But Fry was undoubtedly a devout Christian of the Quaker variety, as were the other two of the big three British chocolatiers, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, all of whom were directed towards manufacturing through being barred from most professions. They were drawn to chocolate in particular because they regarded it as a more moral treat, and that was how it was widely perceived: an innocent indulgence, supplied by men whose Quaker conscience dictated that they combine its manufacture with good works. In a wider sense, we might see that Fry’s egg as symbolising a strain of particularly moral — indeed, overtly Christian — capitalism, operating paternalistically both in its own workplaces and the surrounding community. The story of these eggs, and the companies that made them, therefore forms a simulacrum for the narrative of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from local, civic-minded commerce toward globalised, faceless big business.   

I grew up in Seventies York, upon which the Rowntrees had been showering gifts for nearly a century. The primary benefactor had been Joseph Rowntree II, heir to the first Joseph Rowntree, who’d established the business in 1822. In 1893, JR II established Rowntree’s garden factory in York, whose 4,000 employees benefited from a female welfare worker, a doctor’s surgery, sick and provident funds, savings and pensions schemes. Nearby was — and is — New Earwsick, a model village for employees with pretty Arts and Crafts houses, each with a fruit tree in the front garden, and no two successive trees bore the same fruit, to promote crop-swapping and neighbourliness. There was a toytown air about the signs indicating “Butcher”, “Greengrocer”, ”Chemist”. No sign indicated “pub” of course.

Several members of my extended family worked for Rowntree’s, and they were entitled to heavily discounted chocolate, some of which came my way, and my mother always included a Kit-Kat in my packed lunch, a token of love from her, and (it seemed) the Rowntrees themselves. One could still almost believe that their primary concern was philanthropy and the creation of charitable trusts, while they left the chocolate making to secular subordinates.

I benefited in many ways from Rowntree largesse, playing tennis and swimming in Rowntree Park, acting in plays at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre and swotting for exams in York Library, which they’d funded. I never went inside the factory but did once visit its equivalent in the Midlands: Cadbury’s Bournville complex. This too is a garden factory, with a similarly relaxed spaciousness between the buildings, like pieces on a chess board towards the end of a game. I recall seeing, among many other tokens of paternalism, the factory dentist’s surgery, indicated by a sign in Cadbury’s purple. At the time (early 2000s) Cadbury’s seemed to have retained the “purity” (a word much employed in their advertising) we appeared to have lost in York.

Rowntree’s was acquired by Nestlé in 1988, and I remember being shocked at seeing the Swiss flag flying from the factory roof. Nestlé have since invested heavily in the York factory, but they admit that they don’t continue the Rowntree tradition of York benefactions, and the extent of their wider philanthropy is mysterious to me. A spokesperson for the firm said: “We don’t necessarily PR our charitable work.”

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In 2010, Cadbury’s, which does still support the charitable Cadbury Foundation, was sold to the America-based multinational, Kraft, and is now owned by Mondelez, a company hived off from Kraft in 2012. In York, we knew all about Kraft. It had acquired the other York chocolatier, Terry’s, who were not Quakers, but whose factory — closed by Kraft in 1993 — nonetheless had a fishpond, bowling green and sports fields, and whose female hockey team played in the colours of one of their best-known brands: All Gold.

But even before British Big Chocolate entered a world you’d need a degree in business studies to comprehend, the companies had not been averse to capitalistic chess playing. In 1919, Cadbury’s had (gently and politely) acquired Fry’s, and in 1969, Cadbury’s merged with Schweppes, despite Schweppes mixers being used in alcoholic drinks. In his history of 20th-century confectionery, Sweet Talk, Nicholas Whittaker refutes the sentimental version of the Rowntree’s takeover, whereby Nestlé was seen as a bully spoiling for a fight: “Who should it be? Cadbury’s looked a bit too muscular, and that Mars was a Yankee smartarse. How about that Rowntree’s wimp in the corner, happily counting his Smarties? He’d do.” On the contrary, as Whittaker writes, it was “all about percentages, shareholdings and wheeler-dealing”.

