Catching Sleepers

In late 2009 I changed jobs and so did my commute to work. I began traveling on the London Underground from zones 1 to 5 and back every day. On average this resulted in me sitting on the tube for over two hours for the whole journey there and back. It wasn’t long before I was roaming the tube carriage with my eyes, reading all the adverts and watching who got on and off at each stop. During these observations I began to notice there was a regularity of people sleeping on the tube trains I frequented. At first I ignored them, trying not to look at them as much as I did with other travellers, but I soon became increasingly curious; would they miss their stop? What would happen if they snored? Were they disturbed by the change in passengers sitting next to them from stop to stop? And so on.

This curiosity grew into a fascination. Which in time motivated me to collect and document the observations of the sleepers I saw. It was very casual at first, after all there are only so many sleepers per week, but sure enough I started to amass quite a collection and some patterns already began to emerge. Initially my most prominent observation was that at the particular times I was travelling and the specific carriages I was using out of habit were frequented by ‘regulars’. Which I saw as a bit of a problem for a study, I didn’t want to capture the same people day in day out for an indefinite period of time, I began to yearn for a wide spectrum of sleepers, which lead to me sitting on the Circle Line on a Saturday and varying the route and time of my journey to work as much as possible.

Once twelve months had passed, I began to collate the results to identify the findings and see if there were any deeper insights to be had. I was then fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share the study at the Interesting North 2010 conference. Since doing so I have heard many stories about other peoples experiences sleeping on the tube and in public. And I continue to get sent pictures of sleepers with the question ‘How many points?’, a direct result of the offbeat conclusion of my talk.

Thanks very much to Tom for drawing my attention to Walker Evans who was best know for documenting the great depression, but who was also got some fantastic images of people on the Subway.