My exchange of books from the beloved tube station has disappeared. Who is to blame for his death? | Zoe Williams

IIn my nearest tube station, there was an exchange of books at the entrance, which I liked for the adoption speed. You can drop any old nonsense at random in the morning and, when you’ve returned in the evening, he’s gone. Once, I left an anthology of short games from 1976. It was not a particularly special year for the plays, and none of them was by whom you have heard of – but when I got on the tube, someone in my car read it.

As satisfactory as it is, I could barely call it a large part of my life. So when the small exchange libraries disappeared overnight, I would not look like what many people I know, who blamed, variously: health and security have become crazy; Sadiq Khan (and, fair play, I suppose that he is the only person you could name a transport for London, but it is unlikely that it is decisive vote); philistinism; modernity. What could have caused this barbaric act?

Enter Jim Waterson, former Guardian Reporter, who now runs Centric in LondonA substitution for the news from the capital. Since the King’s Crossed Fire, he said, it has been contrary to the fire safety regulations to have combustible materials in any part of a station.

I remember this event, mainly because it was horrible and 31 people died, more injured scores, but also because before, you could smoke on the tube. It was an age; The simple fact of trying to get a mental image of people who light up in a carriage of tube puts it in the 80s; To be more correct, it was in 1987.

What is incredible is that the fire has been forgotten long enough for combustible materials to have been reintroduced into tube stations. I can think of other solutions to the sadness of death of the balance sheet; We could leave our books in heaps neat outside the tube, and hope that it was not raining, for example. But we must probably accept that health and security have in fact not gone mad, but simply continued on its slow but healthy path, trying to act a danger at the same time.

Zoe Williams is a guardian columnist