As a stalwart user of TfL services, you probably don't give a second thought to people using them for the first time. But visitors to our capital often find travel daunting, and TfL has a special wodge of tips, advice and special offers to help them get around.
If you're new here, TfL very much hope you'll find their Visiting London webpage before you arrive. As well as an embedded journey planner, the page leads with five prominent features that might be of interest to London Transport virgins. First off is a big splash announcing that buses in London are cash-free. This won't be news to you, but to those who've not been here in the last twelve months (or have never been) it may come as a surprise. Also, the emphasis on cashlessness allows TfL to push their important offer in panel number two - the Visitor Oyster card.
The Visitor Oyster card is just an ordinary Pay-as-you-go Oyster card, with the same daily caps and everything, but with a prettier pattern on the front. And it has two big advantages over a bog standard blue one, the first of which is that TfL will post it to you before you arrive. Decide how much cash you want on the thing (they recommend £15 for a weekend), stump up a £3 non-returnable 'activation fee' and it'll be on its way. This'll save you queuing up at the first station you reach when you arrive, which is important now that every ticket office is being terminated.
And secondly a Visitor Oyster card allows you to partake in special offers carefully curated by the folk at TfL Towers. These vary, but the current list (available here) includes 20% off your bill at Planet Hollywood, a free hot fudge sundae at the Hard Rock Cafe and 15% off at M&Ms World in Leicester Square. And OK, so these are tourist horrors to be avoided at all costs by discerning folk, but some of the other offers might have much more relevance to ordinary Londoners. 15% off purchases at the Foyles bookshop on the South Bank, for example, that could be damned useful. Or 25% off a Vinopolis tour, assuming you can get in before they close down. Or how about free entrance to a weekend night at the dogs at Wimbledon Greyhound Track (this also available to ordinary Oyster card holders, before you decide to trade yours in).
Panel 3 on the Visiting London webpage leads to a page for "Visitors and Tourists", with a choice of useful two pdfs. One of these is a special tube map I've never seen before. It's called the 'Small theatres tube and rail map', and shows all the railway lines in London along with all the theatres with under 400 seats. There are no West End classics here, but instead dozens of smaller independent venues which deserve our wider attention. There's the Cockpit near Marylebone and the Tricycle near Brondesbury, as well as the Compass near Ickenham and the Chickenshed near Cockfosters. The use of dotted lines to link each theatre to its nearest stations makes for a total mess in places, and is frequently entirely illegible. But I'd say this map (if done properly) is the sort of thing TfL ought to be promoting more strongly to a more local audience, because surely it's Londoners who'd be frequenting these small suburban theatres rather than fly-in fly-out tourists.
The second pdf is an 18 page visitor guide, called Hello London, and brings together all the tourist travel essentials in one place. It explains zones (the Harry Potter Studios are in Zone 9, apparently), gives start/finish times for various services, and urges you to use the Journey Planner to plan your journey. And there's a tube map, a riverboat map and a simplified bus map too, indeed if you downloaded this onto your tablet before you arrived in London you'd be in good shape. But although the brochure's dated 2015 it still manages to mention "Barclays Cycle Hire" on page 2, oops, so presumably it's not updated all that often.
Dig down and the 18 pages are littered with self-promotion. TfL are advising visitors to travel with them, sure, but also to consider travelling more widely on TfL's premium services. Boris's introduction on page 2 doesn't mention tubes and buses, for example, but does mention riverboats, the sponsored cablecar and sponsored hire bikes. The London Transport Museum gets a plug on page 3, as it should, and the capital's new bus gets a glamorous spin ("The New Routemaster bus featured in the James Bond flm ‘Skyfall’ and runs on routes 9, 11, 24, 38 and 390"). Meanwhile the cablecar and river boats get umpteen mentions throughout the document, including a starring role in a sample tourist itinerary on page 15, because the cablecar and riverboats are essentially tourist services so this brochure is their natural home.
Tucked further down the Visiting London webpage, beneath further panels promoting the cablecar and riverboats, are details of London's Visitor & Travel Information Centres. There are currently five of these, and by the end of the year they'll be the only places to go to find a TfL member of staff offering services behind a desk. Their focus isn't really travel, it's more being helpful and flogging stuff, like tickets to Madame Tussauds, coach tours, the London Eye and the top of the Shard. You'll find them at Piccadilly Circus, various central London termini and Heathrow, with VICs at Paddington, Euston and Gatwick Airport opening in the summer. The newly refreshed VIC at King's Cross is open now, in the entrance to St Pancras, replacing the ticket offices that closed down there at Easter. This gleaming facility has the look of an Argos collection point about it, all plastic panels and bright colours, with smiling staff poised at computer terminals, and the opportunity to browse a selection of gifts while you queue.
So as the summer season prepares to kick off, remember the humble London tourist. They get better Oyster cards than us, they get better-presented information than us, and they get secret maps the rest of us never see. They get ticket offices and we don't, because they spend more money than we do on expensive visitor attractions. And they get cablecars and riverboats rammed in their face, because we tend not to use them so there are plenty of seats. You may curse when one stands on the wrong side of the escalator in front of you, but their money probably helps keep your fares down, so be nice.
Which comes first, Crossrail or the General Election?
It's a trick question, obviously, and the answer is Crossrail.
More specifically that's Crossrail Place, the new retail destination at Canary Wharf. You may have spotted it being built in a former dock to the north of the main skyscraper village, indeed if you've been past on the DLR you can't have missed it. It's a huge long building that from the side looks like an ocean liner with a cricketer's shinpad dropped on top, or from each end like an alien snake baring triangular teeth. It's going to be Canary Wharf's new Crossrailstation, or at least the very deepest levels are. But two floors above ground and two below are to be devoted to a retail and leisure complex, and that's Crossrail Place.
