London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
Here we go, here’s your daily London fix. And, hey, I guarantee you, you’re going to like springing this one on your friends.
Off to the races we go.
One hundred years ago today, London changed colour.
Not all at once, of course. The buildings stayed the same. The buses were still red. The sky was probably grey.
But at Piccadilly Circus, on this day, August 3rd, 1926, three new colours quietly took command of Britain’s busiest streets.
Red.
Amber.
Green.
One hundred years later, we obey them without a second thought.
Today we’re stopping at one of the busiest crossroads in Britain. Piccadilly Circus. The place where everybody’s in a hurry, everybody’s looking up at the giant advertising screens, and hardly anybody notices the little invention that changed the way we all move around.
Traffic lights.
Simple.
Obvious.
Inevitable.
Except, of course, they weren’t.
For thousands of years there’d been roads. For centuries there’d been London streets. For generations there’d been horses, carts, sedan chairs, hackney coaches, hansom cabs, omnibuses and pedestrians.
Nobody needed traffic lights.
You looked.
You judged.
You squeezed through.
If there was a problem, somebody shouted.
Or swore.
Or swung a fist.
Then came the motor car.
Suddenly London had a new problem.
Cars were faster than horses. Quieter, too. They could appear from nowhere. And every year there were more of them.
By the 1920s, Piccadilly Circus had become exactly what its name suggests.
A circus.
The word originally meant a circle. But it might just as well have meant a three-ring circus, because what unfolded there every day was a spectacular performance. Double-decker buses, taxis, delivery vans, motorcycles, bicycles and streams of pedestrians all trying to occupy the same patch of road at exactly the same moment.
There was only one thing preventing complete pandemonium.
A policeman.
He stood in the middle of it all.
Imagine the job.
You’re wearing a dark blue tunic and a tall helmet. There’s no little traffic island to protect you. No crash barriers. No fluorescent jacket.
Just you.
Surrounded by several tons of moving machinery.
Arms waving.
Hands slicing through the air.
Whistle shrieking.
Stop.
Go.
You.
Wait.
No, not you.
Every movement had to be crisp and unmistakable. Londoners learned to read a policeman’s gestures almost as though they were a language.
If you’ve ever watched old films of London in the 1910s and 1920s, you’ve probably seen one of these remarkable figures standing bolt upright in the middle of the road, conducting the traffic like the maestro of an exceptionally noisy orchestra.
They became celebrities in their own right.
People came to watch them.
Tourists photographed them.
Children copied them.
Some officers became famous for the elegance of their movements.
They were London’s ballet dancers.
Only with buses.
But the city kept growing.
More cars.
More buses.
More confusion.
One policeman simply couldn’t cope forever.
So London began looking abroad for ideas.
Traffic lights had already appeared in parts of the United States. Engineers there were experimenting with electrically operated signals. The systems improved. The idea caught on.
Britain watched.
And finally decided to take the plunge.
Piccadilly Circus got the honour.
On this day, one hundred years ago, Britain’s first three-colour traffic lights went into service.
Mind you, they weren’t quite as automatic as we’d imagine today.
Inside a small control cabin sat an operator, watching the traffic and changing the signals by hand.
Think of it as a policeman who’d been given a roof over his head.
Even so, it was revolutionary.
No whistles.
No frantic arm-waving.
Instead, coloured lights.
Red meant stop.
Green meant go.
Amber…
Well, amber may be the most optimistic colour ever invented.
It doesn’t really mean “go.”
It doesn’t really mean “stop.”
It means, “Be ready.”
Though, if we’re honest, generations of London drivers have interpreted it as meaning, “Quick! You can still make it.”
Some things never change.
Now here’s the delicious twist in the tale.
London had actually invented traffic lights nearly sixty years earlier.
In December 1868, outside the Houses of Parliament, the railway engineer John Peake Knight designed what is generally recognised as the world’s first traffic signal.
It looked rather like a railway semaphore.
By day it used pivoting arms.
By night it displayed red and green gas lamps.
The idea was brilliant.
The execution…
Less so.
A gas leak caused an explosion that badly injured the policeman operating it.
The experiment was abandoned.
For almost sixty years Britain decided that perhaps traffic lights weren’t such a splendid notion after all.
So today’s anniversary isn’t really the birth of traffic lights.
It’s the birth of traffic lights that actually worked.
And once London embraced them, there was no going back.
Today there are thousands across the capital.
They’re so much part of the scenery we scarcely notice them.
Unless, of course, they’re stuck on red.
Or somebody jumps the lights.
Or the electricity fails.
Then we suddenly remember why they exist.
There’s another lovely irony.
The man in the middle of the road hasn’t disappeared entirely.
Go to Horse Guards on Whitehall and you’ll still find police officers stopping the traffic.
Not because the lights have failed.
Because ceremony outranks technology.
The King’s Life Guard is changing.
The horses have right of way.
For a few minutes, twenty-first-century London bows to traditions that are centuries older than the motor car.
And somehow that feels exactly right.
That’s London.
Layer upon layer.
Roman roads.
Mediaeval lanes.
Georgian squares.
Victorian engineering.
Twentieth-century traffic lights.
And twenty-first-century Londoners trying to get to work on time.
So next time you’re at Piccadilly Circus, don’t just look up at the giant screens.
Look down.
Imagine the lone constable standing where the traffic converges.
Whistle in his mouth.
Arms cutting through the air.
Then picture the little control cabin that, one hundred years ago today, quietly ushered Britain into a new age.
Three coloured lights.
One of the biggest little changes London ever made.
Today those three colours are so familiar they’re almost invisible. Yet every time we stop at a red light, ease away on green, or take our chances with an amber, we’re taking part in a little ritual that began, here in London, exactly one hundred years ago today.
See you tomorrow.