‘People have stood next to my cab and ordered an Uber': The black cabbies fighting to survive

Telegraph

09-04-2025

There are about 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross Station, the traditional centre of London. Some are vast, Monopoly-board avenues that form part of A-roads. Others are tiny medieval passages barely wide enough for a portly mare. A rare few are Roman straight; the odd one makes some sense; but the vast majority, in a city as old and gloriously unplanned as London, are tarmacked scribbles.
To know them all would be near-impossible, but black-cab drivers do. That's the theory, anyway. The Knowledge of London, the legendarily difficult test all black cabbies must pass, takes three or four years to study for, largely because it requires memorising every route and point of interest in that circle.
The result is that a passenger can ask to be taken almost anywhere in the capital and the driver needs only the two seconds it takes for their customer to open the door and slump into the back seat to figure out the journey.
'The Knowledge really is as hard as they say,' Shane Gardner says, crawling up the rank at Waterloo Station. She's driven a black cab for nine years. 'People have talked about making it easier. But that's what makes us different, isn't it? That level of quality. We've still got to be that good or what have we got?'
Gardner's diesel TX4 is one of 28 black cabs on the rank this Monday lunchtime. A few years ago, she says, 'the queue would have gone all the way round the station, down the ramp, and back down onto York Road. We kept moving because the fares kept coming. There's so few of us now.'
These are lean times for black cabs. Recent figures show the number licensed by Transport for London (TfL) dropped from 22,810 in 2013-14 to just 14,470 in 2023-24, while only 104 new drivers were licensed last year – 10 per cent of the figure in 2016. If those numbers continue at this rate, there will be no black cabs on the road at all in 2045.
The reasons for this are manifold, everything from the rise of Uber and other private hire companies to cycle lanes, the threat of driverless cars, and the difficulty of The Knowledge. Drivers invariably mention the soaring cost of zero-emission capable taxis. Now the only model able to be licensed, their price has risen 40 per cent to £75,000 in the last eight years.
'They're too expensive. Fellas my age, we own our cabs. But I'll never get one of the electrics. The young blokes you see driving them work for the finance company, because they'll never own it,' says Phil, another cabbie on the Waterloo rank. He's 64, and has been in the trade since 1981.
'In my day you could take out a loan, work like the clappers for three years, then own it. I planned on being in this till I retire, and we used to be able to keep our cabs for 15 years, after that you can't relicense them. Well, our lovely mayor, Sadiq – sorry, * Sir * Sadiq Khan – brought that down to 12. Who's going to take a massive loan right at the end of their career? It's that or rent one for £3-400 per week. Maybe it's OK for young fellas but look up and down this rank. It's not young fellas.'
He's correct. TfL statistics show that 62 per cent of cabbies are aged over 53, and given every driver I speak to during a day riding black cabs around the city has to be crowbarred away from extolling the negatives, the applications probably aren't pouring in.
Traditionally, cabbies call the lean, early months of the year 'kipper season' (as it's all they could afford to eat), but that season's now longer and longer. 'Takings are down,' Gardner says. 'You're waiting longer at stations, the hands aren't going up… It's not pretty for people coming into the trade.'
Still, when nudged towards positives, Gardner, whose cab bears the sticker 'Mama's Taxi', can still find them. 'I like being my own boss, sorting my own hours,' she says. 'You meet so many interesting people, all sorts, and if you want time out to do up your house or go to your kids' schools or whatever, you can. Besides I like driving, I enjoy it.'
At Waterloo, I ask Gardner to take the photographer, Geoff, and me to Russell Square. It's a straightforward one – Waterloo Bridge, Strand Underpass, Southampton Row, it's on your left, if you pass the old Hotel Russell, now the Kimpton, you've gone too far – but when she took The Knowledge, examiners could have thrown any of thousands of possible 'runs' at her.
During the process, candidates at 'Knowledge College' are summoned for 'appearances', potentially dozens of them, at which an examiner tests them on multiple A-B routes. These won't just be streets but also 'places of interest' like hospitals, prominent offices, transport hubs, sights, consulates, green spaces and possibly even pieces of public art.
