Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 165: The Bethnal Green Disaster

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

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ALICE Based on Devon's reaction to us doing it last time, I think we should probably do a sync point. So, um. LIAM Oh, were they pleased that we did that? ALICE Yeah, yeah they were. So I think, Justin, if you count us down, three, two, one, mark, and then Liam and me clap on the word mark. JUSTIN Okay.

Three. Two. One. Mark. ALICE Beautiful. That's something. Alright, I believe... LIAM Four years in, baby!

ALICE Yeah. We're finally there. SEAN It's fine, it's like five years. ALICE And the thing is, I do this on the other two podcasts, and that knowledge is not disseminated. I'm like one of those really low technology spread regions in fucking Europa Universalis. SEAN This is why, what I've always done, when I was editing the podcast I would just make sure that the point where the Zencast started was on screen, so that I could sync everything there, right? So the other thing, everyone does 321 Mark, but I never hear anyone do 321 Luke or John

or Matthew, you know? That's the best gospel! Yeah, I like the Mark thing because it makes me feel like a submarine captain, y'know? It reminds me of Hunt for Red October, like, y'know, on my mark. JUSTIN Mark Twain and then clap twelve times. ALICE That's right. Hello and welcome to, well there's your problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, with

slides. JUSTIN 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 Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. Oh he doesn't like that at all. That's thrown you so badly, I'm sorry. Do you wanna go again?

My pronouns are he and- no it's too late, we must press on. Uh, yay Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McEderson, my pronouns are he and I'm the person talking right now, okay, that's it. This is, I've fucked the vibe so badly by just, like, commandeering. I apologize, profusely. JUSTIN This has gone poorly. ALICE Like, the next one, I just, y'know, you're

back in the driver's seat. 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. JUSTIN No, it's upside down. ALICE like that. JUSTIN No, it's upside down. ALICE Oh boy. JUSTIN Also it's missing the risers. ALICE Yeah, you would be hard pressed to, like, you know, use this staircase.

And we're gonna talk about how it got there. SEAN Well MC Escher wouldn't be. ALICE Eh, I guess so. We're gonna talk about why MC Escher put this staircase. JUSTIN 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. ALICE It's a skill issue, you know?

It's like when someone has one of those impossible fetishes, like somebody who's like a real giant-esque thing, it's like, you can draw it, but it's never gonna happen for you. It's a real shame, yeah. We're gonna explore why MC Escher cannot exist within this space at Bethnal Green Tube station. ALICE Only way you can get off is to go visit a Paul Bunyan statue. LIAM What the fuck, Roz. Why are you telling the people my secrets? ALICE Why this, like, Klein bottle is pouring into

itself forever. But first we have to di- wait, no, I'm gonna give this back to you, this is uncomfortable, Justin, Klein bottle is pouring into itself forever. But first we have to do- wait, no, I'm gonna give this back to you, this is uncomfortable, Justin, please. Yep. Before we talk about why this memorial is here, at Bethnal Green Tube Station, we have to do the goddamn news. Ah, it feels so much better. So I think it will be, uh, I'll have an update for anyone who's interested in cycling in Philly and the mayor's opinion on it. Oh yeah, a developing story.

Yes, exactly. So this is in the wake of the death of Dr. Barbara Freedes, hit by a drunk driver on Pine Street. I forget which, it was Spruce or Pine, anyway. You know, there's a big protest by the Bicycle Coalition in front of City Hall, and it collected 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 formally arranged a while back, right, and

they were going to deliver the petition to the mayor. Anyway, so they all got there, they did the big protest, and then they went to the gates of City Hall to 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. ALICE very begrudgingly, yes. JUSTIN Yeah. And then they stopped them again, and all they could really do was like, okay, we're gonna 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, y'know, make... all you had to do was accept the petition and not do anything. ALICE As I understand it, and put a pin in this sentiment, because there's gonna be some developments on it in my professional life soon, every mayor in America is a kind of, like, incredible Nixonian tyrant. JUSTIN Uh, yes. ALICE 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. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, this has been sort of a weird saga so far. Mayor Parker, the administration believes they were elected on a platform of, like, y'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. ALICE Yeah, you just kind of vote habitually for,

I guess, more dangerous streets, like more dead pediatricians or whatever. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. This is just weird. It's weird to look at, it's weird that, y'know, she is continuing the general legacy of not doing anything as mayor. But y'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. So, I don't know, this is the status of cycling in Philly, is that if you wanna do it, and you get murdered, who cares, the government, you know, the mayor's gonna come and piss on your grave. ALICE Right, it's your fault somehow. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. So yeah, everything's miserable still. Nothing's gonna get better. Everything sucks. ALICE At some point you gotta start doing some, you know, cycling based direct action, you know, you gotta do some critical mash shit.

That too, yeah. ALICE 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 four hundred 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. Hey, that's pretty cool. That's cause 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, y'know, little comment, I guess. Yeah. Speaking of, all gender restroom behind a line of security. Oh boy. Uh, let's check in on the Democratic National Convention. Must wait. Um, I don't know what's happened here at all.

Oh, I'm just still fucking letting Bill Clinton speak? God damn it. JUSTIN I know a lot of people who've been, like, following this with rapt attention, and you couldn't... you'd have to put me in, like, the clockwork orange chair to look at any of this. ALICE Well, they gave Joe Biden his, like, happy ending, right? Where they kind of, like of did the ego thing. Okay, grandpa. Yeah, yeah, he got to do a speech, and to be fair, they dialed in the cocktail of amfetamins

that was early enough in the afternoon or whatever, that he locked the fuck in for this speech, he was like, watching old Biden, he was coherent. America, I gave my best to you. Congratulations. Yeah, absolutely, it just got up there. I'm old as fuck. Vote for Kamala Harris. D- Congratulations, grandpa, you did it. You killed every Palestinian toddler.

ALICE- Yep, yep, yep. Some of his surrogates were bitching in the press about how, y'know, there was enough time and they weren't getting sucked off enough, whatever, fine. And yeah, so, the one thing that I noticed that right wingers were getting mad at, and they were there looking for stuff to be mad at, Matt Walsh was there in disguise. S, I saw that. ALICE Fucking asshole. That was pretty funny.

ALICE There were, Richard Hanania, the guy who was gonna be the new intellectual light of the conservative movement until he got exposed- ALICE Oh, the guy who looks like a hypogeic dog? ALICE Yeah, and the guy who got exposed for being like an open, full Nazi. That guy was talking about how, like, Kamala Harris's 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 turned on the lights and 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? JUSTIN I like how they've just decided we're not gonna talk about any policies until after the election. ALICE It's weirdly starmer, isn't it? JUSTIN Yeah, it's very... international starmerism is spreading, you know?

ALICE I mean, she's gonna try and do the starmer-ite thing of, like, winning on a kind of, like, loveless landslide, and then get into office and the approval rating hits like minus fifty the next day. Like, I dunno. ALICE What else happened? Uh, Tim Walz is vice president, we were still complaining about Shapiro in the last episode. LUCKY I'm happy to be wrong. ALICE Luckily that didn't happen.

Yeah. 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. ALICE It's true. This makes up for the kind of England Euros thing for me. You know? 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. 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 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. JUSTIN He demeaned the white race.

