London Overground Read Online Free Page B

family outings.
    In 1865 it was decided, the City and its money machines hungry as ever, and requiring a rapid infusion of clerks and functionaries, to pleach a branch line from Dalston Junction to Broad Street, a satellite of the Liverpool Street terminus. The new station thrived, expanding to nine platforms. Think of this status, in terms of short-haul colonialism, as being equivalent to the grander transactions of that launch pad of Empire, Tilbury Riverside: its cavernous baggage hall designed by Sir Edwin Cooper, its numerous platforms offering rapid transit to the heart of the metropolis. Think of the regiment of hopeful immigrants.
    The Dalston Junction to Broad Street espalier, away from the main line, thrived and remained in use – I was happy to
take it – until 1986, that fateful year. Margaret Thatcher, who believed that anybody over the age of twenty riding on a bus, or enduring public transport, was a self-confessed loser, pariah, potential socialist, closed the link: with the claim that it was unpopular, no longer paying its way. She tore down Broad Street and got on with the real business of making a chunk of the City into a pastiched New York: ice rink, status art, golf equipment, James Bond car raffles, wine bars that looked like tomato sheds. We lost stations and gained hubs: the slower the service, the more time marooned on concourses, the better the shopping opportunities. So take to your cars: as our modest commute to the City was terminated, the M25 orbital motorway was opened, the ribbon cut on 29 October 1986.
    For the next twenty-four years, up to the point where the Olympic imperative demanded a major linking hub (never brought into play) at Dalston Junction, the stretch of elevated railway running down to Shoreditch remained in limbo. The old Dalston Junction Station was reduced to rubble. And, in time, the Victorian theatre alongside it would follow. I thought of a charming remark by Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, after she had failed some minor academic challenge in the neighbourhood: ‘Gott strafe Dalston Junction.’ Hackney Council, like the bloody knights sent galloping to Canterbury by Henry II, took her literally.
    Almost as soon as access was forbidden, invasion began: schoolkids looking for adventure, muggers and street-feeding Apache opportunists scanning twilight pedestrians from a perch above the Middleton Road bridge, drug providers and their twitchy clients, rough sleepers. And the usual drift of psychogeographers auditioning an evolving wilderness.
    And so, yet again, the non-space, the zone that is unmentioned, no part of any official development package, becomes the
only
space, covert, returned to nature, half wilderness,
forbidden. It was difficult back then, and near impossible now, to find a secret way, truly green, free of cars, and outside time. Saplings grew into small woods, railside forest screens. Wildlife and lowlife multiplied. Contraband was dumped overnight. You could pick through the trash of a new morning and recover your emptied handbag, books or papers not worth burning.
    It would have been a great thing if the elevated track had been allowed to complete a circuit of London, without trains, and with the sort of edgeland fecundity that Richard Mabey celebrates: mind-food for free, a walk in parallel, and above, the traffic of the working city.
    After close to a quarter of a century of fruitful neglect, development caught up: Legoland ziggurats, light-stealing towers, investment silos. And the launch of London Overground. The direct connection to Liverpool Street and the City was no longer possible, lost to Broadgate Circus. Now City workers and Hackney folk wanting to make the connection with the Underground service at Liverpool Street were decanted at Shoreditch and invited to make a detour through Spitalfields. Every rail halt, every Tesco Metro, every petrol station, every cash machine had its resident beggar with dog and cup.
    If I could no longer walk