Beeching's legacy

If when in Italy I meet someone from England, they often say they live in London. When I am in London and meet someone from Italy they are likely to come from almost anywhere on the peninsula. Of course the explanation lies in the meaning of the word London.

Hatfield once could never have been included in the answer London. People who wanted to have their families grow up in cleaner, greener surroundings accepted up to 20 miles as the reasonable commute (16 minutes Hatfield to King's Cross, non-stop) and settled in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Essex... all the pretty towns and villages within the 20 miles. There were trains till midnight and after that it was the mail and milk trains at 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning.

Now there are commuters covering up to 100 miles each way. Those hours travelling are devastating to every kind of social network both in central London and in the communities pressed into London service. Devastating too to the families deprived of those travelling hours, and via such dangerous and inadequate services that can no longer be avoided by taking to choked roads and closed inner London.

Why do Italians live from Aosta to Lecce, happy to answer to Florentine, Roman, Mantovan, Venetian, Sicilian... indeed proud to be so, when we are scrunched up in old trains, uprooted from early lives and communities, without family homes, and living not a cycle of family life and its transformations, but only in the here and now.

Was it Beeching and his ilk who tore up the detailed social transport systems, that produced such mass discomfort and dislocation?