ALICE Good. Good. ALICE By saying he liked, uh, ground beef tacos. ALICE Yeah. Yeah, they did, like, one of those really forced, inauthentic bits where they're being filmed for some reason, where 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.

But- LIAM Yeah, a hot dish, yeah. ALICE Yeah, like, Midwestern food. It's fine. And 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- Yeah, they're probably pretty good.

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 they're doing. I'm getting sick of seeing pictures of dismembered Palestinian toddlers on Twitter. Yeah, and there's only so much... If we could put a stop to this it would be really nice. ALICE There's only so much, like, you know, brat

summer that you can take, when the rest of your timeline is somebody with their entire head getting exploded, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE I will say this though, I stand by the cooking thing, if only because I can't imagine many of the other presidents or nominees cooking, y'know? Like... ALICE Yeah, Trump's never cooked. I remember that.

ALICE Trump has never cooked in me and his life. SEAN Yeah, Trump has no idea what a stove is, he's never seen one. ALICE I... it might be controversial, I don't think Obama's cooking's good. I could see that. ALICE 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. Freedom pie. Mm. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, I don't think he can cook, is the thing, 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.

That's why he had to go to McDonald's when he went jogging. 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 his way around a grill, um, would do, like, a steak directly, like, on the coals

or whatever, like... Oh, hell yeah. Um, and I believe that, like, I'm willing to 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 mining a bonus episode about the Secret Service.

The Secret Service fucking hated the Clintons. Like, all of them. Sometimes with good reason, often with bad reason, but that was not a happy relationship that they maintained. Which, y'know. LIAM It's funny. ALICE Yeah, it's funny and is, I guess, kind of relatable, y'know.

JUSTIN 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. ALICE Yeah, it's like living in a European country where the Prime Minister's just like, around, you know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Oh, um, AOC. Sold out. JUSTIN Yeah, something happened with AOC, and I don't

know what it is. ALICE Oh, she did the big endorsement. There's not much to say about it, like, she wants to be president, and like I say, all- JUSTIN I think they've been grooming her to be the next Pelosi for a long time now. ALICE I mean, yeah, and Pelosi, to be fair, maneuvered this one pretty well. JUSTIN Yep, but Pelosi works some shit happen.

ALICE She's like a mob boss, she's not a good person, but she is an effective person. LIAM Exactly. She's very good at her job. Yeah, I mean she sized 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- a wood stove with one match.

Yeah, cool, okay, but like, I believe Bernie Sanders could fuck up toast, you know? All the eggs. Because he's a recovered hippie, he's probably done, 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 gonna fuck something up it's gonna be breakfast. Do you think he makes a good breakfast? I think Bernie probably makes a good breakfast.

I don't... Maybe. I think it's very heavy on the good NOLA in a way that I don't like. Yeah. That could be the case as well, yeah. I don't know, we'll have to conduct a survey somehow. But yeah, so like, AOC also doesn't care about you and doesn't see you as human. She especially doesn't see Palestinians as human.

One of the sadder things I've seen was, Ilhan Omar, who I think is one of the few members of Congress who I would never trust any of these people, right, but who can be dependent on 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 Israel. JUSTIN Yeah, as long as the ceasefire deal is give us the hostages and we'll kill you, there's not gonna be a ceasefire. ALICE I wouldn't take that bet, would you take that bet? I wouldn't take that bet. ALICE The fucking trade offer that is the ceasefire that contains no ceasing of fire, yeah, no.

JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, no, it's a ceasefire where, uh, yeah, now they just go in and murder everyone afterwards. We'll stop shooting for one day, maybe. ALICE It's grim. It continues to be grim. And like I say, all these people continue to be complicit, enthusiastically so, in it. And politics, politics very bad. Continuing to be very bad.

JUSTIN Yep, politics continue to be very bad. ALICE We're presu- well, actually I don't want to say that, because if I predict it then, y'know, that might have an effect on things, because of the lathe. So the election is yet to happen, and it really does seem like Trump wants to lose, regardless of whether he actually does. Like, at this point... JUSTIN Yeah, there's a... the Democrats have a very narrow pathway to losing this. He doesn't want to campaign.

I think he's shook from the... 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? I like that I'm calling him a pussy for having trauma from having been shot at. Having been shot at, yeah. Oh well. But in other news...

So, at time of recording, tomorrow, the Canadian railroads, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, that's a recent merger, it's not a great name, yeah. 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. ALICE Whoa. Okay. That's not a thing that's, as we saw when Biden, shamefully, like, broke the rail strike

in the US. Isn't that one of the things that has, like, such major infrastructural consequences? JUSTIN Major consequences. No one's gonna be able to bring harvests in, obviously that shuts down domestic and international container traffic. After a couple weeks, you know, the water treatment plants run out of chlorine, everyone gets cholera, it's not a great situation. ALICE Yeah.

Throwback. JUSTIN Yeah. The situation, as far as I know, um, cause this has been even less reported on than the American Railroad Strike, and that was not well reported on. ALICE Apart from one article in the New York Times, the paper of record. JUSTIN Well, even that one I would look back and make some changes to. ALICE You're letting the perfect enemy of the good, you know? Yeah. Um, very similar issues here, uh, 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, uh, 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... ALICE The same problems, except it's twice as bad, because you gotta 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 the Teamsters did secure one concession a long time ago that Americans don't have. All the locomotives have coffee makers in them. Huh. Yeah. Um, 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. ALICE Oh, so precision scheduled railroading happens to you and you're sitting in a siding for 18 hours, you don't get paid for that? JUSTIN You get paid for a day regardless, but I believe if you go further then... 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 counter offer is just, look, shut up, we'll pay you more, even though the job is incredibly dangerous and it's miserable. ALICE Again, with all these strikes, anywhere internationally, I feel like you run into a hard adaptational hard adaptational limit of like, you can pay people however much you want to do the thing, if it's that miserable, they're not gonna do it. JUSTIN They're not gonna do it, yeah, exactly.

This is one of the fundamental issues, and we'll talk about this hopefully in the next episode we put out. You know, the fundamental issues with the way the railroads are currently run is that you have to really immiserate and exploit people in order to do it in ways that just were not the case even 20, 30 years ago. So you know, it's, it's, it's, 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 cause, uh, 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, um, you know, I think Justin Trudeau has a lot less power to just force everyone back to work. ALICE Well, I mean, wouldn't it be the first time that Trudeau did extra-chartorial powers in order to maintain the Canadian system of government? Hashtag just watch me. Um, yeah, no. We'll see. I don't know.

Why'd I say hashtag? I'm turning older and older all the time. Because of the way time works. We'll see what happens in about six hours and seven minutes. Um. Delicious. I hope Devon 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. Um. Yes there are. Yeah. Anyway. That was the goddamn news.

As I said, a lot of slides. Hi, welcome, I and Three Beers am gonna explain to you... Oh boy. A very under-reported disaster, like, contra 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? JUSTIN What is the tube, why is it like that? So I just wrote a little introduction here. Uh, 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. And the idea is you have this underground passenger railroad and it links all the main railway termuses in London together, which means it's not specifically for local transportation.

