N17

To deepest North London to see my daughter who is staying at a friend’s house for a while. Walking back to Seven Sisters tube I go another way from the road I came by and misread the map. I don’t mean I went the wrong way, but I failed to guess what sort of place I was walking through. There’s a circular street called Clyde Circus. On the map it looks like the sort of street plan I associate with 1930s or later council estates. But when I got there its actually very late Victorian terraces and quite posh. I should have paid attention to the words rather than the pictures. Anywhere called “Beaconsfield Road” is likely to be a long straight street of late 19th century “villas” (because almost certainly named after Lord Beaconsfield AKA Benjamin Disraeli, who died in 1881).

North London feels different from South London. (for a valus of “South London” that is I suppose more or less South East London inner suburbia). At any given distance from town it tends to be more inner-urban, with a more developed and denser infrastructure, perhaps more sophisticated, and also somehow less provisional. It feels like they finished building it. And fewer of those dark streets. S

And it really is a quick way back to the tube.

Not that that did any good. Hoping to be back home just after midnight I tried to change to the Northern Line for London Bidge at King’s Cross. Arrived on the platform about twenty past eleven and waited, and waited. No southbound train on the indicators. Just when I was starting to think about looking for a bus they did the Inspector Sands announcement, Sensible passengers started leaving immediately. A few minutes later they did the evacuation alarm and we all made our way to the surface. False alarm it turned out but at five to midnight I was at the back end of St Pancras watching the staff try not to have a fight with an aggressive drunk. So out to the bus stop, and three cigarettes later (waiting for 63, 171, 436) was back at Lewisham at nearly half past one.

Then I still had to change the washing in the machine do some other stuff to get ready for tmorrow and fell asleep in an upright chair which is why I am blogging this now.

Can I go to bed and get up in two or three hours? I am about to find out.

Not pretentious at all

Overheard on a train:

Someone who works with films was talking to someone who works with TV. Odd lines stuck out:

“He calls himself ‘Ironik’ spelled with a “K” but he takes himself more seriously than anyone I’ve ever met”

“You can guess the pitch – a cross between Flashdance and Fame but set in London”

“Only one person who has ever been in a film before”

“There are some theatre people involved – and that’s FATAL!”

“Charlotte Rampling has signed up for it, and that’s good”

“My credibility depends on this”

Waterloo morning

Overheard on a platform at Waterloo Station:

“All I do all day is stand here and blow the whistle. I dress up like a fool and stand around on the platform and blow a whistle”

[A middle-aged bearded Railway Servant, as we would have called them a century ago]

Overheard on the train:

“Just imagine walking up and down Oxford Street pretending to be hats and dogs”

[That attracted my attention. I really very much wanted it to be "hats and dogs" not "cats and dogs". Imagine the unconfined nature of my joy when the reply came:]

“We should do it! Dress up as Monopoly pieces!”

[Two teenage girls with very short skirts and too much makeup who looked as if they were enjoying their half-term. Though they then went on to spoil the general aura of post-modern anti-consumerist Situationism with:]

“Have you seen my MySpace profile this week? You saw X on my friends list?”

“X Y? Yeah, but I didn’t look at HIS profile!”

“His picture is SO GAY!!!! He’s like, a goth, he’s using this goth profile!”

“But he’s such a chav!”

“Yeah, he’s a real chav. He listens to NU METAL!”

Lewisham, 08:37 2nd October 2007

Follow the link for bigger pictures.

The Gardener

I’ve been reading on the train. Short stories are easier than novels because you can fit them in between stations.

Yesterday I started The Mark of the Beast and other fantastical tales which is a collection of Rudyard Kipling stories edited by Stephen Jones, and published in the wonderful Gollancz/Orion “Fantasy Masterworks” series. Its volume 50 and so far there aren’t three duds among them. The companion “SF Masterworks” series is almost as good. They do what they say on the tin. These are the books you ought to have read if you want to have read the books you ought to have read.

Yesterday I flicked through it and read The Man who would be King and The Bridgebuilders and a couple of other stories based in India some of which I’d read before. All very good. This morning on the train to work I read The Gardener as recommended in Neil Gaiman’s introduction.

Last week I read or re-read all of the Harry Potter books and finished the last one on Monday. They were OK. They made me laugh a few times. I don’t think they made me cry at any point. This ten page story by Kipling, which I read on the train between Lewisham and Waterloo, had tears in my eyes by the fifth page. I just about managed to control myself until I read the last line of the story (the last word really) and all but burst out sobbing hand had to get up and walk down the train so as not to disturb the other passengers.

So if there is anyone else writing blogs about odd people they see or overhear on commuter trains in London: I was that soldier.

Euston

In my previous post I praised the train system in London for the excellent way it got me to Euston even though half of it was being dug up by blokes in shiny yellow suits. That’s all very well, but it was Euston it got me to.

There are many reasons why I’ve always preferred to go up north on the East Coast line rather than West Coast whenever I’ve had the choice. Its not just the the view, or the trains, or the comfort, or the timekeeping, or my idiotic preference fro anticlockwise loops. A large part of it is that King’s Cross is so much a nicer place to catch a train than Euston is.

