

Yes.

Also, the other thing is, perversely, like this is something that's not sort of well understood about the war, austerity.

Civil defense spending

decreased throughout the war.

Well, we don't need this shit anymore.

Exactly.

We finally got Jerry running.

Yeah, the blitz is over.

And so in 1941, they start cutbacks on shelter building.

1942, they like drastically reduce the like

personnel numbers of police and civil defense because that's free manpower.

It's free manpower.

Like you can use those guys for the war.

Those guys all need to go and like go to like El Alamein or whatever.

Or they're all going to go over there and tell the Germans what's all this then.

Exactly.

And so like stationing a police officer all the time outside the entrance to the shelter is like not possible anymore.

And the one officer whose job it was wasn't there because he had been delayed by like dealing with people using flashlights, torches in the blackout, being like, what's all this then?

It's the only phrase he can use.

Exactly.

He can't even coherently explain what they're doing wrong.

What's all this then?

And if you are going, what's all this then?

on a street like two blocks away, then you're not going to be able to individually go, what's all this then?

at people trying to get in the shelter

into this shack.

And to be clear, like, this is a view of the shelter entrance in daylight, right?

Like completely unmarked,

unlit also.

If we go to the next slide, here is a view of the shelter entrance in darkness.

Oh.

Not so good.

Not so good.

I would have trouble finding this, I think.

Yes,

this is going to be a problem.

If we go to the next slide, we have a view down the staircase in question, like now, right?

And as you see, it's not like like a wide staircase.

It's like 10 feet wide.

It's 19 steps, and then it goes down into this like 12 foot long landing, right angle turn, and another staircase.

And that gets you into the ticket hall.

It's just like 30th Street Station.

There's a couple of things here as well that you don't need to worry about.

um because they didn't exist yet number one is that emergency do not enter sign um number two two is the plaque next to that emergency do not enter sign um

the railing in the center any of the like grippy textural stuff with reflectors on the stairs or as far as i can tell maybe any marking on the stairs at all um what you had instead of this was one 25 watt light bulb and yes yeah you can see where i'm going with this not so good not so good gonna get confused gonna get turned around am i supposed to be going down or am i supposed to be going up the steps are also apparently very uneven and worn.

Which is impressive for a brand new station.

I know.

But people have been like up and down at a bunch of times.

I will say, Bethmore Green Council did ask the government three times, hey, can you install or give us the money to install?

a railing in the center of this and some more lights

and they were told that's too much money go fuck yourself right you just yeah nope nope there is one of my

yeah one of my my sources for this makes a great deal of hay out of the fact that they kind of diluted that funding proposal by asking for even more money than that to build a library like a permanent one in the shelter i don't think that matters but like

whatever people need to read man there's a war it's it's also

it's boring in there yeah

but also like if i give you the proposal and i'm like i need a bunch of money for a library and some more money for essential safety equipment like yeah i see what you're saying um next slide please

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Back to the show.

So this being Britain, we now have to talk about nepotism.

And on the left here, we have a photo of me at my posting station.

Right.

This is where I'm firing off my tweets.

So Winston Churchill, you may have heard of this guy.

Yes.

He's the guy who was uncomfortable about executing Nazi officers.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

He was also the guy that ran over 500 pedestrians a night during the blitz.

That's right.

It's crazy we don't talk about that more.

People are going to get mad at us in the comments on that one.

So Churchill had this weird fixation for rockets.

And I guess eventually with the development of like missiles, he'll maybe be vindicated by history.

But ever since he was like first Sea Lord, he had loved a rocket.

To be fair, if you look at this image on the right, it looks fucking sick.

Rockets, you know, they sound really cool when you get them early in the game, and then they're pretty much useless until later on when you get the Spider Tron.

You know, then you can go into the biter bases and really give them what for.

Until then, it's personal laser defense, way more effective.

No, he was trying to rocket jump.

So

this led to because Churchill was like a big

booster of rockets.

Sorry, we were talking about Factoria before the before.

So that's all good.

big booster of rockets.

And so one of the things that the Navy invested in very heavily pre-war was something called the Unrotated Projectile,

which is, it's a fun code name.

It's the same as like, if you know that the original code name for

vibing, I'm moisturized, I'm unrotating

in my land.

My skin moisturized, my projectile unrotated.

Unrotated.

Yeah.

They're unrotating around some projectile Tweater.

This is nothing.

That must feel really good to be unrotated.

The projectile knows exactly how unrotated it is.

But so the Navy invests very heavily in a series of these unrotated projectile rockets.

They just called that as a cover name.

um in the same way that the early british nuclear program was called tube alloys um

You'd never guess it, but they actually do rotate.