This thing is used for like long distance mainline 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. ALICE Yeah, it's a mess of like five or six or ten or twenty different train companies each trying to do competing underground railways to get absorbed and stuff, and it expands kind of spasmodically as well. JUSTIN Yeah, and for a long time there's like, y'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 shafts, investors- ALICE Yeah, it's cut and cover. You just dig into the street and then you put a roof on it, y'know? JUSTIN 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 a good episode for the future, just talking about the London Underground. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. a good episode for the future, just talking 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? Mm. 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, cause they thought you didn't need windows if it's only in a tunnel. Turned out everyone hated that. ALICE It's like, get in the box, you know? JUSTIN Get in the box. They call them padded cells.

ALICE I dunno, it sounds like it could be kind of, like, sensory. I dunno. JUSTIN 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 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...

ALICE I will have a lot to say about the Central line specifically, for it is here that our tragedy is set. JUSTIN Yeah. You have the Northern line that was built to confuse and infuriate people, cause the Northern Line goes to South London. ALICE This is a southbound Northern Line train. JUSTIN What? Shouldn't that be the Southern Line? ALICE Make it make sense! ALICE 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. ALICE And, yeah, well, fuck! ALICE Every tube station like this is like a sort of 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. LIAM Alright, yeah. This looks like an experience, TM.

I really love this diagram, by the way, complete with the red brick tube station and the little buses as well, this is 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 extra tubes that go nowhere. Awful. But yeah, just as you say, right? And these deep level tubes will have, like, implications going forward. JUSTIN Yes.

One of these implications is vertical circulation. ALICE How get into and out of station. JUSTIN Yeah, how do you get into and out of the station? This is a big problem when your station is far underground, as shown by this hilarious parody diagram of the new San Jose extension of BART. Oh, where's Saddam Hussein going here? Me falling down every single one of these in sequence, you know? So in a subway station that has pretty good service, you know, maybe you have trains arriving

every three minutes or so, each direction, and they're gonna fart out about a hundred passengers each. ALICE And to be clear on the tube, it's way more than that. JUSTIN Yeah. It's gonna 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. ALICE This does not stop the London Underground from using a few of them, 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 five hundred stairs in this staircase, are you sure? JUSTIN 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 I guess they didn't- ALICE It's a piece of psychological warfare.

Like, you nudge them. JUSTIN Exactly, yeah. ALICE Be like, fuck, that sounds like a lot, and like, 513's unusually specific, y'know? JUSTIN You have... elevators are an option. They're fast, but they're low capacity. Usually need a huge bank of elevators if you're gonna try and build a deep level subway station. 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. ALICE In London deep level tubes, these are typically arranged on like, one or two flights of very steep escalators. Which are like, sort of guarded on each side by a shitload of advertising hoardings for herbal supplements and stuff. I have always been terrified of falling down one of these, and yeah, you should be.

JUSTIN You gotta see some of the ones on the Washington Metro, because somehow they make that sense of verticality even worse. ALICE When these were brought in, these were like a wooden stair platform over a kind of rubber track. We talked about it in the King's Crossfire episode. Which has a lot of tube stuff in it as well, which saves me talking about it again. JUSTIN Yes. Now, escalators are one of those things, y'know, they feel like much more modern technology than they are the first practical ones were installed on Coney Island in 1896. By the teens and twenties they're very common everywhere.

Y'know, but still not being put in all new tube stations, for instance, which we'll talk about. ALICE Absolutely. Alright. So, this is a tube map. And it doesn't look like the tube map that you have now, because this represents... you know how I said that the tube expands spasmodically, right? In this case, it's all been centralized under London Transport, but what they do is a series

of five year plans, effectively, and they have a plan called the new works program, which is meant to run 1935 to 1940. 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 to the red line in the middle here. They're gonna expand it out into the west, out to Denham, and they're gonna expand it out to the east and then north, out to Lake Horth, or the Looper Hanel. So if we can John Madden this a bit, on the kind of eastern end, on the corner of the central line, you can see Bethnal Green, which is marked for expansion.

And London is still an expanding city, it's doing urban sprawl because there's no green belt or anything to stop it at this point. And the idea is that you're gonna create new suburbs, you're gonna induce demand, you're gonna build a station in a village, like, you know, Ongar or whatever, or Epping, or Vaden Boys, and people are gonna, like, build houses there and move there, and it's gonna, you know, you're gonna expand the city that way. JUSTIN I mean, I have a lovely pebble-dashed semi-detached house. ALICE Yeah, exactly.

Actually, some of the Metroland suburbs are like, really nice. Um, but- S-They've got some of those really nice town squares, you know? L-Yeah, yeah. S-They're like, sort of the art deco architect, really good. Yeah, I like those. L-Often the tube station is like, really beautiful architecture as well, there's some real like- S-And it's like the focal point of the town.

L-Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some real art deco shit happening there. S-It takes the place of a church. L-Yeah. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some real art deco shit happening there. JUSTIN Takes the place of a church. ALICE Yeah. The central line is, I believe, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, it's all deep level. This is gonna be a major problem for it, because it runs straight through the centre 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 Cockney's come from. We'll talk a bit about it in the east end of London, right, which is, you know, it's where Cockney's 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 and district line, that's where a lot of the docks are in London, and a lot of this area, like Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Bo, 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 the docks and factories and all of this, like, Bethnal Green was bombed hugely, incredibly intensively, largely to attack the docks and factories and all of this. 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, if you're doing construction, you'll still run into unexploded German bombs. If we go to the next slide. JUSTIN It's like one building in Gaza. ALICE Yeah. This is how far we've descended, I know. 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. JUSTIN Shitly named. ALICE Yeah. Like, some of the names are good, the Weaver line of the Overground now. JUSTIN Shitly named. ALICE Yeah. Like, some of the names are good, the Weaver line isn't. Um, yeah, so it's poor, it's crowded, a lot of this is, like, formally considered to be slums. JUSTIN Now all these row houses cost like twelve

million pounds, I assume. ALICE Oh, yeah, easily. This is currently being, like, mercilessly gentrified, and we'll get to 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, the long post-Victorian urban crowding thing. And if you want a sense of what it's like, possibly you've seen Peaky Blinders, or the Superior Ripper Street, so you've got, like, a lot of manual labour,

a lot of organized crime, a lot of immigration, big Jewish community, big Irish community, lot of antisemitism, a lot of communism, a lot of fascism. Like, this area saw 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 organized slum clearance. 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, but they also tried to ban Jews from living in it.

This is the kind of triangulation that happened amongst British Communists in the 1930s. You gotta... you sometimes have to ask yourself, what would Lenin do? Mm. 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 closely built, brick-built... Socialism of fools, eh, we're pretty dumb, we might do that. Yeah, but, fools like a clown, it's very amusing, people like it.

But yeah, 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 y'know. ALICE Or too much money for a kombucha. ALICE Or if you can't afford London Fields, it's a great place to have a podcast. I have been to a flat viewing, and 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 in this. 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 is so good that for several decades they were the oldest rolling stock still in passenger use, had a long retirement on the Isle of Wight, there's beautiful vents on the tops, like, really nice. They just wouldn't die.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, stupidly reliable. And again, to sort of set the scene for how close we are to shit popping off here, this is, as you say, the 1938 stock, right, in London, London Transport, London Underground, is still like, yep, full steam ahead, we're gonna have the shit done by 1940, everything's gonna be great. JUSTIN Nothing bad's gonna happen. ALICE Next slide, please. LIAM Oh.

