On the Slow Train by Michael Williams

Author:Michael Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409050896
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE 21.15 FROM EUSTON – THE ‘DEERSTALKER EXPRESS’ TO THE REMOTEST STATION IN BRITAIN

London Euston to Mallaig, via Edinburgh, Glasgow, Crianlarich, Rannoch and Fort William

THERE ARE FEW more unlovely gateways to a long-distance railway journey in the world than Euston station in London. ‘Even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture,’ wrote one correspondent in The Times in 2007,

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.

The contrast today with what was once here could not be starker. Nowadays the only monuments travellers will find where the famous old Euston once stood are the temples to the global empires of fast food – Burger King, Harry Ramsden’s and Café Ritazza. But here, just by the ticket collector on Platform 9, once towered the huge, soot-stained and romantically majestic emblem of Britain’s mighty Railway age. Built by Philip Hardwick in 1837, it was inspired by the Doric propylaeum at the top of the Acropolis in Athens and built to celebrate the arrival of Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham Railway from the north. It was the largest Doric propylaeum ever built and reached a height of more than seventy feet. The fact that it was widely judged the most significant monument of the Railway Age did nothing to save it, and despite a campaign by John Betjeman and other architectural worthies its death warrant was signed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1961 to a chorus of public outrage. At the end of 2009, as the credit crunch set back plans to demolish Euston and start again, millions were spent tarting the station up, although the twenty-nine million passengers who use the station every year may fail to notice the difference.

But all is not lost. Even in the modern Euston it is possible for determined souls to summon up some of the glamour and romance that rightfully belongs here. Sneak past the Square Pie shop and the Bangers Bros sausage takeaway, and turn left at the statue of poor old Robert Stephenson, the only surviving remnant from the booking hall of the old station, now marooned beneath the black glass and concrete Network Rail HQ – a handy toilet for pigeons and a repository for discarded coffee cups. Just by the bus station is a pub called the Doric Arch, unexceptional in itself, but at the top of the stairs to the bar is a poster which I’ve always regarded as one of the most evocative to be found of any railway station in London.

It has no date but clearly derives from Edwardian times. In the picture it is mid-evening on

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