The Quakers had also been worldly enough to embrace advertising even though, as Deborah Cadbury writes in her 2010 book, Chocolate Wars: “Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself; abhorrent to a man of God.” The heyday of chocolate advertising was in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of it was particularly un-Quaker like (the way those fashion models ate a Cadbury’s Flake, for instance). And whereas Cadbury and Rowntree’s benignity on the home front was unquestionable, they took their eye off the ball when it came to the cocoa-producing regions.

In 2021, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Barrow Cadbury Trust — created in 1920, and now an independent charitable trust “inspired by Quaker beliefs” — apologised for the fact that their endowment was “not free from labour exploitation”. In the early 19th Century, Cadbury’s had acquired cocoa from plantations where slave labour had been used. The company eventually organised a boycott of those plantations by British cocoa manufacturers, but they had benefited from slave labour for eight years. Also in 2021, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust — established in 1904, and now “an independent Quaker charitable trust” — apologised for the “Rowntree company having purchased cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved people”.

More from this author

Flying Scotsman could save Doncaster

By Andrew Martin

Cocoa production is still bedevilled by labour exploitation, which is one reason why the Fairtrade label (imprimatur of the Fairtrade movement) was established in 1997. It is applied to goods produced ethically, for which a fair price had been paid. Neither Mondelez nor Nestlé are currently signed up to Fairtrade, although both have their own schemes of certification: Cocoa Life and Rainforest Alliance respectively. Cocoa Life operates in partnership with Fairtrade but neither it nor Rainforest Alliance guarantees a minimum price to cocoa farmers, which Fairtrade does. In 2009, Nestle’s Kit-Kat did become Fairtrade-registered, a momentous event, given the scale of Kit-Kat sales, but in 2020, Nestlé moved Kit-Kat into its Rainforest Alliance scheme. (Nestlé insisted this was about unifying all their products under one umbrella and not a moneysaving measure. But Joanna Pollard, a co-ordinator of Fairtrade Yorkshire contended that cocoa farmers would lose out heavily, and she presented a petition of protest with 300,000 signatures at their York factory.)

It tends to be only the smaller players who can now claim the moral high ground, a reversal of the previous situation. Tony’s Chocolonely (“crazy about chocolate, serious about people”) was founded in 2005 by a Dutch TV producer, Tuen van de Keuken, whose chocolate bars have irregular divisions, like crazy paving, to reflect the inequalities of the chocolate industry. The “lonely” tag is because van de Keuken felt as if he alone were addressing exploitation in chocolate farming, but the company’s moral claims go only so far. Chocolonely has never claimed there is no child labour in its supply chain, which is just as well, since, in 2022, the company reported that 1,701 instances of it had been found in the previous year — a situation it has undertaken to correct.

So there remains a moral dimension to the chocolate industry, albeit now a globalised one, and there is a new moral fraughtness, concerning our view of both its past and its social effects today. To the question of modern slavery, we might add the British obesity crisis that has come along to embarrass the chocolatiers. And in the modern age, there is even an anxiety about the nomenclature of their seasonal eggs. In one sense the creation of the chocolate egg pushed Easter in the child-oriented, secularised direction that Christmas had already begun to take in the Victorian period. (Decorated hard-boiled eggs had previously been given to the local poor rather than one’s own offspring.) While the Easter chocolate can be viewed as a Christian symbol, it is increasingly not so perceived.

