LIVERPOOL STREET STATION Group: British Railways Purchase price: £200 Rent: £25 Annual passengers: 95 million Borough:City of London Postcode: EC2
The fourth and final railway station on the Monopoly board is the busiest station in the UK, a great contrast to mere Marylebone and Fenchurch Street. Like the others it was an LNER terminus in 1935 when Victor Watson and Marjory Phillips chose the names of the properties after a day trip to London. In today's post I'm going to focus on the mainline station, not the tube nor subterranean Crossrail platforms, and rest assured the text will be fully illustrated because I was only stopped once by a security guard enquiring why I was taking photos.
Trains from East Anglia initially terminated at Bishopsgate, a high level terminus approximately where Shoreditch High Street station is today. The extra push into the City of London took place in the early 1870s, displacing over 10,000 residents, with the creation of a new terminus on a site previously occupied by the Bethlem Royal Hospital. This opened in 1874 immediately alongside Broad Street station, initially with two platforms for main-line trains and eight for suburban trains. An extra ten platforms were added during a phase of expansion in 1890 and covered by a much plainer trainshed roof, with trains still forced to squeeze in and out of the station through a six-track neck under Shoreditch High Street. A major upgrade of the station took place in the 1980s after Broad Street closed, enabling development of the Broadgate complex, and a further massive office-based transformation is proposed if developers can push their controversial plans through.
Liverpool Street, the street, is late Victorian and named after one of the UK's longest serving prime ministers, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool. Station aside its premier building is the Great Eastern Hotel, designed in a Renaissance style by Charles Barry Jr and opened in May 1884. At the time it was the City of London's only hotel, ideal for bankingfolk to stay in overnight, and contained 160 bedrooms, two Masonic temples and a separate restaurant block. A turn of the century upgrade added lavish decoration and over 100 more rooms, then in 1996 the whole caboodle was sold to the Conran Group who spent £65m on a luxurious restoration, and the current owners are Hyatt Hotels whose nightly room rate is twice the price of a weekly season ticket to Norwich. Taxi drivers who cluster in the street outside are generally assured a good tip.
Today's station has 17 platforms with the Overground and Stansted Express departing from the lower numbers, Inter-Cities departing in the middle and trains passing through Stratford up the far end. Stansted-bound ticket gates continue to be emblazoned with red signage warning that contactless is not available on trains to the airport, as many only discover when they're slapped with a huge penalty at the far end. The hubbub of the 'teen' platforms is much diminished since Crossrail started running through journeys a couple of years ago. Only when you step through the barriers do the glories of the trainshed roof fully reveal themselves, and only if you walk to the very far end does that glory subside as you enter the pillaredunderworld beneath Broadgate with its Network Southeast banding still intact.
The main station concourse is below street level and brighter than it used to be in the days when departures were displayed on a clickety clackety split-flapboard. Today's electronic replacement spans the centre of the space, side-on, Network Rail having thankfully not replaced it by smaller boards at floor level and a blaze of irrelevant advertising. Passengers from the tube or Crossrail emerge mid-maelstrom opposite platform 6, whereas those entering from Bishopsgate or Liverpool Street descend via escalators, stairs or baggage-encumbered lifts. A lot of the clutter on the concourse has been removed to streamline passenger flow, leaving an information kiosk, a bank of ticket machines and an inadequate number of seats in situ. A proper customer lounge is tucked away up the side of platform 10 where most travellers will never spot it.
The original ticket office became an Oliver Bonas a few years ago, now accompanied by a much more useful Greggs. The latest ticketing facilities are a few paltry windows in a drab gap between platforms 10 and 11, but are themselves in the process of being relocated to make way for three new shops. Other platform-adjacent retailers include Upper Crust and a burritos vendor, with the remaining outlets having recently been ousted in favour of additional ticket gates (coming soon). A long-underwhelming WH Smiths remains opposite, alongside a snackgrab courtesy of the Camden Food Co and one of London's six Moleskine stores for stationery obsessives. Here too is the access to the underworld, aka the public toilets, where escalators have kindly been provided rather than the miserable narrow staircases some other mainline stations foist upon the desperate.
Liverpool Street station has an upstairs too, a balcony rim populated by further vendors keen to top up your journey with refreshment and tat. M&S Food and Leon are the chief traveller targets, there being less need for smelly bathbombs and rubber ducks en voyage. A tanning shop might seem an unnecessary inclusion at a rail terminus but this is the station that serves Essex so no doubt it has a solid business case. The less mercenary side of the balcony allows passers-by a good close-up of the back of the Great Eastern Hotel and its redbrick facade, along with a few pub stools for perching. Perhaps more imposing is the Great Eastern War Memorial, an 11-column marble marvel which was originally located in the booking hall but was relocated up here in the 1990s. Look out underneath for a set of lift doors and a plaque to Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson who officially unveiled the memorial in 1922 only to be shot by the IRA a few hours later as he returned home.
Sun Street Passage along the western flank was once the dividing line between Liverpool Street and Broad Street stations. Today it accesses a seriously lacklustre bus station where unfortunate passengers wait in a passage for deliverance, then reverts to an alleyway following the surviving side of the Victorian trainshed. At the far end is Exchange Square, a blandly artificial terrace from which you can normally look down from a high vantage point across the terminating tracks. However contractors from Morgan Sindall have just started work on refreshing the station roof, making it resilient to 1-in-10 year storms and replacing lichen-encrusted panels with brighter panes, so this fine view of multiple platforms is currently obscured until 2026.
The station's retail offer was recently extended by the creation of a split-level luxury mall nextdoor at 100 Liverpool Street. The existing arcade with its Boots and chocolate kiosk was seriously up-glammed with the addition of Reiss, Kiehl and Neom and other brands upstairs, plainly targeted at bonus-burdened financial types emerging from the offices above. Round the corner is a glitzy Hackett conveniently facing a Crossrail egress, and the piazza has just been filled with a bobbly sculpture by Yayoi Kusama resembling a string of silver globules, officially called "Infinite Accumulation". You get the feeling that Liverpool Street station is attempting to rival St Pancras as an iconic destination and is catching up, but still at least 20 years behind.
