Fly the Tube

Someone looks like they were a bit troubled on the London Underground heading to Heathrow, if the scrawled message on following ad is anything to go by.


I was at the Football 3's soft launch with my friend Utku who works for Mint Digital (great idea to turn their meeting room into a pub, by the way) and he showed me a photo he took on Sunday.

The ad was extolling the virtues of Tube as the best way to fly, but someone else reckoned that getting a train would be better than flying. Maybe it was a message about saving carbon footprints rather than a speed issue though.

Either way, the ad about Heathrow reminded me of an London Underground ad from the Seventies, which promoted the Tube as "The only way to fly".


So I grabbed my Underground Art book and sure enough, the ad, with it's very Seventies looking typeface, was there. As you can see, it's next to another more striking ad showing a clamped Tube.

The ad on the left is from 1984 & refers to when wheel clamping was introduced. "The absurd image of a clamped Tube train makes the advantage of Underground travel immediately obvious" wrote Oliver Green in the book.

However, as I live reasonably close to Heathrow, I usually take the opposite approach and take a taxi rather than a Tube to the airport. It's faster for me as I don't have to faff around with my luggage on a packed Tube or deal with interchanges. But loads of people do get the Tube to Heathrow rather than the Heathrow Express. I've never taken the Heathrow Express, but I have missed a flight through being stuck on the Gatwick Express, so I wouldn't see the train as the "only" way to fly.