This fucking guy again. ALICE This fucking asshole, and his stupid car, which is not cool, and doesn't look good, just to get that on the record, just to really lay that down now. JUSTIN What happens behind the bay wall stays behind the bay wall. ALICE You don't need to acknowledge it, you big dumb idiot. ALICE This is our version-

JUSTIN I'm not acknowledging anything. ALICE It's our version of the discourse hat. JUSTIN I did nothing wrong. ALICE Uh-huh. Okay, but... ALICE Okay. Well, the important thing is that this guy in his ugly car, start World War Two. And one of the things that happens in World War Two 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 de Salle. 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. You look at this stuff and obviously you think, well, if the London Fire Brigade are gonna have to cut stuff it should preserve, y'know, the 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 fighting fires all day and also paints a painting that

anthropomorphizes the fire as Dr. Fucking Manhattan. JUSTIN Yes. Also, kids like looking at fire trucks. ALICE Also this! ALICE As I understand it, they are still considering reopening in some form, but they need the money to do it. Not that we as a podcast have clearly any influence over, y'know, the government of London or of the UK, but like, this seems like it would be a good idea, y'know, the government of London, or of the UK, but like, this seems like it would

be a good idea, y'know? As it is the only stuff that LFB have to get you sentimental about is like, Shoreditch Fire Station having the big, like, love is the running towards over the doors, which is still cool. JUSTIN So, Keris Stammer, your people yearn to look at fire trucks. ALICE I mean, I know I do. It's the thing. JUSTIN Yeah, let me expand that. Not just kids like to look at fire trucks. Everyone likes to look at fire trucks. ALICE I mean, I know I do, is the thing. JUSTIN Yeah, let me expand that, not just kids like

to look at fire trucks, everyone likes to look at fire trucks. ALICE Kids, autistic adults, right? JUSTIN Yes, if you don't like looking at a fire truck, I don't know what's wrong with you. ALICE Yeah, yeah, fully. JUSTIN Are you really fully human? If you can't enjoy simple pleasures, look at that cool firetruck. ALICE So, say for the sake of argument, you are a

civilian in the East End, and you are being 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. JUSTIN Exciting new bed from J'Heir Insad. ALICE 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, 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. ALICE I feel better already. JUSTIN Yeah, it doesn't... I'm just imagining a big old wooden joist coming down on you, and I'm thinking, eh, this might not work that good. Plus, you know, you might fall through the floor, you know, it's also not so good. ALICE Also true. If the whole two or three story like, terrrest House comes down, what you have received from

the Ministry of Supply here is a kind of Ikea coffin. I mean, granted it looks not dissimilar from some sleeping arrangements I've had before, but 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 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 plates between you and Eternity, to as much dirt as you care to 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, hammered dome? What are you, half a cylinder? That shape. And like, you just shovel dirt on top of it 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 gin up some atmosphere and go like, okay, but now imagine you're being bombed. SEAN Okay, what do you want me to fucking do with that? Here in America we don't have bombings, we have school shootings. Duh. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You have to make like, little explosion sounds, like, poof. Hell yeah. If the museum has a particularly high budget sometimes they'll like, add that, you know?

Unfortunately I quite enjoyed this, it gave me the kind of like, autism, like, hug box sensory thing. 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 have slept in a hole in the garden, but yeah, I was fond of this. So yeah, this is- Like, 30 years from now we'll be talking about how we were in the war.

Yeah. Were we not? When I was in World War II. This thing 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 reasonably safe from shrapnel and whatever, so it's nice if you can get it. But if you can't- JUSTIN You know, like, a German bomber does a dive bomb and a bomb comes right through

the front door? Not ideal. ALICE Yeah. But if you don't have one of these, and you don't wanna sleep under your table, what do you do? Well, you know about the deep level tube. Next slide please. And so immediately, pretty much as soon as war breaks out, to be honest, but definitely

after the Blitz starts, people start trying to shelter in the underground. And this is something that London Transport are very keen to avoid, something the government are keen to avoid, there's this, like, fixation in British government at the time about, like, bombing neurosis, right, they think people are gonna, like, psychologically go to pieces, and they have to maintain morale, to wear all the, like, keep calm and carry on stuff. JUSTIN Yeah, they're gonna put up all the keep calm and carry on posters, yeah. ALICE Yeah, put up all the keep calm and carry on posters, yeah. Yeah, literally. Because the idea is that, like, people are... there was this kind of existential horror

of bombing, born out of, like, Yannica and the kind of, the bomber will always get through military theories of the time. And the idea was, they already really knew how civilian populations would respond to being bombed, and people kind of assumed the worst in government, and thought, well this is gonna be cataclysmic, people are gonna lose their reason, they're gonna start bashing each other's heads open and sucking on the brains. SEAN As you do.

ALICE Yeah, exactly. And so for a while they were like, well absolutely not, don't use these as shelters, this is illegal, it's dangerous, and most importantly it's dangerous to morale. JUSTIN Go out there and get bombed. It's your duty to go out there and get bombed. ALICE Get under the fucking table, you know? Ultimately this did not hold right, largely as a result of sheer popular force behind

it, you just couldn't stop people from doing it. By the end of the war, this was completely formalized. Oh no, I missed the last train, what will I do? Get my cozy dad ready! This was, I like the tube, the deep level tube was remarkably easy to adapt into shelters, and it hadn't been designed that way at all, but they had a late night train that would come and restock all of the refreshments and stuff, you had, in some cases, organized sleeping bunks and stuff, and various services installed

on these. There was this weird situation- You had a lot of space. Yeah, exactly. There was this weird situation where every shelter was technically run by three different bodies at once. Because the London Transport had a hand in it, it was technically the London Passenger Transport Board, or whatever. Civil Defence, and then also the local council, who were usually the ones shelling out most of the money for outfitting it. But

these became very very popular, if we go to the next slide, if it gets really crowded, as it often does, you end up sleeping on the escalators and blocking them, this is Bound's Green, rather than Bethnal Green, but sort of similar vibe, right? You can see the 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. It built the station, they had dug the tunnels, but there was no track in it. So it could only be used as an air raid shelter, but it was also kind of perfect for that,

right? Like, you have all the space... JUSTIN Oh yeah, I was just wondering from the two pictures ago, like, okay, did they keep one track in operation? Or did they have to clear everyone out every morning so the trains could run? ALICE Yeah, they literally did. What would happen is, they would shut down the traction current, people would sleep on

the tracks getting covered in brake dust and rats or whatever. And then in the morning they would kick everybody awake and kick you out of the station, and then turn the traction current back on. I don't know if anyone got electrocuted doing this, but I wouldn't be surprised. JUSTIN I would imagine there probably were a few accidents, yeah. ALICE But yeah, because there's no tracks in this, you can just sleep in the tunnel, the Bethnal Green Council can install bunks, and they install in fact five thousand of them.

And it's a high capacity shelter, it's very very safe. And they install various amenities, they put in a library, because Bethnal Green Library gets destroyed by bombing on the first day of the Blitz. They put in a theatre, they put in like an interfaith worship room, which makes that by the way a sort of an older idea than fucking people complaining about woke, would have you say, and a sick bay. And so this is kind of like an 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. This- Oh boy. Yeah, this is, uh, this is, um, Bomber Harris. So Germany can, like...

