Do Not Pass Go

by Tim Moore

  As chief architect of the Metropolitan Board of Works, Joseph Bazalgette personally designed three bridges over the Thames – two of them, Hammersmith and Battersea, still extant – and in creating Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road was the father of two of the three prominent West End thoroughfares (the other being Tottenham Court Road) whose omission from the Monopoly board it is most difficult to justify. (In fact, I’d also like to include Haymarket, if only to reveal that Ho Chi Minh once worked in a restaurant there.) Most vitally, of course, without Bazalgette’s inspiration and tireless endeavour the London Monopoly board would be a square short – the Water wouldn’t Work. We might not all get on a Tube train every morning, or take a midnight stroll down Piccadilly, or browse for headscarves amidst the timbers of an ancient man-o’-war, but pending a radical overhaul of human physiology every Londoner should long continue to thank Joseph Bazalgett many times a day. Though this side of Chiswick Bridge, obviously, we couldn’t give a shit.

  CHAPTER 10

  The (Other) Stations

  I COULD NEVER quite be doing with the stations – you couldn’t Harold Clunn them over with plastic hotels and no matter what their supporters claim you never, ever got all four. In a game that was about wild speculation, about staking it all in the hope of enormous reward, investing in stations was like opening up a Post Office savings account. When you snapped up Trafalgar Square you’d greedily scan down the rent tariffs and think, ‘Blooding buggery-poop!’ (It’s OK – you’re nine.) ‘This only cost me £240 and soon it’s going to be paying out £1,100!’ With a station you’d glumly verify that the very best case scenario consisted of getting your money back. Then you’d swap it with your sister. My sister always used to hoard stations, and when you swapped one with her for anything except a utility it was difficult – impossible – not to wiggle your fingers in her face while whooping the special whoop that traditionally accompanies an abuse of gullibility.

  But one soon grows out of such mindlessly vindictive behaviour, and entering middle age I surveyed the stations anew. This time, what struck me was not their tediously monochromatic title deeds, or the plodding linearity of their rent increases, but this: what the ugly, naked man is Fenchurch Street doing there? Trumping even Vine Street and Northumberland Avenue, three of the four stations showcase Vic and Marge at their most wilfully obscure. If Les Dennis introduced ‘A railway terminus in London’ as a round in Family Fortunes and filched his answers off the Monopoly board, there’d be a lot of those negatory electronic donkey noises before anyone got Liverpool Street or Marylebone, let alone Fenchurch Street. ‘We’ll go for Paddington, Les.’ Our survey said . . .’ Eey-ore! ‘Er . . . Waterloo?’ Eey-ore! ‘Euston? Victoria? Charing Cross?’ Eey-ore! Eey-ore! Eey-ore!

  The truth, as anyone with a pre-1948 board will tell you, is that the four stations are the London terminuses of a single company – the London and North Eastern Railway. As with the orange ‘law’ set, of course, this answer merely substitutes one ‘why?’ for another, one starker and rather more profound. Quite why Victor Watson nurtured this bizarrely partisan bond to the LNER we are unlikely now to know. Yes, LNER ran King’s Cross and Leeds and the trains he took between the two. Yes, it was one of the dominant railway companies of the era, and, as numerous speed records attested, the most glamorous. I have even seen it seriously suggested that the choice reflected London-born Victor’s desire to build bridges between the capital and his adopted Yorkshire (his family moved from Brixton to Leeds when Vic was an infant).

  But none of this seemed wholly satisfactory, and having pulled over on the way home from Crossness and got the board out and landed on Chance, and been assessed for street repairs, and drawn again and been despatched on a GO-passing, £200-collecting trip to Marylebone Station, and thought for a bit, I realised that to get any useful sense of what the three remaining stations had to say for themselves I’d have to visit them all. Each for the first time. In the same day.