Yeah, they rotate

quite a bit, actually.

And these things are fucking useless, politely.

Like,

they put them on battleships as anti-air defense, and they don't work.

But Churchill likes them.

And in particular, Churchill's scientific advisor and a man who he once called his dog, Frederick Lindemann,

who also maybe caused the Bengal famine, also really liked rockets.

And so because the British government at this time, especially under church, is like very nepotistic, they're able to force through this idea of like, use this for everything.

Our unrotated projectiles will block out the sun.

Yeah, exactly.

And so there's like naval use for them.

The army uses them.

And in particular, they get mooted for anti-aircraft use.

Like Churchill kind of foists these on anti-aircraft command.

There's actually some suggestion within the Ministry of Supply that the kind of data being used to show that these things work is being actively falsified.

Just because they're like, yeah, but the fucking rocket goes up.

It's cool.

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, take the fucking fire at that.

Yeah.

And the idea, the theory, the doctrine here is that you're going to use because anti-aircraft is like, it's all guns at this point, like artillery guns.

You're going to kind of like bulk up anti-aircraft gunfire by also having these like, you know, rocket barrages that go up to like 19,000 feet.

Um,

are they at least cheap?

No.

There was a theory of how they were gonna use these that was so stupid they ended up having to abandon it, which was to use it like a barrage balloon, where each rocket would like trail a wire, and the hope was that like a plane would fly into it and like saw its own wings off or whatever.

Um, uh-huh.

It's a lot of you gotta, you gotta put a whole spool on the rack.

Yeah, yeah, this is, I think, one of many reasons why this didn't work.

But so Churchill kind of foists these on anti-aircraft command.

If you want to sense of the nepotism involved,

he kind of makes them establish an experimental battery of these in Cardiff and then puts his son-in-law in command of it just to give him something to do.

So like, again, like whether he was wrong to do this is like a difficult question.

Like as far as things Winston Churchill was wrong to do, it doesn't make the top 100.

But, like,

the whole thing was like cronyism from top to bottom, right?

Um, next slide, please.

I don't know why they didn't just rotate the projectile.

If they just rotated the projectile, we wouldn't have had any problems, but no, they wanted it unrotating.

Yeah, I'll rotate my projectile by driving my car around, idiot.

Um, they had a, they had they did the the the it was designed by a woman who famously cannot rotate a projectile in their mind.

Oh, God.

So if you take like these rockets, these unrotated projectiles, and you put them on land, you call it a Z battery.

And they come in different

sort of varieties.

You can get like a kind of a multiple rocket launcher like you have on the left that's mobile.

You can get a single rocket launcher on the right that's static.

And yeah, they can't hit the broad side of a barn, but they look impressive.

Suspiciously like it can rotate.

It's cylindrical.

It seems likely.

This thing's got tires.

I know those things are rotating.

It looks impressive.

It sounds impressive.

And like one sort of thing

to say is that this isn't majorly secret stuff.

By 1943, this is filtered down to the home guard, which are just like people from the town.

So,

yeah, exactly.

Captain Mannering has been given access to a kind of early surface-to-air missile.

Oh, good.

And that's

fine.

You know, like they've been firing these at the Germans for like the better part of two years at this point.

They're not ostensibly that worried about information getting out about them, but even so.

The government's not in the habit of like, you know, sort of like not being secretive, especially when there's a war on.

They got a one-page manual that comes with it, just says, do not rotate.

Under no circumstances is this projectile to be rotated.

Oh my God, you rotated the projectile.

Did you do that?

I just,

I have a feeling that the kind of the manual that came with these involved a lot of the phrase, stand well back.

Yes.

Next slide, please.

So we talked about my complicity in gentrifying Bethnal Green.

I know Bethnal Green quite well.

And the reason why I know Bethnal Green quite well is, as I discover here, I cannot put a map showing the distance from Victoria Park in Bethnal Green to Bethnal Green tube station without including the location of the Trash Future studio.

Do not try to find the Trash Future Studio.

It would be trivially easy to do.

even if you didn't have the like, you know, location data of this box that I've put around it.

But please do not try to find the Trash Future Studio.

No, instead, you can spend some time here at the Vagina Museum.

Exactly.

You can go to the Young V ⁇ A.

You can

hang out and go climbing and two different

city farms.

Yeah.

Exactly.

What's going on here with Mexican Soul?

I don't know what's going on.

That's like average London restaurant.

Mexican Korean fusion restaurant.

Must be.

Yeah.

It could be really good.

It could also not not be really good.

You know what?

Next time I'm down, I'll go and I'll report back.

Okay.

