Commuter chaos in the capital as tube strikes begin

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, Londoners will soon be able to dine on food from the 1600s in a modern-day chop house.

0:27But first, commuters in the capital are being forced to find alternative routes to work on the first of four days of strike action by the RMT Union. The Transport for London's website crashed this morning and they're accused to board the Elizabeth Line and buses, with virtually the entire underground network suspended. Passengers have said their journeys are taking three times longer and are being advised to complete their travelling by 6pm. The last tube-wide strike took place over pay and pensions, but this week's action differs as separate groups of workers will walk out on different days. The industrial action kicked off on Sunday with limited services running, but levels of disruption are ramping up through to Friday.

1:11The worst impact for congestion and transport is expected on Tuesday, with more Londoners still typically working from home on Mondays and Fridays. Docklands like railway trains will also not run on Tuesday or Thursday because of strikes arising in a separate dispute. Here's Jared Wood from the RMT explaining why London Underground staff are on strike. First of all, our demand is for a 32 hour, four day week and actually in the 21st century, we don't think that that's an unreasonable demand for any worker to make. But we've been really clear with LU in every meeting that we've had with them, that what we want to see is a real step towards that.

1:51We are not insisting on implementing 32 hours, four days over a one year pay deal. We'll talk to them about a longer term deal if they want to, to try and phase things in but we want to see real progress members are absolutely exhausted you know as you say it's uh uh it's routine to start work at 4 4 15 a.m it's routine to finish work at 1 a.m it uh people work weekends they uh some people do permanent nights and it is absolutely exhausting i i did it for 20 years and you you know you never feel you never feel right your heads your head's wrong you you get brain fog all the time. It's really difficult and there's a lot of research now that shows that it can reduce life expectancy by, I mean some studies would suggest up to 15 years to do those sort of shifts for 10 or 20 years in your working life and we want that addressed.

2:43We just want London Underground to engage in talks with us based on giving us a little bit of additional time off for people as a starting point. What we can't do is just go into endless discussions about recutting the same hours because it doesn't work. We've tried it. We can't make realistic improvements on that basis. Joining us now is the Standard City Hall and Transport Editor, Ross Lydell. Ross, remind us why RMT workers are striking and what their demands are. So this strike is not primarily about pay. There is a pay offer on the table, but the main reason the RMT has gone out on strike is over concerns about the length of the working week and staff fatigue.

3:26The RMT has this ambition, it's a bit of a sort of blue sky vision of a 32 hour, four day working week. Now that sounds rather fantastic to me and probably many Londoners and many standard listeners. I'm sure we'd all love a 32 hour working week. At present, tube staff work 35 hours a week, which again is probably on the generous side, But the RMT says this is something they're absolutely determined to deliver. However, today they did tell me that they don't expect to go down from 35 hours a week to 32 hours a week in one year. Essentially, they want transport from London Underground to make steps towards 32 hours.

4:08Namely, if they could get half an hour off the current working week of 35 hours, then I think we would see this dispute come to a halt. How does this strike compare to previous strike action? Well, the thing that I noticed most this morning, there hasn't actually been a tube strike for about two years. There was going to be one in January last year, but that was averted at the 11th hour when the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, found£30 million from City Hall reserves to essentially pay off the RMT and give them a pay rise. In terms of what's happening this morning, I spent several hours this morning both speaking to the RMT outside King's Cross station, cycling in from my home in East London, went up and down Oxford Street a couple of times as well.

4:51The thing that has really struck me is how many Londoners are out and about, how many are essentially defying the strike, have been determined to get to work. In the past, it's typically been the situation that many people simply don't bother. You may see some trying to squeeze onto buses and some using the Elizabeth line. But today, Oxford Street was rammed, the road down to Holborn, down sort of New Oxford Street, Clerkenwell Road, Rosebury Avenue in Islington, completely congested with traffic and an extraordinary number of people on bikes, especially line bikes. So whereas today Transport for London will lose about 15 to 20 million pounds in fares income, it's fair to say that line bikes will be seeing their profits spike as a result of the tube strike.

