How London's iconic black cabs will survive the Uber age

It also pledged to push the government for a continuation of the plug-in taxi grant, to reduce VAT at public charge points and to remove the tax from the purchase price of taxis.

So my cab driver should have a lot to talk about, but first I need to find him or her, a job that takes all of 30 seconds. Uber’s app may have revolutionised hailing a private hire car but it can’t beat just jumping into the nearest available taxi.

“We’ve been shafted by the 20mph limit and the fact we can’t go down low-traffic neighbourhood roads so can’t take a passenger, who may be disabled, door to door,” its driver tells me. “Taxis should be allowed to go everywhere a bus can but some routes like Tottenham Court Road we can’t enter.

"So we take the road running parallel to it but it has two cycle lanes that makes it narrower and costs journey time. A typical £15 journey three years ago now costs £25. TfL is trying to get rid of us.”

If that’s true, why has 21-year-old Mohamed B, London’s newest and youngest taxi driver, become one? We were planning to interview Mo for this story but he cancelled at the last moment on the grounds that all he had to say he’d already said in his employer’s video publicising his success.

The Covid lockdown may have forced a lot of taxi drivers out of the trade, but Mo explains in the film that this was exactly the stimulus he needed to become one himself. With time on his hands, aged 17, he knuckled down to learning the Knowledge. Two years later, he’d passed all the tests but had to wait until he was 21 to get his licence.

“I’m having the best time,” he says. Even the taxi driver who took me to Taxi House admits that, despite everything, he “loves” the job. Will McNamara be as sanguine? “We’ve had taxis since Cromwell’s day and London will always have them,” he tells me in the back of a taxi he’s magically summoned from nowhere.

“I’m optimistic about that because we’re sitting in the cleanest and 100% wheelchair accessible taxi in the world, driven by the most highly regulated and trained cab drivers in the world. But the driver you spoke to is right: TfL’s war on motorists is also being waged on taxis. On top of that, you’ve got a taxi which, by the time you’ve financed it, can cost up to £100,000. It’s tough.”

In spite of these challenges, McNamara reckons the green shoots of a recovery are emerging. “Demand for taxi rides is growing as workers begin returning to their offices,” he says.