Euston is the nastiest of all London’s mainline stations. Forget the appearance of the architecture (cheapo mid-60s international style airport lounge faced in dirty shiny fake stone) forget the supposed desecration of what went before (I’m to young to remember it), Euston just isn’t practical. It is inconvenient to use. It puts unnecessary difficulties in the way of passengers.

The trains themselves are set back very far from the street. If you approach from the main road you have to walk across a barren Euston Square – basically a dog toilet with one gay bar in the ruins of the gatehouse of the previous incarnation of the station, then through then up some concrete steps and under a sub-Corb office buildings raised above you on pilotes, across a rough concrete platform exposed to the open air and frequented by drunks and stray dogs, into the huge main concourse (in winter as unpleasantly hot as the outside is cold and windswept) right across it to the entrances to the train shed which lead to long ramps passing down to the staggered platforms. It can easily take a 300 meter walk to get to your train.

Navigating through the succession of spaces can be a nightmare if you aren’t used to it. And not just for pedestrians. The bus station is an overcomplex figure-of-eight loop of tarmac which has buses going in different directions along the same route crossing each other’s path – you can get gridlock inside the bus ranks at Euston.

The concrete forecourt is raised up above street level and accessed by anything from three to twenty steps, unless you know to approach it from the Drummond Street side or the south-west corner, under the old Inmarsat building, or you find the one kinky dog-legged path leading up by the door to the toilets of the bar. Start anywhere else – such as the middle bus station, or the road crossing to Friend’s House or New St Pancras Church, or anywhere on the east side of the station – and you need to make your way up steps. Of course people carrying heavy luggage, or with young children, or who have mobility problems, never use a mainline railway station. Only healthy young car-drivers with small handbags get on trains.

Once inside the concourse your route to the platforms is obstructed by the entrance to the tube station – it probably seemed a good idea at the time to put it slap inside the main doors but in practice it means that only about a third of the doors are much used, and in the rush hour when there are queues to get down the escalators – or at any time of the escalators are out of order – the middle third of the concourse is blocked by a crowd trying to go underground. Things aren’t improved by the astonishingly stupid siting of the information office which can easily have queues of thirty or so people waiting for it, sticking out into the concourse at right angles to the queue for the tube, making an L-shaped block of humanity breaking the concourse into separate zones. You will probably be in the wrong one.

It is as if the building wants the public to come in from underground or by taxi or car – there is no clear pedestrian route in and out from the busses or the street to trains. As if only inferior and unimportant people came by bus or on foot. The whole structure turns its back, or more accurately its side, against the people and looks in on itself, presenting barrier after barrier to anyone trying to access the inner sanctum where there are actually trains. It is unfriendly and intimidating especially to people with mobility problems, or who have a lot of luggage. The message is that passengers don’t count, you are merely on one of the many things a modern train needs to be provisioned with. Wait your turn.

And things are worse if you do have to wait. Passengers are herded into the rectangular concourse to wait for their trains. There is nowhere to sit. The area is too large to feel safe or comfortable in, too obstructed by the entrance to the underground, by tat shops and concessions to move around easily in, too far from the ticket office or the toilets or the bars.

And they make you wait. Like at Victoria or Liverpool Street (though unlike King’s Cross and perhaps Paddington) they are in the habit of not announcing the platform your train is to leave from until about five to ten minutes before hand. Sometimes not even that. Then there is a huge long walk down the ramp and along to the trains (your seat reservation is always at the far end unless you pay extra) Anyone with the slightest mobility problem has the greatest trouble getting there in the time allowed – you have to guess the end of the station you will be directed to (it has to be a guess as you can’t see the trains, they are hidden at the bottom of the ramps), and move towards the platform in time, obscuring your view of the big board which is deliberately placed to encourage you to stand as far as possible from the trains. And there is nowhere to sit If you have difficulty standing or walking Euston is not a welcoming place.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Victoria copes with perhaps four or five times the throughput of passengers in a similar-sized space, yet feels much less demeaning. When there are crowds gathered, at rush hour or if there are serious delays, there is a buzz about Victoria station, while Euston merely feels oppressive. Kings Cross is tiny by comparison, has about the same number of passengers as Euston (maybe even more) yet fits us into what is actually a rather pleasant space – or at least an interesting one. You can sit in a bar or cafe and see your train and the announcement boards. Charing Cross is even smaller, and has a similar number of passengers to Euston, though as an almost entirely commuter station it has less luggage an and averagely more sussed passenger.

Euston numbers platforms from left to right as passengers look at them.

Why?

Short of complete demolition and rebuilding its probably too late to do anything much about the layout now. But it could be improved. Strip out the kiosks and concessions, move them all outside, open up the concourse space, put in chairs or benches. Redirect the queues for info and taxis. Put some ticket machines in the concourse. Announce platform numbers BEFORE boarding starts. Maybe there is even room for a mezzanine floor at the front, or some retail in the airspace above the trainshed (as at Victoria or Liverpool Street).