But like, I've, because I've been around here like a million times, both for work and also just because like it's it's figuratively close to home for me.

Um, it would hopefully be literally close to home for me if anyone who works in property in London could answer their fucking emails.

Um, anyway, the point of this.

There is one of the things that I'm going to do.

I'm going to read Roz's address live on air.

i'm trying to move to london i'm trying so hard it's like how do you not answer your emails for six months

but so anyway the thrust of all of this is that there is one of these z batteries in vicky park um i think probably towards the western end like maybe they're hoping to fire the rockets up through the pagoda i don't know um but so this is there and

I I'm not actually sure.

There's a kind of, there's a narrative that's developed about this disaster, which is underwritten about, which we'll get to for reasons.

But like, presumably, this is a home guard formation.

Presumably, these are people from the area who are doing this after work.

Yeah.

It's like everyone's going to go, we're going to go, we're going to go down to pub, and then we're going to go to the Z battery.

Yeah, exactly.

We're going to have a nice day, and we're going to shoot down some Jerry's.

We're all going to rotate the absolute fuck out of some projectiles is what we're going to do.

I don't rotate the projectiles.

next next slide please i didn't have that many pints

so at 8 17 p.m oh boy the air raid siren goes off um

because i'm i'm actually not sure why right because there isn't an air raid um and it's either the possibility is that someone has seen uh like has imagined a plane and has therefore like turned on the siren or it's going to relate to something that's going going to happen in a minute it's actually uh it's actually uh the siren comes on when you accidentally rotate a projectile

warning warning um

yeah so 8 17 p.m um the the air raid siren goes off and people are sort of like primed for the idea that like there is going to be an air raid in very short like notice um it's also right the cinema nearby closes so a bunch of people get kicked out onto the street um 10 minutes later at 8 8.27 p.m., the like air raid searchlights come on to look for planes, and three buses pull up at once outside the shelter.

Therefore, you have a big crowd, several hundred people, all trying to get in the shelter at once.

It's dark and it's raining.

Next slide, please.

All right, it's not good.

Oh, boy.

So as people are going down the steps,

This is when the Z battery in Vicky Park decides to do a test firing, which is the other possibility that this is what the aerates are in as far as part of this test, and just lights off a bunch of these rockets, these unrotated projectiles.

And apparently, based on like sort of eyewitness testimony and what's been written about it after the fact, this is totally new to people.

Like

no one has any idea what the fuck this is.

Like they think they're being bombed because it sounds like it.

Like, they think that, like, Hitler has invented a new weapon designed to, like, personally fuck them all in the ass.

Holy shit, they're going directly away from us.

Yeah, but it's like, it's like a couple of blocks away.

And, like,

you're getting this, like, weird kind of like Stalin organ noise.

And, like,

in fairness, if you're a Londoner and you hear like a weird noise and assume that's a new weapon that Hitler has designed to fuck me in the ass,

yeah, the first V1 bombing was like a year later.

So like you really can't win here.

Right.

Next slide, please.

So you've got a few hundred people trying to get down this staircase.

That's good.

I'm not actually sure if these white painted lines existed.

I think so.

But you'll notice no central handrail.

The sole markings that you have is like, again, non-reflective white paint along the edges of the stairs.

And this like hard right turn on quite a short landing.

Yes.

And there's also no police and no air raid wardens around.

And as we've said before, many times, when you put people in a crowd, people are kind of scared and stupid animals, right?

Like

this is already a very dangerous situation.

The steps are like presumably wet from rain getting tracked in.

They're uneven.

It's dark.

Everybody's scared.

There's some suggestion that like uh, the rockets going off like panics people, and then that's also been sort of like argued against.

It's, I'm not sure if we'll ever actually know for certain one way or the other.

Um, because it's entirely possible that there is no panic whatsoever, right?

Like, this is just something that can that can happen.

Because,

uh, next slide, please.

What did I say about fucking queuing?

Expression he has.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

In fact, if we go to the next slide,

not that I thought that I would be any better at cueing if I thought that Hitler had invented a new weapon to fuck me directly in the ass.

But like, what happens is either because there is this surge of panic or because there isn't and it just happens.

A woman carrying a baby like trips on the bottom step.

Oh no.

Uh-oh.

And an old man who is like kind of tailgating her trips into her.

And there are, you know, I'll just read from the official statement here.

According to accounts so far received, shortly after the air raid alert sounded, substantial numbers of people were making their way as usual towards the shelter entrance.

There were nearly 2,000 in the shelter, including

several hundred who had arrived after the alert, when a middle-aged woman burdened with a bundle and a baby, tripped near the foot of a flight of 19 steps which leads down from the street.

This flight of steps terminates on a landing.

