1Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poem ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ opens with the voice of an old Caribbean migrant to London remembering his early days in the city. ‘W’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun’, he recalls, ‘mi use to work pan di andahgroun/ but workin’ pan di andahgroun/y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’.1 Johnson’s poem is one of many creative works by postwar migrants to Britain and their descendants in which the London Underground railway system plays a prominent role. At an immediate level, references to the Underground bear witness to the experience of many postwar migrants who were able to find work on the network in an otherwise prejudicial and racist city, in which getting a job was not easy if one was considered black. London Transport was one of the few employers who actively encouraged and recruited migrant labour. Between 1948 and 1956 London Transport began employing Caribbean workers from Barbados via the Barbados Migrant Liaison Service (BMLS); in 1966 the scheme was extended to Jamaica and Trinidad. As well as working on London’s buses, many migrants worked as Underground station staff, canteen assistants, track engineers and as builders. Training for London’s Underground workforce took place at Acton. As Susan Okokon puts it, ‘Although proportionately small in numbers, Black transport workers in London were highly visible in their employment, and became an integral feature of life in the capital’.2

2That said, the ability of these migrant figures to refashion London, both materially and imaginatively, has often been a remarkably difficult and vexed affair. Visibility is no guarantee of equality or ready acceptance. Many postwar migrants precariously lived and worked beneath the surface of London, existing in the cramped confines of the city, apart from, as well as a part of, the fabric of day-to-day life in London. London may have offered employment beneath the streets for its initial postwar newcomers, but above ground it remained a mysterious, hostile and dangerous place for black arrivants. The curiously dislocated and subterranean position of these vital workers is captured in Johnson’s narrator’s quizzical remark that, oddly, in working on the underground you don’t know your way around. A life underground kept many migrants at a remove from the daily happenings of the city, serving the city’s transport network rather than participating in its social and cultural traffic.

3In knowing one’s way around London, the London Underground map is arguably one of the most important methods of orientation for newcomers and Londoners alike, schematising the city’s chaotic geography in an orderly structure which makes sensible the often complex routes and changes of transport required when travelling across the capital. But in the work of many postcolonial writers, the Underground has often been appropriated as a figure of the city’s betrayals, illusions and confusions for those arriving from overseas. It is frequently a location of cognitive and identitarian chaos often at odds with the schematic promise of order and ease of passage figured in its famous symmetrical map. For several writers, the Underground has served as an important imaginative location where the frustrations of living in London are explored—frustrations which seem all the more painful in the light of the city’s allure and promise when seen from afar. In a number of important works in the immediate postwar years the Underground is scripted as a hellish underworld, where pandemonium and chaos reign. But it has also been seized upon as a location of potential postcolonial dissidence, where new communities and attitudes incubate below the streets of the city, ready to threaten to challenge the officious, prejudicial city above. London’s Underground railway system has come to signify new diasporic movements of peoples and cultures initially subterranean and surreptitious, driven underground by the cold reception of an intolerant capital city—movements which determinedly produce the metamorphosis of the city at large through the creative kinesis of their cultural endeavours.

4 The London Underground, then, is an important trope or image which writers have turned to as a way of rewriting London in the light of diasporic experience and possibility. As Sam Selvon once put it, ‘working the transport’ has been at the heart of the imaginative and social rescripting of London as a site of stubborn diasporic accommodation and postcolonial flux.3 In this essay I will focus on three brief examples: a recording of Lord Kitchener’s calypso ‘The Underground Train’ (1950), Hanif Kureishi’s film Sammy and Rose Get Laid (1988) and Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988). In choosing these examples from different generic modes and at two different moments in the history of postwar diasporic writing in Britain, I aim to suggest the range of a much wider field of enquiry and body of texts which this essay can only point to rather than explore with the necessary patience.