Afterwards, they could make fairly light work of the following: 'Grafton Square to the Myddleton Arms, please, stopping at the Gabon Embassy, then the Traveller's Club where my guest will jump in, but we also need to pick some things up from the Cabinet Office and the CBRE headquarters en route. Oh and it'd be good to pass the 'Boadicea' statue if there's time?'
Studies have suggested a black-cab driver's hippocampus enlarges due to the sheer amount of names, places and routes they come to know. It is, Gardner says, a skill that never leaves you. Her father drove a black cab for 22 years. He has Alzheimer's disease now, but while many of his most important memories have slipped, he still retains his in-built GPS.
She smiles. 'I can say to him, 'What can you tell me about the Strand, Dad?' And he'll come to life and go, 'Well you've got the Savoy Hotel, then Somerset House, then Waterloo Bridge or down to Fleet Street and St Paul's…' It's amazing. Some stuff is embedded so deeply, I guess, it just never leaves.'
Gardner bases herself on the rank at Waterloo as it was her father's patch, too. 'Some days you can sit there for two hours waiting for a fare, then someone asks for Tommy's [St Thomas's Hospital, about a 2 minute walk away]. You just have to laugh.'
The furthest she's gone is Oxford – a £300 fixed fare in a snowstorm. Other trips she'll willingly give for free. The generosity of drivers can vary, but there are unwritten credos in the trade. 'I did a Great Ormond Street run earlier, so I did that for free.'
That's typical. It's also tradition for drivers to not charge for their very first and very last runs, and many will give free trips to veterans on Remembrance Day. Unlike a lot of taxi companies, black cabs never refuse a woman in labour, either. And some might look kindly on damsels in distress.
'I picked up a young lady on the Aldwych to go towards Canary Wharf once,' says Gardner. 'I kept chatting to her and she was quite worse for wear. Then she got very aggressive so I stopped and called the police and an ambulance. I still wanted to take care of her.
'The police proceeded to take her to the most expensive hotel in Canary Wharf to sleep it off. So I guess she learnt her lesson when she woke up...'
Like every cabbie I meet today, Gardner isn't a fan of the current mayor. 'I don't think he's on our side at all.' This isn't necessarily party political, she simply feels that under Khan's management, London has become a worse place to be a driver.
'I've lost the love of it a bit, I'm staying out longer and longer. I've had enough of the traffic. They're trying to bring down emission levels but how is that happening when you've got a load of stationary traffic with their engines running?'
Well, I guess the idea is that you go electric. 'There used to be all these enticements – no road tax, Congestion Charge exemption, the cost of charging was low. Now those are gone, or [in the case of the Congestion Charge, which will include electric vehicles from December this year] about to go.'
There has been an organised taxi service in London since at least 1654, when the government of Oliver Cromwell ordained that hackney coachmen and carriages in and around the cities of London and Westminster should be regulated by the Court of Alderman of the City of London. The name 'hackney carriage', incidentally, has nothing to do with the now trendy borough to the east, but instead the Norman French word hacquenée, which refers to a horse suitable for hiring.
The drivers are rightly proud of their culture. 'We're a good laugh, on the whole. Quite funny people. And we look after each other,' Gardner says. When Uber arrived, around a decade ago, she found 'they were quite aggressive to women drivers, blocking me in, but we had WhatsApp groups, so I'd get back up…'
At Russell Square is a green cabman's shelter. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 61 such wooden huts – the shape of a shipping container, and originally built to be no wider than a horse and cart, per city regulations – were built near taxi ranks to offer drivers a place to rest and get a hot drink or meal during their shift.
Today there are 13 left. Inside each is an attendant, a small kitchen, room for about a dozen cabbies to sit on a U-shaped bench, and a hatch at the other end for passing trade. A strict 'no alcohol or gambling' rule operates, and non-cabbies are prohibited from going inside.
There are no drivers at the Russell Square shelter when I arrive, so I hail another black cab, this time driven by Zoe Flint, 51, who's normally based at King's Cross but sometimes cruises, looking for a raised hand in Holborn and Covent Garden.
