‘“You are riding this train over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over… and then you die.’ Or, a brief history of commuting, health and wellbeing in Britain”

Martin Moore (20 October 2024)

Wednesday 20th February 2019: A definitely real, not apocryphal, marketing encounter

It is a Wednesday in February, 2019. I am anxiously awaiting a train from St Albans to Exeter. I have supervisions and research meetings at the University in the afternoon; delays could mean missed connections, disgruntled students, and botched efforts to establish myself as a reliable, permanently employable, colleague.

I pace the platform. Minding the yellow lines, of course - I am not an anarchist. Whilst walking, a poster catches my eye: a small dog (or is it a puppy?) seems to ask if commuting is making me sad. I read on, expecting some form of mental health- or grassroots transport campaign looking to address the tolls of regular travel. I find instead an advert for a digital marketing company, promising potential employees an office nearby. The equivalent of “if you lived (worked) here, you would be home (or happy) by now”.

Photograph by the author

Perhaps because of my prior experiences as a long-distance commuter (or “super commuter”), in the years before seeing this poster I had begun to notice burgeoning discourses linking commuting to issues of health and wellbeing – from stress and anxiety to physical ailments, air pollution, and environmental damage. Therefore, rather than make me question my present employment, this encounter instead prompted another question.

How – I asked myself, and not out of convenience for this story – does this poster’s link between commuting and sadness sit within a longer history of commuting as detrimental to health and wellbeing?

In the rest of this post, I will respond by suggesting that we can trace medical and cultural interest in commuting’s ills to least the nineteenth century. The concerns raised have shifted over time, animated by developments in medical theories, in commuting modes and conditions, and in broader cultural and political anxieties. Yet, despite such changes and the diverse social positions of commuters, the predominant subject of focus in commuting discourse has consistently been the health of White, middle-class, able-bodied men. Commuting discourse, in this sense, was often structured by racialized patriarchal norms of Britain’s imperial modernity.

Victorian and Edwardian commuting: hanging straps and loose bowels

Anxieties about our health on the commute are not novel, then. As Joe Moran reminds us in his wonderful Queuing for Beginners, the term “commuting” only become commonly used in British English during the mid-twentieth century – decades after first use in the US. Practices of commuting in Britain, however, have a longer history. And, as in America, commuting became increasingly widespread with the rise of industrial, “mass” society.

This process accelerated after the 1860s, when the increasing spread of factories and large-scale, bureaucratic employers intersected with expanding rail networks, fuelling the development of suburbs and new “dormitory” towns. Most notably around London, workers of different ages, classes, and genders, were moulded into rail and underground commuters. Trains and tube shuttled labourers, business owners, clerks and more between differentiated sites of leisure, reproduction, and economic production. Though not without some conflict and anxiety about social mixing.

In historian Simeon Koole’s terms, regular travellers learned how to mind the gap over these decades, as the architectures and provisions of rolling stock and stations were made and remade. Discussing the Tube, Koole notes how the introduction of hanging straps in the 1900s, or increasingly open carriages in the 1920s, created novel situations in which movement and etiquette had to be navigated and improvised. Different modes of travel created different expectations of space and behaviour, too: buses and overground rail services remained seated, whereas underground services built in standing room.

It was not long, however, before physicians began to question the effects of such routine travel for work, especially by train.

In 1868, for instance, Dr Alfred Haviland provided warnings to those ‘persons who travel daily to and from their business’ by rail.

As Haviland put it, all rail travellers were in danger of falling ‘down dead whilst hurrying to the train’. Rushed meals and anxious sprints for trains, he claimed, caused unbearable bodily strain as passengers were effectively killed by timetabling. But commuters were at special risk. Over time, the ‘hurry, anxiety, rapid movement, noise, and physical disadvantages’ of the train gradually made their mark, and ‘season-ticket holders’ were frequently observed to ‘age very rapidly’.

In the rote, repetitious nature of Reggie’s commute – complete with standard commuting uniform of suit, umbrella, briefcase and newspaper – author David Nobbs found the perfect metaphor for expressing Reggie’s growing anomie with a life of mundane conformity, lived in an endless loop with no meaningful end. In so doing, moreover, he also expressed wider cultural anxieties around stunted (white) individuality and lost virility integral to framings of male “midlife crisis”.

