Black cabs and routemasters
According to the Guardian this could be ‘the end of the road’ for the famous London black cab.
The taxi we all know and love is the FX4. Its friendly rounded curves and satisfying clunky doors are somehow reassuring; we know we’re safe.
The new TX4 just doesn’t have the same feel. It seems to be a bit of a pastiche of the black cab, put together by someone who really wants a top of the range BMW.
Still, there are enough FX4s out there that for the foreseeable future you’ll be able to take a ‘black cab’.
However Ken Livingstone pulled the Routemaster bus out of service. That’s the famous red doubledecker bus that has been an icon for generations of Londoners.
To be fair to Ken, there are some good reasons why Routemasters just don’t cut the mustard. Disabled access is a very weak point compared to modern low-floor buses, and the older buses aren’t fuel efficient either. None the less, taking the Routemasters out of service deprived us of one of our most striking symbols.
The Routemasters do still operate on two routes though – from Royal Albert Hall to Aldwych on route 9, and from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill on route 15. So if you want to take a proper red London bus, make your way to one of these routes and hop on.
Or head to Brick Lane, where an old Routemaster is now in use as a restaurant – ‘Rootmasters‘. The pun may not be great but the veggie food apparently is.(Rootmasters, Ely’s Yard, part of the Old Truman Brewery complex.
Photo Credits: Taxi – James Cridland; Routemaster – Salim Virji, both on Flickr
4 Comments
[...] Black cabs and routemasters [The London Traveller]Our favourite taxis are going. And the Routemaster;s gone. Illustrated by a picture of a taxi that I took a while back in the London Transport Museum. [...]
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I love Routemasters and black cabs. They’re the first two things that I see in my mind’s eye, when I think about London. I think that Ken Livingstone had made a horrible mistake, by pulling them out of regular service. He should have kept them in service. They might not cut the mustard, in the minds of disability activists, but they do cut the mustard for the majority of the world’s population. I feel that Routemasters should be back running in regular service, along side the disability friendly buses that do cut the mustard. That way, everybody can be happy, both Londoners and tourists, alike.
While I do think we needed a new generation of vehicles that are greener and more wheelchair-friendly, I share your concern that we’re losing a lot of London’s visible icons. I don’t think anyone really considered what we’re losing in terms of the value of ‘Brand London’ – red phone boxes, red buses, black cabs…. In fact, taken all together, these changes are as disastrous as knocking down the Houses of Parliament would be. But they didn’t need planning permission…