On the Slow Train (15 page)

My train from Stratford arrives at the first westbound station, Hackney Wick, in minutes – not because we have gathered speed but because all the stations are so close and this slowest of slow trains rarely gets above 20 mph at any point on the journey. This
is
the heart of Hackney – rustbowl London, a wasteland of derelict factories and streets that appear to go nowhere. Iain Sinclair, the chronicler of unconventional London life, describes it thus in his book about Hackney,
That Rose-Red Empire
: ‘A once Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty.' But it also represents the vibrancy of ethnic London at its best. By Homerton the carriage is buzzing with what seem to be most of the 150 languages that are currently spoken in the metropolis.

Sadly, at this end of the line the magnificent station buildings of the North London Railway, designed by E H Horne in the Venetian-Gothic style and constructed of white Suffolk brick, Portland stone and terracotta, have mostly gone. By the end of the 1950s, the infrastructure of the old North London was like something from a Gothic horror movie. Water dripped through ceilings, algae ate away at elegant carvings, slates dropped from roofs and once-splendid wooden structures mouldered away with dry rot. Weeds grew through cracks in the platforms. It was the perfect scenario for the Beeching axe. But change was in the air. There were the first inklings that the endless advance of the motor car might end up strangling London, and local authorities along the line roused themselves to save it from closure. Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party, wrote an article in the
Manchester Guardian
suggesting that it should be incorporated in the Tube map, a status it has only recently fully achieved, nearly half a century later. But when the North London was finally reprieved in 1965 by the Labour transport minister Tom Fraser, British Railways had their revenge and butchered nearly all the heritage – substituting bus shelters and huts built from the cheapest materials where Horne's commodious buildings had once stood. One of the most monstrous acts of vandalism was the total demolition of Dalston Junction, once a grand station with several platforms, where even in the early 1960s passengers might find a roaring coal fire in the
waiting
room on a winter's night. You could once, in the heyday of the line, pick up a restaurant-car express to Wolverhampton from here. But as it sank into decline, passengers might be forgiven for thinking they had alighted at a ghost station. What a pity, since a new but more spartan Dalston Junction has opened as part of the new route taking the North London Line south of the Thames through the world's first underwater tunnel, designed by Marc Brunel, Isambard Kingdom's father, at Rotherhithe.

Sadly though we shall never again be able to take the slow train to Broad Street. Which is why I am abandoning the train at Dalston Kingsland and taking a rare bus diversion from my journey. This morning I am on a special mission to rediscover memories of Broad Street, because my father was among the hundreds of thousands of Mr Pooters who commuted into the station every day, making the fortunes of the North London Railway and its successor, the London and North Western Railway. (Henry Pooter, hero of George and Weedon Grossmith's novel
The Diary of a Nobody
, makes no mention of the North London Railway, although it is a fair bet that he would have used its services to travel from his home in Holloway to his job as a clerk, like my father, in the City.)

This is a social world that has almost entirely vanished. For forty years, Stanley Williams caught the 8.23 each morning from West End Lane station (now West Hampstead) to his job as a clerk in the offices of the Royal London Insurance Company in Finsbury Square. Not only did the timing of the trains not change much, nor did people's jobs. These days, according to the latest statistics, the average twenty-something stays in a job for less than two years. Stanley Williams stayed loyal to the North London until his retirement, always preferring the style and comfort of its electric trains to the Tube. The line was electrified as long ago as 1916, and one of the original cars, which lasted in service until the 1960s, is in the National Railway Museum in York – the oldest electric multiple unit in the land. No wonder it lasted so long, since its equipment was supplied by one of the best engineering firms in
Switzerland
– Oerlikon Maschinenfabrik of Zurich. Even in the bleakest days of the nationalised railway in the 1960s the North London continued the tradition of having trains specially designed for it, although the Class 501 units, built in British Railways' works in the 1950s, did not have such splendidly comfortable cushions as the Oerlikons, nor did they have the leather straps to open the carriage windows, which were a favourite trophy for local schoolboys and their penknives.

