The Battle For Liverpool St Station
Griff Rhys Jones, President of the Victorian Society, has written this update on the revised yet equally misguided proposals for Liverpool St Station
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
After a positive roar of protest, with over two thousand unsolicited objections to the last scheme, Herzog & de Meuron and the original get-rich-quick developers, Sellar, and their wrap-around scheme, appear to have taken a train out. But Network Rail have come back furiously, deceptively and determinedly. They have appointed new architects, ACME. They are back with new proposals, as unrepentant as ever.
Look at these very carefully. The exact plans have not yet been revealed but these visualisations are hugely misleading. The angle of vision is of a three-foot tall squirrel wearing wide-angle glasses. It would seem that the former Great Eastern Hotel will dwarf the proposed office block. Not so, these newly planned structures would tower ninety metres over the Conservation Area. You will not get this from the architect’s pictures because they are apparently going to be constructed of gossamer. So light and virtually invisible that you will have to squint at these ‘imagineerings’ to even see them against the sky.
Yet this is pulled wool for disbelieving eyes.
The proposed new towers above the station, even swathed in a boa of fashionable greensward, are still there.
LISSCA (the campaign to Save Liverpool St Station) has taken time to unravel exactly what is proposed. It appears the developers are still building directly on top of the listed station concourse and now demolishing and expanding much of the area below too, adding shops to the engine sheds. They are still radically altering the majority of protected views in the Conservation Area. The money to be made from offices and retail is – most emphatically – still the driving force behind this development.
I fear the developers’ ‘improvements to the concourse’ PR spin is a deliberate blind. It is a snow job. It is a distraction. It ignores the White Elephant in the room.
Recently Network Rail staged a hurried ‘consultation’ to outline what they offer the man on the Ilford five-thirty.
If you were asked this sort of question…
‘Do you think disabled access should be improved at this station?’
or…
‘Do you want step-free access?’
or…
‘Would you like more room on the concourse?’
or…
‘Would you like to ascend to heaven in a phaeton accompanied by angels tootling trumpets?’
You would probably answer ‘yes’.
Network Rail claim 250,000 people ‘interacted’ with their consultation but they can only muster 1,800 actual people who approve. In other words, the vast majority saw this for what it was – a one way ticket to the moon.
Many of those consulted have complained that their own negative comments and criticisms have been ignored, not accepted or presented. There was a question – for example – that asked ‘Wouldn’t you like a greater selection of cafes and shopping experiences?’ – to which the answer was a generally straightforward ‘No’. But Network Rail did not include that in their gushing self-congratulation. They are eager to push on and seem to be in a terrible hurry. To wrong-foot any further protest one must suppose.
In truth, more retail space is towards the real centre of their proposal while the unnecessary office space is at the very heart.
How can I say it is unnecessary? Surely, I must be aware that the City needs to grow because the Corporation says so. In fact, the Corporation has already given its blessing to fourteen new office skyscrapers, even though only eleven have proved possible. Developers balked at the commercial viability of the others. The Corporation has produced a fanciful projection of millions of square feet of new demand. They foresee a decade of more massive City of London growth. Really?
Here at Liverpool St we see the end result. The assertion that London needs to sacrifice its precious heritage by building on top of it – in order to achieve this specious intent – is wholly preposterous, yet this what is being proposed.
Walk around the existing concourse. Please. It is easy to do. It is very rarely crammed, malfunctioning and unfit for purpose – even in the rush hour. (As the PR people repeatedly claim.)
Many of the required ‘improvements’ are undoubtedly possible without any significant alterations. There is – for example – already a disabled lift but the constant complaint recorded on TripAdvisor is that that it is never working. It does not require a couple of billion quid to ensure proper maintenance.
There should also – surely – be step-free access from the new building in Broadgate? That should have been part of any deal for the overbearing re-development to the west. Why has it not been achieved?
Take a look at the elaborate and rather lovely bargeboards at the back of the train shed. Get some paint out Network Rail. They are rotting away.
Network Rail have a statutory duty to make the station work and address these failures. They do not have a statutory duty to trash heritage. They do not have a statutory duty to be avaricious property developers and build office blocks on top of stations. Yet they have already done so at London Bridge with the Shard and now they think they can do the same at Liverpool St. Horrifically, they have announced plans and greedy ambitions to do the same at Victoria and Waterloo.
I use Liverpool St Station regularly. It is my station. I do not recognise the claims that it is – as ‘the busiest station’ in London – in urgent need of radical reformation. I do not find it at all crowded and impractical, and I often use it at rush hour. I simply do not recognise Network Rail’s claims of inherent pandemonium.
The proposed massive office development at Liverpool St is not at all necessary to the community, to heritage, to the railway system or to London. We must assemble the troops and continue stating our case. This is not about the past this is about the future. Our great-grandchildren will not applaud us for permitting a totally out-of-character cankerous growth to sprout on top of a noble Victorian station.
St Pancras and Kings Cross stations demonstrate how wonderful and historically important it is to strip away later ‘improvements’ to reveal the splendours of the railway age. This is good practice. The Liverpool St proposal is bad practice, obviously.
