My Night On Liverpool St Station
If you have not yet objected to the monstrous block they want to plonk on top of Liverpool St St Station, the deadline is this Friday 4th July.
When I wrote ten days ago there were only 180 objections versus 613 comments in favour but – thanks to you the readers of Spitalfields Life – there are now 836 objections versus 680 comments in favour. This is astonishing progress.
Yet if we are to stop this appalling development, we have to far surpass those comments in favour and we have until the end of Friday to do this. Please encourage your friends, family, neighbours and colleagues to object.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY
Many of the comments in favour are in response to adverts placed by the developers on social media asking people to support more toilets and better handicapped access at the station – with barely any mention of the monster tower block. I would question whether these commentators were fully aware of the nature of the development that they were supporting. Consequently, it is arguable whether these single line comments are legally compliant and some readers have already chosen to refer the developers’ adverts to www.asa.org.uk as misleading.
When I was callow and new to London, I once arrived back on a train into Liverpool St Station after the last tube had gone and spent the night there waiting for the first tube next morning. With little money and unaware of the existence of night buses, I passed the long hours possessed by alternating fears of being abducted by a stranger or being arrested by the police for loitering. Liverpool St was quite a different place then, dark and sooty and diabolical – before it was rebuilt in 1990 to become the expansive glasshouse that we all know today – and I had such an intensely terrifying and exciting night then that I can remember it fondly now.
Old Liverpool St Station was both a labyrinth and the beast in the labyrinth too. There were so many tunnels twisting and turning that you felt you were entering the entrails of a monster and when you emerged onto the concourse it was as if you had arrived, like Jonah or Pinocchio, at the enormous ribbed belly.
I was travelling back from spending Saturday night in Cromer and stopped off at Norwich to explore, visiting the castle and studying its collection of watercolours by John Sell Cotman. It was only on the slow stopping-train between Norwich and London on Sunday evening that I realised my mistake and sat anxiously checking my wristwatch at each station, hoping that I would make it back in time. When the train pulled in to Liverpool St, I ran down the platform to the tube entrance only to discover the gates shut, closed early on Sunday night.
I was dressed for summer, and although it had been warm that day, the night was cold and I was ill-equipped for it. If there was a waiting room, in my shameful fear I was too intimidated to enter. Instead, I sat shivering on a bench in my thin white clothes clutching my bag, wide-eyed and timid as a mouse – alone in the centre of the empty dark station and with a wide berth of vacant space around me, so that I could, at least, see any potential threat approaching.
Dividing the station in two were huge ramps where postal lorries rattled up and down all night at great speed, driving right onto the platforms to deliver sacks of mail to the awaiting trains. In spite of the overarching vaulted roof, there was no sense of a single space as there is today, but rather a chaotic railway station criss-crossed by footbridges, extending beyond the corner of visibility with black arches receding indefinitely in the manner of Piranesi.
The night passed without any threat, although when the dawn came I felt as relieved as if I had experienced a spiritual ordeal, comparable to a night in a haunted house in the scary films that I loved so much at that time. It was my own vulnerability as an out-of-towner versus the terror of the unknowable Babylonian city, yet – if I had known then what I knew now – I could simply have walked down to the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market and passed the night in one of the cafes there, safe in the nocturnal cocoon of market life.
Guilty, and eager to preserve the secret of my foolish vigil, I took the first tube to the office in West London where I worked then and changed my clothes in a toilet cubicle, arriving at my desk hours before anyone else.
Only the vaulted roof and the Great Eastern Hotel were kept in the dramatic transformation that created the modern station and the dark cathedral where I spent the night is gone. Yet a magnetism constantly draws me back to Liverpool St, not simply to walk through, but to spend time wondering at the epic drama of life in this vast terminus where a flooding current of humanity courses through twice a day – one of the great spectacles of our extraordinary metropolis.
Shortly after my night on the station experience, I got a job at the Bishopsgate Institute – and Liverpool St and Spitalfields became familiar, accessed through the tunnels that extended beyond the station under the road, delivering me directly to my workplace. I noticed the other day that the entrance to the tunnel remains on the Spitalfields side of Bishopsgate, though bricked up now. And I wondered sentimentally, almost longingly, if I could get into it, could I emerge into the old Liverpool St Station, and visit the haunted memory of my own past?
A brick relief of a steam train upon the rear of the Great Eastern Hotel.
Liverpool St Station is built on the site of the Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known as “Bedlam.”
Archive images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
I spent a similar night on Euston station whilst waiting for the first train North. At that time if you were waiting for early trains you were locked in to the concourse and dossed down as best you could on the concrete floor. Luckily my neighbour was a friendly young chap who liked a chat and was a salesman for Glenmorangie (or similar) and wasted no time in introducing me to his samples. How we managed to get to our trains whilst heavily under the influence at 6 in the morning I shudder to imagine.
I had a similar experience in the late ’70s/early ’80s (can’t recall exactly which year).
For a number of years Rod Stewart played a series of concerts in London around Christmas time. A group of us from Norwich would often travel down to one of them. Usually we drove, but one year I got the train and met up with friends who had moved to London. After the concert I made my way back to Liverpool Street, only to find I’d missed the last train back to Norwich. I do remember that my lateness was exacerbated by consumption of alcohol in a drinking establishment near the concert venue (probably Earl’s Court or Olympia). All I could do was wait for the first train in the morning.
It was November, December or January; I was wearing a t-shirt and a thin leather jacket. Liverpool Street seemed such a gloomy, dirty, maze of a place. By 2 or 3 in the morning I was absolutely freezing cold so decided to walk down to Billingsgate Market, just to experience it and avoid death through hypothermia. Once there, as an innocent youth from the provinces, I was put off by the noise, bustle and considerable bad language(!) so I didn’t enter the market itself and returned to Liverpool Street. Fortunately one of the night staff took pity on me and offered me a seat in their rest room, which contained a small open fire. Not too comfortable but nice and toasty.
Eventually I caught the first train to Norwich but, in compliance with the Law of Sod, the heating wasn’t working in any of the carriages!
Now, as a Londoner of almost forty years and with more money in the bank, the internet, a smartphone, Google Maps and a good grasp of London’s transport systems, that wouldn’t happen.
Excellent. I totally identify with that tale, as I mentioned my own a few days ago, but not quite as eloquently.
(The original Mark)
For me, this was a richly-layered story. I so enjoyed the word picture of the hapless young traveler, feeling apprehensive and weary — (that must have been quite a mood swing after seeing the castle and watercolors!) — and I also enjoyed thinking how much the Author is now so tightly woven into the fabric of the great city. The story of the station reminds me of how it feels to find oneself a part of a huge metropolis, and to finally feel strangely “at home” in such a vast, inexplicable place. Belonging!
Onward and upward.
My father worked in the office above the bank in the market, so with me in tow Dad would take me to the market then on to petticoat lane for a walk about. After the rebuilt the station it sadden me, I loved that old place as a kid, full of tunnels , walk ways, all the Iron work, the high glass roof of the main area, the clatter and noise the smell, the train announcement system, the boards that flipped that changed train info. Magic at its best. Oh and so much more.
What a powerful, evocative post. Your memory of Liverpool Street Station captures exactly why places like this matter—not just as transport hubs, but as vessels of personal and collective history.