Dang, I wish I’d had my camera with me today. I was in Canary Wharf for the thousandth day in a row, for (hopefully) my final interview, and I saw the most interesting thing at the Canary Wharf Docklands Light Railway (DLR) station.
Canary Wharf itself is situated east of London proper, and the DLR and Jubilee line are pretty much the only way to make the trek from central London to Canary Wharf. And since Canary Wharf has pretty much become London’s primary finance district in the last decade, the sheer number of people using DLR to come or go from Canary Wharf is staggering — it’s literally like an entire town picking up and going to another town every morning and night. As one of the HR people remarked, people are like ’sardines in a tin’ on the DLR during rush hour.
The DLR is quite different from the London Underground (’tube’), the most obvious difference being that you rarely ever swipe your ticket or Oyster card. Instead, they have roving ticket officers who will come by with handheld readers. The other significant difference is that the DLR trains are not human-operated. That’s very interesting, because it means trains stop at the same place on the platform each time. And what that means is that people, trying to maximise their chances of getting on the first train to come by, figure out where the train’s doors are going to be and clump together near those special spots. If I had had my camera today, I would’ve taken a picture showing 3 clusters of 15-20 people packed together (in preparation, literally — even though the train is nowhere in sight), with 10-15 feet of empty platform between them.
Of course, the clusters get bigger and bigger as more people arrive on the platform. And that’s when the really interesting behaviour comes to the fore. Furtive glances as people on the perimeter of cluster A try to decide whether they can squeeze closer to the front of cluster B, trying to decide whether to chance it and lose their spot in A. People in B realising what’s going on, and resolutely squeezing ever more tightly together to deter them. And finally, the chap from A craning his neck to evaluate his chances of merging with cluster C, before slumping his shoulders and deciding to stay put.
0 Responses to “Sardines in a tin”