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SCMP Reporter

Londoners are lonely and going underground to look for love. The British capital is swinging again this summer as residents bask in a newly invigorated economy that has brought top fashion designers, chefs and anyone who has anything to do with style back to London.

 But it seems many of the beautifully turned out customers packing the trendy restaurants are hungry for love rather than the latest cuisine.

 Newspapers are packed with advertisements for dating agencies that cater to every kind of personal need and background. Some specialise in particular types of sexual tastes, while others cater for a particular type of clientele.

 Wanna-be lovers can select their partners according to age or profession, or let salaries shape their requirements.

 But this summer a new dating phenomenon has developed with people searching for their partners on London's ancient underground rail system: the tube.

 Sliding Doors, a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, has made the predatory passenger respectable and one magazine now runs a weekly column where commuters advertise to try to get in touch with a possible partner they glimpsed on the train home from work.

 In the movie, Paltrow plays an executive who loses her job and meets a man on the tube on her way home whom she falls in love with.

 Or does she? In a parallel life the character just misses the train carrying her potential lover and she travels home to her unfaithful boyfriend.

 This romantic comedy has achieved almost cult status in London and led to the publication of 'real life stories' of couples who have met on the underground.

 Time Out, the London listings magazine and style bible, has started a classified column where passengers who glimpsed someone across a crowded carriage try to make contact.

 'Underground, 27th. 10.30 am. Central Line. Shepherds Bush to Notting Hill Gate. You: fair and demure. Me: dark curly hair, carrying two bags, overwhelmed,' a typical piece in a recent edition reads, with an accompanying box number in the hope the once seen passenger will get in touch.

 'Metropolitan Line, 19th about 5 pm from Baker Street: brown hair, brown suede jacket, long black skirt. We exchanged glances and smiles until I got off. Wish I had jumped back on that train with you! Please, please write,' another pleads.

 A quick survey suggests about 60 per cent of the classifieds are placed by men trying to contact a woman.

 But most are written in such a way that it is difficult to tell whether the 'gorgeous blonde in black coat travelling on the Victoria line' was male or female.

 Articles in British papers have even suggested which of the train system's 11 lines is most likely to provoke an introduction that could end in love.

 The District line, which stretches across the capital from the suburbs in Essex to the gentrified streets of Wimbledon and Richmond in the southwest of the capital, is highly recommended.

 Apparently the long distance between stations on this line allows plenty of time for commuters huddled behind their newspapers to exchange shy glances which might develop into something more than an embarrassed introduction.

 The crowded, dirty and unreliable tube system seems an unlikely place to provoke passion. Breakdowns are frequent and many of the tunnels are more than 100 years old.

 Tales of being trapped in crowded carriages for more than an hour are not uncommon and some parts of the system are so unreliable that people refuse to use the tube if they want to arrive on time.

 As unlikely as it may seem to find true love while crushed into a crowded carriage, some say they spend so long travelling to work it provides their only opportunity for a chance encounter.

 'I spend about two hours on the tube each day,' an Italian businesswoman who had recently moved to London told me. 'I'd read a story in an Italian newspaper about British people falling in love on the underground and couldn't believe it.

 'The trains are so crowded and so old it's terrible down there but sometimes on the way home I get bored and start wondering about the passengers sitting around me.

 'I start thinking: 'I wonder what he does and what his job is.' I suppose it could be easy to start dating someone you met on the train.'  One reason there are so many frustrated singles could be that so many people living in London are new to the city. A strong pound and a prosperous economy is drawing thousands from across Europe to look for work in Britain, with many of them finding jobs in the capital.

 More than 500,000 people are estimated to live on their own and many others are forced into flat shares with strangers to reduce the rent.

 One graduate from Lisbon who recently arrived to take a job with a finance company said it was sometimes difficult to make friends in the crowded city.

 'In Portugal it's easy if you like a girl; it's easy just to go and talk to her. But in London people are more reserved, it's difficult.'  As for me I'm off home - I think I'll take the tube.



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