By
Alessandro Patel
BSc Anthropology
Waterloo Station at 6pm on a Friday.
The departures board flickers in that slightly impatient way station boards do, the crowd breathes in and out, and the whole place feels as if it knows more than it is willing to say. I’m heading back to Winchester, trying to look like someone who understands the flow, even when the flow itself feels uncertain.
People gather near a blocked entrance. A few hold their bags closer. Others drift forward in tiny experiments, testing whether the space will open for them. It rarely does. The scene feels improvised but strangely reliable, as if the crowd has collectively agreed on a method without discussing it. There are no instructions, yet people seem to know what’s required to keep things moving: a shuffle forward, a pause, a brief glance that checks whether someone else is planning the same move as you. Nothing dramatic, nothing orderly, but enough to function.
I catch myself joining in before I even think about it. My head lifts for a second, scanning faces, signs, gaps, then lowers again once I think I’ve read enough to act. That brief glance becomes a habit before I realise it’s happening. I’m no longer consciously watching the crowd; my body is making decisions based on cues I barely register. It’s a strange sort of attention, active but unspoken, personal yet shared.
It reminds me of a practical I did earlier in the week, timing geese as they lifted their heads from the grass. Back then, I framed it as data collection: intervals, patterns, predictable variables. Something neat enough to measure and tame enough to plot on a graph. I treated their behaviour as something separate from mine. I told myself humans don’t move like that. Humans, I thought, have reasons, conversations, intentions. We don’t just lift our heads because something shifts in the corner of our eye.
But Waterloo Station disagrees.
It behaves with its own kind of vigilance. People balance attention and momentum without speaking, picking up cues from strangers they’ll never meet again. Someone turns slightly and three people behind them reposition. A hesitation spreads like a ripple. A confident stride encourages others to follow. The behaviour of one unelected leader, learned more through trial and error than any formal teaching, appears reliable enough to trust in moments of uncertainty.
What feels small ends up shaping everything:
each slight pause,
each uncertain shift,
each decision to follow someone who seems to know where they’re going.
The city rests on these tiny but constant adjustments. They aren’t rules, but habits, shared instincts that make public life possible.
I think back to the practical, the assumptions I made, the distance I tried to place between myself and the geese. I wanted animal behaviour to be a tidy chapter in a module, contained and separate. But in this station, surrounded by bodies tuning themselves to one another, it becomes harder to maintain that distance. My own behaviour fits the same logic. I lift my head when others lift theirs. I read the room by watching how other people read it. I’m part of the pattern, not outside of it.
When my platform number finally appears, a small group breaks away. Not the whole crowd, just those bound for the same direction. The rest continue waiting, focused on their own rows on the board. This selective movement feels familiar now. It echoes the way animals respond only to the signals that matter to them. Everything else fades into background noise.
I move with the group, letting their certainty carry me towards the platform. The walk is brief but steady, the kind that blends into itself. What stands out most is the shift from noise to order: the loose chaos of the concourse tightening into lines as people prepare to board.
Inside the train, the windows reflect us only in fragments: coats, backpacks, faces softened by relief, the quiet satisfaction of having finally escaped the station. The platform is now someone else’s problem.
Someone yawns. Someone’s already doomscrolling. Someone wrestles a suitcase into the overhead rack with a kind of tired precision, the awkward grace earned from a long week at work. My own reflection drifts in and out of view, half-obscured by movement.
Anthropology often emphasises the unfamiliar, the distant, the ‘field site’ that requires travel. But sometimes the most revealing fieldwork happens in the places you pass through without thinking: on buses, in queues, near blocked entrances, under flickering station boards. These moments expose how much of life depends on small decisions made alongside strangers, how attention, hesitation, and trust mingle without needing to be named.
Yet nothing resolves itself neatly. There is no takeaway. The moment passes, as moments do, leaving only the faint sense that something was learned and might be forgotten just as quickly.
Anthropolitan 