London in the snow

Often London is a great place to live - today showed that sometimes it's like living in the dark ages. Overnight approx 6 inches of snow feel on London. It wasn't a great surprise - it had been forecast since Thursday and the snow started to fall late yesterday afternoon. Yet despite this the transport system today was the worst I've ever seen it London since I moved down here over a decade.

None of the roads appeared to have been gritted. The local authorities are saying they did grit them - but on the evidence I saw today (and believe me I walked a great many miles in SW and central London) gritting looked to be minimal/non-existent. This meant no buses in London - not a single one! Six million journeys a day are made on London buses - how was that going to happen today? The really annoying thing was the main roads and bus routes were not too bad - the ones I walked along were certainly passable and on the whole pretty clear. Of course the irony is that had the buses actually been running the routes would have cleared even faster.

Quite how the tubes ground to a halt is a little strange. The Circle line - which is actually underground for its entire route - was suspended all day; as was much of the network regardless of whether it was under or overground.

As for the trains... Trains in London even on a good day can be pretty dire - today was carnage. No Southern, South Eastern or First Capital Connect services. South West trains was entirely random - I hiked a couple of miles to another station and managed to make my way into work but coming home was dreadful - not a scrap of information at Waterloo and the website described a 'skeleton' service that was, at best, largely aspirational and on the whole fictional. To top it all when I did get a train it got stuck behind one that had broken down!

I know 'adverse' weather will be difficult - but this weather was well predicted and not that 'adverse'. What really annoys me in this 'information age' was the simple lack of information. South West Trains, Network Rail and Waterloo station in particular should be thoroughly ashamed.

London is supposed to be a world city, the capital of a well developed nation, the next Olympic city. Today it proved to be 'third' world - and at times not even that.

On the plus side, with all the snow, today it did look absolutely stunning.