Victoria Station: Labyrinth

Turning back on ourselves, we retrace our first steps through the dimly lit cellar, passing by the office door from which we had originally emerged. We continue on, down the passage into much more expansive and labyrinthine territory. It is not long before we pass by the first of the large spaces indented in the side of the cellar corridors. These rooms are sliced into sides of the cellar passage and have no doors or dividing walls, but suddenly open up to the left and right. There is no electrical lighting in these pockets. Passing by the first space the security flashes his torch light into the dark recess. A sudden glint of light, off a metal stand, flashes back at us.

“What the bloody hell is that?” The security guard questions aloud.

The manager shines his torch light on the object. There are three metal legs propping up a large board. “It’s an artist’s stand or something. Like an artist’s etching board”.

“What’s it doing down here?”

“How should I know?”

The security guard walks up to it, grabbing the top of the stand, checking the weight with his hand.

“My sister’s an artist. She’d love something like this. She does painting, like. Next time I’m on nights. . .”. The security lifts it completely up, testing how easy it is to carry.

“You’ll find all sorts down here”, says the manager to me.

“Remember when we found all those files?” the security guard asks, with the manager nodding in response.

“You do mean those maps. Those details of the station”.

“Yeah” says the security guard, turning to me. “We found all the detailed plans of the station in the 1930s down here once. Every part of the station was drawn out – even these cellars. Every nook and cranny – the whole station”.

The security guard pauses in thought, still standing next to the artist’s etching board. “We should go find them. We’d make a fortune selling them on Ebay. Some punter would pay a lot for those – they were like historical documents.”

“That’s bloody stupid”, the manager replies. “Those maps are the property of Network Rail now and it wouldn’t take them long at all to find out who’s been selling things on the net. Of course, you would get a lot for them . . .”

“Why don’t we show the lad those maps?”

“Do you remember where they are? - ‘cause I don’t. They’re somewhere down here, but I’ll get lost if I make a wrong turn. There are places down here that I haven’t been to in years and some that I’ve never seen. I’m not getting lost down here with you two.”

We move on down the cellar.

Another pocket-room on the right opens up. It is too dark to make anything out in the space until one of the torches, once again, cuts its light across. A few wooden crates are scattered about. Suddenly, out of the darkness, the front of a train appears. The manager, also seeing this , directs the torch on it. It is a simply frame – the front end of the engine car and nothing more. It sits there hollow and ghostly in the dark, propped up against the wall, with no carriage or cars behind it. Like it had been popped off a locomotive and dragged down here. I could tell from the company colours that it was from Northern Rail. Strange and eerie, it is still not as bizarre as the etching board.

As we continue on down the passage, the out-of-place sight of sunlight appears. The three of us walk closer and come to a wide shaft directly to the left. It stretches out 30 yards before opening onto the embankment to the south of Victoria Station. Peering down the shaft, the cellars, which have so far created a surreal and underground world, are suddenly given a context. Outside I can recognise Hunt’s Bank, or Walker’s Croft – the name purely depends on which side you approach from and which road sign you pass by. It is a slopping grass knoll with a cobble stone road wrapping around it, leading directly into the shaft. But the entrance to the cellars is gated – barring access. The cobble stone road now serves as a carpark of sorts, where people can park outside the last of the truly medieval buildings in the city. The enchanting red sandstone of Chetham’s library, dating back to the early fifteenth century, rises over the other end of Hunt’s Bank. Not all of this can be seen from standing inside the cellars, but the cobble stone road certainly can. It must have once been an access road to the early station. Probably for horse drawn carriages, bringing freight into the station where it could be loaded or unloaded from underground. I quickly turn to my right, to see how far the shaft extends into the station, only to see it disappear ominously into the darkness.

The manager moves us on. Back into the labyrinth.

Victoria Station: Cellar

The door opened into the pitch black. I stepped through unable to orient myself, in a foreign space waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A strong smell of soil and damp wafted through. The security guard turned on his torch and began to look for the light switch. As he fumbled around the beam of the torch ran across the walls in front of us. These were brick walls of the deepest brown – their entire existence spent below the sunlit surface.

“We are in the cellars now”, the manager said, stating the obvious.

“Found it!” The security guard flicked a switch and the sound of electricity hummed in the cellar. The light bulbs hanging above us flickered for a moment before settling into a dull glow. We were in a hallway, stretching off to either side. The manager turned to the left and began walking. We followed him, stepping along the soft dirt floor.

“I haven’t been down here in a while”, the security guard said. “Sometimes I’ll check it out on my night shift though. When it can get a bit boring . . .”

The manager continued to walk along, before stopping suddenly. He began chuckling to himself. He had stopped in front of a dark metallic door with a hefty padlock, on the North side of the wall.

“This is it,” he said with a smile. “This is the duty manager’s door”.

We looked at him quizzically.

“You know the old pub on the road across from the station? Well . . . I guess its not a pub nowadays, but it used to be. It’s a hairdressers now. But a while back it had always been the railwaymen’s pub, where you could drink after work – only workmates there of course. This door leads to that old pub. The manager could just open this door up and have his own secret passage right up to the pub cellar. It goes right underneath the street. You don’t have to dodge traffic, be seen or anything. Direct from the station to the pub.”

“I didn’t know that’s what it was”, said the security guard, surprised at having the secret revealed to him. “Why don’t you give us the key – I’ll check it out next time I’m on nights”.