It's not a very original name, but then where at Canary Wharf is? The long shopping mall at the heart of the development actually has three separate names - Cabot Place, Canada Place and Churchill Place - each in reference to the development they're buried beneath. The parallel shopping mall leading off from the Jubilee line ticket hall is called Jubilee Place, because that's supposed to help remind you where it is. And so this new shopping mall is to be called Crossrail Place, again hijacking the name of a new railway to sell handbags, suits and food.
And Crossrail Place opens on Friday May 1st, a mere ten days from now, which is how you'll be able to pop in for lobster and chips before the General Election takes place. What's amazing at this stage in development is how Google-unfriendly the phrase 'Crossrail Place' still is, with only very minor trumpeting having taken place thus far and the big splash yet to occur. Wander round Canary Wharf's existing malls and you'll now see digital ads for stores at Crossrail Place flashing up to raise awareness. But the wider community has been told nothing, so there's a very real risk that London's cutting edge brandoholics may miss an opening special offer.
So what are we getting on May 1st?
» [dining option] London's third branch of a long-established barbecued crustacean shack
» [dining option] The latest Hakata-style ramen offer in casual, modern digs
» [dining option] Japanese/Danish hybrid concept offering sushi and grilled yakitori skewers
» [dining option] Seventh London pop-up for over-chirpy Mexican burrito merchants
» [dining option] Steak and lager joint aimed at rugby-friendly men in suits
» [dining option] Re-focused greasy fry-up with reputation for massive diner queues
» [vending outlet] Asian tea dispensary, offering to boil leaves for your pleasure
» [vending outlet] Juice bar serving organic-friendly wellness-promoting products
» [vending outlet] Unique coffee/wine menu combo for maximising stockbroker interface
» [fitness unit] Spin class offering high intensity low impact full-body bike workout
» [retail service] Bonus-devouring shop selling bespoke titanium performance bikes
» [retail service] Design outlet cluttered with unnecessary Copenhagen chic
» [financial service] Well-known High Street bank not bailed out by taxpayer
I strongly doubt that the residents of Poplar, a brief walk across Aspen Road, will ever be lured into their new local mall with a combination of shops like that. But this new development isn't aimed at them. Instead, as Canary Wharf expands outwards and upwards, its financial workers and apartment-dwellers are clearly in need of yet more places to gather and spend money. It seems Crossrail Place will literally be filling a hole.
Thankfully there's to be more at Crossrail Place than just food joints for bankers. An extensive roof garden is planned, indeed is probably already nearing completion, indeed looked half-convincing last September when many of us trooped through this building site for Open House. It promises to be green and proper pleasant, unless of course it's filled not only with plants but copious tables for the sipping of cappuccinos. At the heart of the roof garden will be a performance space where an Isle Of Dogs-based theatre group will put on music, dance and theatre, with the inaugural festival taking place over the weekend of May 16th. See how deftly the site's developers ticked all their community boxes there?
And you can't see it from the outside, but an independent boutique cinema has been built on Level -2 with after-work relaxation in mind. There'll be three screens with capacities of 109, 52 and 105 respectively, each with "a mixture of premier armchair and sofa seating with footrest". Tickets for the first screening of Mad Max: Fury Road (3D) on May 15th are now available for only £19.20, plus 75p online booking fee, plus an extra quid if you don't bring your own 3D glasses. A direct hit on the wallets of the target audience there, I think.
Access to Crossrail Place will be from the North Colonnade immediately opposite 1 Canada Square, via an elevated walkway that looks straight out of Space 1999. Alternatively you can descend to former dockside level and cross a paved piazza complete with jet black water feature, this already open bar the dark blue hoardings covering the end. The whole area's dead at present, indeed you may never have ventured this way out of the existing shopping centre/DLR complex. But footfall will start picking up inexorably next month, they hope, until Crossrail Place is as much part of the everyday retail offer hereabouts as Jubilee Place and all the other Places.
And eventually the trains will arrive. Crossrail is currently scheduled to start running on this southeastern branch in December 2018, which is still three and a half years off, with the complete network not up and running until December 2019. And that's less than six months before the country next goes to the polls in May 2020, assuming whatever hybrid government we get limps on that far. Indeed the correct answer to "which comes first, Crossrail or the General Election?" is ultimately Crossrail, but only just. At least you can have a chai latte and oyster platter while you wait.
More specifically that's Crossrail Place, the new retail destination at Canary Wharf. You may have spotted it being built in a former dock to the north of the main skyscraper village, indeed if you've been past on the DLR you can't have missed it. It's a huge long building that from the side looks like an ocean liner with a cricketer's shinpad dropped on top, or from each end like an alien snake baring triangular teeth. It's going to be Canary Wharf's new Crossrail station, or at least the very deepest levels are. But two floors above ground and two below are to be devoted to a retail and leisure complex, and that's Crossrail Place.
Access to Crossrail Place will be from the North Colonnade immediately opposite 1 Canada Square, via an elevated walkway that looks straight out of Space 1999. Alternatively you can descend to former dockside level and cross a paved piazza complete with jet black water feature, this already open bar the dark blue hoardings covering the end. The whole area's dead at present, indeed you may never have ventured this way out of the existing shopping centre/DLR complex. But footfall will start picking up inexorably next month, they hope, until Crossrail Place is as much part of the everyday retail offer hereabouts as Jubilee Place and all the other Places.