Her fall tripped an elderly man behind her and he fell similarly.

Their bodies again tripped up those behind them and within a few seconds a large number were lying on the lower steps and the landing completely blocking the stairway.

Those coming in from the street could not see what had taken place and continued to press down the steps so that within a minute there are about 300 people crushed together and lying on top of one another covering the landing and the lower steps.

And to be clear, crusher injuries are like

difficult to detect for like anyone, even when you have like clear view of a crowd.

In this case, it's like down a flight of steps.

There's you get the kind of like real nightmare scenario, which is like vertical loading, like people landing on top of each other horizontally.

It's very, very, very rapid when it happens.

It happens before you can even notice that it's happening.

Yeah, I think everybody involved is supposed to have died within about 12 seconds,

which

or at least to have been functionally like crushed, you know.

Like the air raid wardens who arrive on scene and like at one off-duty cop show up like a minute afterwards, and at this point, there's nothing they can do.

And as the report says, by the time it was possible to extricate the bodies, it was found that a total of present estimated at 178 had died and a further 60 were in need of hospital treatment.

No bombs fell anywhere in the district during the evening.

So the whole thing was either a test or completely spurious.

And

there's this

like really horrific detail actually from a sort of very junior doctor at the time called Joan Martin.

He says, at 8.45 p.m.

on the evening of the 3rd of March, 1943, we received a phone call telling us to expect 30 faints from a tube shelter.

Quickly, we began taking down children's cots and putting up beds.

I told the medical students I was working with that it must just be a test to see how quickly we could do it, but it was all an exercise.

We had hardly finished changing the beds before the first wet mauve body was carried into the hospital.

Wet because apparently, when they pulled the bodies from the shelter, all they did was to dump them on the pavement and throw water on them.

Mauve because they were all asphyxiated.

They continued to arrive until 11 o'clock that night.

At least 30 bodies, mostly women and children, almost all dead.

We worked through the night, my two medical students and I.

I kept waiting for a consultant to come, but none came.

presumably because they had heard that everybody was already dead.

I had only been qualified for one year, and yet here I was in charge of this desperately impossible situation.

I've had nightmares ever since, and always in my nightmares, people are trampled to death.

So this is just

instant, instant, disastrous, like crush accident.

Yes.

If we go to the next slide, and the death toll turns out to be 173.

again uh 62 of them are children um it's like mostly women of the adults i think there's only like 24 adult men um as you can see here they've like opened up the shack a bit um to to gain access um and if we if we go to the next slide you get a sense of scale down the the staircase.

But yeah, so this was just a photo from the investigation of the like staircase we saw earlier and people in it.

And there's like maybe a dozen people on the landing and it's like you would be hard pressure hard pressed to like push through them you know um uh next slide please oh this one yeah okay so uh the most british authority response of all time um they installed a central set of railings and some more white paint two days after the the disaster the response the response one day yeah the response one day after the disaster was to invoke the official secrets act and swear the council to to say nothing about it Wow.

Well, problem solved.

Yep.

Watch in, boys.

That's never going to happen again.

Absolutely.

Like, sort of my preeminent example of like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, you know, is you'd like to drag all of these like crushed people out of the thing, hose the staircase down, and then you install like sort of two railings, you know?

Next slide, please.

So, as we said, Bethmore Green is like a sort of working-class,

like

both closely knit, but also kind of politically and ethnically contentious area.

And people are massively bereaved,

furious, scared.

You know, rumors start flying around about like, you know, the sort of the left-wing rumor is that this has been like kind of fascist sabotage has been involved.

The right-wing rumor is that this is like some kind of Jewish conspiracy, of course.

Right.

And everybody is like furious at the council specifically, like council officers get spat at in the street.

There's this kind of like

intense sort of like

atmosphere.

So everybody's waiting to see what the government are going to do to like reassure people.

And the answer is, how about the opposite of a public inquiry?

How about we do the most secretive shit possible?

And so they get this magistrate.

Yeah, this magistrate, Lawrence Dunn, in.

um and he interviews witnesses in secret to uh to minimize public demoralization um and reports in three weeks which is lightning quick for anything like this like for any administrative state but like for the british government even at this point that's that's like seriously like i want to be rid of this thing i want to stop talking about it stop talking about the thing we got to make sure that hitler doesn't find out that it's possible to create a human crush Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, literally, yeah.

I mean, this is the thing.

Like, I think Churchill was sort of like on record as saying that, like, it's like an open invitation to continue bombing, right?

Like, because it proves its effectiveness.

And it's like, well, I guess they already knew it was effective because that's why they were doing it.

Yeah, they were doing bombing before.

