I’ve been in London 3.5 months. This convo happened in the uni pub last week:
Classmate: What’s been the hardest thing to adjust to?
Me: Doors.
Classmate: Like... doors?
Me: I keep walking into doors.

Getting out of doors (not into nature; just through a door) is extra, needlessly difficult here. In my apartment building, on campus, and in other public buildings, doors have an adjacent Big Green Button on the wall.

Sometimes the Big Green Button is a tiny white switch. Exactly like a light switch. Or a fuse switch. And it has no label. So maybe you’ll successfully slip out of the room during lecture. Or maybe you’ll plunge your professor and room full of classmates into darkness mid-presentation. Good luck, fucker.

To unlock the door, you must first press the Out button/switch. Then you can push open the door.

Or, if you’re me, you forget this button Every. Goddamn. Time. and slam face-first into the door at full speed. Then you shout, “English door!” at the door, push the button, and stomp down the university corridor with a welt on your nose.

The button is stupid. I have asked every citizen of the United Kingdom why it exists. No one knows. Not even the tour guide at Westminster Abbey, where they have my favorite historical site of all time, of anywhere in the world. The basement of Westminster Abbey is not featured on the tour but afterwards, the guide cuts you loose to wander around. Wander into the basement and you’ll find, in a corner, with no pomp but a humble plastic placard, a small, shut door. The sign next to the door reads: Britain’s Oldest Door. It is my favorite thing. Cuz, like, how do they know that?

This door is 900 years old and has no green button beside it. I assume people got in and out of it just fine. But now? Green buttons everywhere.

After querying the entire Commonwealth, the nearest I’ve heard to an explanation for the Green Button is: “it’s an emergency release button.” Really? Surely, in the event of an actual emergency, you don’t want to pause your enflamed evacuation to stop and push a button.

Doors already open. Without buttons. Doors are great at opening. But in the UK, they made them lock, thus requiring the Green unlock button. The button is a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Which seems very American. I think this is why I’m so annoyed by it.

Also, there is a separate Emergency Door Release button right next to the normal green Exit Button. Remember?

This implies the round green Exit Button is not for emergencies but for everyday, humdrum, totes caz door exiting. Which it is. So don’t give me this crap about the regular green button being for emergency evacuations.

But what if the tea kettle breaks and there is a real emergency? Supposedly, the first in the herd of panicked building flee-ers pushes the super special Emergency Door Release button — the one with the snazzy, super serious, welding shield over it. Supposedly that will open the door. Fine. But....

......how is that any different than the regular green button?! They both open the door! The door: an object which for 900 years didn’t require any buttons to open it.

Now I’ve posted this, I expect someone in the engineering or security or door sector to comment that, actually, the buttons are part of very practical security measures. Perhaps these measures let security personnel lock down sections of a building and isolate a threat. Perhaps they allow nighttime building guards to more authentically reenact Die Hard during the wee hours of their shift. Tell me; I want to learn! Maybe then, next time I smack my face into one of these limey doors, I’ll have some appreciation.

Until then, the answer to:
“What happened to your nose?”
is:
“F*@k! English door!”

- Renée, A Broad Abroad.