From Alfred to Hodge, the non-woke names that ought to now be on the Tube map

Exterior the partitions, within the inexperienced suburbs, huge, horrifying, lantern-framed pits have been gouged into the earth, the place, certainly, lots of the Overground trains journey, and right here the scenes reached their apocalyptic zenith. One customer talked of a “macabre lasagne” of our bodies; others recall individuals out of their minds working by means of fields, kissing strangers, and diving headlong into the bouillabaisse of bones. 

London lived within the shadow of Yersinia pestis for one more three centuries, till the ultimate main outbreak in 1665-6. Not all the results have been bleak; now that demand outstripped provide, labourers might demand greater wages and have become freer brokers elsewhere, fuelling the expansion of London. However total it was God’s horror present and since so many voters have been bowled down like skittles, a commemorative line appears apposite.

The Hodge Line

Along with his tendentious rebranding, Khan appears obsessive about ramming range down our throats even when many people are completely able to considering it’s an excellent factor while not having to see ‘Windrush’, ‘Lioness’ and so forth on the tube map every day. However it’s a relatively restricted, human-centric type of range he’s pursuing, I really feel, one which callously excludes animals, for instance. 

For a lot of London’s historical past, animals have been all over the place. The roads have been filled with horses dragging carriages and later buses; the royal menagerie on the Tower contained lions, tigers, white polar bears, and elephants; the best gyrfalcons and eagles got here to moult every year on the Royal Mews (on the positioning of the long run Nationwide Gallery) and a endless procession of livestock have been pushed to the varied markets (Cheapside Poultry for fowl) and to fulfill their bloody demise at Smithfield, “all smear with filth and fats and blood and foam”, the place may very well be heard “the bellowing and plunging of beasts, the bleating of sheep, and the grunting and squealing of pigs”. 

Perverse it could be to call a line after a pig, however we might decide a creature that serves as a synecdoche for all of the animals, useless and alive, to which London owes such a debt of gratitude: a cat. Cats had a tough time of it for a lot of London’s historical past, being flung from home windows for enjoyable (as Hogarth depicts) and routinely massacred throughout plague seasons, however issues started to lookup within the 18th century, and at the moment no cat was extra adored than the jet-black magnificence that was Samuel Johnson’s beloved Hodge, “a really effective cat certainly”, for whom he personally harvested oysters every morning at Billingsgate and who rubbed and purred towards his shins as he penned copy for his London newspapers.