In my nearest tube station, there used to be a book-swap in the entrance, which I used to love for the sheer speed of uptake. You could drop any old random nonsense there in the morning and, by the time you came home in the evening, it would be gone. Once, I left an anthology of short plays from 1976. It wasn’t a particularly special year for plays, and not one of them was by anyone you’d have heard of – but by the time I got on the tube, someone in my carriage was reading it.
As satisfying as that was, I could hardly call it a huge part of my life. So when the little exchange libraries vanished overnight, I was nothing like as outraged as a lot of people I know, who blamed, variously: health and safety gone mad; Sadiq Khan (and, fair play, I guess he is the only person you could name from Transport for London, but it feels unlikely that his was the deciding vote); philistinism; modernity. What on earth could have prompted this barbaric act?
Enter Jim Waterson, erstwhile Guardian reporter, who now runs London Centric, a Substack for news about the capital. Since the King’s Cross fire, he said, it has been against fire-safety regulations to have combustible material in any part of a station.
I remember that event, mainly because it was horrific and 31 people died, scores more injured, but also because, prior to it, you could smoke on the tube. It was an age ago; just trying to get a mental image of people lighting up in a tube carriage puts it in the 80s.
What is incredible is that the fire was forgotten for long enough that combustible materials were ever re-introduced into tube stations. I can think of some other solutions to the sad passing of the book-swap; we could leave our books in neat piles outside the tube, and hope it doesn’t rain, for example. But we probably have to accept that health and safety hasn’t, in fact, gone mad, but has merely continued on its slow yet sane path, rousing itself to take action one hazard at a time.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 21 March 2025. An earlier version made reference to smoking in a tube carriage in 1987, however this was prohibited from 1984.