  Marylebone’s previous role in my life had been restricted to humorously exploiting the tortured arcanities of its pronunciation when provincial relatives plopped their token there – a torment I would later have cause to regret while spending three university years in a city with a suburb called Penistone, and not finding out until the end of the third what I should have been saying to avoid the bus conductress’s slaps. Anyway, the name isn’t an Anglicisation of Marie-la-Bonne – a popular misconception – but can be attributed to the church built there in 1400 and dedicated to Mary by the bourne, the Ty Bourne being a stream running from what is now Regent’s Park down to the Thames. The last mainline London terminus to be built, Marylebone’s financers at the Great Central Railway spent so much cash placating the well-heeled nimby brigade up the line at St John’s Wood – they had to build a huge tunnel under the outfield at Lords – that there wasn’t much left for the station itself. Opened in 1899, it retains a fetching red-brick, low-key air, boldly eschewing a traditional presence on one of the nearby bustling thoroughfares in favour of an address whose ambience is encapsulated in its name: Melcombe Place. If you’d slept through the suburbs, waking with a start as your train shrieked to a halt at one of Marylebone’s four modest platforms you might feel rather disorientated. You might in fact think, ‘Buttocks – I’m in Lincoln.’ If St Pancras is the cathedral of the railway age, Marylebone is its church hall.

  The tiling along the Underground platform was venerably Edwardian, and the warm Tube air blowing me up the squeaking, clanking wooden-staired escalator to the mainline station timelessly scented. Were you aware that the distinctive smell of the Underground is largely that of human skin dust? And that although 40,000 tons of cosmic powder falls to earth from space every year, a third of all our atmospheric dust is generated by a single dried-up lake in Chad?

  I don’t often find such inconsequentialities sidling unbidden out of some forgotten vault in my mind at eleven o’clock in the morning, but Marylebone’s tranquillity seemed almost to demand idle rumination. It was like Christmas Day: I counted ten different outlets where you could buy a cappuccino and between them they could only muster seven customers. Mighty expresses once pulled out of Marylebone bound for Manchester and Sheffield, but these days it’s served only by foolishly puny Sprinter-style affairs that get bullied by real trains if they go out past the green belt on their own. When film director Richard Lester needed to commandeer a mainline London station for the Beatlemania chase scenes in A Hard Day’s Night, Marylebone was the only feasible option. The station manager probably thought it would be nice to fill the place up for a change.

  Everything about the station recalled a slower, gentler age. The Great Central’s acronym looked down on a florist, a proper stripy-poled barber’s and a cobbler; stubbornly flouting current trends in railwayspeak the announcements were addressed to ‘passengers’ rather than ‘customers’. Decorating a wall near the side exit was a rewarding illustrated history of the station, which quoted a speaker at the opening banquet pondering that ‘when our Queen came to the throne London had not one rail terminus; her reign has now seen the opening of the last’. It was as if the Victorians knew even at the time that their successors would make a bit of a mess of the capital.

  If commuters from the swish new Metroland suburbs fanning distantly north-west out of London kept Marylebone alive, then City workers from the older and tattier Essex feeder towns of Shoeburyness and Pitsea did the same for Fenchurch Street. I had never, ever been to Fenchurch Street and without a very detailed map I’d still be looking for it now. Hopelessly disorientated walking there from Tower Hill Tube, I’d ended up at the Monument – which at least gives me the opportunity to explain that the Pudding Lane where the Fire of London famously began derived its name not from anything toothsomely catering-based but a medieval slang term for the turds that perennially clogged its open gutters.

  Fenchurch Street might be the oldest address on the board – the first part of the name is probably derived from the Latin word for ‘ha
y’ sold at an adjacent market, and remains of what would have been the largest Roman forum north of the Alps have been recently excavated here – but brick-for-brick its current buildings are certainly the newest. Ever since those forum days Fenchurch Street has been close to the heart of the capital’s business district, and for the City of London authorities historical sentiment is rarely a match for what they might call hard commercial sense but most of us prefer to describe as ugly, naked greed.

