Is Euston station really that bad?

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What I’ve been thinking about… defending Euston station

I think Euston station may be one of the most joyous places in London. Wait, where are you going? Stick with me.

As I write this edition I’m sitting on my way on a train to Crewe away from London. You might, quite rightly, ask ‘why?’. It is a place that, to misappropriate the Disneyland slogan, may be the saddest place on earth. A town so bleak, I think even the producer of an apocalypse film might turn it down as a location. 

Despite growing up in London, my family are all exiles from Stoke-on-Trent, and decided in their infinite wisdom to leave the most exciting, scintillating city in the world once they retired and to head back to their ancestral home. The nearest station to that ancestral home is Crewe. So, as a family-oriented fellow, I spend a large amount of my time on extremely slow and oversold trains, heading towards a destination that hardly provokes more enthusiasm. 

If that’s your baseline, then returning to Euston is like a beautiful homecoming. It’s a place that — despite cancelled trains and masses of sprinting commuters that call to mind the zombie hordes in World War Z — I only seem to associate in my mind with happy memories, like walking Euston Road late at night. It’s my favourite time in London, strolling through streets long after midnight and feeling the heartbeat of my incandescent city all the more obviously for the inky black that has enveloped it.

It makes me, a person who even at the best of times is an insufferable evangelical for the capital, realise just how good we have it. And so, it seems fitting, as I’m forced to flee the city I love so dearly it’s almost cringe, to share a bit more about me and how I’ve been living in London for the last few weeks.