In 2010, David Marshall crowdfunded the launch of the Meaningful Chocolate Company, having been given an Easter egg whose packaging proclaimed, “Easter is the festival of chocolate and loveliness.” Surveying the 80 million eggs on sale, he concluded that not a single manufacturer mentioned the religious aspect of the festival, hence his “Real Easter Egg”, which comes with a copy of the Easter story, is Fairtrade certified, and from the profits of which a donation is made to charity. By Easter 2023, 1.8 million of these eggs will have been sold, and without the aid of the supermarkets, who won’t stock an explicitly religious egg. Having spoken to Mr Marshall, I visited my local Sainsbury’s. About half the chocolate eggs on display were described as “Easter eggs”, but the E-word tended to be on the back of the package in small print rather than blazoned the front.

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The Quaker capitalism behind Fry’s Easter egg has become shareholder capitalism. In a globalised world, the chocolate industry grew too big for a connection to any one place or system of belief, unless it be the belief in profit. In decades past, guided tours of the Rowntree factory were regularly offered to the general public. But, a few years ago, when I applied to Nestlé for a tour, they turned me down on the grounds that if they let me in, they’d be overwhelmed with other applicants.

And Quakerism itself is a faith in decline. As Deborah Cadbury writes “there was a time when one in 10 people in Britain were Quakers”, but when she visited Quaker HQ, the Society of Friends on Euston Road, she discovered that membership was down to 15,000. As Quakerism and Christianity has faded from the world of British chocolate, a very familiar modern landscape has replaced it: a transition from the solidity and faith of the past towards a liquid, rootless, profit-maximising present.

True enough, it is as hard to associate Doncaster with the continuing glamour of Flying Scotsman as it is to believe that Diana Rigg — svelte star of The Avengers — came from there. Michael Parkinson said Rigg “radiated a lustrous beauty”; the same cannot be said of modern-day Doncaster, so close to prosperous and pretty York, one stop north on the East Coast Main Line. When it comes to the North-South divide, the latter, cosseted by tourism, doesn’t really have a dog in the fight, whereas Doncaster seems emblematic of all that has gone wrong in recent decades.

The Flying Scotsman symbolises happier times for Doncaster. It owes its existence to what a recent Doncaster Council document described as “the most significant example of levelling up in Doncaster’s history”. In 1849, the town’s Tory MP, Edmund Beckett Denison, persuaded the Great Northern Railway to extend its line north to Doncaster, and to move its works there. By the turn of the century, those works — known as “the Plant” — occupied 200 acres and involved 60 miles of sidings, some tangled with the mineral lines serving nearby pits. The GNR was not exactly philanthropic, as Rowntree’s in York was, but it did reach out to the town. It built two schools for its workers. It helped pay for the construction of Station Road, a handsome thoroughfare along which arrivals by train might saunter into town, past the Oriental Chambers and the Grand Theatre.

In those days, London needed the North. Coal trains left Doncaster hourly for the capital. And the town was a destination, not just a resource. Tourists came for the races, and ambitious young men came from all over Britain to take up apprenticeships at the Plant, including W.O. Bentley, who would use the skills he learnt building fast trains to build fast cars. In 1911, a large, intimidating Scottish aristocrat called Nigel Gresley arrived at Doncaster as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern. He designed the star product a new class of unprecedentedly big express passenger locomotives, built to haul heavy, luxury trains at speed along the East Coast Main Line. It was named Flying Scotsman.

The engine is often described as symbolising all that was best in British engineering, but it also represented an early flowering of the nation’s Public Relations industry, becoming a pin-up in many beautiful posters. There would be Flying Scotsman paperweights, jigsaws, ash trays. The loco regularly hauled the train named The Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh, and anyone who turned up to find a different engine at the front would feel short-changed, as when an understudy takes the star’s part in a play. The Flying Scotsman had luxury carriages, including the Louis XIV-style first-class restaurant car, a cinema carriage and a barber’s shop, in which shaves with a cutthroat razor were offered and accepted — a tribute to the train’s smooth riding. All these trappings were created in the Plant.