Commuting by road: stress, rage, and premature birth

Photo by author

Echoing broader Victorian anxieties about the ailments of modern life, Haviland gave special attention to nerves as bearing the brunt of speed and over-stimulation. This was particularly so for upper-middle class White male, whose nerves were supposedly most refined, and thus most sensitive to overwork.

Through the nervous system, frequent travel created states of acute anticipatory anxiety. In mild situations, this anxiety might lead to gastric distress. ‘I know of one highly respectable and well-known gentleman’, Haviland noted, ‘who frequently experiences a slight attack of diarrhoea just prior to starting a journey… akin to the nervous feeling experienced by boys when anticipating a thrashing at school’.

But the bodily (and social) repercussions could also be more severe. In the case of one senior government official – who took a house ‘about fourteen miles from the scene of his duties’ – ‘palpitations’ and ‘pain in the region of his heart’ accompanied anxiety. He was ready to resign when he was advised to move home instead. This, according to Haviland, rapidly restored his health: ‘had this gentleman continued his to-and-fro travelling he would have undoubtedly ruined his health, by inducing an intractable affection of his heart’.

Rail commuting in the twentieth century: germs, strains, and mid-life crises

Into the twentieth century, new concerns about commuting’s impact on health emerged, as shifting medical and popular frameworks of health encountered changing conditions of commuting. For example, as germ theories entered British medicine and popular culture internationally, new anxieties about infection developed. By the 1920s soap manufacturers even used the figure of the city worker – a commuter who spent over a ‘fortnight [of] every year in the train’ – to discuss trains as ‘your other home’ and ‘agents of infection’.

Discussion of rush and strain did not disappear. In 1959, for instance, the middle-class readers of Family Doctor magazine were advised that: “worry is harmful and work is beneficial. The anxiety and stress of travelling home in the rush hour are therefore far more harmful than working for an extra fifteen minutes or so, and travelling home in comfort”.

Nonetheless, in pop culture, other affects were gradually associated with rail commuting.

This was certainly the case for Britain’s most famous commuter of the 1970s: Reggie Perrin, a suburbanite middle-manager at the fictional Sunshine Desserts, and protagonist of a critically-acclaimed novel and BBC comedy sitcom.

Whilst commuting’s association with the railway did not disappear, as Colin Pooley and Jean Turnbull have shown, British commuting nonetheless became increasingly car-centric after the 1940s. Or at least, male commuting did. As internationally, automobility became hegemonic in transport and urban planning into the 1960s. However, cultural associations with masculinity and the persistence of the gendered employment structures in post-war settlements saw car ownership stratified along lines of class and ethnicity, and car use dominated by “male breadwinners”.

By the 1970s, male road commuting generated novel medical concerns. Post-war interest in stress and tension, saw researchers connect physiological responses to driving to broader concerns about heart disease. Newspapers warned of ‘going to work on a heart attack’, as vocal figures like Dr Malcolm Carruthers situated driving stress within a broader “Western way of death”.

Stills from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC 1976. Included under fair use.

Frederick Charles Dickinson, View of a platform on the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway in its first week of opening, The Graphic, 17 March 1906. Source: Wikimedia.

Cecil J. Allen, Interior of a modern tube carriage, fitted with pneumatic side operating doors, Steel Highway (1928). Source: Wikimedia.

'Hurried to death', or, A few words of advice on the danger of hurry and excitement, especially addressed to railway travellers / Alfred Haviland. Public Domain. Source: Wellcome Collection

Here, Cold War and imperial anxieties about Western decline reanimated Victorian concerns about the toll of modernity on White, male citizens.

Into the 1980s and 1990s, the ailments associated with all commuting expanded further. Briefly acknowledging the existence of commuters who were not cis-men, one newspaper in 1983 even suggested that commuting could cause ‘premature birth’ among those who were pregnant, alongside heart disease and more expected dangers, like road collisions.

However, in popular culture, the affective experience of car commuting remained distinctive. In the 1970s, British Rail were already pitching the train as a reliable, relaxing alternative to the “nerve-shredding” experience of driving. Into the 1980s and 1990s, such framings were joined by new tropes of road rage, highlighting the damaging, irrational frustration befalling the strained and delayed road commuter.

Image from Oxfordshire County Council, Better Ways to Work: A Guide to Green Commuter Plans for Oxfordshire’s Businesses, (1997). Artist Unknown. Consulted at the Modern Records Centre, Philip Ashbourne Papers, National Cycle Archives, Held at the University of Warwick on behalf of the Cycling History and Educational Trust.

