Victoria Station 5: Old Flame

Walking through the main foyer, the manager is in the middle of another story about the station. A few years back, some road works were being done outside Victoria to make it more accessible for buses. This meant they had to rip up the street in order to do the extension work. Under one section of tarmac they uncovered a small room. It was a toilet cubicle. There were no windows and the door had been bricked up. It had been sitting there under the road for years, with no means of access except from above.

"It was just there", said the manager. "Who knows how long for. No one could have got to it any other way". The manager photographed this lost toilet, before they covered the street up again.

There is only a small scattering of people in the Station. It is 11.30 am and not the busiest time. He begins another story, about builders setting up ladders along the high walls and carelessy removing the Edwardian tiles. But suddenly he lets out a loud wolf whistle - apparently directed at a silver haired woman, in her 50s, walking through the foyer. Shocked, she looks up, but her look of disgust quickly turns into a coy smile. She gives a wave and then moves swiftly on.

"I could have had her", says the manager. "Mind you, that was a long while back -over 20 years. She was a looker then. And I coulda had her."

Platform 3 and the Bridge to Nowhere

The back of the office exits out onto platform 3. The sense of loss is felt immediately.
"This station isn't what it used to be", says the manager. The security guard nods in agreement. "They've let it go, let it fall apart". It's a loss of pride, a loss of memory - all connected to a loss of space.
"This was once the longest train platform in Europe . . ."
" . . . in the World", the security guard interrupts.
"No," says the manager, matter-of-factly, "In Europe. I used to think it was the world. But the I read it in this book - there was once a longer one in the states. I was dissapointed to read it, but it was the truth".
If city planning and underinvestment haven't battered this station enough, then facts will.
The manager turns to me and continues, "You see, this station used to connect with another one - Exchange station. Now that was a little ways down the track from here. They linked together in one long platform. Exchange was demolished in the 60's. There's no need to have two stations so close. Was a shame to see it go though. It's a carpark now."

I ask if it is now the carpark in front of the Cathedral.

"Yeah, that's the one. I'll tell you what, if you go up to the bridge above this platform - the one that connects us to the M.E.N., you can have a good look out over the track. You'll see this old path verging off to the left - that's the old track to Exchange Station. The tracks aren't there anymore of course. But the path is. It just cuts off. Finishes in front of a carpark. The brickwall of the carpark. When you're up there, you'll see an old bridge over this path. It was one of those pedestrian bridges taking you from one platform to another. They left it when they took down the station. Don't know why. It don't go anywhere now. It's the bridge to bloody nowhere now . . ."

He pauses, staring off down the track. He's captured the old vision of Exchange station. "Manchester was full of stations back then. Most have gone now. And Victoria - well, they've just let it fall apart."

The security guard nods in agreement. They're railwaymen who take the history of the station personally.

We leave the platform.

Victoria Station: Catechism

The main office is a part of a series of rooms running alongside Platform 3 - rooms carved out of the old Edwardian fabric of the building. The duty manager is a tall, stout man with tightly curled facial hair and a belly bursting out of his yellow station jacket. Upon our entry he immediately berates the thin, pale employee who brought me in. "What are you doing!?" he shouts. "Bringing public into these offices is a security issue!". But his booming voice suddenly switches into a deep and extended laughter. He winks at me - as if I should get the joke. "It's alright. Welcome lad. What can I do for you?" I explain that I'm looking for someone to show me around the station. By the time I'm finished saying this, the thin employee has already slipped quietly out of the office. It's a while before I even notice that he's gone.

The manager says he's happy to take me around - it's a break from all the paperwork. We might even visit the river:

"It's a bit dangerous y'know. A 40ft drop. The river Irk, right underneath here - underneath the cellars. Pitch black as well. You can hear it for sure when you're down there, but you can't see a bloody thing. We'll need a torch."

But it will be 20 minutes before he can take me around, he says. He has to sort some things out. He offers me a seat at the table, which I take - copies of The Sun and Daily Star are strewn about in front of me. The manager promptly sits down beside me. After some brief formalities, the conversation quickly takes a wicked turn. He directs a series of questions at me - a sort of catechism:

"So, you're born in Vancouver. What province is that in?"

"British Columbia".

"I know, I know. Now where did British Columbia get its name?"

"From the British, obviously . . . and it's probably named after Columbus".

"Spot on, mate. Spot on. Now did Columbus ever set foot in B.C.?"

"No".

"Why then, does it have his name?"

"I don't know"

"I'll tell you why . . ."

And so begins his take on the evils of Freemasonry. Freemasons start wars and name continents. They control the Anglican Church and they control national economies ("why is China so powerful now?" "Why does the American dollar bill have that evil eye on it?") All the top politicians - from Clinton to the Bush family, from Blair to the Queen, were masons. He even includes the curious claim that Columbus was actually a Russian named Grigory Efimovich.

The entrance of the head security guard into the office only enflames things. One man's rant now becomes a full-fledged battle. The heavy set security guard has heard it all before. He's not having any of it, saying so in blunt, no uncertain words. Insults and obscenities fly across the room until the manager finally puts an end to it, saying calmly: "You just need to read more".

They decide to show me around the station together. Both grab a torch and the three of us exit out unto the Platform.

Victoria Station 2: Entrance

Nothing was normal in this station. It would have been an obvious and flowing metaphor to say that the descent beneath the station coincided with a slide into the dark depths of madness. But the madness was already here, right on the surface.