Why all this manufactured glamour? Mainly because of competition for the lucrative London-Scotland rail market, but also because of automobile competition. In the Thirties, people would be unlikely to drive from London to Scotland, but they might take a charabanc from York to Scarborough, and the LNER hoped its mainline publicity would add lustre to its local services, for which it adopted the tell-tale slogan, “It’s Quicker by Rail”.

While they were nationalised, in the second half of the 20th century, our railways were increasingly menaced by the rise of the automobile. Investment would be followed by retrenchment, indulgence by hangover, and in 1958 British Railways fell into the hands of a Transport Secretary succinctly described by Christian Wolmar, in his history of BR, as “a car man”. Ernest (‘Ernie’) Marples drove a Jag. He co-owned a company that built roads. He appointed Dr Richard Beeching, a physicist, to take a “scientific” approach to BR, which, not very surprisingly, turned out to mean cutting the network by a third.

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Diesel and electric locomotives would be outshopped from Doncaster over the next 30 years, but trains had lost their primacy. The propaganda surrounding the Beeching cuts characterised railways as a second-class mode. They lost their sheen and so, therefore, did Doncaster. Marples was a Conservative, but Labour was half-hearted in opposition to his policies. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Doncaster’s Labour Council capitulated to the motor car, just as similarly-hued councils did in Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. If you emerge from Doncaster station today, you see an artwork celebrating the town’s locomotive-building history, but all you can hear is the traffic of the town’s inner ring road, constructed in 1970, which creates a barrier between the station and the town.

Doncaster, like most Northern towns, is uglier than it used to be. Elegant Station Road was obliterated by the construction of a huge shopping centre with five levels of parking above it. The only survivor is the Grand Theatre, which stands derelict opposite the station, a great white haunted house. Along the pedestrianised High Street, formerly the Great North Road, attractive premises that once housed grand banks and coaching inns are occupied by fast-food outlets, charity shops, barbers’ shops offering “Haircut £6”. In Doncaster’s most beautiful building, the Minster, I spoke to a local man in his eighties.

“There aren’t more than a couple of really good shops left on the High Street. Fifty years ago, they were all good, and you had some railway first class menswear shops and tailors.” (He was very well-dressed.) When asked how long times had been hard, he said: “I’d date it back to the pit closures.”

Unlike many other places that started to lose their mines in the late Eighties, Doncaster had railways to fall back on. But it suffered a more complete loss of machismo after it made its last loco in 1987. Today, the town retains what the council calls its “diverse railway cluster”, which employs 7000 people, 2000 more than the old Plant. But whereas everyone knew what went on in the Plant, the cluster is mysterious. No one person seems to have the complete list of its tenants. There’s the iPort, for example: an “intermodal rail terminal” signified by a mass of containers visible a couple of miles south of Doncaster on your right from northbound trains. Some containers are brought from abroad including, it is rumoured, by a train that comes via the Chunnel from China. Near the iPort are giant, blank-faced warehouses: Amazon distribution hubs. Doncaster has the dubious honour of being the only place in the UK to have three of these. A woman who works in a Doncaster café said to me: “Today, Donny is a distribution hub — don’t ask me what’s being distributed.”

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Admittedly, there is a good deal of railway-related activity within the cluster. But this being modern “British industry”, many of the names are foreign. Wabtec Rail, an American-owned firm, refurbishes rolling stock at Doncaster. And there’s Volker Rail, a Dutch railway infrastructure company. The foreignness of the cluster is typical: of the 30 or so train operators in Britain today, only half a dozen have British owners. Professor Paul Salveson, a railway expert, says the Doncaster scene exemplifies “the willingness of British governments over the last fifty years to relinquish engineering — the idea that we don’t need to make things”.

Was this an ingredient in the overwhelming support for Brexit? All the towns in Yorkshire except the three most prosperous — York, Leeds, Harrogate — voted to leave the European Union, Doncaster by 69%. In a pub in the city centre, a local explained that people supported Brexit “because they thought something might change”. When asked what had changed, he said: “Nowt.”