Dalston Kingsland is a mean and shabby station built at the end of 1973 after Dalston Junction was closed and passenger services diverted to Stratford. Possibly the only sign of the universe Mr Pooter or my father once inhabited is the Railway Tavern next to the station, on old Irish boozer covered in puke-coloured tiles, which still has its traditional pub sign, with a picture of a train looking more like the red engine in Graham Greene's
The Little Train
than anything the North London Railway might have run. In the bar, where there is a framed front page of the
News Chronicle
announcing ‘Crowning Glory – Everest is Climbed' along with the words of the Irish national anthem, elderly West Indians in baseball caps slumber over halves of Red Stripe. ‘We don't serve food here,' says Rose the landlady as she pours a Guinness in the way only the Irish do, and directs me to Ridley Road market over the road, which is as potent a distillation of multicultural urban life as can be found anywhere on the planet. Amid hundreds of stalls selling every conceivable foodstuff from cows' feet to parrotfish, old-fashioned cockney stallholders with fat jewellery jostle with ringletted Rastas and toothless elderly men speaking Urdu doing deals over boxes of mangoes and yams. There is every kind of tripe, stomach and testicle here – heaving innards of all kinds dripping blood and who knows what other fluids. It is said that with a quiet word at the back of a stall you could negotiate, if you so wished, for some black-market monkey steaks here, but I settle for a relatively conservative goat curry, sneaking into the back of a huge Victorian church to eat it surreptitiously. S
T
M
ARK'S
, D
ALSTON
, C
ATHEDRAL OF THE
E
AST
E
ND
, says the board outside. It is apparently the only
church
in Europe with a working barometer, but when I try to put some money in the offertory box, I find it has been crowbarred out of the wall. ‘It's OK. Give it to me,' says a wizened man emerging from the darkness. I reckon not.

I wonder what the stonemasons of Dove Brothers, Islington, the builders of St Mark's, might have thought. Almost certainly they would have made their way to work here on the North London Railway. But for me it is the No. 242 bus (Homerton Hospital to Liverpool Street) south along the Kingsland Road to the site of what John Betjeman once called the ‘saddest of London stations'. As a small boy travelling to the City with my father – doing overtime to support a young family on a Saturday morning

– I recall vividly Broad Street's deserted air of faded glory. Betjeman wrote evocatively, ‘In the sixties, the magnificent iron roof over the train shed was removed. The large Lombardic buffet and the shops for city clerks were shut down and in 1970 the scale-model 4-4-0 engine whose wheels went round if you put a penny in the slot was either removed or stolen.'

Sad, because I invested what seemed an enormous amount of my pocket money standing on tiptoes watching the wheels revolve. This little engine, which whizzed away without going anywhere, and the Italian man in the buffet who would tip a sugar shaker into my dandelion and burdock drink to create a volcano of fizz, were, for some inexplicable reason, some of the most profound memories of my boyhood. Betjeman went on (writing in 1972):

Standing in the empty concourse at Broad Street today, one has a feeling of its former greatness. A few steps back will take you into what was once an enormous booking hall whose timber roof towers above the station shops. Along on the concourse now stands the 1914 war memorial of the North London, a miniature version of the Cenotaph in Whitehall . . . May God Save the Old North London!

Of course he didn't. At least, not in that joyous incarnation of Betjeman's time. Sitting in Starbucks in the Broadgate Circle amid
the
1980s corporate pink granite over a large macchiato, I reckon the grid reference is about right for the booking office, if not my little penny-in-the-slot engine. Just fancy – at the turn of the century there were more arrivals at Broad Street than at Euston and Paddingon combined. It was the Edwardian equivalent of London City Airport, with frock-coated City gents preferring to take trains to the Midlands from here, complete with the services of a travelling typist provided by the railway. Only Liverpool Street and Victoria had more trains. But not a brick or a shard remains of Broad Street, not even the echo of a whistle. Certainly not a memory. I ask Alphonse, the ‘barista', if he knows there was once a great railway station here. ‘Maybe like the Gare D'Orsay?' he ventures. Yes. But unlike the Parisians, Londoners didn't bother to save it.