A group of railway employees stood together, inspecting the tickets of passengers leaving the platforms. One in particular stood out to me. He was an unusual sight - pasty skin, pale and thin, the type of man who looks chronically ill because he has only ever had a diet of beans on toast and pot noodle. He looked completely awkward in his uniform. It hung off him like he was a wire coat hanger, and his hat was too big for his head, his ears folding outwards under its weight. His look betrayed all the authority that his uniform might have given him. I went straight to him and asked to see the duty manager. Without a word he looked up, nodded, and I followed him.

Layered City: Victoria Station 1

Victoria Station sits as that brooding structure on the fringe of Manchester's new Millennium Quarter. In an area known more for its modern glass edifices, still-fresh public spaces, restored Tudor pubs and carefully preserved medieval buildings, Victoria Station remains a site of continual decline and dereliciton. In the face of so much regeneration it makes you stand and pause. Its state of disrepair is almost infectious, spreading to neighbouring buildings such as the old Post Office. It wasn't always like this, and the longer you pause the more you find glimpses of its beauty and genuineness, and the more it reveals its former power and significance. Its bold Edwardian design stands as testimony to this and is captured in the station interior. It is in the fading grandeur of the detailed and delicate tiling, now dusty and largely ignored. It is in the large-scale map of the old Lancashire and Yorkshire railway painted on the wall tiles of the station entrance. This is as much a work of art as a it is a historical document. The sprawling network of lines extend across the face of the wall, retracing a rail empire that has long since dissapeared. It is in the station pub, with its intricately detailed dome, the colours barely visible behind the layers of dust and dirt. It is in the iron canopy of the station's façade which, in mosiac tiling, boldly proclaims Ireland and Belgium to be possible destinations.

Edwardian architecture was the architecture of an empire on the cusp of its decline and Victoria station has lived out the pathos of its architectural fate. Yet, everywhere the eye can catch glimpses of the station's splendour, hidden behind decades of dereliction. Everything in the station points to a past greatness, to a lost greatness. It's a significance that appears out of an almost mythic other-time, vanishing from living memory but remaining as a hazy and distant vision. Like a Greece at the boundrary of the European Union.
And this is what makes it stand out, this is what makes it compelling. It drew me in, into a strange experience of urban investigation.

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Victoria Station was built in 1844 by George Stephenson. Stephenson had already made his name as a railway pioneer, constructing the Liverpool to Manchester Railway - the first continuous railtrack in the world, and designing the Rocket - the locomotive which had won the legendary Rainhill Trials. Victoria Station was one of the many railway stations to appear in the city of Manchester. The first station in the world still remains in the city - the Liverpool Street station, now preserved in the Museum of Science and Industry. If George Stephenson was the face of the railway revolution, then Manchester was the city that first harnessed it. As the Victorian adage said: "What happens in Manchester today, happens in the world tommorrow".

By the early 20th century, Victoria Station had become the most important station in the region - the central hub for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway stretching from Liverpool to Hull and serving as an access point to the European Continent. During the First World War Victoria Station would bear the responsibility of transporting thousands and thousands of men from the North of England into the trenches of France and Belgium.

The original station remains, albiet incorporated into the vast 1909 expansion work. Stephenson's original cast iron train sheds still arch over the platforms - a major feature of the station's architectural history, however with the shabby tarpaulins stretched across them, Stephenson's work now stands as the most obvious symbol of the station's decline. And in effect, the decline of the city itself as an industrial power. Other western cities would follow suit - inverting the meaning of the old Victorian Adage.

Layered City: Underground

An excerpt from the Manchester Area Psychogeographic paper "Laddism and Labyrinth". The full paper can be viewed at http://map.twentythree.us

Manchester has never had a public underground railway service, but it does have a thriving anecdotal network of tunnels, workings, and cities beneath the streets. Rumour has it that the most recent project to get an equivalent to the Tube operating during the late 1970s (the so-called Picc-Vic line) was prevented by the existence of a system of bunkers and rail lines creating a Regional Seat of Government (RSG) beneath Piccadilly Station - part of the network which would have come in action in the event of nuclear war during the sixties. More rumours have been circulating recently about the discovery of part of this 'secret city' being discovered in 1995 by Nynex cable TV workers, who were promptly ordered to fill the cavity they had unearthed with several tons of concrete. It is tempting to speculate on the geographical alignment along which Piccadilly Station, Manchester Town Hall and Crown Square all lie: a GPO cable and/or rail link may conceivably have been laid during the 1960s as a feature of the RSG.
Dozens of other stories exist concerning tunnels under Manchester and Salford, many centring on the Cathedral and Corn Exchange, in the heart of the Saxon and early medieval town of Manchester. Here, notably, is where John Dee, Elizabethan mathematician, geographer, astrologer and alchemist, lived when he was Warden of the Collegiate Church (before it became a cathedral). Remains of Dee's house are supposed to be preserved under the Corn Exchange, which was built over earlier street levels. Oddly enough, the original Victorian Corn Exchange, opened in 1837, was a copy of a Roman temple to Ceres on the River Ilyssus. Ceres, the Roman equivalent of the Greek Demeter, was goddess of crops and vegetation. For six months of every year she withdrew her influence on the world, in mourning for her daughter Persephone, who had been lured into the underworld by Pluto (the Greek Hades).