But Doncaster’s economy was actually growing faster than the regional average pre-pandemic. Construction — some undertaken on the territory of the Plant — played a part: Doncaster is being regenerated. And it remains an important railway centre, both for passengers — six lines radiate from the town — and the industry. But the glamour is gone. As for the Scotsman, it pursues its whimsical afterlife. Having been saved from scrapping in 1962, it was owned by a succession of rail enthusiast-millionaires — two of whom it bankrupted. They ran it all over Britain until 2004, when it was acquired by the National Rail Museum — located, of course, in lucky old York.

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British Rail must take back control

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In his book, Parallel Lines, Ian Marchant wrote that there are two railways in Britain: the railway of romance and the railway of reality. The latter, he added, was “largely shit”, and here might lie an opportunity for Doncaster. Our privatised railway is fragmented, with its separation of track and train operators, its multiplicity of ever-changing brands and liveries. Unlike The Flying Scotsman or the LNER, it is unknowable, and this is reflected in the anonymity of the Doncaster railway lands.

Great British Railways, the state-owned body expected to take over the nation’s industry, will supposedly fix this problem, providing a central “guiding mind”, and a more integrated network. What with the energy crisis and the recent political turmoil, the Bill to create GBR has been postponed. But the location of its headquarters is expected to be announced in 2023 even so. Doncaster made the shortlist — and it seems by far the most deserving candidate among Birmingham, Crewe, Derby, Newcastle and York.

There is no grand panacea for the sites of former industry. Steps to a better future will mostly be incremental. But occasionally there will be strides. Victory for Doncaster might top even the arrival of the Great Northern Railway as an instance of real levelling up. The city would unequivocally be a railway place once again — an even better thing to be in 2023 than in 1923, perhaps, given the newly recognised environmental kudos of rail. Skilled workers would flock there once more. There would also be intangible benefits: restored pride, an escape from the melancholic retrospection. And perhaps the starry locomotive will have assisted. Doncaster’s pitch for the role contained a killer line: “We built Flying Scotsman”.

Me: “You enjoy that?”
Wife: “Yes.”
Pause.
Me: “But did you understand it?”
Wife: “Of course I did. Didn’t you?”

I’m a bit tired, frankly, of watching thrillers with my wife. She’s too complacent about plotting. “Oh, who cares how he found out where the villain lives?” she’ll say. “The fact is, he did find out.”

So this week I made —alone — my first visit to a cinema since March. I went to see Tenet, the action-packed blockbuster kickstarting filmgoing after lockdown. That said, I was one of about four people watching it in a huge auditorium. We’d all been reminded to wear face masks “except when eating and drinking”, so I bought a big bag of jelly babies.

Given my particular neurosis, it was asking for trouble to see the particular film. The director, Christopher Nolan, favours complicated high-concept plots. His Inception (2010) is about dreams; Memento (2000) plays about with chronology. I followed shreds of the plot in each case — enough to enjoy the spectacle, because Nolan’s films always look great.

Tenet concerns time travel, and my incomprehension was total, in part because whenever someone appeared to be explaining what was going on, I couldn’t hear them. The main explainer was Kenneth Branagh as the villain who is somehow in touch with the future. He delivers a long, possibly crucial, speech in a blustery wind on a racing catamaran — all the time without really opening his mouth. Explication is further inhibited by the fact that the characters — like the audience — often wear face masks, because when you go backwards in time, there’s no oxygen. (The effect is depressing: it’s as if the actors on screen don’t want to catch Covid from the audience.)

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Time travel stories are usually fraught, especially if the author attempts to explain how it’s done; and what happens if you kill your own grandfather back in time? This (‘the Grandfather paradox’) is mumbled about in Tenet. In the film, time travels both forwards and backwards. Approaching the climax, an army officer gives a briefing to two SWAT teams he’s going to be leading in “a pincer movement — not in space, but in time”. The briefing concluded, he asks whether any of the men have questions; none do. I had about a hundred and fifty.