JUSTIN He's the guy who did the plagiarism video, right? ALICE Yeah, this is, this is, this is- JUSTIN That guy had to pretend to c*** himself. ALICE It's Air Marshal Harris Bomber Guy. And... So, 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 Bomber Command is hitting the big war crimes button all over Germany, all Germany can really do about it is retaliatory bombing, right? And the tactics kind of change, the massed bombing raids of the Blitz kind of become impractical, and so instead you get a smaller, faster hit and run raids which give people a lot less warning. And so there establishes this kind of rhythm, where the RAF will destroy some German city, I don't know quite yet, but they'll bomb some German city. And then Britain will expect to be bombed back, just to kind of show willing? So, next slide please. So, 1st of March 1943, this is a date but it's not the date, Berlin is bombed by the RAF for the heaviest, and 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 mostly working in the Ruhr, like, the big Berlin raids wouldn't come until November of that year, but like, 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 expecting a retaliation. Next slide please. So, love this whole aesthetic, very excited to be going to a LARP about this next year. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, I'm actually... yeah, it's gonna be great, I hope. So Britain has for the time,

maybe the best early warning system in the world, thanks to air marshal doubting, and winning the Battle of Britain. And so, it has a system of air raid wardens and air raid sirens and known shelters for people to go to, if there is a raid, and observers and radar and all the rest of it. JUSTIN You got those guys in the tiny armored train on the coast there. ALICE Yeah, exactly. Crossdressing.

And the point of all this is that it's very very vigilant. Maybe too much so. 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. And so, like, this is like, primed for it. Next slide please. That's in context.

I've been meaning to talk about this guy for fucking ages. ALICE You hate this guy. You hate this guy. 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 loading screen tips on how to use public transport in London, in rhyming verse. No thanks. Infuriating. And 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 light out, like no lights, no flashlights, no 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, y'know? JUSTIN Why are people out there driving when it's pitch black? SEAN I thought we were told not to do that. ALICE You're not, but, like, you know. These things happen. You get hit by a bus, or whatever.

JUSTIN You get hit by Winston Churchill, personally. ALICE I told you to stay inside! ALICE Winston Churchill's motorcade is just going and killing 500 pedestrians. ALICE 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

Besserwisser kind of, like, smug, like, rhyming verse thing. SEAN We had to steal the dash and commuter from the Long Island Railroad. Yep. ALICE I also really want to draw your attention to 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 queuers, you know? 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. We see him in the back of a queue with a remarkably sinister expression. ALICE I was about to say, yeah, he's about to pull something. ALICE Wild, yeah. ALICE Just like, four NPCs. ALICE That sounds like something. Wild, yeah. Just like, four NPCs. Yeah, and then Billy Brown with the fucking ricin umbrella.

He's gonna go do some Iome Shinrikyo 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 queues. I cannot stress enough how unpopular this guy was as a mascot. Like, people were writing fanfiction poetry about strangling him, like, into newspapers. Like, this was like a really unpopular but

ubiquitous piece of marketing, and like, sort of public surface, public safety advice. But like, 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 kerbs 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 come back to haunt us. If we go to the 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? Whatever. ALICE Yeah, north. Put em north. ALICE Yeah, we dump a bunch of random, cockney, impoverished children, who have never seen a cow before in rural Wales.

And this is fine, it stops a bunch of kids getting killed, but once the Blitz ended, it turns out parents like their kids and want them around, 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 back into a crowded working class area. And as we saw, it's all terraced houses, you're not gonna hide under the fucking table like the Dairon chat thing. And people want to protect their kids, so like, obviously, the deep level tube is a great idea. Next slide please. So, this is a, like, a representative view of one of the station entrances. There's three on the Tube station, they closed off two, and they used a different one, which I'll show next.

Incidentally, a neat background view of St. John on Bethnal Green. It's a lovely little church. Designed by Sir John Soane, the same guy who did Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the best part of the Bank of England. But yeah, so- ALICE So, was he the guy who did Dodge Picture Gallery and the best part of the Bank of England. But yeah, so- JUSTIN So, was he the one who had the cool house? ALICE Um, I mean, he was an architect, almost certainly.

JUSTIN I probably had a cool house, yeah. ALICE Safe bet. JUSTIN I want to say there's like a Soane house that's really good. ALICE Entirely possible. JUSTIN Probably. ALICE All of the Bank of England stuff has been demolished. If you're wondering why the Bank of England looks like a sort of light house built on top of a house, it's because it is.

JUSTIN Oh, yeah, they did facade me to that one, didn't they? ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what you're seeing is the, like, curtain wall that's sewn, because he built this whole kind of, like, palace, like, Venetian arsenal kind of situation for it. And then built on top of that is the... the other guy, I don't remember. Um, built. It's mediocre, I believe I learned this in architecture history too, or so. Yeah. Yeah.

Nicholas Pevsner called it the greatest act of architectural vandalism of the 20th century. So, you know. Mmm, there's Pennsylvania Station. But, you know, yes. Yes. I mean, there were quite a few. The crimes of man are many. ALICE So 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 they had to have a guy sweeping the bottom of the stairs because of puddles when it rained. So like, 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. JUSTIN 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 into just an open air pit, y'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.

Uh, turned out what that did was ruin the escalators. My god. JUSTIN That only took half a century to fix. ALICE But yeah, so it's this kind of like stepped construction where you walk down a flight of stairs, you're in this 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 might drop a bomb directly down.

JUSTIN The bomb just rolls down in a comical fashion. ALICE 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. JUSTIN This is definitely gonna have people stopping to open their umbrella. ALICE 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, 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 would 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.

JUSTIN Individually greeting you with a what's all this then. hello hello hello, what's all this then, et cetera et cetera, yes. Also the other thing is, perversely, like this is something that's not so well understood about the war, austerity. Civil defense spending decreased throughout the war. Wow, 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 drastically reduce the personnel numbers of police and civil defense, because that's free manpower. It'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 El Alamein, or whatever. They're all gonna 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 their 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? ALICE Yeah, sure. JUSTIN It's the only phrase he can use. ALICE Exactly.

JUSTIN He can't even coherently explain what they're doing wrong. ALICE 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 gonna 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, this is a view of the shelter entrance in daylight, right? Completely unmarked, unlit, also. If

we go to the next slide, here is a view of the shelter entrance in darkness. Oh. Oh, that's so good, that's so good. I would have trouble finding this, I think. Yes. This is gonna be a problem. If we go to the next slide, we have a view down the staircase in question, like, now. And as you see, it's not like a wide staircase, it's like ten feet wide, it's nineteen steps, and then it goes down into this, like, twelve foot long landing, right angle turn, and another staircase. And that gets you into the ticket hall.

There's like 30th Street station. ALICE There's a couple of things here as well, that you don't need to worry about, because they didn't exist yet. Number one is that emergency do not enter sign. Number two is the plaque next to that emergency do not enter sign. The railing in the center, any of the grippy textural stuff with reflectors on the stairs, or as far as I can tell, maybe any marking on the stairs at all, what you had instead of this was one 25 watt light

bulb, and... yes. Yeah. You can see where I'm going with this. JUSTIN That's a 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. People have been up and down a bunch of times. I will say Bethnal 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, there's too much money. You don't fuck yourself, right? Yeah. Nope.