The commuter is dead (and we have killed him): long live workers, and urban environments, and communities

The genealogy traced, of course, is haunted by absences. Most obviously, by actual commuters themselves, most of whom did not conform to the White, male, able-bodied middle-class commuter constructed in medical and cultural texts.

But I want to end by suggesting another sort of counter history: a history of commuting without the commuter. How has the historical emergence and transformations of commuting affected the health and wellbeing of commuters’ Others: the workers who made it possible, the environments forged and transformed around new infrastructures, the communities formed and left behind in commuting’s wake?

Here, commuting becomes more pointedly entwined with histories of empire, migration, and White nationalism. As John Munro points out in this forum , as with histories of the railway, imperialism is inevitably implicated in the broader history of automobility. However, decentring the commuter could also move focus, for instance, to how the ordered post-war movements of Britain’s commuting workforce was made possible only by pulling in racialized labour from Britain’s colonies and Commonwealth. And as with the NHS, racist hierarchies and colour bars were soon erected, challenged, and defended. How did experiences and structures of racism enter the body in these circumstances, structuring the illness of transport workers?

Similarly, we might begin to draw connections between anxieties about commuting on urban environments over time. In 1984, for instance, amidst Thatcherite panic over crime and broken families, one textbook on cities and mental health suggested that commuting contributed to ‘transient cities’ with ‘crimogenic’ environments. Commuting removed eyes from streets, broke relationships between children and absent parents, and destroyed ’the home area, which is not worked in; the business locale, which is not lived in; and...the areas in between, which, used as passage-ways, inevitably cease to be ‘places’’.

Here we find echoes of concern over the earlier formation of the suburb. Fuelled by promises of rural idylls and healthy living, as Sarah Bilston notes, the suburb quickly became an object of cultural contestation. Artists and other social commentators counterposed pastoral visions of Metroland with images of sterile, monotonous conformity – captured in phrases like “Dulham” – whilst doctors in the first half of the twentieth century became deeply concerned about supposed “suburban neuroses” among bored and isolated residents.

Finally, this counter history might also encompass the effects of commuting on those communities commuted around or though. It could map the shifting patterns of pollution and traffic deaths – the inequitable exposure to risk along lines of class, race, age – created through developing commuting architecture. It could, moreover, attend to the ways in which issues of mortality, injury, illness and danger were resisted by those who shared space with commuting traffic, as well as radical health groups who mobilised in opposition.

These are, of course, merely a few possibilities.

Wednesday 20th February 2019… Again

But, to mirror the commute, let’s return to where we began. The train arrives on time, and I make my meetings.

At least, according to my calendar. Fittingly enough, my only memory from this trip remains of that poster.

In one sense, kudos to the marketing team.

In another, I hope our ramble through commuting’s many possible histories has given a sense of how deeply rooted our contemporary concerns with health, illness, and the journey to work really are.

Front Cover of London Metropolitan Railway's "Metroland" booklet. Artist Cyril A Wilkinson. Image in Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia

Martin Moore is a social and cultural historian of post-war Britain, with a particular interest in histories of health, health services, and mobility. He completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2014, after which he joined the University of Exeter as part of Professor Mark Jackson's Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, 'Lifestyle, health and disease: concepts of balance in modern medicine'. This research provided the basis both for an edited volume (Balancing the Self: Medicine, Politics and the Regulation of Health in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2020), co-edited with Mark Jackson), and his first monograph - Managing Diabetes, Managing Medicine, (Manchester University Press, 2019) - which traced how new forms of chronic disease management developed in the post-war period and intersected with projects for managing medical professionals in the NHS. Martin is currently working on two projects: a history of time and care in post-war British general practice, and a history of commuting and wellbeing in late twentieth-century Britain.

This piece was initially presented at a workshop held by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (hybrid) on 4-5 July 2024. It was supported by Wellcome Trust Centre Grant [203109/Z/16/Z] and explored “Everyday Mobilities: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Perspectives on Getting Around.” (You can see event recordings here - day 1; day 2.). In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop explored these developments, examining the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national, and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around”. The "Everyday Mobilities” series on M&M is a first step towards the establishment of an Everyday Mobilities interdisciplinary network bringing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners.