Passengers and pigeons perambulate at Paddington.
London's seven main railroad stations form an impressive collection of transportation terminals. Yes, I know they're not airline terminals, although the Heathrow Express out of Paddington allows you to check your baggage right on the platform and get a boarding pass for your flight. But the stations are big and impressive transportation hubs, each one a unique and storied celebration of journeying and traveling from the pre-airline era. And maybe they have something to teach us.
I've passed through each of them for one reason or another since first coming to the U.K. as a student at the University of Glasgow in 1984-5. These buildings made a deep first impression on me as I made my way to or from the continent or to catch a cheap flight home. (At the time, People Express offered $149 fares out of Gatwick to Newark!) Some were run down, most notably St. Pancras and Liverpool Street stations – unchanged since steam locomotives and World War II, it seemed. But to me, the grime of history made them even more interesting.
So, on a quick trip to London in February 2012, I took time to visit all seven of these old friends, take a few photos, and recall journeys that they still stand silent witness to. That I could do this is in itself a fine example of how much meaning these structures, or any transportation terminal, can accumulate.
I also wanted to catch up on any changes. St. Pancras and Liverpool Street stations have both undergone renewals, while the others have evolved as well – and all of London seems to be under rehab in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympic games. And also, I hoped to contemplate how much these places shaped my own idea of what makes a successful terminal. Read on....
LIVERPOOL STREET STATION
Still busy on a Saturday as midnight closes in.
Liverpool Street Station: This station was where I returned to English-speaking turf in April 1985 after spending a month touring around Europe on an Interail Pass. The 30-day pass ran out as planned in Amsterdam (as did my money, which wasn't planned), but I had a ticket to get me from there across the English Channel to London and then onto Glasgow. I remember Liverpool Street Station a great comfort as the train pulled in that day, a grimy place used primarily for commuter trains.
Two years later, on a three-week reply visit to Europe, I took the boat train out of Liverpool in the other direction – to Harwich, and then a ferry across the channel to the railhead at “Hoek Van Holland,” the fastest way to get to Amsterdam in those days. I wonder if travelling from London to Europe via ferry will someday seem like ancient history. Maybe it already does...
Another encounter with Liverpool Street Station came in the mid-1990s, when my wife and I participated in an unusual London “mystery walk.” For this, we donned Walkmans at a public library in Whitechapel, and then followed the instructions of the narrator as he directed us through the city streets in search of “clues.” At one point, we wound up in front of Liverpool Street Station, where the voice said we would be passed by a man in a blue suit. And sure enough, we were! (It being a business day in London, it wasn't unlikely.) And then the narrator took us inside the station, which by then had been completely renovated and spiffed up, its Victorian splendor restored and a modern multi-level shopping concourse added. My only misgiving is that all the new stuff largely blocked a visitor's view of the station's enormous trainshed, which was expanded at the time.
Today, the station stands as a proud landmark – an impressive blend of the old and the new in London's “Square Mile” financial center. Here's a view of a recent Saturday night (close to midnight) during our visit. Get a load of that roof!
From the upper level, you can get glimpses of the cavernous shed beyond the ticket barriers. To me it looks like something out Willy Wonka, with trains instead of candy.
And, from the same vantage point, check out how the new portion of the station plays off the grandeur of the old. Each amplifies the other, I think, to create a lively mix of past and future — and what better approach for London's "Square Mile" financial center, which the station serves?
Let's see...in more recent times, I recall arriving in the new Liverpool in 2006 on a train from Stanstead Airport after flying a Ryanair flight from Newquay. We were coming back from the Cornwall area, for which we had departed from Paddington Station; see below. Liverpool Street Station made me feel like I had arrived someplace, making it an impressive gateway to the city.
PADDINGTON STATION
Paddington Station: My wife and I took the “Cornish Riviera” sleeper service from here on a Sunday night in 2006, boarding just before midnight and then snoozing our way out to Penzance. It was a great romantic experience, I thought – arriving at the station after a full day's activities, finding the platform, being welcomed by the “guards,” or what we would call conductors, and then boarding, settling into our compartment, and then having the train ease out of the quiet station on its journey through the night. We did it because at the time there was talk that the train, the only other sleeper service in Britain besides the trains to Scotland, might be discontinued. Turns out it wasn't, but you never know.
Paddington, longtime London terminus for the legendary Great Western Railway (which at one time sported an extra-wide gauge), remains a key London transport hub, especially now with its Heathrow Express rail service, which gets you to the airport in all of 15 minutes. I took this once as well, the only other actual Paddington departure I recall. But I like coming here as it's always impressed me as one of London's grandest, with its double-barreled curving roof and open platforms and roadways right onto the concourse. Some of the access is blocked for security reasons, but the place continues to be a beehive.
VICTORIA STATION
Victoria still drowsing early on a Saturday morning.
Victoria Station: I saw a lot of Victoria Station in the 1980s, when the cheap U.S. flights were out of Gatwick Airport, which was (and is) quite some distance from London. The way to get there, then and now, is the 'Gatwick Express,' which runs from Victoria every 15 minutes and takes you right to the airline terminal. Back then, Victoria had great left-luggage facilities right near the Gatwick Express platforms, making it easy to stow your stuff and explore London unburdened until flight time.
Views from today. Look at those arches, which somehow make the space beyond even bigger!
And those arches aren't needed because the concourse really is vast. Here's just one section of it:
Back in the day, Victoria also had an international air, as it was where once-frequent the boat trains departed for Dover. In the pre-Euro, pre-Chunnel era, the station had a prominent bureau de change in the center of the terminal and a bookstore that was one of the few places that reliably carried copies of the big Thomas Cook European train timetables. (I still have the Winter 1984-85 edition I hauled all around Europe with me.)
Here's a view of those platforms today:
These same platforms are from where I shipped off in December 1984 on my first journey across the Channel, via Dover and Oostende on a cheaper-than-cheap student rail/ferry ticket, to visit a college friend then roistering in Belgium. After that, I explored Paris for a few days, but my el-cheapo special had me routed back through the obscure four-hour ferry crossing from Dieppe in France to the English coastal town of Newhaven. There were about 12 people on the entire ferry that bleak December day. After struggling for days with my minimal French, I still remember the mild relief of hearing an English accent on the platform after the train lurched into Victoria that evening – at 6:309 p.m., according to Thomas Cook.
Today, Victoria is primarily a commuter station, with some “long distance” services, if hour-long journeys to the south count as such. Even so, it's still a massively busy place – enough so that there are chronic overcrowding problems at the Underground station below. (At the Underground entrance, TV monitors show you the platforms so you know what you'll be getting into.)
Speaking of monitors, here's a shot of all the cameras watching Londonders go about their business:
The station's large train shed echos with the rumble of departures and arrivals 24 hours a day. It's also a hub for city bus routes, and long distance services make heavy use of the nearby Victoria Coach Station. Here's another view of one of the concourses, with train board far in the distance. Blow this one up and look at that well-used floor.
And yes, it's undergoing refurbishment, especially the outside, in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympics, so that's another layer of complexity. Here's what it looked like the morning I passed through:
With a location that's within walking distance of Westminster, Victoria adds up to one of London's hardest-working stations. And though I haven't made use of it in a while, something tells me it hasn't seen the last of me.
And here's a boo-boo courtesy of American Airlines. Of all the places to put up a large billboard featuring clocks with different times, Victoria Station is probably not the best idea:
WATERLOO STATION
Building tomorrow's station today, or at least prior to the 2012 Olympics.
Waterloo: Here's a station that's right now a work in progress. One entire end of the station's interior is under wraps, with "work light" illumination that only adds to the impression of a factory floor:
I first visited Waterloo when I was a student bumming around London for the first time in November, 1984, and solely out of a desire to ride the Waterloo & City Underground line – the only one with just two stops, linking the rail station with the "Square Mile," London's traditional business hub, on the opposite shore of the Thames. Hey, I had a one-day pass, and no money otherwise, so entertainment is where you find it. Taking the Waterloo & City line, identified by its weird sea green color on the Underground map, allowed me to commune with the spirits of commuters past, present, and yet to come, with apologies to Charles Dickens.
I recall going up to the Waterloo platforms and being excited at another classic London train station: the grand terminal house, the grand entrance portals, the grimy train shed. Incomprehensible announcements, pigeons racing low through the concourse, commuters striding purposefully from train to job and back: it was all there, the grand theater of modern life on parade, with Waterloo the stage.
Even the whole “Waterloo” name was redolent of British Empire, even though it was mostly gone by the time I stumbled through.
And so I rode the Waterloo & City line, known colloquially as “the Drain,” back and forth several times. Like the wooden escalators in the Underground, it seemed to be a relic from pre-blitz Britain. Rolling stock looked like it was borrowed from the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. The cars on the little trains were wooden and worn out. In a few years, the whole line would be shut down for complete refurbishment, new rolling stock and all, so that the bankers and businessmen heading into their City jobs wouldn't get to work thinking Neville Chamberlain was still prime minister.
Back up on the concourse: The cavernous station, the only main terminal south of the Thames, for a time served as the city's “international” train terminal. When Eurostar high-speed train service under the English Channel started in 1994, the London end was housed in a newly constructed six-track addition to the existing Waterloo structure. I took Eurostar twice (London to Brussels) in the mid-1990s, and the new part of the station, with its airline-like security and boarding, definitely had a “future is now” feeling. It was a grand way to commence my first-ever trips on high-speed rail anywhere.
But Eurostar operations moved out to St. Pancras station in 2007 when the new high-speed segment directly into London was completed. Today, the six Eurostar platforms are shuttered, awaiting rebirth perhaps as a central point for sleeper service from London. Cue the crickets chirping...
Even with the moribund Eurostar platforms, Waterloo remains a busy place, and still does some international business, if you count the rare trans-Atlantic passengers disembarking at Southampton and taking the train in. (Alas, there's no dedicated boat train from the dock anymore.)
Time to go — so how's this for a grand exit?
EUSTON STATION
Railway Terminal or mausoleum? This early in the morning, hard to tell.
Euston: Here's the station I haunted the most as a student. It's where the “west coast” trains up to Glasgow come and go, and so I passed through here many times, either heading to one of the London airports or going across town to Victoria Station for the train/ferry to the continent. Unlike the other London mainline stations, Euston is modern, meaning the original station was knocked down in the 1960s in a fit of “old is bad” progress. It was replaced by a cheerless mausoleum-like structure that only looks more absurd as the years go by, especially when compared to the city's other termini.
Well, I guess every group needs a control. Still, the place has character, if only because it continues to be a hub for Scottish people coming to and from the city. They gather in groups, they swap “fags” (cigarettes), engage in good-natured banter, and generally act like one big family when on English turf. That was the case when I was a student (just hearing those accents reassured me that I was in the right station) and it continues to be so, though on the recent morning I visited, many passengers waiting for trains to Scotland weren't even born when I first stumbled through Euston. Aye, here they be, lads:
Because it feels like a glorified subway station, I've never been too moved by Euston. However, one distinction the place has is that it's where the “Caledonian” overnight sleeper trains depart for Scotland and the far north. Back around 10 years ago, I snagged a couple of "bargain berths" for something like £19 each, an incredible bargain, allowing my wife and I to journey overnight to Glasgow without breaking the bank. (I recall our return flight from Prestwick Airport was something like £1.99 each on a Ryanair promotion.)
But that's not enough to compenate for what was lost, apparently, when the original station was demolished in the early 1960s. For reference, here's a couple of postcards showing what it used to look like:
For some perspective on this subject, how about this little morsel cribbed from Wikipedia?
Writing in The Times, Richard Morrison stated that "even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture, Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London: devoid of any decorative merit; seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst among passengers; and a blight on surrounding streets. The design should never have left the drawing-board — if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing-board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight."
So it appears that what happened to Euston is the British equivalent of New York City losing Pennsylvania Station to the wrecking ball at about the same time. In both cases, the loss of these imposing structures from another era spurred preservation efforts that saved innumerable other buildings, including (in London) the marvelous St. Pancras Station and (in New York City) the wonderfully restored Grand Central Station.
And in another parallel, recent attempts have been made to resurrect both terminals. In London, a plan to restore Euston's former glory was announced in 2007. It's now on hold after the Brits recently approved the "H2" high speed line from the city to the Midlands, with Euston as the London terminus. Still, Euston may yet get its former glory back. In New York, a long-term plan to revive the spirit of Pennsylvania Station by means of the similarly massive (but underused) post office complex next door remains mired in the same thing that all of America seems mired in these days.
KING'S CROSS STATION
King's Cross: This station, home to the two-hour express trains to York and long-distance service to Edinburgh, is the city's oldest surviving main rail station, and looks it. The front of it, with its squat lines and yellow bricks and pair of utilitarian archways, always looked antiquated compared to the city's grander Victorian-style stations — or it least it did until this year, when the whole complex began a facelift in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The facelift, in progress when I visited, keeps the original structure intact, but surrounds it with various canopies and things -- most notably, a "Western Concourse" covred by a roof that looks similar to what architect Norman Foster put over the British Museum's inner court, and a new public park in front to replace the clutter of structures that has long obscured the station itself.
King's Cross always felt like a special place to me. (Any station with the name "King" in it will seem a bit rarefied to an America, I suppose.) With an Underground station that serves more lines (six) than any other in the system, it's just one of those really important hubs that help define a city and how it's experienced.
It's also the site of the notorious King's Cross Underground fire, which killed 31 people in 1987 and was caused by grease build-up in one of those old wooden escalators. (See the Waterloo entry.) Having been through that station many times, I recall being horrified to read how, when the fire alarms sounded, guards evacuated the platforms by shooing passengers up the still-functioning escalators, not knowing that the poor souls were being fed into the heart of the intense conflagration above them!
