When months of negotiations collapsed and the government decided to push ahead with PPP, Livingstone decided to take it to court, claiming that the government had usurped his constitutional right to control transport policy and that its decisions will endanger lives. Rattling around in the darkness, the promise of light in the cab of a tube driver is made long in advance. The next platform announces itself initially in a small shaft. Its growth is gradual, but little can prepare you for the glare of your arrival, where blank faces are waiting - a blur of people looking up from their books and newspapers. They have been waiting for you.
Physical geography is meaningless here.
You are travelling hundreds of miles a day and yet the city looks the same - long monotonous stretches of penumbra followed by short bursts of fluorescent yellow. Only through human geography can you map your way through time and place. Suits in the morning, tourists at lunchtime, schoolkids in the afternoon, impatient before 9am, rowdy after 9pm, blacker in the south and north, browner to the east. You are both in and out of control. Gliding through the city's underbelly, ferrying your human cargo to and from work, you are all-powerful.