'We can't just blame Uber for the situation we're in,' she says, pulling back onto Southampton Row. 'There's too many vehicles on the road full stop. We're all competing for the same bit of tarmac. It's frustrating for me and frustrating for the passenger, seeing that meter go up.'
Hers is an electric cab rented from Sherbet, the leading eco black cab company. 'Sherbet Dip-Dab, cab,' Flint says. 'The tourists like that one, if they even know what cockney rhyming slang is…'
A decade ago, she says, Uber, Bolt and other app-based private hire companies were muscling in on the patch and stealing fares. 'I don't know if that's quite the case now, they were just new kids on the block. We're actually very competitive, price-wise.'
It's true: you hear people remark more and more that Uber – with all its algorithmic surge-pricing – has become more expensive than a metered cab in London these days. Add to that the fact you can pre-order a black cab on multiple apps, plus the quality of the service, and you realise it's not the product that's the problem.
Flint comes to a stop. 'The sad thing is, we probably will die out. We may be competitive, but if you don't use it, you lose it.' A few days after we meet, TfL, which sets black cab meter prices, announced fares would increase in April by double the rate of inflation in an effort to address rising costs for drivers and to ensure that a career as a cabbie remained viable.
We've made it to Grosvenor Gardens in Belgravia, and another green cabman's shelter. At the tiny hatch, the attendant, Fliss, leans out and scrutinises me, then invites me in through the side door to meet the cabbies. You'd never know it from the outside, but a cackle of six drivers huddle in the back, joking and gossiping.
A few scatter with my arrival. Between them, they might well have driven all the roads in London. 'Between us,' Paul Warby says, looking around the room and weighing the likelihood up, 'yeah, it's possible.' Warby, 59, has been driving for 19 years. Sitting opposite him, Judith Elliot, 57, has done 26 years. Next to her, 62 year-old Marion Margetson is on 27.
'So I'm just a rookie, a junior one,' Warby says, smiling. 'A butter boy.'
A what?
'But-a-boy. A new driver. We call them butter boys. People say it's because they'd be taking the bread and butter from the mouths of older drivers and their families, but really it's but-a-boy, as in, you are but a boy.' Later I look this up; opinions vary.
Tossing the question of why so many drivers have disappeared, they each give a different reason at once. 'Khan!' says one driver on his way out. 'Want to know what we call him? Khanage. Man couldn't run a bath…'
'Uber!' comes another cry, this time from Elliot. 'It is, look at the numbers.' She takes out her phone to check TfL figures for the end of March. 'There's 16,000 black-cab drivers and 106,000 private licences. That's why there's so much traffic.'
Margetson blames road closures, low-traffic neighbourhoods, cycle lanes and the like meaning black cabs cannot offer a door-to-door service anymore – once a point of difference.
'There's a massive recession coming, and we can see it because who are always the first people to tighten their belts? The wealthy. We've started to be seen as a luxury item, and we can see they're taking cabs less,' Elliot says.
'Can I ask you a question?' she continues, 'when did you last hail a cab?' To my shame, I cannot remember. Whenever it was, I probably put it on expenses. 'People don't look up and hail, they look down and at their phones if they need a cab. I've had people stand next to my cab and order an Uber.'
It's a sentiment Phil, back at Waterloo, was keen to make. 'Talk to a 20-year-old and they do not give a toss about us, they didn't grow up with black cabs, they don't know the value of it. That's why this rank will be owned by Uber or some other tech company one day,' was his frank estimation.
Outside the shelter, Elliot cleans a speck of London plane tree bark from the roof of her taxi. 'What people don't realise is that if we lose black cabs, it's not just the cabs. It's the mechanics, the garages, these shelters, all those jobs too,' she says.
Famously, London's black cabs must have a turning circle of 25ft, allowing them to perform the nimblest u-turns in a city of preposterously narrow streets. No need to pause, no need to reverse. Over the decades, this has come to form the cabbie character. They don't like to sit still, and they hate going backwards.
'It's not in our nature to sit in traffic. We just want another fare, we don't like the meter running up, we like to keep moving,' Elliot says. 'A to B, A to B.' She looks to Warby for agreement, who nods. Then she unlocks her cab. 'That's it really.'