VisitLondon, that seasoned oracle, lists ten stations in which the visitor to the capital ‘can expect to travel to and from in London’. These so-called ‘cathedrals of steel and glass’ have touched and inspired numerous writers, from John Betjeman getting the horn for St Pancras’ arches, to Simon Jenkins making the unlikely declaration that there is ‘magic in the air at Paddington’.
Your correspondent is not inspired by the romance of our sublime stations. In fact, he despises them entirely. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 nailed romantic simile for eternity, comparing the lover to a summer’s day. As I sit, staring wide-eyed at Euston’s platform 1, the delicate scent of discarded Burger King wrappers tickling my nostrils, with the dribbled piss of the men’s toilets clinging to the soles of my shoes, and the great swelling mass of my countrymen locked in miserable commune with their iPhones – the only things I can seek to juxtapose with these icons of the nation’s industrial past are the very summit of human evil: serial killers.
While London’s stations are unlikely to claim your actual life, they will, at some point, claim your will to live – making them, to my mind, much, much worse than any of the monsters with whom they are compared below.
waterloo
harold shipman
You wake up at some ungodly hour, next to your wife, who you refuse to love, in the front bedroom of a house that looks like every other in the cul-de-sac. You open the curtains as yet another sunrise soaks the view you have come to loathe of Woking, or Wimbledon, or Guildford, or any other place that a budding tv writer looks to situate his sitcom delineating the agony of the human condition.
You put on your T M Lewin outlet-bought suit and shirt. You walk to the station, and crowd into a silent miasma of Metro ink and morning breath. And so your daily journey through your life’s failure begins, your morning cappuccino cooling in your hand as the train glides through the suburbs.
Finally you arrive, and as you drudge alongside your fellows, you dare, unusually, to lift up your eyes unto the skies – in the vain hope that from there will cometh help. But no help comes from the cold marble porticos. Instead, there stands embossed one word as a lasciate ogne speranza for our times: waterloo. You look down to your shoes, your Christmas present from your wife. Everything is forever meaningless to you now, but you will continue on, to the tube, and then to office.
Just as Shipman murdered more than any other killer here, so Waterloo has harvested suited souls innumerable.
charing cross
lizzie borden
‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty one.’
