London-2008

October 20–22, 30, November 4, 2008

The new terminal at Heathrow Airport has defibrillator cabinets every few hundred meters along the hallway. Your heart might very well give out while you walk the kilometer from the gate to baggage claim.

Space-age vacuums roam the city streets.

At first glance, it might seem like we’re simply looking at dumpsters. But on closer inspection, you’ll notice that they’re being pulled along by a little electric garbage locomotive.

Every surface of freestanding municipal infrastructure is covered with special textured paint that makes posting stickers and flyers impossible (in South Korea, they wrap lampposts with textured rubber for the same reason).

And if the police or municipal authorities need to post a notice on a lamppost, they do so with single-use plastic zip ties.

A bus failed to negotiate a corner—and the lamppost is done for.

A special micro-trashcan for gum and cigarette butts.

The lampposts are different in every borough. They’re replaced from time to time. Here we’ve caught a moment when they’ve almost finished cutting down a good old Westminster lamppost and put up a fresh-faced, but less interesting new one next to it.

As for safety barriers, there’s only one kind here—it consists of these thick plastic orange segments.

But let’s go back to the diversity. Every borough not only has its own lampposts but also its own trash cans. Some look like this:

And some like that:

The phone booths are also not always the same classic type. You see all kinds.

The post boxes vary as well (their appearance depends on the size of the box, and the size depends on the location). But they all follow a strict color scheme: black on the bottom, red on the top.

My collection of national receptacles for water and tea now has London represented by a teapot in the form of a post box. I’ve never seen anything kitschier in my life.

I was previously in London in 2000 and 2003. The main difference compared to those visits was a near-total absence of traffic jams. That is to say, they do occur, but they’re more like traffic in downtown Moscow at 1 a.m. This was achieved by introducing a congestion charge for travel in central London. Traffic is monitored by CCTV cameras, which the British absolutely love.

Traffic signs are lit up with spotlights mounted right on the same pole (like everywhere else in the UK).

There are a few backlit signs, but they’re not very common.

Some traffic lights have special louvered visors to restrict the angle of visibility (for situations where multiple parallel roads come out onto an intersection, but the light only applies to one of them). You can find these in the States as well.

And here’s a traffic light tree with constantly changing signals that completely confuses drivers. Good thing it’s in the middle of a roundabout.

Pedestrian crossings tell you which way to look for oncoming cars. This is really useful, since it’s very hard to drop the European habit of looking the opposite way, even when you force yourself to remember that people drive on the other side of the road here. By the way, it’s interesting that while the initial lettering was done by a simple worker’s hand, the part where the asphalt was replaced now has neatly stenciled letters.

In London, you realize what efficient public transportation looks like. The underground here is beautiful in its own way.

The train car had an ad for the London Transport Museum. It turned out to be less entertaining than the Railway Museum in York, but still quite decent.

The exhibit begins with carts and omnibuses. Naturally, there’s a heap of plastic manure under the horse—how would you explain the transportation challenges of the metropolis without it? Sadly, museums in Russia will never have anything like this. Our minister of culture would come and ask, “What is this shit?” Or the patriarch would get offended.

It would be an understatement to say that the iconic London taxis and double-decker buses are abundant here. They’re extremely abundant. This isn’t for the sake of entertaining tourists—it’s just the way things are. The zigzagging lane marking means a zebra crossing is coming up.

London taxis are horrible and wonderful at the same time. They’re wonderful because of the generous amount of space inside: you can stretch out your legs and not even reach the opposite end. They’re horrible due to the total lack of suspension softness of any kind. It feels like riding in a cart. Even in the new TX4 model, which is advertised on the fold-out seat inside itself. Taxis in the form of regular cars don’t seem to exist at all.

There’s an incredibly large number of Russians in London, so no one is surprised to see boxes with Russian-language newspapers around the city (the newspapers themselves are somewhat terrible, like all émigré press).

Your favorite newspaper—Anglia. Our guys on the island.

Street signs in Chinatown have the street names written in Chinese as well as English. A true friendship of the peoples.

Every store has loads of fresh and healthy prepared food to go. Here’s the fruit salad section, for example. Even the fanciest supermarkets in Moscow don’t have anything like this, so we take note as well as full advantage.

Redevelopment is still actively underway in the center of the city.

Airplanes always fly right over central London. If you raise your head and don’t see a plane in the sky, it means the airport is closed. The helicopter is something new; it’s used for security surveillance.