Britain is losing another working-class route to modest affluence
Walking to The Telegraph each morning, I am reminded that even the finest creations have their own natural lifespan and eventually reach obsolescence.
The red London phone box is a globally recognised instant symbol of our capital city. Yet who needs public phones today? The six exemplars I pass have all had their phones taken away, but the boxes can't be removed as they are listed. The kiosks have instead been resolutely drilled shut.
This leads to the daily spectacle of tourists furiously but forlornly tugging at their doors hoping to pose for holiday snaps – but all to no avail. Saving our heritage is to be applauded, but whether we need to preserve quite so many of Gilbert Scott's now redundant cubes is another matter.
Might the black cab be facing a similar trajectory? In 2013-14, there were 22,810 licensed cabs on London's streets – an all time high. By 2023-24 this had fallen to around 14,500, a fall of one third in 10 years.
The number of licences issued to new drivers stood at 1,010 in 2016 – it was 110 last year. On current trends, the Centre for London think tank has estimated the last cab will be off our capital's roads by 2045.
The rate of decline could actually speed up as Transport for London figures show 62pc of cabbies are aged 53 or over. Future tourists might be reduced to posing in a fibreglass mock up of a black cab taking them nowhere, perhaps conveniently positioned in the by then superfluous ranks outside London's railway stations.
Or they may instead decide they can only get their much desired quintessential London photo by travelling to Baku in Azerbaijan. In the run up to hosting Eurovision in 2012, the Azeri government decided their capital's streets could do with some black cab glamour and ordered 1,000.
Before hosting the Cop-29 climate conference last year, they acquired a further 300 zero-emission capable hybrid models. Most conveniently, the oil town on the Caspian Sea also has a small neighbourhood modelled on London's garden squares (and another on Parisian arrondissements). So post-2045, Baku may be the very best place to snap a now lost London street scene.
An argument can be made that the decline in the cab trade is the inevitable product of human progress. Who needs a cabbie who has spent years cramming to acquire The Knowledge when a driver who only arrived in London a few months ago can instantly find the same, or even a better, route via sat nav?
Black cabs thrived on restrictive practices – they can be overpriced and infuriating. In my experience, the one trade that out-moans cabbies is that of the university academic – any casual conversation will likely soon turn into a hard luck story in both cases.
Back when Ken Livingstone was mayor in the 2000s, the traditional cabbies' complaint was that licences were being handed out like confetti and there were too many now on the road. Now it is that Sadiq Khan is strangling the trade.
Sadiq has indeed been a nightmare for black cab drivers. Low traffic neighbourhoods and complicated one way systems, the insistence on new vehicles all being expensive and electric, forcing old diesel models to be taken off the road after 12 years – these have all made the cabbies' lot an unhappy one.
But just as with the old print unions, technology means the decline is almost certainly inevitable.
Nevertheless, the cabbies' decline is a tragedy which has nothing to do with the much vaunted argument that London has the best cabs in the world. The trade has traditionally been that rare thing – a route for working-class men with few academic qualifications to make a decent living.
Cabbies can still reportedly make £100,000 or more if they put in a six-day week. One does not want to cast aspersions on the honesty of the trade, but in years gone by when most rides were still paid for in cash, it would have compared handsomely to the take home pay of all but the most successful professionals.
While no longer the case, it is true that in the past London's cabs were overwhelmingly driven by white men. But even then, the trade was more diverse than sometimes imagined.
It is estimated that in the 1960s, about one third of all cabbies were Jewish. The children of penniless immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe found a way to relative prosperity by driving cabs.
It took them out of the East End and to suburbia. Their children in turn went to university and joined the professions. The quintessential white, male, working-class profession is in fact also an immigrant success story.
It is easy to say the cab trade is an anachronism, but such anachronisms make us richer as a society. It will not be a happy day when another non-academic route to modest affluence is cut off. There are far too few of them already.
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