Preventative work and the easing of the problem in a multiplicity of small ways is being

Preventative work and the easing of the problem in a multiplicity of small ways is being carried out by the homeless charities, whose help is wide-ranging and creative The homeless charities are well worth supporting. What government can do is to focus on the dire equation: no home, no job; no job, no home You cannot get a job if you are homeless. This means looking at benefits, social housing and training.Unfortunately, when the present Government examines benefits, it cuts them, especially for people under the age of 25. When I turn to the Labour leader’s remedies for homelessness, another catchphrase of the moment, also borrowed from the United States, comes to mind – “tough love”. As Mr Blair put it in an article on homelessness he wrote for the London Evening Standard on Thursday, he wants “hard-headed compassion that comes from a commitment to act, not simply a wish to sympathise”. In effect tough love is a deal: we, society, have a duty to help you, the unfortunate, and you have a duty to help yourself. In this case, Labour says its part of the bargain will be to provide better education and skills training and to give local authorities greater scope to provide more affordable housing for rent Which would be helpful, though hardly decisive None the less, be grateful for small mercies At last homelessness has got onto the political agenda..

Harry Beck’s famous and much-copied map of the London Underground has always been more than an aid to getting around the world’s oldest and one of its largest and complicated metro systems. First sketched in 1931 the Underground map is a brilliant diagrammatic pact between Londoners and visitors to London and the city itself. It describes a city that appears to be rational, logical, compact and easy to understand. It offers order out of chaos, and depicts the Underground network as the guiding intelligence or arterial system of the capital. The map was mass-produced from January 1933; the new London Passenger Transport Board, the public corporation charged with running London’s buses, trams and tube trains, came into being six months later. From then on, a miasma of competing road transport companies and the private Underground lines would become one integrated public service under the aegis of two giants of modern urban transport: Lord Ashfield and Frank Pick.

A single- deck bus chugging through remotest Hertfordshire or a steam train puffing along the Brill branch of the former Metropolitan Railway were now painted in standard modern liveries and bore the legend “London Transport”. London’s transport network was no longer a plaything for rival entrepreneurs but a public service with a long-term strategy and considerable modernising work to do.
London Transport came into being as a result of a political desire to create an efficient integrated public transport system. It would rationalise investment and improve services and an infrastructure that, like the mainline railways, had been depleted and exhausted during the First World War and had never quite recovered.By common consent the new corporation did its job superbly, creating the world’s finest urban transport system. Smart new diesel buses, trolley- buses and Tube trains were matched by sophisticated modern architecture and design. In an obituary of Frank Pick that appeared in the Architectural Review in 1942, Nikolaus Pevsner described the LPTB’s late chief executive as “the ideal patron of our age”, and paid homage to the “civilised urbanity and humane common sense” that had inspired London Transport in the Thirties.Sixty years on, a passenger (or “customer”) on the Northern Line is unlikely to know who Lord Ashfield and Frank Pick were and is most unlikely to feel that the shabby trains and dismal journeys are the legacy of some act of enlightened public patronage. The fact that the Underground is in a mess, however, has little to do with the question of ownership and much to do with the way governments have treated it since it was nationalised in 1948 and subsequently handed from public body to public body with little apparent concern for its future.