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Samuel Pepys was not an easy-going commuter.

In the struggle to get from seething lane to Whitehall, he exhibited something close to the mindset

of the average London cyclist, deploying

the word can't, while slowly inflating with murderous feeling. Being peeps, he sought to cope with

the worst of the traffic, axle to axle on Ludgate Hill, by sending for a barrel of

oysters or getting out of his coach to investigate

the cake situation. On Wednesday the 25th of September, 1661, we find him making his way from

St Martin's Lane with Colonel Robert Slingsby. He and I and his coach through the muse, which is the way that now all coaches are

forced to go because of a stop at Charing Cross by reason of a drain there to clear the streets.

He had been down that way the previous October at St Giles' Circus to see the hanging, drawing and

quartering of Thomas Harrison the fuss of

the regicides, and he was no more pleased with the congestion then. Citizens in Restoration London

were obsessed with the nearness of death, also with shaving minutes off everything you could

shave minutes off, including crossing the road. Was that the

beginning of urban hurriedness, a phenomenon we now take for granted? For some weeks now, I've been

standing at St Giles Circus, the junction of Tottenhamcourt Road, Oxford Street, New Oxford Street and

Charing Cross Road, watching people try to pass from one

side of the road to the other. Given that we are now in 2015 and have traffic lights, generally decent

shoes and pavements free of slurry, you'd think crossing the road might be a little easier

than the journey up the north face of the Iger. Not necessarily. The crossing

has traffic lights, but they don't really work. They work on paper. The green man appears and

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