Still, not all is lost. Small railway companies like the North London were often grand in disproportion to their size, and despite the wreckers of the 1960s a few mini-Broad Streets have survived. I take the No. 48 bus to pick up the line again at Hackney Central, where more than sixty years since it closed the station building is almost intact, although now it is a Turkish restaurant. Squint a bit, and its palazzo-like frontage with its Gothic pilasters could just about be perched on the bank of the Grand Canal.

But there are other ghosts that haunt this stretch of line as it runs through Hackney. Do the local estate agents and bank staff, polishing off the last of their kebabs this late lunchtime, know anything about the grisly events of 1864? On Saturday 9 July that year
Thomas
Briggs, chief clerk at Messrs Robards and Co. of Lombard Street in the City of London, caught the 9.50 p.m. train from Fenchurch Street to his home at 5 Clapton Square in Hackney. Later in the journey, two clerks, by coincidence at the same bank, who had purchased tickets for Highbury, opened the door of a first-class compartment and found something wet on the cushions – blood. It was everywhere – on the walls, on the windows, on the ceiling of the compartment. Later that evening Alfred Ekin, the driver of a train heading back to Fenchurch Street, found Thomas Briggs severely injured on the track. He had been bludgeoned with a blunt instrument and died soon afterwards.

The murder made history, as it was the first ever to take place on a British train. Astonishing really, since it was thirty-four years since the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first fully-fledged passenger line – and what opportunities there were for thieves and robbers in the gaslit and often-lawless world of mid-Victorian Britain. The Briggs murder was sensational in other ways too. The murderer, a young German called Franz Muller, was quickly traced through the distinctive design of his hat, which he had left behind in the compartment during the kerfuffle. By this time he had fled to New York on the sailing ship
Victoria
. But the world of transportation was changing, and not just on the railways. Detectives jumped on a steamship, the
City of Manchester,
and after a thrilling race across the Atlantic were waiting on the quayside to arrest Muller. He was tried, found guilty and, despite his plea of innocence and an appeal to Queen Victoria from Prince Wilhelm I of Prussia, publicly hanged in Newgate prison. The case had far-reaching consequences. A public outcry led to the end of public hangings, and the new electric trains of the North London Railway were designed with long open saloons rather than the more risky single compartments. Muller's name lived on in the description of a particular kind of black beaver hat.

After this an air of murder seemed to hang about the old North London, which was the scene for two more nationally famous killings. On 9 January 1900, Louise Masset became the first woman to be hanged in the twentieth century. She had been convicted of killing her three-and-a-half-year-old son Manfred and dumping his body in the ladies' lavatory at Dalston Junction. Curiously, fourteen years later to the day the body of another child was found on the line, this time under the seat on the 4.14 p.m. from Chalk Farm. In a celebrated case, his father was charged with the murder but acquitted. He became a newspaper seller on Liverpool Street station, where he was killed in an air raid in 1941.

But enough of this gruesome stuff. It is time for one of the finest free shows available from any railway carriage in the land, best enjoyed between dusk falling and the closing of curtains on, say, a November evening. For between Hackney Central and Richmond the line runs intimately cheek by jowl with the living rooms and kitchens of the houses along the line. Glimpsed through the trees at the end of a back garden or spotted from the vantage point of the many viaducts that run for miles above the rooftops it is possible to get an anthropologist's-eye view of the entire social spectrum of the metropolis. Here is a mother making tea for her children freshly home from school. There is a writer seemingly lost for words staring up from his desk, the train a welcome diversion from more pressing things. Now a clinch between two lovers, caught for just a brief moment and then gone. As we clatter into Camden Road we are in the territory of John Betjeman's ‘Business Girls'.