Actually, this one, they didn't even have to do any bombing to do.

It's, it's against

wait for someone to rotate a projectile.

Yeah.

It's, it's the same thing about like

sort of neurosis, right?

It's worrying about morale to the extent that like, oh, we're gonna like people are gonna go insane about this if they know that this happened.

Um, and so this this inquiry, they say, oh, we'll release it like in the future, subject to security considerations.

Um, and really stick at the Hitler and say, look, we can kill our own people.

We don't need to.

Fuck you, buddy.

And I mean, the security considerations there are the rockets kind of um you don't want to admit the thing about having cut police and civil defense numbers either, because that suggests correctly that you're like running out of manpower.

And you don't want to demoralize people.

And so this just gets completely hushed up.

I haven't read the inquiry itself,

but I've read in the course of doing like a bit of a law degree more than my fair share of old high court judgments.

And the tone is very much in keeping, you know.

Like

if you look at like contributory causes of the disaster, one of them is a wholesome respect for the dangerous splinters from our own anti-aircraft barrage.

Like, it's it's this kind of like, um,

you know, it's, it's juridical, right?

Like, it's, um, it's really fucking annoying is what it is.

Yes.

And, and this sort of like this inquiry, uh, it acknowledges all the structural stuff.

Like, it looks at the staircase and it goes, well, this is completely unlit and completely unstaffed and really uneven and it doesn't have a crush barrier.

Um, that's a subsidiary cause, yeah.

The proximate cause is people just panicked for no reason.

Um, I believe the exact line is a number of people losing their self-control at a particularly unfortunate place and time, which is sort of venomously insulting.

Yeah, it's bullshit.

I was about to say, it's like, oh, it's your own damn fault.

Yes, yeah,

how dare you embarrass us?

Uh, you embarrassed us in front of Hitler.

Yes

Next slide, please.

This is the the cover sheet for

for the report which you may notice has

one two three

four separate things telling you to keep it secret two of which are in red

This document is to be kept under lock and key special care may be taken to ensure the secrecy of this document

Most secret.

Yes, yeah, there's a line in in the archives about this um Doubt was expressed as to the expediency of publishing a summary of Mr.

Dunn's findings.

And so they just didn't.

Like, they only sort of like anything comes out about this after the war, pretty much.

And this was a particularly difficult position for Bethnal Green Council because

they could have kind of exonerated themselves by proving that they asked the government to put in like more safety measures.

But then then they would have been breaking the Official Secrets Act for saying anything about it.

And so, you know, at the time, there's no like PTSD or whatever.

There's no counseling.

Like,

and in particular, even if there had been, this is like, it's a working class area.

There's no resources and there's a strong culture of just get on with it.

You know, you can get shell shock, but those unrotated projectiles, they're not shells.

Yeah, exactly.

After the war, people did sue the council, who was maybe not really to blame here.

And they got some small amounts of compensation, like about a thousand pounds after the war.

And even then, like the judgment wasn't well publicized either.

Like, I guess, in general, my point here is that I can't stress enough the kind of like insane powers of secrecy the British government has now, let alone in like 1946.

And so, like, this was barely remembered for decades.

Nothing happened.

Those people never existed.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

That center railing, that's always been there.

What are you talking about?

The High Court judgment did

suggest that there was no panic and it was just kind of like someone tripped and, you know, people weren't even rushing, which is plausible enough to me.

That sounds about right.

Yeah.

This is the thing.

This is still contested, right?

Because

if we go to the next slide, as far as like public commemoration of this goes, there was like pressure to do it for a long time.

And the first acknowledgement officially of this was in 1993.

Damn.

If we remember the like, look down the stairway, that little plaque next to the emergency sign, that's this.

That's a little plaque from Tower Hamlet's Council, which says

this is the site of the worst civilian disaster of the Second World War.

And very clearly,

Tower Hamlet's Council is like, please shut up.

We don't want to think about this.

You can't afford this.

Yeah, genuinely.

And it's a very like, it's not very visible.

It's pretty like sort of like pro forma.

And yeah, even apart from the like deaths and injuries and like trauma, like this just absolutely destroyed people.

There's a quote I came across from

a child survivor named Alf Morris, who said 60 years later,

I was only a child, but I can still remember what happened here as if it was last night.

I never go to a football match.

I don't want to go to the theater.

I don't like going anywhere where there are crowds.

Like this is like fully and like incredibly traumatic thing that has just been swept under the rug.

So if we go to the next slide.

It's sort of like one unexpected effect of this is that because so many of the survivors were children, that meant that they were around to pressure the government about it for a long time.

Good.

This is one of the only things that like happens in Britain.