There's a moron. Yeah, one of 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. LIAM People need to read, man! There's a war on! JUSTIN It's boring in there. ALICE Yeah, but also, like, if I give you the proposal and I need a bunch of money for a library and some more money for essential safety equipment.

JUSTIN Ah, yeah, I see what you're saying. ALICE Um, next slide please. JUSTIN Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about

exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. And it also gets you our full back catalogue of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash wtyppod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. ALICE 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. This is where I'm firing off my tweets. So Winston Churchill, you may have heard of this guy. JUSTIN Yes. He's the guy who was uncomfortable about executing Nazi officers. ALICE Yeah. Absolutely. LIAM He was also the guy that ran over 500 pedestrians a night during the plitz.

ALICE That's right, it's crazy we don't talk about that more. LIAM Oh, people are gonna get mad at us in the comments on that one. ALICE So, Churchill had this weird fixation for rockets, and I guess eventually with the development of missiles he'll maybe be vindicated by history, but ever since he was first Sea, he had loved a rocket. To be fair, if you look at this image on the right, it looks fucking sick. JUSTIN Right, 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. Then you can go into the biter bases and really give them what for. Until then, it's personal laser defense, way more effective. ALICE No, he was trying to rocket jump. So this led to, because Church was like a big booster of rockets. SEAN Sorry, we were talking about Factorio before the podcast. ALICE So it's all good.

He was a 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. It's a fun codename. It's the same as, like, if you know the original codename for... Vibing, I'm moisturized, I'm unrotating. In my lane. Yeah. My skin moisturized, my I'm unrotating. In my lane. Yeah. My skin moisturized, my projectile unrotated.

Unrotated. Yeah. They're unrotating around some projectile twister. This is nothing. But, so... That must be feel... that must feel really good to be unrotated. The projectile knows exactly how unrotated it is. So, the Navy invests very heavily in a series of these unrotated projectile rockets, they're

just called that as a cover name, in the same way that the early British nuclear program was called Tube Alloys. JUSTIN You never guess it, but they actually do rotate. ALICE Yeah, they rotate actually do rotate. Yeah. That's the gimmick. Quite a bit, actually. And these things are fucking useless, politely, like, they put them on battleships as 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 Churchill, is very nepotistic, they're able to force through this idea of, like, use this for everything. And... Our unrotated projectiles will block out the sun. 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. ALICE Exactly, hey, take this, fire it at that. ALICE Yeah. And the idea, the theory, the doctrine here is that you're gonna use, cause

anti-aircraft is all guns at this point, like artillery guns, you're gonna bulk up anti-aircraft gunfire by also having these rocket barrages that go up to like 19,000 feet. JUSTIN Are they at least cheap? ALICE 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. LIAM Uh-huh. JUSTIN You gotta put a whole spool on the rack. ALICE Yeah, yeah, this is, I think, one of many reasons why this didn't work. But so, Churchill kind of foist these on anti-aircraft command. If you want a 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, again, whether he was wrong to do this is a difficult question, as far as things Winston Churchill was wrong to do it doesn't make the top 100, but the whole thing was cronyism from top to bottom. Next slide, please. JUSTIN 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. ALICE Yeah, I'll rotate my projectile by driving

my car around, idiot. SEAN They had, it was designed by a woman who famously cannot rotate a projectile in their mind. ALICE Oh, god. So if you take, like, these rockets, these unrotated projectiles, and you put them on land, you call it a Zed battery. And they come in different sort of varieties, you can get like 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. RILEY This looks suspiciously like it can rotate. ALICE Yeah. It's cylindrical, it seems likely. RILEY This thing's got tires, I know those things are rotating. ALICE It looks impressive, it sounds impressive. And like, one sort of thing to say is that this isn't majorly secret stuff. Like, by 1943 this is filtered down to the Home Guard, which are just like, people from the town.

JUSTIN Yeah, it's army. ALICE Yeah, exactly. Captain Mannering has been given access to a kind of early surface to air missile. 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 extensively 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 it 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 have a feeling that the manual that came with these involved a lot of the phrase, stand well back. 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 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 Trashfuture studio. Do not try to find the Trashfuture studio. It would be trivially easy to do, even if you didn't have the location data of this box that I've put around it, but please, do not try to find the Trash Vita Studio. ALICE Instead you can spend some time here, at the Vagina Museum. ALICE Exactly!

You can go to the Young V&A, you can hang out and go climbing in two different... SEAN Are you going to the city park? Yeah, exactly. What's going on here with Mexican soul? I don't know what's going on. That's like average London restaurant. Is it Mexican-Korean fusion restaurant? Must be, yeah. Yeah, it could be really good. It could also not be really good.

I'll... you know what, next time I'm down I'll go and I'll report back. Okay. But like, because I've been around here like a million times, both for work and also just because like, it's figuratively close to home for me, it would hopefully be literally close to home for me if anyone who works in property in London could answer their fucking emails. Anyway, the point of this. There is one of these- LIAM I'm gonna read Rod's address live on air now. ALICE 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? So anyway, the thrust of all of this is that there is one of these Zed batteries in Vicky Park. I think probably towards the western end, like, maybe they're hoping to fire the rockets up through the pagoda, I don't know. But so, this is there, and 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. JUSTIN Yeah. It's like, everyone's gonna go, we're gonna go, uh, we're gonna go down to pub, and then we're gonna go to the Z battery. And we're gonna have a nice day, and we're gonna shoot down some jerrys. ALICE We're all gonna rotate the absolute fuck out of some projectiles. Is what we're gonna do.

LIAM Or I don't rotate the projectiles. ALICE I'm not gonna do that. ALICE Next slide, please. LIAM I didn't have that many pints. ALICE So, at 817PM, the air raid siren goes off. Because I'm actually not sure why, right, because there isn't an air raid, and it's either the possibility is that someone has seen, like has imagined a plane, and has therefore like turned on the siren, or it's gonna relate to something that's gonna happen in a minute.

But- It's actually, the siren comes on when you accidentally rotate a projector. Warning, warning. Yeah, so, 817PM, the air raid siren goes off, and people are sort of primed for the idea that there is gonna be an air raid in very short notice. It's also right as a cinema nearby closes, so a bunch of people get kicked out onto the street. Ten minutes later, at 8.27pm, the 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. ALICE Alright, that's not good. Oh boy. ALICE 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 eye witness testimony and what's been written about after the fact, this is totally new to people. Like. No one has any idea what the fuck this is, they think they're being bombed because it sounds like it. They think that Hitler has invented a new weapon designed to personally fuck them all in the ass. JUSTIN Holy shit, they're going directly away from us! ALICE Yeah, but it's like a couple of blocks away, and you're getting this weird kind of Stalin organ noise, and like, in fairness, if you're

a Londoner and you hear a weird noise, and assume that's a new weapon that Hitler has designed to fuck me in the arse, yeah, the first V1 bombing was like a year later, so like, you really can't win here. Next slide, please. year later, so like, you really can't win here. Next slide please. So, you've got a few hundred people trying to get down this staircase. 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, again, non-reflective white paint

along the edges of the stairs, and this hard right turn on quite a short landing. 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 presumably wet from rain getting tracked in, they're uneven, it's dark, everybody's scared. There's some suggestion that, like, the rockets going off, like, panics people, and then that's also been argued against, I'm not sure if we'll ever actually know for certain one way or the other. Because it's entirely possible that there is no panic whatsoever, right?

