If hell exists, then certainly it resembles the concourse at Euston station. You stand, neck craned in the direction of the departures board, squinting beneath synthetic lights that appear completely calibrated to induce migraines. You dodge passengers who stampede like wildebeests in the direction of platforms introduced moments earlier than trains are resulting from go away. Enterprise exterior for air, and it’s gray so far as the attention can see: the concrete rectangle of the station, the equally drab models housing Pret and Nando’s on the forecourt, the faces of the folks freshly traumatised by their Euston expertise. It’s an unsightly, smelly, joy-sapping expertise. “Absolute chaos – by no means once more,” one current Tripadvisor overview sighs. “Miserable and disgusting,” one other snappily sums it up.
After which there are the delays, the cancellations, the throngs of pissed-off travellers packing the principle corridor. Barely every week appears to go by with out reviews of some recent type of carnage breaking out on the station, accompanied by movies exhibiting huge crowds jammed shoulder to shoulder (within the run-up to Christmas, Euston’s seasonal nadir, one memorable tweet described it as “a Petri dish of chaos”). It’s sufficient to ship any common travellers into fight-or-flight mode. I’ve had the misfortune to journey to and from Euston on the West Coast Important Line – which runs to cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow – for a couple of decade. It’s by no means been an particularly fulfilling expertise. I used to placed on my trainers earlier than making an attempt to journey on a Friday night time, kidding myself that it would give me the sting within the notorious “Euston sprint”. However lately, it has sharply deteriorated.
Final autumn, the Workplace of Rail and Street stated that crowds had reached “unacceptable ranges” at Euston, and issued Community Rail with an enchancment discover (on the time, a Community Rail spokesperson stated that managing “a busy and common station like Euston is a day by day problem”, and stated they had been trialling measures like earlier boarding to cut back crowding). A couple of months later, Avanti, the rail firm that operates alongside the west coast, emerged as Britain’s least punctual prepare operator, with simply 46.3 per cent of companies arriving on time. And large query marks encompass plans to convey HS2 there: in October, the federal government stated that the route will solely terminate at a brand new station in Euston if it may partly be financed by non-public funding.
How did Euston purchase such a grim popularity? The nice irony of its backstory is that, as London’s first inter-city railway station, it was as soon as an aspirational, revolutionary place. George and Robert Stephenson, engineers for the London and Birmingham Railway, selected a spot on what was then the sting of London, surrounded by farmland owned by the Dukes of Grafton; their household seat, Euston Corridor in Suffolk, gave the brand new terminus its identify. Work started within the 1830s, and Charles Dickens would later recall the “dire dysfunction” of the railway’s building in his novel Dombey and Son. “Homes had been knocked down; streets damaged by way of and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug within the floor, huge heaps of earth and clay thrown up,” he wrote. The station opened in 1837, initially taking passengers to Boxmoor in Hertfordshire. When the road was prolonged to Birmingham the next 12 months, the journey took simply over 5 hours (I’ll go away you to insert your individual punchline about Twenty first-century journey instances right here).
The person answerable for its design was the architect Philip Hardwick. Practice journey was in its infancy, so railway firms needed their stations to evoke a reassuring sense of custom. To tug this off, Hardwick appeared to the traditional Greeks to dream up a worthy “gateway to the North”. In 1838, a 72-foot-tall propylaeum supported by Doric columns, like the doorway to a Greek temple, was unveiled exterior the station. Propylaeum, in fact, doesn’t actually roll off the tongue, so the construction turned referred to as the Euston Arch. Quick-forward 10 years and Euston additionally boasted a lovely, neoclassical Nice Corridor designed by Hardwick’s son, full with plaster reliefs impressed by the cities it served and a coffered ceiling that recalled Rome’s Basilica of St Paul Outdoors the Partitions.
However being the primary of its variety had drawbacks. “Typically whenever you do new issues, you get a dominant design: folks work out methods to do issues, and it sticks,” says Marcus Mayers, a visiting analysis fellow at Manchester Metropolitan College who has many years of expertise within the railway trade. “Euston was constructed earlier than the dominant design of railway stations and companies had been established.” It expanded piecemeal: though the Nice Corridor was a stunner, a lot of the remainder was “dilapidated and derelict”, with outdated platforms, Mayers explains. Plans for an overhaul had been placed on maintain in the course of the Second World Conflict, and the station was additional broken within the blitz.