Like, it's not on the same scale as something like Hillsborough, but it does strike me as a similar case of like trying to like bother officials to like, you know, acknowledge your suffering or your death or your trauma for like decades and decades, you know?

And ultimately, this is like, this does work,

but it's still

like, you have to go through this process of like survivors groups and lobbying.

And I think one of the things that they're sort of

very keen to advance is this theory that like, this is something that's proximately caused by this like rocket battery firing.

and that the government were very keen to hush this up.

And I think that makes a compelling narrative, but I don't know how supportable it is.

We killed 173 people because we didn't want to buy a light bulb.

Yeah, I mean, that's more, I think that's more accurate, basically.

We didn't want to install a railing.

Like

the Z battery, the unrotated projectile was not really a top secret weapon.

If it's being staffed by like home guard crews, those are people that you know.

And even if they're not going to talk about it, like it's, it's something that I think the link there is a lot murkier murkier than is sometimes suggested, right?

And I think it's very possible to take away a kind of like easy understanding of like they fired the unrotated projectiles and you know, people like panicked and there was this huge crush when it could have could have equally have happened, you know, any of the other nights when people really were being bombed.

No one wanted to rotate the projectile.

The problem is they extended that to not wanting to rotate the light bulb in order to install it.

Yeah, no.

And then if we go to the next slide, ultimately what this produced, as far as I know, nothing further in the way of compensation, which is pretty shameful.

But what it did get was Bethnal Green, one of London's ugliest public memorials.

Oh, good.

I'm prepared to be yelled at about this, but I do not like this.

Also, it is literally called the Stairway to Heaven, which

it's a little on the nose.

to make this sort of weird

stairway-shaped thing.

I mean, I don't know if I'd want to be reminded of that.

Made out of teak,

which is cool, I guess.

Adding to my list of like least sort of like architecturally compelling memorials in London, I think it's this and the like National Police Memorial.

But

yeah, so like now there's something at least, like more than just a plaque.

So we have kind of like the historical debt to our like slaughtered predecessors has been kind of erased, I guess, aside from all the people with like lifelong trauma.

Next slide, please.

Helpfully, Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things

did two Zoom calls with a ghost writer.

And out of this came a book with her name on it called 19 Steps.

about this.

This exists so that she can have it adapted for the screen and have her name on it.

I don't look forward to the film.

The book contains, I think it opens with the line, it was hot, the kind of heat that made you wish for it to cool down, which

wow,

sure.

Yeah.

This is one of those kind of disasters.

I don't know you can do a film about.

You know, it's kind of like how they did a film about the miracle on the Hudson.

It's like, you know, if the whole incident takes less than an hour and 30 minutes, especially if it's substantially less than an hour and 30 minutes, maybe you should consider a different different way of talking about it.

I think they'll build out a whole kind of romance about it, you know, which

it's going to take a lot of work.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, also, this is just the way that books get written now, which sucks.

Like,

this exists as like an intellectual property.

It's really hard to,

as much as, okay, here we are at an hour and 45 minutes, it's really hard to expand.

We didn't want to install a light bulb.

Yeah, I mean,

this is why I talked about the

New Works program.

It's why I talked about the blackout.

It's because of, you know, both because it's interesting context and because it helps you kind of build this thing out around it, you know, because otherwise you don't have a podcast and you don't have a book.

If we, and in fact, I have some more padding to do because if we go to the next slide, I am, I'm fully prepared to lose my shit.

This is the thing I've been building up the head of Steam towards the whole episode.

Oh, yeah.

So this is, this is the, like, one of the three entrances to Bethmore Green Tube.

You can see it has the little plaque on it.

It has the little like memorial wreath as well.

The fucking staircase is still there.

Yeah.

And it, it has a central railing.

It has some like grippy bits and some reflexive bits, but the arrangement is still the same.

Right.

And there are a million tube stations like this.

And aside from being an accessibility nightmare, it is still, I suggest, genuinely dangerous, right?

Like as much as there are mitigation factors now, like the cool flashing emergency, do not enter sign, or the railings, or you hope that the like one met police officer left and like London would still be around.

But like if you need to try and get a lot of people into or out of a like random tube station in a hurry, which is something that the tubers had to do,

like within living memory for me, like, and as we saw at King's Cross, right?

There are still serious system-wide vulnerabilities.

Um, not just the tube, I mean, Euston train station is like an accident waiting to happen as far as crashes go.

Um, but like, in particular, like, um, the central line, a lot of the like sort of deep-level tubes, you know, I love the tube as much as the next Londoner.

And, like, obviously, I love Frank Pick and the tube map and the Diamond Randles at Moorgate and the weird domes at Kennington and Clapham Common and the fucking Metroland spaceship that landed in Southgate.