For some reason, though, King's Cross seems to be the one that gets singled out in books and movies for London train station action. Most famously, it's home to the mythical "Platform 9¾" in the Harry Potter books. Amusingly, the station now sports signs to this platform, which take visitors only as far as a brick wall with a luggage trolley half-embedded into it. Further back in time, the station played a key role in 'The Lady Killers,' a 1955 British comedy film, and many, many more. Maybe it's because King's Cross just sounds so British.
I must have taken the train to Edinburgh from here at least once long ago, but don't have any exact recollections. To fill in the gap, on this most recent trip I bought a "one-day return" ticket out to Cambridge and back. Nice to take a fast ride out of London and into the countryside, if only for a morning.
ST. PANCRAS INTERNATIONAL
Oh, to go to work each day amid such splendor!
St. Pancras: I consider St. Pancras one of the grandest terminals of all time anywhere. Built at the height of Victorian extravagance, its huge iron train shed fronted by an elegant Old World hotel, it's exciting just to look at.
And how about the design? It was the creation of Sir George Gilbert Scott, a 19th century architect who also designed the main building of my alma mater, Glasgow University. Time to quote someone more knowledgeable than me:
"The building initially appears to be in a polychromatic Italian Gothic style – inspired by John Ruskin's Stones of Venice – but on a closer viewing it incorporates features from a variety of periods and countries. From such an eclectic approach, Scott anticipated that a new genre would emerge.
Little did Scott realize that rather than inspire a new genre of architecture, for a long time his building inspired nothing but neglect. When I first encountered it, St. Pancras was the one London rail terminal most likely to be demolished. It was underutilized — only a few trains used it at the time. The hotel had closed. The place was filthy and begrimed, a monument to deferred maintenance. Hey, it was the 1980s. Did London really need this oversized relic? Could London afford to keep it up, never mind restore it?
I didn't know the answer to those questions. But even at its low point, with only the occasion British Rail train pulling in or out, I sensed a certain energy and potential in St. Pancras. Even in disrepair, it possessed a quiet dignity that persisted through the soot. It had great bones. As I explored this structure, I felt that underneath all the dirt (and, yes, the occasional passenger train to Luton) beat the heart of a great railway station.
Here's picture from the early 1980s; St. Pancras in the doldrums...
And guess what? St. Pancras endured long enough to become worth shining up to serve as nothing less than London's international rail station to the world! Really — in 2007, a refurbished St. Pancras reopened as the city's glittering gateway for Eurostar service to Paris, Brussels, and beyond.
The big changes began after the millenium, when a "new" St. Pancras (a modern addition on the station's eastern flank) was built to house domestic service. With that complete, the old gal herself was closed for a thorough rubdown and rebuild. Even the hotel was reopened!
I hadn't been back to St. Pancras since all of this happened, so it was quite a thrill to march up Euston Road and into a completely regenerated St. Pancras. Here's the first sight of St. Pancras, just catching some of the early sunlight on the first morning of our stay:
The station, formerly a grimy hulk, had been transformed into a 21st century hub for international rail travel, and losing none of its grandeur in the process.
Most impressive, I thought, was what must have been a daring move — giving up a few train platforms under the western side of the train shed. This allowed the lower level to be opened up for a shopping arcade, and made the shed above that much more impressive as it soared over people below. Check it out:
This was a masterstroke, one that actually augmented the station's original energy. (I later learned this was an accidental result of a change in design.)
But enough of me. The following exterior/interior pictures speak for themselves.
Hey—you'd think London was hosting the Summer Olympics or something!
On the upper level, I was delighted with the statue of John Betjeman, the poet who helped lead campaigns to save St. Pancras from being demolished during its darkest days. Here's Betjeman (with an unintentional imitator), seeming to regard with wonder what his efforts hath wrought. It's a great sculpture.
I also very much liked "The Meeting Place," a bronze on a much larger scale by Paul Day located under the giant clock on the upper level. It's best seen from a bit of a distance, but still, there's something vital about it. The contemporary nature of it seems like a great bridge between the station's classic lines and the sleek Eurostar hardware that fills the upper level.
I have to say, I'm not too impressed by the modern addition, but in a way they had no choice. How could they have begun to compete with something so singular as the original St. Pancras building? Instead, here's the result:
Well, perhaps a quiet and understated contemporary style (straight lines, open spaces, glass walls) was the right way to go. Still, I recall using this new area when it opened to board a train to visit relatives in Derby, and it left me cold. It still looks like something temporary to me:
LAST STOP, ALL ALIGHT
And that's it for our tour of London's main railway stations. I know, I left out a few that might well be included: Charing Cross, Cannon Street, Fenchurch, Marylebone, and so on. But these are the seven I know, and seven is enough to get the idea, I think.
But then there's the Underground. Most stations are undistinguished, but some are worth commenting on. In fact, I poked around the Westminster Station while changing lines with just that reason in mind, but I'll share my impressions about that at another time...
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