Ask any random person and I’m sure they’ll say that London is a huge, sprawling metropolis. Compared to other world cities though, it’s actually relatively small. When I first moved down here, I remember how it seemed utterly vast; yet as I have got to know it, it has begun to feel increasingly knowable, navigable and even walkable.

Of course, when I say that it is walkable I mean that I can go around it in my powerchair: I don’t personally have to walk anywhere. I can navigate around the city, from borough to borough, quite easily, either just in my chair or using the various types of public transport. I have written before about how much I love to explore the paths and towpaths, and how fond I have grown of London’s busses and tube system: they help the city seem far more compact than you might expect. Walk along the Regent’s Canal west from Stratford, for instance, and in a couple of hours you’ll find yourself in Central London; and the new Superloop bus routes speed up getting around Greater London even further. Thus a place which seemed so vast and sprawling, in a way now feels rather compact.

The thing is, that assumes such transport systems are working normally. Thanks to things like the Elizabeth Line, guys like me can get from one side of London to the other quicker and more easily than ever before. If such systems are not working properly, however, things obviously become far harder and slower. This afternoon, for instance, I thought I would head back to the other Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, basically as part of my effort to get to know the other side of London a bit more. The trip there looked straightforward enough: the Lizzie Line to Paddington, then the Circle line to White Lane. I guessed it wouldn’t take more than forty minutes or so. When I got to Paddington though, I was told that the lift at White Lane had broken, but fortunately I was helped to get a bus there instead.

The big difference between buses and trains is that buses have far slower: they use far more convoluted routes and have to deal with traffic. The bus I had to take,  the seven, seemed especially bad. Thus a journey I had expected to take just minutes took more than an hour, and proved far more tedious and stressful than I had expected. As a result I got to my destination far later than I thought I would, and when I did it was almost time to start thinking about heading home.

Thus the size of this city can vary from day to day: a trip that can seem quick and straightforward on one day can prove anything but on the next. This is especially true if you use a wheelchair and are thus reliant on accessible stations and working lifts. A welcoming, homely world city can turn in an instant into a sprawling, alienating labrynth. Hence Londoners can seem simultaneously small and vast, walkable and unknowable at the same time; shrinking and expanding like a lung.