Improve the outside. Remove the existing blocky little slab rooves cantilevered out of the front and put in much larger and higher and lighter ones – curved to avoid shading the very nice Robinia trees – to keep rain and a little sun off anyone waiting there. Move more of the sales outlets outside, replace crappy concrete tables with nice round wooden ones and a lot more seating, refocus the shops on the east side to to face more out into square. Simplify and re-route the buses.

But the best thing would be to tear it all down and start again. Ideally do something imaginative. But even if there is no imagination to be found, a retro copy of a typical 1860s terminus would be better than what is there now.

The Curse of the Lewisham Head End spreads to on-train catering.

To Lancashire to see my Mum’s new house

Great thing about living in a city with complex public transport is that there are so many ways to get anywhere. They may all be slow and unpleasant, but there are lots of them.

I got a bus to Lewisham Station intending to take the DLR to Bank and Northern Line to Euston. And then found that, as this is the dreaded Bank Holiday Weekend the DLR was closed from Mudchute to Westferry Circus. (In passing, one of the reasons so many car drivers think that trains are shit in Britain is that they only ever take them on non-working days – when they are usually shit – long-distance trains usually work fine on weekdays outside holiday times). So I took the mainline to London Bridge instead, intending to get the Northern Line to Euston. And got there to find that it was closed for track works as well, or at least the Bank branch was. So I got the Jubilee line to Waterloo, changed to the other side of the Northern Line, and went up that way, and still got there with 25 minutes to spare. Has I known about the tube I might have taken the train to Victoria instead and gone to Euston on the Victoria Line. Or had there been no trains at all at Lewisham I could have taken the bus to New Cross Gate and gone up to London Bridge from there – or possibly even got the East London Line to change to Jubilee at Canada Water or through to Whitechapel to get on the Met or the Hammersmith and City to Euston Square. Or if no tubes at all I could have carried on by bus to the Elephant or to Bricklayer’s Arms and another bus via Aldwych for there – a journey that to night only takes 40 minutes, not counting waiting time, but is probably a lot longer in the Saturday shopping times.

Try doing that with the once every third Tuesday services you get in most places.

complexity makes the system more redundant which makes it more robust and possibly more resilient.

That got damn near a train-spotting post….

We just passed Watford Junction.

Talking of trainspotting, this is a Virgin train and its a bank holiday so I suppose we are lucky its moving. No buffet though. I could do with a cup of tea I should have realised and got one at the station (even though it was Euston)

Either that or their brand-merge with NTL has infected the railway operation with whatever dread disease destroyed customer service from that Lewisham head-end, passed on from Videotron to cable and Wireless to NTL and now to Virgin. The Internet is fine, and the cable TV is more or less fine except taht it mysteriously needed a new box at our end that they didn’t tell us about till the bloke came round supposedly to fix the phone which doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for four months now, but a new phone company would make me take at least a day of work to install their line and this is cheap, considered as a way of paying for cable TV and Internet connections, so the phone is an optional extra really. Or in this case, not an extra, because Virgin/NTL don’t know how to make their phones work.

Train driver (or whoever does these things) just announced that “hopefully” a “we will be picking up a member of the onboard catering team” at Coventry or at Birmingham International. Halfway there & I bet it takes 40 minutes to get everything ready & then there will be a queue.

Why is it that when you start thinking about food and drink you want some? If I wasn’t on this train I’d probably still be in bed at the moment (12:30 on Saturday, a civilised time for a lie-in), or maybe just getting and having a bath wouldn’t have dreamed of getting food or tea yet.

We’ve been waiting at Rugby for a long time…

… and the food bloke finally got on at New Street, and didn’t open till we were well beyond Birmingham, and there were 18before me in the very slow queue including someone whose credit card didn’t work and who was 60p short (in the end another customer gave him the 60p because it was going on so long) and I was still in the queue at Stafford, and at Crewe, and got back to my seat just in time for Warrington.

But trains are good. Really.

London is good

Easter over, lets get back to learning about London.

Today showed me just how much easier life is in urban environments than out of them. Just how much the well-connectedness and mutual interependence of things can make life simpler. I didn’t go to work today and stayed in bed all morning. At 3pm (2pm in God’s time) I was lying on my bed reading the Ship of Fools. (I have a posting from 15:09 to prove it – Isn’t wireless Internet access wonderful?) I then washed, got dressed, walked to the station (phoning my daughter on the way – she’s somewhere in the Midlands looking after puking persons), bought a week’s travel pass with my credit card, got on a train, went to Greenwich, bought a ticket to the film, went to the toilet again, and was in the cinema well in time for the 15.45 showing of Amazing grace. (Which is worth seeing apart from the last scene). Not that there was any point in being on time, there were ten minutes of trailer to sit through before the actual film. And they have decent air-conditioning (it was actually hot in London today), reclining seats, and a bar right next to the (very small) auditorium with a panoramic view of Greenwich and you can take your drinks into the show. (I has an espresso – it was only 4pm). Then sit in the bar afterwards for a decent pint of Staropromen and a great view and back home by train, taking me all of 15 minutes. Try doing that in the country. Sometimes cities just work.

Today I like London.

Tomorrow I have to go back to work.