  London’s first skyscraper went up here in 1957 – a fragile fourteen-storey affair with the sort of balconies the Beatles looked over on those blue and red compilation album covers. Since then the developers have been far too busy looking up to look back. From behind hoardings on all sides issued the empty-vessel clunks and apocalyptic booms of serious construction; the atmospheric cement dust made your nostrils twitch and hard hats outnumbered pinstripes in streets around.

  No one sleeps in Fenchurch Street any more, so no one’s likely to complain about the noise or the claustrophobia of a life lived in shadows. And, rather more oddly, fewer people work here than at the dawn of the Monopoly era: since 1935, the daytime population of the City’s Square Mile has fallen from half a million to a quarter. Computerisation has wiped out the financial sweatshops where rows of clerks toiled at manual calculators like those old bus-conductor ticket machines. This begs the question: what is the point of all these new blocks? And the answer, I’m happy to speculate wildly, is shallow corporate vanity: a lust for unoccupied vertical space which one might call Atrium Culture.

  I only really mind because the glazed cliffs that this culture has spawned are just so desperately dull. They’re not tall enough to be impressive in a Manhattan sense – only in a fairly lump peasouper would these boys get to scrape any sky – and are just so unremittingly . . . well, you know, square. Show someone a picture of Liberty’s or St Pancras or even Pentonville Prison and they’ll have something reasonably animated to say about it: these are edifices that provoke thought. Show someone a picture of one of Fenchurch Street’s prominent structures and they’ll gaze at it intently waiting for something unexpected to leap out from the photograph – a three-dimensional image of a camel race, perhaps – and when it doesn’t they’ll bleakly mumble, ‘It is twenty-three storeys high. Can you let go now?’

  I read, with heart sinking, an A4 ‘site progress report’ gaffer-taped to one hoarding which read, ‘Work will proceed quickly now due to the repetitive nature of the panelling.’ Gosh! I can’t wait to see that place when it’s finished. Though, actually, they don’t want you to. You don’t cover something in mirrors if you want anyone to look at it. When you look in the mirror, you don’t look at it. Anything in the vicinity that dared to be different was sat on or crowded out by what the architect Richard Rogers has described as ‘arguably the ugliest group of modern buildings in London’. The Tower of London could only manage a fleeting, wobbly reflection in some bronze-mirrored repetitive panel, and the graceful, low entrance arch of Fenchurch Street station was aggressively hemmed in by great flanks of louvred glass and concrete.

  Twice bombed by Zeppelins in the First World War and overhauled in 1935, the station was given another facelift in 1987. Perhaps that isn’t quite the mot juste. Many drastic procedures are carried out in the quest for eternal youth, but to my knowledge no pioneering physician has yet been brave enough to push back the boundaries of surgical rejuvenation by stoving his patients’ features in with a Le Creuset frying pan. For once inside that graceful arch, Fenchurch Street is transformed before your eyes into the changing room in an Austin Allegro-era leisure centre, with stroboscopically flickering fluorescent tubes and tiles the colour of breakfast cereal leftovers sloughing across the floor and halfway up the walls.

  After Marylebone’s airy gentility it was all very disappointing. So modest are the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the upstairs concourse at Fenchurch Street that when the announcer spoke it was like being addressed by a wrathful God whose all-seeing eye had fallen upon signalling problems outside Leigh-on-Sea. The route out to Southend has for years been nicknamed the Misery line, and though this may largely be down to delays and overcrowding, the ambience of its London terminus can hardly have helped. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded so much were it not for Fenchurch Street’s lengthy heritage. For over a thousand years this had been the very heart of the capital – deep under my feet lay a seam of charcoal marking Boadicea’s fiery revolt in AD 60, and the street names around told their own long stories: Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, French Ordinary Court. The little runt of a road out at the front of the station was actually called London Street.

  My intention had been to stay for the rush hour, clinging on to a ticket collector as a human tide of 28,000 mauve-shirted, power-suited City boys and girls threatened to carry us off through the barriers and away to Shoeburyness. But it didn’t happen: the City isn’t the 9–5 place it was in the early Monopoly age, and a lot of those 28,000 would be at their desks until well after 6. Five o’clock came and went, and at quarter past so did I.