There have been many complaints about the sound mixing of Tenet, and most reviewers have admitted to at least partial bafflement when it comes to the plot. The Telegraph’s line, “Don’t try to understand it — just rewind and enjoy the ride” is common, as though incomprehensibility were some small endearing eccentricity. Or it might be that Nolan is getting credit for creating this smokescreen, as if it proves his brilliance. Apparently, he spent ten years deliberating over the plotline. I don’t know how long he spent on the dialogue, but at one point somebody says, “There’s a new cold war — ice cold.”

Tenet is a thriller, and thrillers are supposed to create tension. If the audience doesn’t know what’s happening — if, for example, they can’t tell who’s chasing who in a backwards car chase — there’s no tension, only confusion.

Of course, there’s room for some confusion in a thriller. It’s like the magician’s fast distraction patter, from which a surprise might spring — and surprises can help build tension. But what’s even better is the opposite of surprise: anticipation. This can arise from a particular situation — for instance Alfred Hitchcock’s famous example of a bomb under a table. The characters don’t know it’s there: will it go off? Or it might come from the audience’s knowledge of a fatal flaw in a character’s makeup. In this way, tension and characterisation are intertwined.

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The plot of Roman Polanski’s film, Chinatown, is intricate, but the complications hinge on the peculiar and poignant situation of the Faye Dunaway character. I know dozens of people who’ve seen it — none of them say it was too complicated. The same is true of Robert Altman’s film of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye, in which the characters are given better motivations than in the original novel. (We’ll be coming back to Chandler). Of more recent films, I’d cite Knives Out, a whodunit of last year, as a film with well-managed complications.

Knives Out pays homage to ‘Golden Age’ of British ‘whodunit’ crime writing, of which the main exponents were Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Their books are also called ‘cosies’ because the settings are opulent and the detectives are God-like — and the more complications the detective can surmount, the more God-like they are.

The cosiness was appreciated by readers seeking relief from the social tensions of inter-war Britain, but there are often too many twists. In The Five Red Herrings by Sayers, it takes Lord Peter Wimsey about 30 pages to explain whodunit. A Christie novel to avoid is Murder on the Links, where there’s much hasty shuffling of suspects towards the end, as though she realised, in a panic, that each successive one was too obvious.

The Golden Age books usually have too many suspects, and the existence of the character finally revealed as the culprit might have entirely slipped your mind. In his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler wrote that, when reading the Golden Agers, he found himself having to “go back to page 47 to refresh my memory about exactly what time the second gardener potted the prize-winning tea rose begonia”.

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But if Chandler’s stories were more realistic than those of Christie and Sayers, his plotting could be just as problematic. Farewell My Lovely begins with Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, observing a murder committed by an overwrought man looking for an ex-girlfriend. Marlowe is then immediately involved in another murder of a more rational type, relating to a jewel theft. The two murders eventually serve the overall plot, but the juxtaposition jars. They don’t seem to belong in the same book, and they once did belong to separate short stories of Chandler’s, which he cannibalised for the novel — a common habit of his. Chandler is a superb writer of atmosphere and dialogue, but his novels create in me anxiety rather than tension. I’m always waiting for another ragged and disorientating jump cut.

It’s perhaps more tempting to over-plot now than ever — to come up with something for the Tweeters and bloggers to chew on. But I like that strain of genre writers with a casual approach to plot. Elmore Leonard, I think, more or less made up his plots as he went along, influenced by the developing vagaries of his very three-dimensional characters. And I approve of Lee Child’s laidback approach to the Jack Reacher novels: “Ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, then delay the answer.”

I admire the spare plots of Georges Simenon’s stories featuring the laconic detective Maigret, in which the culprit might be someone Maigret — and the reader — vaguely thought it was all along, and this person is finally triggered into an admission by an apposite remark of the detective’s.