“No way”. Said the manager curtly. “No one’s getting in there. It’s only for the manager. Anyways, it’s probably blocked up at the other end now. Either that, or you’ll surprise the hairdressers!”

We move on down the cellar hall. Not far along we pass under the last of the lightbulbs. The hall ends and a dark opening awaits us. It’s a doorway, but already open. Stepping into the entrance we are again confronted with near pitch darkness. I get the feeling that we are about to enter a sizable room.
But the manager stops short.

“Are we going in?” asks the security guard.

Hesitantly, as if he has only just realised something, the manager replies “Ah, ah – I don’t want to go in there”.

“Why not? Just show the lad the room.” The security guard shines his torch in. Rows of large metallic cabinets stand in the middle of the room. They go on for someways, disappearing into the darkness. They are completely empty.

“I just don’t want to,” replies the manager.

“Why? What’s in there?”

Not entirely answering the question he replies, “Those cabinet used to store all the staff files. Information on anyone who worked in this station, or anyone who had ever worked here, was on those shelves. But its all been moved”.

“Right, I’m turning on the light”. The security guard steps through the entrance and reaches his hand around and pulls a hanging thread. Just like before, there is a gentle hum before the lights slowly flicker on. There are two lights hanging from the ceiling, unable to cast their light on the farthest corners of the room.

“What’s wrong? Are we going in or what?”

This time the manager responds more aggressively. “I’m not going in”.

The three of us pause for a moment, staring into the room. My sense of intrigue suddenly turns into a sense of foreboding about the space. Perhaps the manager knows something, even sinister, about this room. The fact that either of these men will come down to the cellars during their night shifts is eerie in itself, besides even considering what the night might offer up in such an antique underground.

We turn and leave. Heading back the way we came.

Victoria Station: Office

Office:

The entrance into the cellars was through the Network Rail offices, located in the north end of the station. A grossly overweight man with long grey hair, slicked back with either thick gel or sweat, sat at the reception desk as we entered through the door. He was speaking on the telephone, his squaky high-pitched voice at odds with his heavy bulk. The receptionist waved the manager, the security guard and I through without interrupting his conversation on the telephone. The security guard, however, stopped at the desk inviting some friendly banter from the receptionist, who put his hand over the phone and asked in his piercing shrill: “What ya want?”. “Get back to work!” the security guard shouted, stooping down to the man’s face. Laughing, he walked down the stairs and I followed.

The stairs wrapped tightly around in a sort of spiral. The first landing had doors on either side – office entrances not out of place in any administrative building. But we continued down. It was apparent that the farther the stairs took us down, the more cluttered and less organized the space became. It became less of an office and more of a dumping ground. Papers, files and old lamps would take most of the space on the stairs. When we reached the main landing at the bottom of the stairs, the place was an absolute mess. I had no way of really knowing, but it seemed at this point that we had descended about twenty feet beneath the station. Around us were countless boxes, some empty, some spewing out useless documents and paper. Some files were stacked nicely together while others were strewn aimlessly about. A desk sat in the corner, half covered by the mess. A cable ran across it, apparently once attached to a computer that had long since been taken. An old, out of date monitor was placed to the side, propped up against a filing box. A layer of dust was caked on everything – so thick that it seemed like no one had touched this place for years. Yet it was still very much an office space. The white plaster walls, no matter how dirty, were certainly one of the stations more recent additions, and the desk suggested that once someone had used this room for more than a storage space. The manager opened the door on the north end of the landing.

Victoria Station: The Great war

The Great War

The three of us, led by the manager, reached the far end of the station foyer. Carved into the wall in front of us was a gated entry. The entry was arched and covered in pale yellow Edwardian tiles. The red wooden gate covering the entry looked considerably younger than the door way itself - it certainly wasn’t part of the original design. The space beyond was clearly visible though the gate - and there was nothing there. An empty, derelict space. An empty lot with dirt ground and patchy tufts of grass and weeds springing up. Old red bricks were scattered about. A tramline also cut across the space, continuing on to Corporation Street which was also visible through the gate, with its constant stream of buses. The fact that you could see the blue glass tower of the CIS building in the distance, along with the ultra-modern Shudehill carpark, only amplified the feeling that the space before me was useless and derelict.

But this entry had once led somewhere.

The manager lifted his hand out to a small bronze plaque to the side of the entry. Something I hadn’t noticed yet.

“There are three memorials to the Great War in this station - the First World War as we call it. The others are much bigger, but to me this has to be the most poignant. You can read it - it says:
In memory of those many thousands of men
who past through this gate to fight
in the Great War 1914-1919.

“You know why it says that? Because the original station had 16 platforms, and the main ones - Platforms 1 and 2 - where located right through this gate. All this empty lot out here, with the tramlines, was once the main platform in the station. And Victoria Station was the most important station in the region in those days. If you were a soldier, heading off to fight in France, you would have left from this station. And from Platforms 1 and 2, just as I said”.

He paused. The security guard nodded, and mentioned that people often forget the First World War. An utter waste it was. A useless slaughter, where soldiers were treated like cattle. The aristocracy simply sent young men out to die. Millions died for absolutely no reason - whatever they may say.

The manager began talking again. “People walk past here all the time. Take no notice of it, like everywhere in this station. But you can imagine back then, say 1916 like - a soldier saying goodbye to his family, his wife and kids, or his parents. Maybe even his friends. They said goodbye while passing through this gate. This was the first step of their journey to the trenches and most of them never came home”.

I was to find out later that this particular entry is known as “The Gate of Hell” and “the saddest spot in Manchester”.