Euston Road, which runs along the north edge of London’s congestion charge zone, is a strange, compromised mishmash of what should be a grand city avenue. A six-lane thoroughfare crammed with traffic, it is also home to the British Library, the Wellcome Collection and three major railway stations, of which by far the ugliest and least loved is the terminus that shares its name with the road: Euston.
Euston, to misquote the misquotation of Apollo 13’s message to mission control, has a problem. It is ill-designed, overcrowded and fraught with passenger frustrations. More long-term, no one yet knows whether it is going to be the London terminus of HS2, as was originally planned.
Last week, my esteemed Guardian colleague Barney Ronay published a post on X that struck a chord with thousands of users of the station.
He described it as “easily the worst main station in Western Europe” and compared the experience of waiting for delayed trains and being force-fed advertising on the giant screens that now dominate the station to “being taken away to be machine gunned in the woods by various mobile phone and soft drinks companies”.
But not everyone is as circumspect. “I think it’s a shithole,” says Sean Gibbs, who regularly travels down from Blackpool. “The layout is awful, and the shops are crap and also expensive.”
It’s 3.30pm on a damp Friday, and people are standing in little clusters on the concourse, their eyes locked on the departure board to find out when their train will be allocated a platform. When there are a number of delays or cancellations, the concourse often becomes packed, and the journey to the platform is turned into a pop-up assault course. “For a major London station, it’s all wrong,” says Dev Lapsley, waiting for the train to Manchester that he takes each week.
“What you need to get away from is that mad dash to the trains. I don’t think it’s a safe way of getting people to the platforms.”
Last Sunday, there was what Network Rail refers to as an “intruder” on the tracks just north of the station, which brought trains to a standstill, and a dangerously large crowd built up on the concourse. It could be described as an exceptional circumstance, except the rail system is always subject to unscheduled incidents: signal failures, suicides, intruders. And no other large station seems to suffer the consequences of such events quite so painfully.
This is partly due to a lack of space and partly because platforms are often not allocated until too near to departure time. That in turn is down to an excess of trains in relation to platforms, which is further exacerbated by late trains. As Euston is the home of Avanti, the UK’s worst-performing train operator, it obviously has more than its fair share of tardy arrivals. Network Rail, which is responsible for the UK’s railway stations, is aware of Euston’s troubles, but says it has taken steps to alleviate congestion by removing retail booths from the concourse, increasing “circulation space by 20-25%”.
A departure board has also been placed in the forecourt, which dates from the 1960s, when the splendid Victorian station was knocked down and the current rather grim version built. The outside area could easily double as an East German civic space in a John le Carré adaptation.
The idea is that people can sit here as they wait for their trains. But that presumes the absence of rain – the height of meteorological optimism – and ignores the greater distance to negotiate in the frenetic rush to the platforms.
Direct access to the tube station was also removed a while back to help crowd control, which many passengers find an irritating inconvenience.
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All these measures are stopgaps, however, as a major redevelopment is urgently required for the whole station and surrounding site. As a Network Rail spokesperson says: “The station was not designed for the number of people that are currently using it. It needs to be rebuilt. Everyone acknowledges that.”
Yet the redevelopment, and decisions on its scale and nature, have all been waiting on news of whether Euston is to be HS2’s London terminus.
As things stand, the fast line to and from Birmingham – the northernmost destination of the high speed railway designed to cut travel time to the north – starts and ends in Old Oak Common, a large industrial estate between Wormwood Scrubs and Acton. Imagine the Eurostar pulling into a banlieue beyond the périphérique and you get some idea of how off the mark this plan is.
The government is conducting yet another review of the rail system, including HS2, but it’s been warned that it needs to make a decision by the end of the year if tunnelling costs aren’t to escalate.
According to the Network Rail spokesperson: “There are basically two designs for Euston, one that incorporates HS2 and one that doesn’t.”
That sounds sensible, except it turns out there isn’t really a design for either. One insider on the redevelopment team says that there are several planning stages to go through before any kind of designs are drawn up, and no master plan exists at present for either eventuality.
Whatever happens, it seems it will be many years before Euston station stops being the rotten tooth among the capital’s increasingly gleaming main stations. In the meantime, there’s not much for passengers to do but be machine-gunned by the battery of advertising boards, while keeping one eye on the departure board for the platform scrum.