5:38So many people are determined to get around and sort of hats off to them. So there are obviously alternative ways for people to travel around the capital then. Yes, there are. We have the Elizabeth Line is still working, although this morning there were some early morning headaches when there weren't enough staff at Liverpool Street Station to enable the Elizabeth Line to stop there. It's now, we are told, running normally. Similarly, there was an issue briefly this morning at Tottenham Court Road Station. These are the two busiest stations on the Elizabeth Line. essentially two of the busiest stations in London.

6:10So both are being served by the Elizabeth line. Liverpool Street is also served by the London Overground, which is also running normally. And in the last hour, TfL has been able to get some tube services up and running. Now, don't get too hopeful because these are really only sort of little sort of shuttle services out in the sticks, as we would say. The centre line is running just a few stations out in West London between West Rice, Lipan Ealing and White City. more usefully. You could say it's also running in East London between Stratford, Epping and Hainault. So that's particularly useful because if you can get to Stratford or if you're coming from Stratford, you can change there onto the Elizabeth line or onto Greater Anglia services.

6:52So there's a benefit there. A small part of the Metropolitan line is running as well around Amersham, Chesham and so on, and also between Uxbridge and Harrow-on-the-Hill. And finally, a small section of the northern line is running between High Barnet, Mill Hill, East and East Finchley. But again, the problem there is if you're coming in from High Barnet, you don't really want to be getting turfed off the tube at East Finchley because that is still a long, long bus ride into town. So although some services are running, probably at least 90 to 95 percent of the London Underground is not running.

7:27So have you spoken to Londoners this morning then? I did. I spoke just by chance to a couple of coffee vendors outside Angel Station. I had sort of stopped there on my bike ride in to check if the barriers were pulled over the front of the station. And indeed they were. There was both a sad sight of seeing the tube barricaded over and also, sadly, some rough sleepers outside as well. So two signs of Sadiq Khan's London, you could say. And entirely by chance, two of the chaps who are trying to sell some coffee in newspapers just outside the station started chatting to me and made very clear how unhappy they are at the RMT, saying it's disgraceful that a union can essentially bring the city to a standstill.

8:09they were saying the RMT was holding London to ransom. And essentially, he said, sack the lot of them, bring in people who want to do the job. This isn't acceptable. And what happens next? So the strikes are planned until Thursday evening, pretty much until midnight on Thursday. Different staff will go out on different days. And also overlapping with these tube strikes is that tomorrow and on Thursday, there are two 24-hour strikes planned on the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway. It's also potentially the chance of some bus strikes in West London as well, just to further have made people's journeys even trickier.

8:47Now, the reality is that if the strikes do last until Thursday night, it will mean until at least eight o 'clock, probably mid-morning on Friday before the tube gets back up and running. So if you're hoping to commute into work on Friday morning, don't bet on there being a tube there waiting for you. However, I think it would be a decent bet at this stage to say that these tube strikes won't last until Thursday night. I think people will see the disruption today and perhaps sort of sanity will prevail. And potentially you would hope that the RMT and TFL might get back around the table. However, the RMT made very clear to me today that essentially there has to be a decent offer on the table that recognises their concerns about the length of the working week and staff fatigue for them to actually suspend the action.

9:35The fact they've actually done pretty well by their standards just now, a lot of their members have come out and supported this. So we could be set for four days of shutdowns. I think four days is still a big ask and we may not get there. But as it stands, yes, don't expect to be able to get on a tube train really until Friday mid-morning. Before the strike started, TfL's expectation was that it would be pretty much little or no service between Monday and Thursday. And as we chat just now at lunchtime on Monday, that looks a pretty good bet. let's go to a break coming up in part two feeling peckish pea soup beef shin and a whole pig's head are all on the menu at a new restaurant in the capital we'll see you back here in just a moment

10:30welcome back the hospitality sector is having a tough time at the moment but there's some positive news today as the restaurant group, formerly known as D &D London, is preparing to launch its first concept in almost five years, following a rebrand and overhaul of the business. Liverpool Street, Chop House and Tavern will honour London's historic restaurants using recipes from the 1600s, which celebrate East London's meat and fish traders who have supplied chefs for centuries. The building itself is an old warehouse which dates back to the East India Company and Launston Place, a favourite restaurant of Princess Diana and once the holder of a Michelin star, is due to reopen next year as well.