Christopher Nolan should read some Maigrets. He might then make a film where people yawn, watch the rain fall, savour a last Calvados while the barman puts the chairs on the table. And he would do it so beautifully.

Andrew Martin’s latest novel is The Winker (Corsair)

My footsteps echoed as I walked towards the ticket gates at Bank during what used to be the evening rush hour. I was the only person in that corridor, and when I passed through the ticket barrier, I noticed for the first time that the presentation of a valid Oyster card causes the word ‘Enter’ to flash up. It had a sinister connotation, as though Vincent Price were cackling in the background.

At the time of writing, ridership is a little over 10% of the normal figure, even though as many as 90% of the usual number of trains are operating at peak times. Whereas I hear “Wish the flipping pubs would open” all the time, I’ve never heard, “Can’t wait to get back on the Tube”. In the time of Covid-19, a trip on the Tube seems to be just what the doctor didn’t order, and the disease might have been designed to underline all those associations of the Tube with interment, the underworld and death.

When writing a history of the Underground, I discovered that Bank station was effectively built in the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth church, which still stands, looking slightly affronted at the proximity of the station. In The Wasteland, St Mary Woolnoth ‘kept the hours’ as the commuting crowd flowed on (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’).

In the first half of the 20^th Century, avant-garde writers were much concerned with the Tube as a symbol of modernity. Most took a baleful view. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote that, for one character, “descent into the Tube was like death. We were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that seemed to roar down there like desert boulders.” And there was an imbalance, in that the writers more favourably disposed to the Tube tended to find it interesting rather than straightforwardly pleasurable. “I travelled by a tube train,” wrote F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist, in 1912, “I got what I wanted – not enjoyment, but a totally new idea of motion, of speed.”

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I myself have always enjoyed the Tube, possibly because I have never had to commute. I subscribe to what might be described as the official line, which is that it is a beautiful, humane system, doing its best to mitigate the unnaturalness of the subterranean environment. This might also be described as the Frank Pick view, and my purpose in outlining it here is to commend it to anyone stuck with using the Tube right now.

Frank Pick was second-in-command of the Underground in the inter-war years. He was in charge of the aesthetics, to which he applied the principles of the Design Industries Association, which had evolved from those of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as set out by William Morris: elegant utility and fitness for purpose. In The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, Michael T. Saler contends that Frank Pick “dreamed of establishing Morris’s earthly paradise… the Underground would be a model of aesthetic integration and communal service, a catalyst for a more harmonious London of the future.”

Pick moved to London after growing up in York (as I did myself). According to Saler, he regarded London as “a hundred towns divided one against another”, whereas York was “the model for the integrated city life that Pick hoped could be re-established in all communities, especially London”.

By means of the Underground, Pick would make London a comprehensible as York, and to make the Underground comprehensible he commissioned Harry Beck’s diagrammatic Tube map. The above-mentioned Johnston typeface was another Pick commission. It adorned directional signs, sometimes illuminated (in light boxes) in the geometric, light-filled stations of Pick’s protégé architect, Charles Holden. Holden’s suburban masterpieces, such as Arnos Grove, Cockfosters, Tooting Bec, are open for business, and if they figure in your essential journey, consider: you are experiencing works of art at a time when all museums and galleries are closed.

Holden’s central London masterpiece is Piccadilly Circus. Oliver Green, the author of many good transport books (most recently London’s Underground) once suggested to me that Piccadilly Circus, with its seven pedestrian entrances from the street, ‘epitomises Frank Pick’s doctrine of passenger flow.’

The circular Piccadilly Circus ticket hall was conceived by Pick and Holden as a ‘concourse’ or ‘circulating area’ – new words when it opened in 1928. The station was overtly glamorous, like the people in the posters commissioned by Pick encouraging Londoners to make the most of their city. One poster proclaimed “The Playgoer Travels by Tube”. It shows a tail-coated waiter bowing to a couple in evening wear, and such attire was not incompatible with the mellow lighting in opal glass of Piccadilly Circus (which deliberately suggests a promising early evening), the use of brass, marble and expensive hardwoods, the cosmopolitanism implied by the World Clock, a map traversed by a mechanism showing the time anywhere in the world.