Like this is just something that can happen, because, uh, next slide please. What did I say about fucking queuing? ALICE I know the expression he has. ALICE Yes, yeah, exactly. In fact, if we go to the next slide. Not that I thought that I would be any better at queuing if I thought that Hitler had invented a new weapon to fuck me directly in the arse, 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. And an old man who is like tailgating her, trips into her, and there are, y'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 in 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 difficult to detect for anyone, even when you have a clear view of a crowd, in this case it's down a flight of steps, you get the kind of real nightmare scenario which is vertical loading, people landing on top of each other horizontally.

JUSTIN It's very very very rapid when it happens, it happens before you can even notice that it's happening. ALICE Yeah, I think everybody involved is supposed to have died within about 12 seconds. LIAM Geez, gross. ALICE Which, or at least to have been functionally crushed, y'know? Like, the air raid wardens who arrive on scene and 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 at total a 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 really horrific detail actually from a very junior doctor at the time, called Joan Martin, who says, At 8.45pm 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 carts and putting out 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. Right? Yeah. disastrous, like, crush accident. Right. Yes. If we go to the next slide. And the death toll turns out to be 173, again, 62 of them are children. It's mostly women of the adults, I think there's only like 24 adult men.

As you can see here, they've opened up the shack a bit to gain access. And if we go to the next slide you get a sense of scale down the staircase, but yeah, so this was just a photo from the investigation of the staircase we saw earlier and people in it, and there's maybe a dozen people on the landing, and it's like you'd be hard pressed to push through them. Next slide please. Oh, this one, yeah. Okay, so, the most British authority response of all time, they installed a central set of railings and some more white paint two days after the disaster.

The response one day after the disaster was to invoke the Official Secrets Act and swear the council to say nothing about it. ALICE Well, problem solved. Yeah. That's never gonna happen again. ALICE Absolutely. My preeminent example of shutting the stable door after the horses bolted, you know, is you'd drag all these crushed people out of the thing, hose the staircase down, and then

you install two railings, you know? Next slide please. So, as we said, Bethnal Green is a working class, 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, 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 some kind of Jewish conspiracy, of course. And everybody is furious at the council specifically, like, council officers get spat at in the street.

There's this kind of intense atmosphere. So everybody's waiting to see what the government are gonna do to 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, Lawrence Dunn, in, and he interviews witnesses in secret to minimize public demoralization, and reports in three weeks which is lightning quick for anything like this. Like for any administrative state, but for the British government, even at this point, that's like, seriously, I want to be rid of this thing, I want to stop talking about it,

stop talking about the thing. JUSTIN We gotta make sure that Hitler doesn't find out that it's possible to create a human crush. ALICE 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. JUSTIN Yeah, they were doing bombing before, actually, this one they didn't even have to

do any bombing to do. All they had to do was wait for someone to rotate a projectile. ALICE Yeah. It's the same thing about, like, um, 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. And so, this inquiry, they say, we'll release it, like, in the future, subject to security considerations. And- JUSTIN Really stick it to Hitler and say, look, we can kill our own people, we don't need you.

ALICE Fuck you, buddy! ALICE And, I mean, the security considerations there are, the rockets kind of, you don't want to admit the thing about having cut police and civil defense numbers, either, because that suggests, correctly, that you're 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 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. If you look at contributory causes of the disaster, one of them is a wholesome respect

for the dangerous splinters from our own anti-aircraft barrage. It's this kind of, like, you know, it's juridical, right? Like it's really fucking annoying is what it is. And this inquiry, 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. That's a subsidiary cause. ALICE Yeah. ALICE The proximate cause is people just panicked,

for no reason. I believe the exact line is, a number of people losing their self-control is a particularly unfortunate place and time. Which is sort of venomously insulting. ALICE Yeah, it's bullshit. JUSTIN Yeah, it's bad to say, it's like, ah, it's your own damn fault. ALICE Yes. Yeah. JUSTIN How dare you embarrass us. You embarrassed us in front of Hitler. ALICE Yes. Next slide, please. This is the cover sheet 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. ALICE Most secret. ALICE Yes, yeah, there's a line 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. They only, anything comes out of that after the war, pretty much. And this was a particularly difficult position for Bethnal Green Council, because they could've kind of exonerated themselves by proving that they asked the government to put in more safety measures, but then they would've been breaking

the Official Secrets Act for saying anything about it. And so, at the time, there's no PTSD, or whatever, there's no counselling. And in particular, even if there had been, it's a working class area, there's no resources and there's a strong culture of just get on with it. You can get shell shock, but those unrotated projectiles, they're not shells. Yeah, exactly. get shell shock, but those unrotated projectiles, they're not shells. ALICE 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, the judgement 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. SEAN No, nothing happened. Those people never existed. Don't worry about it. SE. Don't worry about it. ALICE Don't worry about it. JUSTIN That center railing, that's always been there. What are you talking about?

ALICE The High Court judgment did, like, 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. JUSTIN That sounds about right, yeah. ALICE This is the thing, this is still contested, right, because if we go to the next slide, as far as public commemoration of this goes, there was pressure to do it for a long time, and the first acknowledgement officially of this was in 1993.

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 wanna think about this. Like, it's not- We 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 deaths and injuries and trauma, 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 theatre, I don't like going anywhere where there are crowds. This is fully an 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. This is one of the only things that happens in Britain, it's not on the same scale as something like Hillsborough, but it does strike me as a similar case of trying to bother officials to acknowledge your suffering or your your death, or your trauma for like, decades and decades, y'know? And ultimately this does work, but it's still... you have to go through this process of 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. JUSTIN We killed 173 people, because we didn't wanna buy a lightbulb. ALICE Yeah, I mean, that's more, I think that's more accurate, basically. We didn't wanna install a railing. Like, the Z battery of 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 gonna talk about it, it's something that I think, the link there is a lot 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, y'know, people panicked, and there was this huge crush when it could've equally have happened any of the other nights when people really were being bombed. SEAN 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. ALICE 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. I'm prepared to be yelled at about this, but I do not like this. It also is literally called the Stairway to Heaven, which...

ALICE It's a little on the nose. You make this sort of weird stairway shaped thing. I mean, I don't know if I'd want to be reminded of that. ALICE Made out of teak. Which is cool, I guess. Adding to my list of least architecturally compelling memorials in London, I think it's this and the National Police Memorial. But yeah, so now there's something, at least, more than just a plaque.

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

Grip it. ALICE Sure. Yeah. JUSTIN 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 Hudson. It's like, you know, if the whole incident takes less than an hour and thirty minutes, especially if it's substantially less than an hour and thirty minutes, maybe you should consider a different way of talking about it than a film.

I think they have to build out a whole kind of romance about it, y'know, which... SEAN It's gonna take a lot of work. ALICE Yeah, yeah. And I mean, also, this is just the way that books get written now, which sucks. Like, this exists as an intellectual property, it's grim. SEAN It's gonna, it's really hard to, as much as, okay, here we are at an hour and forty-five minutes, it's really hard to expand, uh, we didn't want to install a light bulb. ALICE Yeah, well, 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 build this thing out around it, y'know, because otherwise you don't have a podcast and you don't have a book. And in fact I have some more padding to do, because if we go to the next slide 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. So this is one of the three entrances to Bethnal Green Tube, you can see it has the little plaque on it, it has the little memorial wreath as well.

