Fare Grounds - NYTimes.com For those of us who cannot escape London, a largely Victorian metropolis notable for its almost surly gravity - all that red brick, all that cream-painted masonry, all those fog-cloaked Gothic revival churches - the cabbies' shelters are perhaps the most iconic of its structures. The tourist (long may she visit us!) may seize upon more obvious London logos - upright bobbies in their mammary-shaped helmets, red-painted double-decker buses and, of course, black cabs - with which to decorate her sense of the city as a 600-square-mile souvenir tea towel; but for those prepared to check in their carpetbag at the Paddington Station left-luggage office and linger awhile, it's the inconspicuous shelters that come, creepingly, insidiously, to typify the town. Shedlike structures with walls of green-painted planks, tiled pitched roofs and odd little pseudo-campaniles at the top, the cabbies' shelters squat not on the York stone curbs of London's thoroughfares but right in the road. This explains their titchiness: because they were on the public highway, the shelters could not be any bigger than the area occupied by a hansom cab and its horse. And why, I hear you plaint in your nasal, trans-Atlantic tones, were the dear little things on the public highway to begin with? Well, that's simple: by 1904 there were more than 11,000 cabs plying London's streets: 7,499 hansoms (one horse, two wheels, the driver on a raised bench behind the cabin) and 3,905 growlers (four wheels, four passengers in back, one beside the driver; Sherlock Holmes leaps into a growler at the beginning of "The Sign of Four," his second outing on the royal road to literary immortality). We know these very precise numbers because our London cabbies - they of the bolivating, the bellyaching and the casual bigotry so beloved of our foreign visitors - have been licensed since 1639. Yes, for nigh on four centuries they've been leaning down to expectant faces and querying, "Where to, guv?" However, by the late 19th century there were so many of them that regulations were introduced making it illegal for cabs to clop about willy-nilly. Instead, their drivers were required to remain on their ranks until someone hired them. Now, your mid-Victorian London cabbie was - unlike his modern counterpart - not a notably abstemious figure; so, as the way always is with le bon ton in our burg, a group of worthies clubbed together to provide a solution to the problem of cabbies sitting on their ranks getting mullered. "Mullered," meaning to get utterly drunk, derives by way of British prison slang from the Old English "mull," meaning "to grind to a powder"; not - as Michael Caine would say when playing the cockney superspy Harry Palmer - a lot of people know that. Headed up by the Earl of Shaftesbury, the worthies established some 64 cabbie shelters throughout central London. Since the cabbies couldn't leave their ranks, the wealthy philanthropists brought refreshment to them wrapped up in green-painted planks; and since the shelters must perforce be "ranked-up," they also had to be the size of cabs. The size of cabs on the outside, that is, but on the inside it's quite a different matter. Allow me a further digression: another icon of the London streets is the police box, a blue booth about the size of a telephone box (itself yet another London icon, now utterly inutile). The police box was equipped with a rotating blue light on its Moorish roof and a telephone for bobbies to call in the Depression-era equivalent of an airstrike: truncheon-wielding bovver boys on horseback. In the unfeasibly long-running BBC science-fiction show "Doctor Who," the police box is transformed into the time-traveling hero's Tardis, a multidimensional vehicle that is far, far larger on the inside, and houses all the flashing-light-bedizened consoles beloved of futuristically inclined set designers. Well, the cabbies' shelters are like this; from the outside they have the air of little cricket pavilions that have been - somewhat oxymoronically - urbanely rusticated. I always think of them as mysteriously antedating London itself, and having been plonked down there for two long millenniums while the concrete and clay built up around them. But on the inside they are equipped with a dining area - a U-shaped table, benches along the walls that can seat 12 - and an en suite kitchen where some jolly old boiler can fry up bacon sarnies and stew tea strong enough to trot morbidly obese Mickey on. "Boiler" as a derogatory expression for a woman of advanced years derives from tough old fowl that require boiling; "sarnies" I think self-explanatory. The shelters are so cunningly carpentered - with everything neatly hinged, tongued and grooved, that even with a full complement of cabbies supping, sipping and smoking (hence the mock-campanile; it's really an air vent) they still feel roomy. Not that you, dear reader, will ever be able to experience this palatial interior; of the remaining 13 shelters several are open for takeaways, but to sit in the inner sanctum you would need either to be an initiate of that profound London mystery "the Knowledge," or to be friendly