11:14Joining me now is The Standard's food and drink writer Josh Barry. So Josh, tell me more about this rebrand of the D &D restaurant group. D &D London has changed to Evolve, the Evolve collection and probably the most significant thing about this is they've brought in Martin Williams as CEO. He began in his new role about six months ago. So they've had a period of consolidation, looking at the restaurants that they have in the group, the kind of big hitters and the ones that might not be performing. And they're kind of reshaping things, tweaking, training staff, looking at food suppliers for meat and fish and so on, and coming up with new ideas, new concepts, all the while trying to sort of consolidate the brand and kick things up a little bit at some of their more famous names like Bluebird and Chelsea.

11:59And what is a chop house? A chop house is one of London's oldest type of restaurants, if not the oldest, dates back centuries. And they came about as a means to feed workers, really, who lived and worked in London, mostly in the city of London. Kind of affordable places where good meat and fish that kind of came through Smithfield, Billingsgate and so on. You kind of go in, sit on a kind of wooden pew, have a nice hunk of steak cooked over the fire, maybe with some sort of sauce or a nice bit of fish. Lots of pies, hearty, comforting British fare, basically. And then sort of ale and tankards and maybe a bit of wine later on.

12:41How are they planning on serving food from the 1600s? Do we know what will be on the menu? Yeah, there's a few recipes. so they work with a food historian martin was telling me to kind of go back through some genuine and authentic i know that word's terrible but whatever recipes from back in the day including there's a pea soup to the exact same recipe from 1669 i think it is and then sort of kind of barnesley lamb chops a slightly less popular fish but a really kind of good ones to have like ray ray wing with capers and lemon really kind of old recipe chicken pies and stuff and then lots of oysters beef consomme stuff like that it's the kind of food actually i don't know whether people used to watch this but heston blumenthal used to do a lot of this stuff when he was on tv more regularly kind of going back to he went all the way back to medieval times or whatever didn't he but this is a little bit later but kind of anyone who's watched like a drama on the bbc about like Victorian police or something and seeing them pick up a kind of old meat pie that just comes with a really flowery, rich, deep gravy, kind of almost like Bovril and just cracking open oysters with knives and drinking Guinness, that sort of thing really.

13:51All among kind of dark wood and low lights and candles. Dickensian almost, I suppose. Do you think they've chosen to go in this direction then? London hospitality is going through a bit of a moment, I suppose. A lot of it at the moment is about going back to basics and nailing something simple right I think it's about affordability above all else there's a reason burgers and pizza are doing so well at the moment because they're tasty and a way to go out and have a nice time but aren't going to cost the earth and there will always be the one percent you know or the ten percent as well who have lots of money and who can go to enjoy tasting menus and kind of fancy places in Mayfair but most people want to have a nice time, drink a bit of wine, have good service.

14:38And I think kind of, you know, there's a kind of nourishment to going into a place with white linen tablecloths with a sort of refined and sort of simple service, but one that feels familiar and almost nostalgic. There's a point around like sourcing good food and being sustainable, but also I think people are a

15:04stuff it's like well any restaurant should use local produce that's normal it shouldn't be like a thing or a selling point often restaurants that say ingredient lead I take it as a sign that probably their staff are not going to offer the service that I think is important basically. And what sort of price point are we talking about here is it accessible? Oysters will be a fiver each the chicken pie for two 38 quid steaks from 27 and there's a whole pig's head for 35 quid obviously it was fallow that did that first just have to shout that out i think that it's accessible for london and certainly in the city of london these are really good prices for where the restaurant is absolutely so in that respect yeah and a lot of people can afford that in town it's still a fair wag you're still going to be paying like 50 60 quid a head if you're going to have a couple of dishes and some decent wine

16:01and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm we'll see you then