Such is the stylistic development of the London railways until the dismal grouping and the even more dismal eclipse of all individuality which has now occurred. But just as in a church architecture is not so important as the worship which goes on there, so in railways the associations of a station and of a line are part of its beauty. The personality of most stations in London survives, even through British Railways, and will continue to do so until everyone in England is exactly the same as everyone else.
Waterloo is the “services” and race-goers’ station—for “Pompey,” “Soton,” Aldershot, Epsom, Ascot. It has a rather high-class suburban connection. Civil Servants who have reached C.M.G. and knighthood stage find it near Whitehall and convenient for Esher and in pine-clad Southern Electric suburbs their wives play cards with wives of rich city gentlemen. The humbler Civil Servant uses the Metropolitan and moves outwards beyond to Rickmansworth and Northwood as his salary increases. He probably knows he is not going to reach the heights of Esher Civil Servants and there is no point in establishing a railway carriage connection on the Southern Electric. The commercial people who use the Metropolitan are in their turn slightly less rich than the city gentlemen who use Waterloo.
The flashiest of all suburban travellers are those who travel daily from Victoria by first-class Pullman trains to Brighton. Indeed, Brighton so dominates Victoria Station that though continental trains depart from its South Eastern Section, though many of the inner London suburbs are served by puzzling loop lines which start here and end at London Bridge, Victoria is the station of what moneyed leisure is left in London. Though it is meant to be associated with the South Coast and summer holidays, the sea is not what one associates with those who use it regularly. They do not look as though they took a winter dip in the English Channel. Warm flats, television, cocktail cabinets and bridge seem to be more in their line.
What a contrast is Liverpool Street! Here those extraordinary, cramped and uncomfortable Great Eastern carriages are drawn out above the East End housetops to wide acres of Essex suburb, two-storey houses, flat recreation grounds, strange chapels of strange sects, the well-trodden commons on the fringes of Epping Forest. Here workmen’s trains run early in the morning. Here the old London sulphur smell pervades and even red bricks receive a black coating. Dense streets of Tottenham, Wanstead, Leytonstone, Barking, Edmonton, you are the real London and you form a barrier between the town and the unspoiled country of East Anglia! So many trains carry your patient passengers in and out of the black cathedral of Liverpool Street that expresses to Harwich, Yarmouth and Norwich seem slow at starting and ending for fear, no doubt, of knocking into one of these hundreds of suburban steam trains. Fenchurch Street has the same quality as Liverpool Street and so has London Bridge.
Charing Cross is the railway’s concession to the Continent. Though it is possible to leave Charing Cross for Kent, the impression travellers like to give when they use Charing Cross is that they are going abroad. Little Bureaux de Change at the entrance encourage the impression and Edward Middleton Barry’s elaborate Eleanor Cross, befouled by pigeons in the station yard, reminds us once more of one of Europe’s shining gifts to England, Eleanor of Castile.
I do not know what to say of Cannon Street. Of all the stations of London it is my favourite, so echoing, so lofty and so sad. Whoever used it and who uses it now? Holborn Viaduct was the great station for hop-pickers on their journey to Kent. But Cannon Street is too stately for that sort of thing. It is much less important than London Bridge at which most of its trains stop. Perhaps the people of Bromley, that lonely high-class suburb in Kent, love Cannon Street as I do.
There is one station, however, which hardly anyone uses at all—Broad Street, which is given over to ghosts of frock-coated citizens who once crowded the old North London trains from the steam suburbs of Highbury, Canonbury and Camden Town. Often do those sumptuous L.M.S. electric trains swing across the North London suburbs on that smooth, useless, beautiful journey to Richmond. At no time of day have I known it impossible to find a seat in their spacious carriages. And the frock-coated ones are dead and gone like the rolling stock which carried them, their houses have been turned into flats, their gardens built over by factories.The North London was the last line to use wooden-seated third-class carriages as it did on its Poplar branch (now closed), the last line in London to run no trains during church time on a Sunday morning, and within living memory the General Manager of the line refused to allow Smith’s bookstall on Broad Street to sell any vulgar-looking papers. Still the trains run, through haunted gas-lit stations, on the most revealing railway journey London can provide.
The main line platforms of King’s Cross are all expresses and Civil Servants bagging the first-class sleepers to Scotland, their fares paid for them out of our taxes. I do not like it, despite its noble architecture. It is a station, like Euston, that those few of us who are not Civil Servants will associate with injustice. But these dim suburban platforms at King’s Cross to which