  Only one platform shy of the combined total run up by the other three Monopoly stations, Liverpool Street was almost overbearingly thronged by the time I got there. Guards were blowing whistles, electric trolleys beep-beep-beeped through the crowds, a phone rang to the tune of ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’.

  Named after a road named after a Prime Minister, Liverpool Street was the largest London terminus when it opened in 1874, its lofty, Gothic frontages dominating the spindly medieval taverns and houses around. The station’s integral hotel, the Great Eastern, boasted a glass-domed restaurant and a secret platform where trains delivered sea water to fill its marine swimming baths. Here was a building which had some front, and then some more.

  From the last war onwards, however, Liverpool Street languished in neglect, acquiring a squalid and rather seamy reputation; Ian, my friend from the Ritz, recalls visiting the bar of the Great Eastern in the early eighties and finding it peopled with ramshackle ladies of the night and lairy wideboys necking Double Diamond. Even the late MP Tom Driberg, whose fondness for toilet sex with big soldiers hardly marks him down as a pernickety fusspot, damned the station as ‘a hell hole’.

  Now, though, the Great Eastern (once the site of Bethlehem Royal Hospital, the original Bedlam) is a poncily minimalist Conran venture, and the station behind it has been lavishly made over. Standing where the Tube station opens into the concourse I craned my neck back and gazed up at the soaring iron arches and fancy brickwork; the latter gleamed as if varnished and the former had been regally repainted in their multicoloured Victorian livery.

  I uncraned my neck and immediately wished I hadn’t. Floating uneasily right across the concourse was a sort of aerial corridor of curved chrome and Perspex, as harmoniously attuned to its surroundings as a bouncy castle in the aisle of Westminster Abbey. Along it were arranged a parade of small retail concessions, largely catering for the sorry-I’m-late-love market: florists, jewellers and, for the drunken, tardy husband keen to make a bad situation worse, a Sock Shop. Propped up at one end was a garish confectionery trolley, and seeing this emblazoned ‘Sweet Chariot’ I made a face like the scorer of a flamboyantly improbable own goal.

  With most of the trains hidden behind that chrome walkway, it was suddenly difficult to identify this as a station. In a way it isn’t. More so than any of the other Monopoly stations, in fact more so than any other London station, Liverpool Street has moved boldly beyond its original brief – that tired concept of a building where people got to catch trains. The figures seem ridiculous, and yet if they were to be trusted I’d be one of the twenty-five million annual visitors who walk into Liverpool Street with no intention of leaving it on a train. Add on the one hundred million who arrive with every such intention, but inevitably have to hang about for a bit waiting for this hope to become a reality, and Liverpool Street is apparently able to offer retailers twice as many potential consumers as Heathrow Airport. Soon, we’re told
, there’ll be a Marks & Spencer, upmarket fashion retailers and, amongst many other dining options, a slice-to-go operation run by Pizza Express called – and you might want to put any breakable items out of reach at this point – Pizza Express Express.

  Any hair-tearing commuters reading Railtrack’s commercial manager boast to the Evening Standard about the retail benefit associated with ‘dwell times of up to thirty-three minutes’ could be forgiven for lashing him nude to the Sweet Chariot, though with any luck he’s enjoying some professional dwell time of his own these days. Retail sales at London’s stations rose 70 per cent in the three years after 1997 and at the time of Railtrack’s demise contributed 13 per cent of the company’s total revenue. The Costa Coffee outlet at Waterloo is the chain’s third busiest in Europe; Body Shop’s Euston branch generates more sales per square foot than any other across the globe. Passengers, it seems, have finally succumbed to the indoctrinating argot of the post-privatised railways and become customers. I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to push quite large things over.

  You know things are bad when the government’s own ministers cheerfully admit that Britain’s railways are now the worst in Europe. A possibly meaningless but certainly eye-catching statistic reveals that in 2000 passengers on the London Underground wasted the equivalent of 6,735 years in delays caused by deteriorating service: more dwell time than even the most odiously cynical commercial manager would know how to exploit.