The fucking staircase is still there, and it has a central railing, it has some grippy bits and some reflective 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. As much as there are mitigation factors now, like the cool flashing emergency do not enter sign, or the railings, or the hope that one Met Police officer left in London would still be around. But if you need to try and get a lot of people into or out of a random tube station in a hurry, which is something that the tube has had to do within living memory for me, and as we saw at King's Cross, there are

still serious system-wide vulnerabilities. Not just the Tube, I mean, Euston train station is like an accident waiting to happen, as far as crashes go. But like, in particular, the central line, a lot of the deep level tubes, I love the Tube as much as the next Londoner, and obviously I love Frank Pick and the Tube map and the diamond roundels at Moorgate and the weird domes at Kennington and Clapham Common and the fucking Metroland spaceship that landed in Southgate. But at some point, possibly while you're boiling to death on a central line train, you have to acknowledge that this is an 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. 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 this is stuff that you could only overcome with serious investment, or maybe not at all. And that sucks, because it's just baked in, and apart from anything else if you use a wheelchair you have to get off in fucking St baked in, and 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 maybe even impossibility to adapt beyond what a bunch of guys in top hats who decided it would be a good idea to run a steam train underground, and then a bunch of guys

in their thirties thought it would be good ideas. And I don't say that this is like another accident waiting to happen, but it's just an example of what it's like living in Britain where all the major public infrastructure has done legacy, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, it's not like they're gonna build Crossrail 2. I mean, they were going to, but they're not going to. ALICE It's just, you can look at the Elizabeth line, right, and you think, this is beautiful and very successful and very effective and

efficient and safe, and you go, well why can't we do this with all this? Because it's like, it's built on 200 years of intermeshed bullshit, y'know? And no one is willing to try and untangle this Gordian knot that runs beneath London. JUSTIN I can't even figure out the level boarding on outer stations on Crossrail. ALICE No. No. ALICE 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 disaster, which was successfully hushed up, I should say, like, this isn't

something that is much written about, I mean, there's like, more so lately, more so thanks to the efforts of survivors, Rishanara Ali 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 a real, like, Britain pill, this episode, or at least I intend it to be, y'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. And then eventually, as the area's getting gentrified, maybe we'll put in a weird memorial.

JUSTIN It's too small of a staircase to get killed by, that's the other thing. If you got killed on the Spanish steps in Rome or something, that's respected. This is too small. This should not be able to kill that many people. ALICE It's, again, feeding a lot of people into a really confined space, you know? And it's just... it's something that, like, all these stations were designed before anybody

had any theories about what crowds would or should do, I guess. Because they're too busy picking out the, like, sort of perfect font. Which, to be fair, I do like the font. ALICE The font is very good, yes. ALICE If you want... 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, colour 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 a lot of it's very idiosyncratic and very micro-focused, and on like, oh look at the tiles we got, and it's like, okay, but you have an entrance way that can kill like, 60 kids in like ten seconds. Is that- JUSTIN You gotta also think that, y'know, when this thing was designed, especially since it had the two other exits, you were never gonna get that kinda crowd load here.

ALICE Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. War makes us do stupid things. ALICE Truly. I mean, ultimately this is Hitler's fault, right? Like, this is who we gotta lay it at the door of.

But like, also, it's poor design, and it's poor design in a way that continues to haunt us, not just in this, y'know? JUSTIN Well, I mean, if we're lucky, in World War III, there won't be time to hit the shelters before the bomb hits. ALICE Oh yeah, you won't know a thing about it, don't even worry about it. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, I have no idea. You know, it's somebody else's problem, pretty quick.

ALICE Well, that's all I had, that's the best Marine Tube disaster. If you write Wikipedia, this probably deserves its own article, to be honest. JUSTIN Probably deserves its own article. You know, just to make sure, in the future no one rotates a projectile and causes an incident. ALICE May not even have been related, but y'know. SEAN Well, we have a segment on this podcast called

Safety Third. ALICE Shake hands with danger. I'm already excited. SEAN I will only say hello to Nova. Hi. Insert sarcastic joke about trans solidarity harming cis people. If you're gonna do trans solidarity why didn't you say hi to Devon as well? That's a good point.

Canceled. Transphobic. Wow, transphobia happening in here. Anyway, I used to work at a hardware store, which shall remain nameless. 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 send them up for delivery. Needless to say, I was trained on all the store's different forklifts.

Yes. trained on all the stores different forklifts. Yes, I am forklift certified, and my license is definitely still active and not at all expired. ALICE Do you see the tweet that's like they installed accelerometers in the forklifts and the new guy racked up 6G on the first day? SEAN Oh my god, wow. What I digress, we were told to always walk around the forklifts and give a visual inspection before using them. This is somewhat similar to a pilot's inspection of a plane before the flight.

ALICE Yeah, except it's way harder and has higher stakes. JUSTIN 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'm not-

I mean, I think 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 pre-shield so they'd obstruct the vision of anyone that made the incredible choice to take a forklift from the damaged forklift area. ALICE I see why this is going immediately.

SEAN Not five minutes later, I saw a guy speeding down the rear aisle runway, that's the straight way between aisle groupings, right? The lockout tags were still in place, obstructing the man's vision. ALICE Like a pair of fuzzy dice? SEAN 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,

JP Oh, that's just weeping, and that wheel is fine, I've driven on worse. ALICE Uh huh. SEAN So he didn't listen to me, likely because I was newer to the position and he'd been in there ten years. ALICE I love complacency. SEAN 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. ALICE There is a special providence that protects fools, children, and the United States of America. SEAN 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. No one got hurt too bad besides JP getting a facial from some hot hydraulic fluid. ALICE I have a few other safety words, 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. ALICE Oh, it's beautiful. SEAN Yeah. Y'all better have a nice day. Or else. ALICE Placing a lockout tagout thing on my fucking day? SEAN 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, it hungers for your injury. Don't be a weird... I'm assuming this guy is a boomer. Sounds like some boomer behavior.

It's definitely like boomer coded, for sure. Boomer coded, maybe Gen X. Mm. Yeah. I tried to get this... It's actually 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 like, on his AirPods. Oh my god, he's got airpods in.

Oh my god, Klaus. ALICE I think the time has come for a zoomer reboot of Stapler Führer, Klaus. Klaus. ALICE Führer? Fuck, no, he's not Führer in that fucking Stapler, he's firing it. I'm tired. JUSTIN He's firing it at Stapler, yeah.

Well, that was Safety Third. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? Um, not really, I just wanted to say I hope I did an okay job and you enjoyed my episode. You did terrific. It's a good episode. I felt like I could've inculcated some more participation there, but I wrote this overnight, and I kind of like, I locked in. You get into podcasting trance.

Yeah, more or less. I'm the podcasting berserk. I was just rotating a projectile in my mind. You're a woman now. Nah, women can't do that. I thought that was the joke, yeah. Yeah, I don't even remember which way the cog is going. Yeah, that's true.

Well, there's a podcast- Listen to all the other podcasts. Listen to our podcast, please. Go on Patreon, listen to our podcast. We'll have a bonus episode out later. Okay.