2 hours ago
5
Park Royal is the worst underground station in London and therefore the world. You come out of a stubby 1930s entrance hall that must have been cute once, right on to a dual carriageway. There’s a hotel on the other side of the road, and a tourist will most likely approach you, asking how she’s supposed to cross, and your answer will be just a sub-verbal collapse into nothingness. There is no obvious way to cross the road. This place was built for cars, and if you’re not a car, you’re stuck in a tube station now. There is actually an underpass, but that’s no excuse for dystopian urban planning.
I was there helping the Stop Trump Coalition make a video before the US president’s state visit, whenever that might be, and they were there to see Tesla Takedown, which is not as antagonistic as it sounds, just a score of people, one dressed as a shark for some reason, holding signs that said: “Honk if you hate billionaires.” Tesla drivers were honking as they drove into the showroom. It wasn’t the easiest thing to guess, a year ago, that you were buying an ad for the values of Elon Musk, nor what those values would transpire to be.
Everyone honked: big cars, small cars; rich people, not rich people; an Ocado van. An ambulance put its siren on. Was this a movement building? “The feedback mechanism of a honk is quite ephemeral, isn’t it?” said an anthropologist who had declined to be interviewed. But hah, he shouldn’t have kept talking to me.
It was the smallest protest I’d ever seen, unless you count the Prettiest Staffy in Lewisham beauty pageant, organised by someone to low-key protest against the vilification of staffordshire bull terriers. But those on it – US progressives, a woman from Ukraine who has lived in the UK since before the Russians invaded, an anti-Brexit campaigner who had brought his EU flag – should have been the most politically depressed people you could meet, whereas in fact, they were the least.
The true mechanism of a honk is that it buoys the spirit, for ages, possibly for ever.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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