5Lord Kitchener’s particular connection with London and transport was immortalised on 22 June 1948 when he was filmed on the gangplank of the S. S. Empire Windrush, in Tilbury Docks, London, singing a calypso which he had written on the journey from the Caribbean, later recorded as ‘London is the Place For Me’.4 Kitchener arrived in London with the first boat-load of postwar Caribbean migrants to England, and his calypso—a fantastical, comical projection of what life in London might be like for the city’s latest newcomers—captures much of their initial optimism and sense of adventure. Strikingly, the calypso depicts the migrant as traveller, free to move around the globe and across the city at will and without obstruction. ‘I’ve been travelling to countries years ago’, sings Kitchener to a jaunty calypso accompaniment, ‘but this the place I wanted to know: London, that’s the place for me’. His fantasy of the migrant in the metropolis projects the Caribbean arrivant as savvy flâneur and anticipates (perhaps even inspires) the figure of Sir Galahad in Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956).5 The English are happy to see newcomers at large in London—indeed, ‘they take you here and they take you there’—and the migrant can apparently move freely through the city at will: ‘at night when you have nothing to do, you can take a walk down Shaftesbury Avenue.’Transporting oneself, or being transported, around London is not a problem, it is imagined, and the city is full of opportunities to indulge in its great outdoor spectacles. ‘You will laugh and talk and enjoy the breeze and admire the beautiful scenery’ sings Kitchener, cheerfully.

6Of course, Kitchener’s calypso is not about London at all but about the dream of the city embedded in migrant myths of the mother country. The reality of arrival would challenge this myth, particularly the freedom of movement envisaged in the calypso. Rather than enjoy the sights of the city and its refreshing, oxygenating breezes, on arrival many migrants were sent to live underground in cramped conditions: the first temporary location of Caribbean settlement in London for the ‘Windrush’ migrants was Clapham Air Raid Shelter in South London.6 And underground many of them often stayed, working on the Underground trains or, as James Procter has explored, living and meeting in gloomy, austere basement rooms.7 Kitchener’s calypsos written during the initial years of his sojourn in London attempt to maintain in their musical composition the optimistic, sardonic and hopeful attitude often found in the genre, but his lyrics bear witness to the realities of struggling through London, even if their satirical and comical modes seek to displace and control the pain of being a new Londoner. In ‘The Underground Train’, first recorded in January 1950, it can be noted that the assumptions of easy passage envisaged in ‘London is the Place for Me’ have been succeeded by an awareness of the very real problems of moving through the city at will; while the breezy vistas of London above ground have been gazumped by the city’s subterranean mêlée.

7‘The Underground Train’ is in many ways a familiarly jaunty, comical and uplifting calypso, and concerns Kitchener’s confusion when he tries to use the Underground railway system to take a journey across London. ‘Never me again’, he laments at the song’s start, ‘go by under-underground train’. In an attempt to take a train to Lancaster Gate station, Kitchener becomes lost in Piccadilly tube station: ‘I went down below’, he sings, ‘stand up in the crowd, don’t know where to go’. He follows a young lady who catches his eye, but falls down the escalator and loses sight of her. Soon he catches his train but his attention wanders as his glance fixes upon another woman and he consequently misses his stop. ‘To tell you the truth, I was in a mush’, he confesses, ‘when I find myself at Shepherd’s Bush’—he has missed his stop and gone too far (presumably on the Central Line). After another unsuccessful encounter with a third lady, Kitchener finds himself back at Piccadilly having failed to see the sign for Lancaster Gate through the train window. His journey has been a failure in more ways than one.

