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The Gobby, Stroppy Stars of Cab Driver
24th July 2008
They have the knowledge and don’t they let you know it. London’s black cabbies, or more accurately Licensed Hackney Carriage drivers are gobby, stroppy, expensive and occasionally exasperating. They are also the best in the world by as many miles as they drive in a year. If you live in this awkward, unknowable metropolis they are one of the few constants in an ever-changing cityscape; a life saver, an escape route, a treat and a treasure, acquired just by sticking your hand out or whistling on any street corner. If you’re new to this town they are your only guarantee of getting wherever you want to go safely and quickly with an instant introduction to lippy London philosophy thrown in for the admittedly considerable sum on the meter.
Those genuinely handsome cabs; old fashioned, solid, but with a turning ability which would shame Cristiano Ronaldo, are sadly these days too often spoiled by splashy advertising graphics over their once sober livery, but they’re still as much an iconic part of the London visual language as double-decker buses and beautiful bridges. As a visitor you have to ride in one – they are our equivalent of gondolas - but with added political debate rather than light opera. If you’re a Londoner you have to stop yourself from riding them too often or you’ll go bankrupt in the back seat.
Seeing one of those curvy beasts, with its “For Hire” light gleaming invitingly through the morass of traffic whether you’re late for a meeting or too drunk to know which way is home, is one of the great sights of our city. But even better is the absolute certainty that the driver will know exactly where you want to go and the best way to get there. The fact that they’ll also think they know exactly what the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be doing, the next winner of the Grand National and the riddle of the sphinx is all part of the entertainment.
The knowledge is a gruelling three-, four- or even five-year training regime which involves not only memorising just about every street, road and angular alley in the whole of the city, while riding a moped in the rain, but also dozens of obscure institutions, attractions and curiosities. Would you, for instance, know how to get from the tomb of Giro the **** Dog to Postman’s Park?
The amount of information aspiring cabbies have to absorb is equal to any degree course, and according to research means that the frontal area of the brain known as the hippocampus is almost as inflated as their fares. So of course they’re big heads. And of course they’re expensive - you have to pay for the best. Not to mention the fact that the years of study plus the cost of buying a cab (about 38 grand), diesel and insurance is a big investment.
As the presenter of a BBC London radio show, which relies for part of the time on phone calls from listeners, I know just how voluble - but also valuable - cabbies are. They’re essentially professional Londoners, invariably ringing in with salient points, humorously put, while simultaneously dropping off a punter or doing a U-turn on Oxford Street. They are city sages, and if you look in that bit at the front of the taxi where they keep their flasks of tea and bags of coin, you’ll often see a Spanish grammar book, a saxophone course or a Peter Ackroyd novel next to the West Ham programme. They are working class lads (and an increasing number of lasses) hooked on learning.
What they aren’t is crooked. I’ve taken thousands of cabs, and had thousands of arguments, but never because a driver has intentionally taken the wrong route or tried to rip me off. Complaints against taxi drivers are taken very seriously by the Carriage Office and few cabbies would risk their hard-earned badge to make a couple of bob by going round the houses.
Occasionally you’ll get one who’s rude, but then sitting in traffic all day would turn me into a Gorgon. What they rarely are these days, though, is bigoted. Crowd into one of their Tardis-like old shelters, as I did for our Arena special on the cab trade, and you soon realise that if London has changed, then so have its cabbies. The stereotype of the embittered old bloke moaning about foreigners and refusing to go “over the water” has died out with pea-soupers and Routemasters. Cabbies nowadays are a diverse lot who will happily take anybody anywhere, because they know they’re under very stiff competition and maybe even under threat of extinction.
The advent of Sat Nav means that for a couple of hundred quid anybody can plot a route to anywhere, so maybe all that studying and testing for the knowledge starts to look like an anachronism. But a mere machine cannot possibly compete with the patina of urban nous that badge-holders build up over the years. We’ve all had or heard of Sat Nav disasters, and it’s hard to imagine that a London cabbie would have mistaken Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire for Chelsea’s football ground as recently happened to Earl Spencer’s daughter. But what really sets them apart are the little tricks of the trade - the back-doubles and short-cuts; the time-sensitive stuff about offices or clubs turning out; the road works they spotted the other day; the sixth sense that tells them which way to go.
But, even more importantly, that gruelling apprenticeship known as the knowledge is a test of character - and that’s what London taxi drivers certainly are - characters.
Cab Driver, BBC Four, Saturday, 26th July, 9pm
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Kind regards,
Brummie Cabbie.
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