ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the complexity of London's road network and its rhythmic irregularities thus worked to frustrate attempts to automate pedestrians and recodify their practices as a disciplined set of habituated responses. Any instruction to Cross Now' remained dangerously direct, whilst uncontrolled crossings had always to be supplemented by an informal mutual courtesy. London's interwar pedestrians were thus refashioned as strangely hybrid creatures. Whilst more generally aligned to wider corporate objectives, the contingencies of the metropolitan street demanded a more sophisticated form of predictable behaviour. Pedestrian management became less about habituating certain corporeal actions, than about instilling a type of intelligent responsiveness that could readily adapt to all unforeseen circumstance. This moved the underlying model of British pedestrian management beyond the docility of the Taylorised labourer, towards the more complex intelligence of the cybernetic subject that Norbert Wiener would articulate at the end of the Second World War.