8Although Kitchener satirises his romantic questing below the ground in his encounters with three anonymous women, the failure to meet women—voiced through Kitchener’s typically ironic chauvinism—is an index of a larger, sobering failure of the city to live up to its expectations, to satisfy the desires of its (often male) new arrivants. It is no surprise that the calypso begins and ends at Piccadilly Circus, where the statue of Eros features; indeed, the journey describes a circuitous route of frustration and dissatisfaction. Although the calypso makes light of its depiction of Kitchener trying his best, but failing, to navigate around the Underground system, it also conjures something of the sobering disorientation of the migrant in London trying to make his way in a fearful, crowded and anonymous place. In many ways it shares the spirit and the tonal range of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners which similarly refracts the confusion, bewilderment and disorientation of migrant London through a calypsonian sensibility. At the close of Selvon’s novel, the narrator remarks that the migrant Londoners display a ‘great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot’ (Selvon 1985: 141). Kitchener’s calypso similarly depicts both motion and stasis: on the one hand, the calypso depicts Kitchener charging across London, delighting in its proper names and meeting new people; but on the other hand he gets nowhere, and he ends the song alone and feeling distinctly foolish for his wasted trip. Kitchener sings about the Underground train as a way of demythologising the migrant’s dream of London: this London is difficult to manœuvre through, a place of frustration where orientation is hard, a site of disconnection and distraction: ‘Yu don’t get fi know your way aroun’, as Linton Kwesi Johnson’s narrator would have it. Lost beneath the ground, unable to make connections with either other people or the correct trains, Kitchener’s calypsonian persona is an anonymous and lonely figure who has lost his way, stumbling through the crowds, unable to secure a firm footing in a sinister, indifferent city. The calypso’s comic inflection of the events it describes is an attempt to deflect and control the disquieting feelings it otherwise might indulge; but it cannot banish them. Venturing underground is dangerous, no matter how much one is invited to laugh at the experience.

9In later postcolonial representations, the Underground is rewritten as a site of possibility rather than frustration, where the dangers of disorientation which threaten the migrant are turned outward, back against London society at large—although the sense of the Underground as a sinister, chaotic location still remains, however faintly. It is interesting that Hanif Kureishi’s self-confessed idealised sense of London as a site where radical new kinds of social and cultural endeavours might emerge was first nurtured on a train, specifically during his trips to Central London from the suburbs of Bromley:

When you got on the train and you crossed the river [Thames], at that moment there was an incredible sense that you were entering another kind of world. And being in the suburbs, we could get to London quite easily on the train—about fifteen or twenty minutes—but it was a big jump.8

10In the 1980s, in novels like The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and films such as My Beautiful Launderette (1986), Kureishi explores the possibilities and problems of this bohemian ‘other world’, and interrogates his youthful view that the cosmopolitanism of London’s popular cultural milieu might offer Britons a way of challenging the officious and increasingly racist character of Britain at large. In his 1988 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Kureishi’s association of a train journey with crossing borders, both literal and imaginative, subtly informs his representation of the London Underground as figuring the itinerant character of radical forms of youth culture in London. Indeed, the Underground is presented metaphorically as pointing to the itinerant subversiveness of chic cosmopolitan youth, a subcultural force which potentially challenges the officious character of the city at large.

11Set in the 1980s, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid recalls the incendiary and riotous relations between the state, represented by the Metropolitan police and Conservative politicians including Margaret Thatcher, and London’s inner-city populations which are young and frequently black. Amidst these populations the film often features a group of teenage musicians known as the straggly band, amongst whom lives a young black male character, Danny. Danny is also known as Victoria as he spends so much time travelling below London on the Victoria Line—as he puts it, ‘I know these tube lines. Sometimes I ride the tubes all day’.9 The androgeniety of Danny/Victoria’s doubled name suggests a different kind of figure than Kitchener’s amorous male calypsonian, while the Underground network is figured as a site of subversive and progressive itinerancy rather than transience and disorientation. Indeed, the film’s connection between having mobility through the city and anti-authoritarian youthful subversion is crucial, although the film also considers some of the problems with the nomadic, itinerant life of the straggly band and the youthful subculture it epitomises.