Take a really good look at this proposal. We need to register our discontent even more forcefully. We have not had a proper response to the legitimate objections already aired. Our case still stands.
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
ACME’s proposal for the entrance from Bishopsgate with a tower block on top
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
The foot of the tower block viewed looking east along Liverpool St
Visualisation courtesy of ACME
The foot of the tower block looking west along Liverpool St
If you have not done so already, please sign the Save Liverpool St Station petition, and share it with your friends, family, colleagues and networks.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION
Support our crowdfund, so we can take the legal fight all the way to the Secretary of State and halt these destructive plans.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE CROWDFUND
When the new planning application is submitted – probably in January 2025 – please be ready to write a letter of objection. We will alert everyone who signs the petition when the application is live.
Festive Tours & Gift Vouchers
Boy brings home a Christmas tree at Spitalfields Market in 1946 by Monte Fresco, East End Photographer (1936-2013)
Blow away the cobwebs with a walk around Spitalfields on New Year’s Day. Tickets are available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on January 1st 2025 at 2pm.
CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR NEW YEAR’S DAY
Bookings are open now for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields and also The Gentle Author’s Tour of The City of London until September 2025.
Gift Vouchers for The Gentle Author’s tours make ideal gifts for family and friends. Supply the name and postal address of the recipient of the gift voucher when you make your order and The Gentle Author will mail them a hand written Christmas card with a code that can be redeemed for tickets to the value of the voucher.
Spitalfields Life Books For Christmas
If you are seeking Christmas presents for family and friends, you need look no further because Spitalfields Life books make ideal gifts which you can have personally inscribed…
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S LONDON ALBUM
Between the covers of this magnificent red Album with a gilded cover you will discover more than 600 of the Gentle Author’s favourite pictures of London in print for the first time, setting the wonders of our modern metropolis against the pictorial delights of the ancient city, and celebrating the infinite variety of life in the capital.
Take a walk through time with the Gentle Author as your guide – be equally amazed at what has been lost of old London and charmed by the unfamiliar marvels of London today.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S CRIES OF LONDON
The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.
For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM
The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.
As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END 1971 – 1987
SIGNED COPIES
David Hoffman’s bold, humane photography records a lost era, speaking vividly to our own times.
When David Hoffman was a young photographer, he came to live in a squat in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel and it changed his life.
Over the following years, he documented homelessness, racism and the rise of protest in startlingly intimate and compassionate pictures to compose a vital photographic testimony of resilience.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY
“This small, beautiful book is an elegy to companionship. Encompassing both the everyday and the profound, it should be judged no less valid for the fact that the friend in question is a cat.” Times Literary Supplement
Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author. Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A MODEST LIVING, MEMOIRS OF A COCKNEY SIKH
“a timely reminder of all that modern Britishness encompasses” The Observer
In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh Singh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his father Joginder Singh who came to Spitalfields in 1949.
Joginder sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet he found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER EAST END VERNACULAR
The Gentle Author presents a magnificent selection of pictures – many never published before – revealing the evolution of painting in the East End and tracing the changing character of the streets through the twentieth century.
“A fragment of the riches flowing from a continued fascination with London’s topography” – Evening Standard
“Harvested from the thirties to the present day, Spitalfields Life’s gorgeous collection of East End paintings is more knees-up than misery-fest” – Hackney Citizen
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE MAP OF THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR
Follow in the footsteps of all those who came before, with a keen eye and an open heart, to discover the manifold wonders of Spitalfields.
Adam Dant has populated The Gentle Author’s Tour with portraits of more than fifty people – both the living and the dead – who have lived and worked in Spitalfields over the past two millennia.
Ramble through two thousand years of culture in the heart of London and discover some of the people and places that make this historic neighbourhood distinctive.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER A HOXTON CHILDHOOD
AS Jasper’s tender memoir of growing up in the East End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’
In this definitive new edition, A Hoxton Childhood is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s struggles and eventual triumph in the cabinet-making trade,The Years After.
George Cruikshank’s Festive Season
As we brace ourselves for the forthcoming festive season, let us contemplate George Cruikshank‘s illustrations of yuletide in London 1838-53 from his Comic Almanack which remind us how much has changed and also how little has changed. (You can click on any of these images to enlarge)
A swallow at Christmas
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas dining
Christmas bustle
Boxing day
Hard frost
A picture in the gallery
Theatrical dinner
The Parlour & the Cellar
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s birth
Twelfth Night – Drawing characters
January – Last year’s bills
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George Cruikshank’s Comic Alphabet
Hairdressers Of The Eighties
I am delighted to publish these photos from A London Inheritance – written by a graduate of my blog course.
A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 1st & 2nd. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse, and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details
Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign
Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’
His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered
June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.
Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser
Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing
Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.
Apples, Hair Stylist
Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist
The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window
Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London
Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist
Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’
The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell
Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance
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HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 30th & 31st October 2021
This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.
“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author
COURSE STRUCTURE
1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.
SALIENT DETAILS
The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 30th-31st October, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.
Lunch will be catered by Leila’s Cafe of Arnold Circus and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £300.
Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.