It must be actually double the scale it’s to take care of the variety of passengers
Gareth Dennis, railway engineer and author
Within the Sixties, the entire web site was earmarked for demolition. The poet John Betjeman was amongst those that campaigned for the Arch to be saved, however then-prime minister Harold Macmillan was unmoved. “An obsession with such buildings will drain our nationwide vitality,” he stated. The Arch was unceremoniously destroyed, in what the Royal Institute of British Architects has described as one of many nation’s “biggest acts of post-war architectural vandalism”. Stones from the monument had been finally found in a again backyard in Kent and on the backside of the River Lea.
The Sixties redesign gave us the Brutalist-style concrete field we all know and like to hate right now. It may not enchantment to up to date sensibilities, however on the time it was useful and recent, because of easy, clear traces and extra pure gentle. “It was the other of what it’s right now: it was clear, it was slick, it was fashionable,” says railway engineer and author Gareth Dennis. “It felt like the longer term.” A brochure exhibiting off the brand new station describes fancy services like a “catering room” out there for “banquets and buffet dances”, in addition to “high-class bogs with showers and baths”. Now, it’s laborious to think about someplace you’d be much less keen to have a shower than Euston station. What went so very mistaken?
One of many greatest points, Dennis suggests, is that the quantity of trains going out and in of Euston has vastly elevated since then, however the station itself hasn’t grown in tandem. “The station continues to be the identical dimension station that carried six instances fewer trains a day,” he says. “[It] must be actually double the scale it’s to take care of the variety of passengers.” HS2 and even Crossrail 2, he argues, may need taken a few of that stress off. Plus, outlets and cafes have encroached on the ground area (the new-ish mezzanine stage, the place you possibly can choose up a Leon wrap whereas surveying the frazzled passengers beneath, solely enhances the sense of claustrophobia). “Rapidly, that station that when felt massive and ethereal appears like a small shed,” Dennis provides. And when a number of trains are delayed or cancelled, “you’re speaking about hundreds of individuals squished into that area. It’s not simply uncomfortable, it’s not simply disagreeable, it’s unsafe.”
There are different components that assist compound Euston’s woeful popularity. “If folks get annoyed, their notion of an surroundings adjustments,” explains David Bamford, professor of operations administration at Manchester Metropolitan College. And Euston is actually a dispiriting place for a passenger. Bamford’s analysis has discovered that poor signage solely makes aggravating locations extra aggravating – and “the signage in Euston is completely garbage”. The station, he provides “appears extra interested by promoting with an enormous LED display screen” – a comparatively current addition that now dominates the station’s again wall – “than it does in truly serving to you get in your journey.” Platform data is non-existent, too, till a couple of minutes earlier than departure. This all creates an absence of passenger belief, he argues, which is just compounded by “the uncertainty that you just’re truly going to achieve your vacation spot”. Euston, Mayers suggests, is presently “in a horrible locked place due to politics. Nobody’s going to do something as a result of they don’t know what’s going to occur subsequent”. However it’s not all doom and gloom: he reckons that the station is “eminently redesignable”, as there’s “no scarcity of area”.
Within the brief time period, the primary level of motion needs to be “guaranteeing the reliability on that line goes means again up into the excessive 90 per cent [range]”, Dennis suggests, “so that you don’t have the scenario the place hundreds of individuals are caught”. To make issues higher for many who do find yourself ready for delayed trains, he says, he recommends “eliminating all of the promoting, pulling again retail [spaces] much more, extra seating: all these issues that basically prioritise the passenger who’s caught”.
Euston is the beginning and finish level of one of many busiest routes within the UK: we deserve a station that’s match for goal (I’d even accept one which doesn’t continuously scale back me to tears). However we’ll solely get that if the folks in cost are keen to make huge selections, as a substitute of papering over the cracks. “Euston needs to be a grand gateway station, moderately than ‘how will we ship as cheaply as attainable?’” Dennis says. “It’s by no means going to be mounted long run with out us going ‘We would like one thing that’s good, moderately than the minimal viable product.’”
