Travelling with Small Children: The Part of London Public Transport Nobody Warns You About

The deep Tube lines — Central, Bakerloo, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Waterloo & City — have no air conditioning. They were built into clay 150 years ago and the clay holds heat. Recorded summer carriage temperatures regularly exceed 35°C. This is hotter than the legal limit for transporting livestock. It is the environment you are about to put a six-month-old into.

A flushed, screaming baby on the Central Line in July is not "your baby being difficult." It is a small human responding to heat stress in the only way a six-month-old can.

Every parent of a young child in London has had this moment. The toddler is having a meltdown. You have tried every distraction in your arsenal. And across the carriage, a man in a suit — or sometimes a woman in expensive trainers — is looking at you in a way that says, clearly and without speaking it: "Why did you have to bring it on here."

You are not imagining this look. It is a real look. And it is not a judgement that has anything useful to say about you, your child, your parenting, or your right to be in public space. It is, however, exhausting to absorb on top of everything else. The private car is the space where that look does not exist.

Toddlers kick. Toddlers throw snacks. Toddlers smear yogurt on the seat. Toddlers kick the seat in front. Toddlers kick the leg of the stranger next to them, which the parent then has to apologise for, while the stranger sighs theatrically, while the toddler — sensing tension — does it again.

None of this is the child's fault. A two-year-old confined to a static seat in a hot crowded space cannot regulate their behaviour the way an adult can. They are doing exactly what a two-year-old is supposed to do. The environment is what's wrong, not the child.

Breastfeeding in public is legal in the UK and explicitly protected by the Equality Act. That law does not, unfortunately, change how a new mother feels when a hungry six-week-old has to be fed on a packed Northern Line train, with no privacy, with the eyes of strangers either pointedly looking away or — sometimes worse — pointedly not. Bottle-feeding is not always easier; the heat of a Tube ruins the temperature of formula, and finding somewhere to sit to do it at all is its own challenge.

This is not about whether you "should" feel comfortable feeding in public. Of course you have the right. The point is that many mothers, particularly in the early months, would simply prefer not to do it under forty strangers' gaze on a 35-degree carriage — and a private car offers that choice. A rear-facing seat in a quiet vehicle is a different experience from a Tube bench. Both are legal. One is dignified.

You needed a wipe. To get the wipe, you had to open the bag. To open the bag on a moving Tube, you had to put it on your lap. The train lurched. The bag tipped. Three nappies, a tube of Sudocrem, two dummies and a small pot of Calpol are now rolling around the floor of the carriage. The man in the suit (see Reality 02) is watching.

The entire mechanics of caring for a small child — feeding, changing, distracting, comforting — is designed for a private, contained, climate-controlled space. The Tube is the opposite of that space. Every parent who has done it knows the cost.