Robson Cezar’s Affordable Solar-Powered Houses
Each year at this time, we feature Spitalfields artist Robson Cezar‘s houses made from boxes collected for him by the stallholders at Whitechapel Market.
This year, Robson has made affordable houses at £45 each and every one is fitted with a solar panel. If you leave it on a window sill, it will charge in daylight, light up automatically at dusk and the light will go off at dawn. And they will do this more or less indefinitely.
Robson has enjoyed employing the colours, printed lettering and images of fruit and vegetables on the boxes, and made windows from coloured mushroom crates. Each house is a day’s work and he has been working for months to create this spectacular new collection. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie visited Robson’s studio in Bow to photograph the houses and take his portrait.
We are selling them on a first-come-first-served basis, so if you would like one please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com giving your first, second and third choice, and we will supply payment details.
These houses are sculptures not toys and we do not recommend them for children under the age of twelve.
Robson in his studio
RED: From left to right – top row A B C D, middle row E F G H, front row I J K.
GREEN: From left to right – top row A B C D, middle row E F G, front row H I.
WHITE: From left to right – top row A B C D, middle row E F G, front row H I.
BLUE: From left to right – top row A B C D, middle row E F G, front row H I.
YELLOW: From left to right – top row A B C, middle row D E F, front row G.
Casting a shadow causes the houses to light up
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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Remembering Mr Pussy In Winter
Today I remember my old cat, Mr Pussy. This is an extract from the biography I wrote of him, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY.
On dark winter nights, Mr Pussy seldom stirred from the chimney corner. Warmed by a fire of burning pallets, he had no need of whisky to bring him solace through the dark hours, instead he frazzled his brain in a heat-induced trance. Outside in the streets, Spitalfields might have lain under snow, the paths might have been coated in sheet ice and icicles might be hanging from the gutters, but this spectacle held no interest for Mr Pussy. Like the cavemen of ancient times, his sole fascination was with the mesmerising dance of flames in the grate. And as the season descended towards its nadir in the plunging temperatures of the frozen byways, at home Mr Pussy fell into his own warm darkness of stupefaction.
When Mr Pussy grew old and the world was no longer new to him, his curiosity was ameliorated by his love of sleeping. Once he was a brat in jet black, yet he became a gentleman in a chenille velvet suit, as tufts of white hair increasingly flecked his glossy pelt. One summer, I noticed he was getting skinny and then I discovered that his teeth had gone which meant he could no longer crunch the hard biscuits that were always his delight. Extraordinarily, he made little protest at this starvation diet, even as he lost weight through lack of food. I learnt to fill his dish with biscuits and top it up with water, so that he might satisfy his hunger by supping the resulting slush. And through this simple accommodation – plus a supplement of raw meat – his weight was restored to normal and he purred in gratification while eating again.
Once Mr Pussy was a wild rover, ranging over the fields in Devon, disappearing for days on end and returning proudly with a dead rabbit in his mouth. Yet in the end, he did not step beyond the end of the alley in Spitalfields and, in sub-zero temperatures, he only ventured outside to do his necessary business. Sprinting up the stairs and calling impatiently outside the door of the living room, he was ever eager to return to the fireside and warm his cold toes afterwards, sore from scraping at the frost in the vain attempt to dig a hole in the frozen earth. Like a visionary poet, Mr Pussy acquired a vivid internal life to insulate himself against the rigours of the world and, in the absence of sunlight, the fire provided his imaginative refuge, engendering a sublime reverie of peace and physical ease.
Yet Mr Pussy still loved to fight. If he heard cats screeching in the yard, he would race from the house to join the fray unless I could shut the door first and prevent him. Even when he had been injured and came back leaking blood from huge wounds, he appeared quite unconcerned. Only two small notches in his ears persisted as permanent evidence of this violent tendency, although I regularly checked his brow for tell-tale scratches and the occasional deep bloody furrows that sometimes caused swelling around his eyes. But I could stop him going out, even though it was a matter of concern to me that – as he aged and his reflexes lessened – he might get blinded in a fight one day, losing one of his soulful golden eyes. Since he was blissfully unaware of this possibility, I had no choice but to take consolation from his response when he could not eat, revealing that Mr Pussy had no expectations of life and consequently no fear of loss. His nature was to make his best accommodation to any exigency with grace.
Be assured, Mr Pussy could still leap up onto the kitchen counter in a single bound. He could still bring in a live mouse from the garden when he pleased and delightedly crunch its skull between his jaws on the bedroom floor. If I worked late into the night, he would still cry and tug on the bed sheets to waken me in the early morning to see the falling snow. When the fancy seized him, he could be as a sprightly as a kitten. Come the spring, he would be running up trees again, even if – in the darkest depth of winter – he only wanted to sleep by the fire.
When I was alone here in the old house in Spitalfields at night, Mr Pussy became my sole companion, the perfect accomplice for a writer. When I took to my bed to keep warm while writing my stories, he was always there as the silent assistant, curled into a ball upon the sheepskin coverlet. As the years passed and Mr Pussy strayed less from the house, I grew accustomed to his constant presence. He taught me that, rather than fear for his well-being, I needed to embrace all the circumstances and seasons that life sends, just as he did.
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