12The straggly band often appears in spaces which emphasize mobility: immediately after the opening credits it is portrayed singing and dancing in a tube station, and when Sammy races home from Anna’s house to greet his father’s arrival they slow his passage by walking across the road in front of his car. Their mobile homes are parked below a flyover bridge, on a caravan-site which is a specifically creative space: the kids are depicted growing crops in the waste land and using a printing press to produce their own books. With their festive energies, the straggly band embodies a convivial subcultural presence in the city that recalls the calypsonian fortitude and optimism of Kitchener’s Londoners, although Kureishi’s company is inclusive of men and women, as well as many different races. Danny/Victoria functions almost as a spokesperson for the community of kids, and also invites the film’s middle-class characters such as Sammy and Rosie to interrogate the rioting in the city (which the film depicts) in terms of an important social revolt. As he puts it: ‘We have a kind of domestic colonialism to deal with here, because they don’t allow us to run our own communities.’ His supportive view of the rioters’ activities is tempered by a critical approach to their methods, and he articulates a possible alternative to the social divisions of the city at large. Danny/Victoria draws attention to the destructiveness and divisiveness of violence and invites a contemplation of the riot as a travesty of subaltern resistance, rather than the righteous revolt of youth. Through his character, important both to the plot and the structure of the film, Kureishi attempts to articulate the radical possibilities of London’s youthful underground culture, with the Underground railway network figured as a subversive location in which a subterranean community of young people is circulating beneath the city at large, threatening the status quo above.

13In many ways, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid concerns the ways in which this underground, sub-cultural London struggles to establish itself in the intolerant and prejudicial atmosphere of 1980s Britain epitomised by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The kids amongst whom Danny/Victoria lives present an alternative community of resistance—based on the principles of non-violence, tolerance and democracy—but it is one which is ambivalently represented. Later in the film they are evicted from their caravan-site by a Thatcherite property developer, and they end the film wandering nomadically through the city. In the final scene, just before Sammy’s father Rafi is found hanging, Rosie’s friends discuss the future of the kids’ community. During the exchange one character proposes that ‘I expect they’re heading towards Westminster’. ‘The seat of our Parliament?’ asks one of the friends. ‘No’ replies another: ‘under the bridge.’ The kids’ community, mobile and animated by its straggly band, ideally contains the potential to disrupt the authority of those who occupy state power at Westminster. The challenge remains one of translating such subversive, subaltern potential into meaningful social change at large in the city, one which successfully and directly impacts upon the ideology and actions of those in Thatcher’s Government—or, to put it another way, of turning an underground subcultural movement into something more permanent and able to effect meaningful change. Until the insurgent energies of the kids acquire meaningful agency above ground, they always remain on the fringe, sent under the bridge or incubating below the streets.

14In the same year as Kureishi’s film appeared, Salman Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which remains to date his most sustained engagement with London, a city where he lived for many years until the declaration of the fatwa on 14 February 1989. Ironically, Rushdie has tried to play down his literary relationship with the city since famously relocating to New York City—in 2000 he bizarrely declared in an interview that ‘for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it’ —yet his representation of London in the novel is informed by a deep sense of its literary depiction by postcolonial writers.10 Writers such as Janet Frame have conceptualised the Underground in terms of a deathly hellish underworld: in Frame’s Edge of the Alphabet there is described the ‘harpy scream and hiss of warm air, the whine, the hurtle of [Underground] trains through the tiled catacombs’.11 Unsurprisingly in a novel which toys with the theological vocabularies of heaven and hell, Rushdie’s depiction of the London Underground draws upon this tradition, not just confined to postcolonial writing of course, of regarding the Underground in terms of a deathly, mythical underworld.

15 In the vignette of Orphia in the Underground, Rushdie mobilises the story of the mythical musician Orpheus in the underworld, travelling into hell to reclaim his lost love, Euridice. In Rushdie’s witty rewriting, the crazed figure of Gibreel Farishta wanders into the appropriately-named Angel tube station and encounters a Caribbean migrant woman at the ticket office, Orphia Phillips, who is pining for her love, Uriah Mosely, one of the lift operators at the tube station. The couple have been caught by the station supervisor in an amorous embrace, and Orphia has been banished in disgrace to the ticket office to work above ground while Uri works below. Orphia has a rival, Rochelle Williams, about whom Orphia worries while she is marooned in the ticket office. Encouraged by Gibreel, she descends the ‘hellish maze’ of the Underground station in pursuit of her lost love, only to find him in a clasp with Rochelle.12 Uri tells Orphia that he is betrothed to her rival. ‘You filthy bum’ Orphia screams at Gibreel after walking up the 247 steps of the spiral staircase back to her ticket office, ‘You no good devil bum. Who ask you to mash up me life so?’ (Rushdie 1988: 331).

