Don't let city be the death of you (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Don't let city be the death of you

7:32am Tuesday 2nd December 2008 in Doctor Tom By Dr Tom Smith

I’ve just been listening to a radio programme about the increasing difficulties for commuters.

I’ve had my fill of commuting. For several months in the Seventies I travelled by train, then the ‘drain’, every morning from Basingstoke into St Bart’s Hospital, in London.

The drain is a Tube line which passes backwards and forward between Waterloo station and the Bank, made for city men, but handy for the hospital, too. There are no seats. Everyone stands, jammed together, for the ten minutes or so that it takes.

I left home at 7am and returned at 7.15pm, provided that I had managed to get my day’s work done in time. The trains into and out of London were as crowded as the Tube, so that most mornings and evenings I had to stand.

It was chastening for me that my job then was to research the effects of stress, physical and mental, on the heart and circulation. Naturally, I was a subject, having my heart rate and blood pressure, and blood tests for other signs of stress, taken every day. The other subjects were some of my fellow researchers, and a host of postmen from the local sorting office nearby.

It soon became clear that we had to divide the subjects into two groups.

Those who lived locally and had no bother getting to and from work had quite different heart and circulation test results from those who struggled into work by train, bus, tube or car every day. The fittest were the people who walked or cycled to work, taking between 30 minutes and an hour to do so.

In my own case, if instead of a smooth journey to St Bart’s I had had a delay or rush to get there, it would be half an hour or more before my blood pressure and heart rate would return to normal, and I could start on the day’s tests.

I only did this for a few weeks. The permanent staff at the lab continued to commute daily through the monster that was London then, 30 years ago. I escaped: many of them didn’t.

My professor, who commuted from Surrey every day, died of a heart attack at 57. Three of my research colleagues succumbed to the same illness in their early 60s. One died on the train home from work, aged 49.

My escape was to country practice. My journeys from then on have been on uncluttered roads, through the most beautiful countryside, with hills all around me, to pleasant small towns and villages.

Yesterday I counted a milk lorry, a school bus and three cars on my 20 miles to a meeting.

Of course I don’t know if my move to the country did save my life. I do know that my blood pressure and heart rate are lower now than they were when I was 30 years younger, commuting into London, and that the colleagues who died early continued to struggle through the crowds.

These are anecdotal examples, not backed by statistics or other evidence, but they mean a lot to me.

We really must get to grips with the whole pattern of city life. The frustrations of being constantly in a crowd, and even in gridlock, takes a terrible toll on human happiness and life itself.

Stress induces high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, stomach and duodenal ulcers, even irritable bowel, depression, anxiety and suicide. It provokes eating disorders and asthma, and alcoholism, tobacco addiction and even drug abuse.

Much of that stress comes from the lives we are forced to lead. To live far away from the workplace is bad enough. To make the journey between home and the workplace so difficult and stressful compounds the problem. And in these times of economic uncertainty, when more and more stresses are placed upon people at work, it isn’t surprising that so many people can’t take the strain, and something gives.

So let’s have more people living near their workplace. Let’s take a lot of work out of city centres and nearer people’s homes. Where we can’t do that, let’s make city centre housing affordable for critical workers to live in. We can’t continue to dehumanise the conditions in which we work.

I’m amazed that the Government is still contemplating building 100,000 homes, for around 200,000 extra people, in and around the London area. Are they completely mad, when there are plenty of beautiful areas in which people could live and work happily in the North?

To empty the North and further crowd the South is insane, not just for economics, but for the ultimate health of the nation. I wonder why the people in Westminster, who make these decisions, can’t see it?