But, like, at some point, possibly while you're boiling to death on a Central Line train, you have to acknowledge that this is a like almost 200-year-old system that has locked in a lot of really bad choices and hard limits on what you can actually do differently, right?

Like the Central Line is getting hotter every year because you can't add more ventilation because it runs through the middle of central London.

And like, it's

this is stuff that you could like only overcome with serious investment or maybe not at all.

And that sucks because it's just like baked in.

And like,

apart from anything else, if you use a wheelchair, you have to get off in fucking Stratford.

And you still have to ask for a ramp in one of the richest cities and the richest countries in the world, which is unacceptable and shameful.

And just like, it's a sort of singular constraint and a sort of failure to adapt or like maybe even like impossibility to adapt.

beyond what like a bunch of guys in top hats who decided it would be a good idea to run a steam train underground and then uh like a bunch of guys in the 30s thought would be good ideas and uh

i don't say that this is like another accident waiting to happen but like it's it's just like an example of what it's like living in britain where like all the major public infrastructure is done legacy you know yeah i mean it's not like they're going to build crossrail too i mean they were going to but they're not going to

it's just you can look at the elizabeth line right and you think this is this is like beautiful and very successful and very effective and efficient and safe

And you go, well, why can't we do this with all this?

And it's because it's like it's built on 200 years of intermeshed bullshit, you know, and no one is willing to try and untangle this Gordian knot that runs beneath London.

I can't even figure out the level boarding on outer stations on Crossrail.

No, I mean,

it's genuinely a bit of a nightmare.

And as much as I am proud of the tube and I like the tube, it's like, I think a representative example, right?

And I think this, this disaster, which was successfully hushed up, I should say, like, this isn't something that is like much written about.

I mean, there's like, more so lately, more so thanks to the efforts of survivors.

Rishinara Lee is the like MP for Bethnal Green.

She's sort of written about it as well, which is very helpful.

Good MP as well.

But like,

there's,

just in general, I think this is, this is a real like Britain pill, this episode, or at least I intend it to be, you know, is oh yeah we can just like kill a bunch of kids out of like sort of negligence and laziness and just sheer fucking inertia um and then eventually we will as as the sort of area is getting gentrified maybe we'll put in a kind of weird memorial so it's too small of a staircase to get killed by that's the other thing you know if you got killed on like the spanish steps in rome or something that's respected this is like too small they should not be able to kill that many people

it's again like feeding a lot of people into a really confined space, you know?

And it's just, it's it's it's something that like all all these stations were designed before anybody had any theories about what crowds would or should do, I guess.

Um, because they're too busy picking out the like sort of perfect font, which to be fair, I do like the font.

The font is very good, yeah.

If you if you want, if you try, I tried reading about the kind of architectural, like, design history of Bethnal Green Tube.

And all I can find about it is the like color of the fucking tiles and how difficult they are to like source and replace.

And I'm like,

that strikes me as a kind of like, you know, representative example of the kind of nitpicky nature of the tube's design, right?

Is that like a lot of it's very like idiosyncratic and very like micro-focus and on like, oh, look at the tiles we got.

And it's like, okay, but you have an entranceway that can kill like.

60 quit 60 kids in like 10 seconds.

You got to also think that, you know, when this thing was designed, especially since it had the two other exits, you were never gonna get that kind of crowd load here.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah,

yeah.

War makes us do stupid things.

Truly, I mean, ultimately, this is Hitler's fault, right?

Like, yes,

this is who we got to lay it at the door of.

But, like, also,

it's like, it's poor design, and it's poor design in a way that continues to haunt us, not just in this, you know?

Well, I mean, if we're lucky in World War III, there won't be time to hit the shelters before the bomb hits.

Oh, yeah, you won't know a thing about it.

Don't even worry about it.

I have no idea.

You know, it'd be somebody else's problem pretty quick.

Well, that's all I had.

That's that's the West McGreen Tube disaster.

If you write in Wikipedia, this probably deserves its own article, to be honest.

It deserves its own article.

You know, I'll just

make sure that in the future no one rotates a projectile and causes an incident.

may may not even have been related but you know yeah

well we have a segment on this podcast called safety third

shake hands with danger I'm already excited

I will only say hello to Nova

hi

insert sarcastic joke about trans solidarity harming cis people well if you're going to do trans solidarity why didn't you say hi to devon as well that's a good point cancelled transphobic Wow, transphobia happening in here.

Anyway, I used to work at a hardware store, which shall remain nameless.

Okay.

The position I worked was order picker.