16The vignette is part of Rushdie’s imaginative rewriting of London in relation to the angelic and devilish tropes of the novel. With London recast as a metropolitan pandemonium to the crazed consciousness of Gibreel, the Underground becomes a second Hades into which Orphia descends in search of her lost love. The erotic overtones of the underground are clearly present in the vignette of amorous pursuit and lost love, as is the notion of the failed quest which also animated Lord Kitchener’s witty calypso. But most important, perhaps, is the sense of the Underground where received stories are appropriated and rewritten. Rushdie’s rewriting of Ovid reverses the gender roles and turns a story of lost love into one of betrayal and infidelity. In so doing it keeps faith with the Ovidian rendering of London as a place of endless mutation and metamorphosis, where stories are constantly being transformed by their appropriation by and engagement with new Londoners—and defeats Gibreel’s imperious and famously misunderstood attempt to order the city’s capricious nature by tropicalising it.13

17Whereas Kureishi used the Underground as the spatial expression of youthful social subversion, Rushdie represents the Underground to epitomise the precarious and deliciously dangerous forms of cultural transformation identified as a whole with London’s hybridising and pluralizing character. In opposition to the Angelic questing of Gibreel, the city’s satanic, gleefully hellish mutability is rendered perfectly through the Underground. Hence, the notions of change, transformation, disorientation, inconstancy and caprice are the imaginative architecture of Rushdie’s London, and a trip to the Underground in the novel exposes their quintessential existence. In so doing, Rushdie both asserts a migrant rendering of the city in terms of the agency of its diasporic energies while also drawing upon a longer tradition of engaging with the Underground in London writing.

18The three examples I have touched upon briefly point to some of the ways in which the London Underground has proved to be a vital imaginative as well as material resource for postcolonial writers of London, as well as suggest the ways in which the initial feelings of disorientation and confusion expressed in Kitchener’s calypso have given way to renderings of the transport system which suggest subaltern creativity, creolisation and contestation. These latter inflections of representing the Underground need stating all the more boldly, perhaps, in the light of the terrorist bombings of 7 July 2005, which have resulted in a view of the Underground railway system as a fearful, deathly, nervous location linked to intolerance and fanaticism, rather than new orientation and subversive creativity. Remembering Lord Kitchener’s witty musical engagement with the Underground in particular, I found it particularly sobering to learn that one of the victims of the ‘7/7’ attacks in London was a calypsonian, Arthur Frederick, whose calypso ‘Signs of Christmas’ is still heard in Montserrat today. Frederick had been a prominent member of the island’s police force; he had migrated to London after the volcanic eruption on the island and worked as a museum security guard. He died on a tube train on the Piccadilly Line.14 In thinking about the loss of Arthur Frederick, it may become tempting to lose faith in the creative, transformative propensity of migration and the art it creates—if Frederick seemed to recall for me the convivial festive spirit of the 1950s calypsos, his murder made me reflect unhappily on the ways in which the energies and tactics of contemporary urban life can be so quickly wasted by new forms of prejudice and danger.

19Yet postcolonial representations of the London Underground tell other tales, and point to a rescripting of the railway network which—one hopes—might be re-read today as challenging both the officious, discriminating racial discourses of postwar Britain, and the new forms of transnational, cellular terrorism which attack the metropolis indiscriminately. As Susan Okokon has argued, the London Underground has been a crucial location in the transformation of London, as the ubiquity of migrant peoples working (on) the transport ‘has made London into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world’ (Okokon 1998: 93). It is hoped that the continued imaginative engagement with the city and its subterranean railway network will resource the cultural construction of London in terms of cosmopolitan collectivity, as well as refuse the logic of those who wish to annihilate the new forms of social and cultural endeavour it may make possible.