Last week, my journey from Bank took me to Piccadilly Circus. I was one of two passengers in the ticket hall and we were outnumbered by the four staff. It was like being in a ballroom before the ball; I half expected one of the staff to offer me a glass of champagne.

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Not all of the glories of the Tube date from Pick’s time. If your journey involves the original parts of the Metropolitan Line (the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863), look out for the steampunk fantasia of the stretch between King’s Cross and Farringdon, which lies in a cutting of towering arcaded walls, with the Fleet River carried in a giant pipe overhead. (If you crane your neck out of a carriage window you can just about see it.)

Or perhaps your habitual run is along the central parts of the Piccadilly or Bakerloo Lines, or the West End branch of the Northern Line. These are the Edwardian Yerkes Tubes, built by the American financier, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who gave London what are perhaps its most beautiful Tube stations, Holden’s work notwithstanding. (Holden’s Piccadilly Circus was a rebuilding of a Yerkes station.)

Yerkes’ architect, Leslie Green, created a different tile pattern for each station, so regular users would identify it as ‘home’, a place of their own. My favourite is Regent’s Park, which has the colours of a chocolate sundae: brown, cream mustard. I also like Covent Garden: white, yellow, orange, brown, with pale green art nouveau depictions of ticket windows. Both stations, being old, have lifts instead of escalators, so they are currently closed (because you can’t social distance in a lift), but you can appreciate the tiling as the trains roll past the deserted platforms.

The relative emptiness of the Tube also permits study of the moquettes, the carpet-like woollen material covering Tube seats. This is expensive to apply, and Londoners are lucky to have it. In most other cities you’d be sitting on stainless steel or plastic. You are gripped in your seat by the moquette’s pile (upstanding fibres) and like any sheep, moquette has thermal properties, being relatively cool in summer and warm in winter. Pick set high standard of moquette design, commissioning the likes of Paul Nash and Enid Marx. He favoured green, which he believed lent ‘a serene atmosphere’, being reminiscent of the countryside.

Those high standards are maintained by the principal suppliers of the moquette to the modern Tube, the high-end fabric designers Wallace-Sewell. Their smart blue and red Barman moquette — named after Frank Pick’s right-hand man, Christian Barman — is found on several lines and is highly popular, perhaps because it has a figurative element, incorporating pixelated images of London Bridge, the Eye, the dome of St Paul’s and Big Ben. Emma Sewell, originator of the design told me she was influenced there by Russian Constructivism, “the way a tractor, say, might be represented in those designs”.

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A darker version of Barman, seeming to show the same landmarks at night, is on the Bakerloo Line, and the crepuscular mood suits those old trains, which date from 1973, and have a sort of faded grandeur.

Or perhaps your necessary journey takes you along the newest line: the Jubilee Line Extension, opened in 1999. Its stations were ‘future-proofed’. They’re big, in other words, particularly Canary Wharf, which is cathedral like, with massive ovoid concrete pillars lined at the base with stainless steel so they are not dirtied by people brushing past. (Fitness for purpose, you see.)

Even on the JLE, social distancing will not be possible if everyone who previously used the Tube returns to it. I suppose people will not return en masse until the virus has been somehow dispatched, or largely forgotten about, but not everyone will be back. The long-promised home-working revolution might finally be here, and London is currently full of wobbling tyro cyclists, some of whom will stick at it. The prospect of a less congested system is a piece of good news in difficult times, another reason to see the Underground bar and circle logo (championed and refined by Frank Pick) as suggesting a rising, rather than a setting, sun.

Andrew Martin’s latest book is Seats of London: a Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns. His website is at https://jimstringernovels.com/