with one such. As acquiring the Knowledge - a route-finding overview of the city comprising the names of all streets and notable buildings within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross - can take up to three years of alfresco study, you're better off trying to get pally with one who has it already: a licensed London cabbie. As I say, there are now only 13 of the shelters, and that we have even these we owe to the descendants of the Earl of Shaftesbury: their fore-philanthropists looked out for the peas, they've concerned themselves with the pod. I spoke to Harriet Anstruther, who, together with her mother, Lady Anstruther (the architect Susan Walker), and the Heritage of London Trust, was part of a group that convened to save the cabbies' shelter in South Kensington. Harriet, an interior designer, waxed enthusiastic about the ineffable dinkiness of the cabbies' shelters: "It's very exacting inside," she said, "given that they couldn't be any bigger - yet there's nothing dull about them, because each one has a vibe of its own. You can imagine the cabbies all having their favorite one. It's like a little secret club. One rather wishes one had one in the back garden. Harriet occasionally attends the South Kensington shelter for the bacon sarnies and infusions with rodent-exercising capabilities - but of course this is only as a takeaway customer. To get inside, as I've said, you need connections. Naturally I have these, in the form of a third-generation cabbie, Harry Harris. Up above I imputed to the London cabbie certain stereotypical characteristics, but Harris fulfills none of these; a cabbie he may have been (he drove for more than 20 years), but he's also a trained psychotherapist as well as a TV writer. I met Harris when I was doing research for my novel "The Book of Dave," which cast a London cabbie as the founder of a religion of the distant future, and he provided insights into that secret club. n search of authenticity Harris and I visited the shelter near Little Venice, where a well-known character called Benny used to hold forth. This was seven years ago, but I still remember spirited effing and blinding about the property prices in Canvey Island (a landform where many cabbies live that resembles a cross between South Central L.A. and a Dutch polder). On this occasion I met Harris at Russell Square tube station, and giving the delights of the surpassingly gloomy bar in the Hotel Russell a swerve, we strolled to the cabbies' shelter. Harris was already getting a little stressed at the thought of immuring himself in this little green tomb, and it was with considerable relief that we found the shelter locked up tight as the proverbial tick. Seated in a chain Italian deli where we ordered risotto with pancetta and honey truffle oil (the bacon sarnie de nos jours), I asked Harris why he still found the thought of sitting in the shelter so intimidating: "They're so claustrophobic, and the cabbies that use them are so cliquey." Did he ever use them when he was driving? "Never," he replied flatly. I'm quite fussy about my food. He did, he conceded, sometimes eat at a cabbies' cafe called Muratori. "They're always desperate to talk," Harris continued disconsolately. That's my memory of being in the shelters - lots of drivers just talking, talking, and not ever listening at all. Certainly the cabbies in the shelter at Westbourne Grove one Sunday in September 1888 exemplified this garrulous tendency. Thomas Ryan, who looked after the shelter, related to a reporter from The Daily Telegraph how a man came in around 4 o'clock: "He had a thick mustache, but no beard, had clean white hands, was round-headed, his eyes very restless, and he seemed to have been drinking." The cabbies in the shelter at the time were talking about the murder victims discovered that morning in Whitechapel, and when Ryan opined that he'd give an awful lot to know who'd committed them, the stranger blandly declared that he had. The cabbies, taking the man for a drunk, simply went on jawing. I imagine them displaying what Harris calls "macho, inarticulate energy." Although no doubt that energy would have found another outlet besides talk if they'd really believed Jack the Ripper was in their midst. The idea that the shelters are like little Masonic lodges may have had some traction in the past, but nowadays there seems little real honor among London cabbies. Scraping the last few grains around our truffle-oily plates with our forks, Harris and I mournfully expatiated on the declining status of the London cab trade. The iconic black cabs - rounded like old Bakelite telephones - have finally begun to be replaced by angular Mercedes, and there's even talk of Nissan cabs! There's also the willingness of London cabbies to use G.P.S., thus entirely devaluing the years they spent acquiring their knowledge of London's highways and byways. It may well be that my intimation concerning those odd little green huts, the cabbies' shelters, is the right one: and that just as they look as if they preceded the city and its 400-year-old cabbing tradition, so may they remain when all the cabbies they once fed and housed are long gone.