Basically, individuals or businesses would make orders to the store, and I'd pick out the order items and set them up for delivery.

Needless to say, I was trained on all the stores' different forklifts.

Nice.

Yes, I am forklift certified, and my license is definitely still active and not at all expired.

Did you see the tweet that's like they installed accelerometers in the forklifts and the new guy racked up 6G on the first day?

Oh my god.

Wow.

But I digress.

We were told to always walk around to forklifts and give a visual inspection before using them.

This is somewhat similar to a pilot's inspection of a plane before the flight.

Yeah, except it's way harder and has higher stakes.

Yeah, exactly.

One day I noticed a forklift with a cracked rear wheel.

So I promptly took the forklift to where we staged the 2B repaired equipment.

On the trip over there, I noticed the hydraulic lines were sweating with a heavier buildup at the upper fitting.

Now, someone told me once that lines like that sweat, or lines that sweat like that, are usually not designed to be used in a hydraulic system.

I mean, I'm not.

That makes sense.

Yeah, I'm honestly not sure how true that is, but I wiped down the line with alcohol to see if the sweat came from the top fitting again.

And I made two separate lockout tagout tags on the machine.

I put one for the wheel and another for the possible leak.

I placed them directly in front of the preshield so they'd obstruct the vision of anyone that made the incredible choice to take a forklift from the damaged forklift area.

I see where this is going immediately.

Not five minutes later, I saw a guy speeding down the rear aisle runway.

That's the straightway between aisle groupings, right?

The lockout tags were still in place obstructing the man's vision.

Like a pair of like fuzzy dice.

We'll just call this guy JP.

I flagged JP down and asked him what the hell he was doing and pointed to the lockout tags.

He said, and I quote, oh, that's just weeping.

And that wheel is fine.

I've driven on worse.

Uh-huh.

So he didn't listen to me, likely because I was newer to the position and he'd been in there 10 years.

I love complacency.

I came to find out that day that a weeping line is pretty much a leak and doesn't seem to have been what was going on anyway.

So I said, fuck it, and tried to find a manager.

About two minutes later, I heard a massive crashing sound in the lumber section.

I hurried on over there to make sure no one was hurt, and I saw JP stumble out from the aisle.

There is a special providence that protects fools, children, and the United States of America.

At a glance, I thought JP was covered in blood, but realized he was covered in hydraulic fluid.

Turns out, it was a leak.

While he was lifting a pallet of 6x6x12 treated lumber, the wheel shattered, basically turning itself into a mini-fragmentation grenade, leaving small dents on the solid steel supports for the aisle.

So, from what I understand, when the wheel broke, the lift dropped to a steel rim.

The fork on that side dropped a little because the entire machine shifted, causing the load to fall just about an inch.

That was enough to overload the leaking fitting, and the line burst.

Oh, jeez.

No one got hurt too bad besides JP getting a facial from some hot hydraulic fluid.

God damn it.

I have a few other safety warrior thirds, but this one honestly takes the cake.

JP thought himself more powerful than a lockout tagout tag, only for his vanity to die along with

the employment.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah.

Y'all better have a nice day or else

placing a lockout tagout thing on my fucking day.

Yes.

If energized, this day will.

This day cannot be made bad.

I really enjoyed this one.

That's good.

That's good.

Folks, respect the lockout tagout procedure.

Please.

Yeah.

Do not become complacent around the forklift that hungers for your injury.

Don't be a weird.

I'm assuming this guy is a boomer.

Sounds like some boomerang behavior.

Definitely like boomer-coded for sure.

Boomer-coded.

Maybe Gen X.

Yeah.

I tried to get this.

It actually is worse if he's a Zoomer, you know.

I tried to get this Zoomer to look at the lockout tag out thing, and he's just on his AirPods.

Oh, my God.

He's got AirPods in.

Oh, my God, Klaus.

I think the time has come for a Zoomer reboot of Stapler Fuhrer, Klaus.

Fuhrer?

Fuck.

No, he's not Furing that fucking Stapler.

He's firing it.

He's firing that Stapler, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Not really.

I just wanted to say I hope I did an okay job and you enjoyed my episode.

I did terrific.

It's a good episode.

I felt like I could have inculcated some more participation there, but

I wrote this overnight and

I locked in.

You get into podcasting trance, yeah, more or less.

Um,

I'm the podcasting berserker,

I was just rotating a projectile in my mind.

You're a woman now, no, no, women can't do that.

I thought that was the joke, yeah.

Yeah, I don't even remember which way the Cogiasi goes.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, listen to all the other podcasts, listen to our podcast, please.

Go on, Patreon, listen to our podcast.

A little bonus episode out later.

Okay.