“Hey, Blackfriars station is really cool!”

‘God only knows’ should be playing through your headphones when the train rolls out of Blackfriars station.

‘God only knows’ should be playing through your headphones when the train rolls out of Blackfriars station. The sky should be a dusty blue and the sun should be suspended somewhere in the middle of things. You should look out of the glass across the water, to the Shard, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, the Walkie Talkie, you should see all these abnormal things. 

When you arrive and walk down the ramp towards the barriers and tap your card and walk up the stairs, around, up some more stairs, along some white marble floor, up some more stairs. Then see, behind glass, the metal trusses of the old bridge, with its protruding bolts that remind you of Victorian shipyards. You should walk up more stairs and look out upon the red poles cut short, stunted out the water. You should climb yet more stairs before you find yourself on the platform. In the mothership. In the armadillo-backed-Tron-esque-tubular-1980s-joy-machine. 

You’ll look around at all the people on the platform in their loafers and Nikes, with satchels and backpacks and scarfs flung around them, looking at their phones and wonder… “Why is no one else amazed?”

If you’re there when the sun is setting you’ll feel like you’re being shipped off to fight in some galactic war. “Where’s my duffle bag?” you’ll have to ask. 

From the outside, the roof looks like someone dropped a packet of baked crisps on a bridge. Grey and oversized yet rather beautiful crisps. 

The stone supports are strong, sturdy, like great cliffs, like the grand canyon, they look timeless, endless. Atop them, sits a spindly collection of glass and metal, so clearly dreamt up by some idealist in the 1980s, dreaming of a world with flying cars and hover-boards and rehydrating pizzas. 

The entrance on Queen Victoria Street looks like scaffolding wrapped in cellophane, for a moment you wonder if it’s still under construction, but no, that’s the look they were going for. “They” being Pascall+Watson who worked on St Pancras, Heathrow, Manchester Airport, London Bridge Station underneath the Shard and some big pavilion in Dubai. And for all my talk of this being a 1980s building, it was actually built in the 2010s. And that crisp roof, it’s covered in solar panels, goddammit! 

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For months, each time I have found myself at the station I’ve been taking photos of it. Thinking about it. Imaging that at some point I’d write about it and get to the bottom of what it is about it that feels important. But I haven’t. It remains a mystery. This was my attempt at sifting through things and coming up with the goods, the answer to why it is so strange and so beautiful. 

I don’t know whether it’s the roof panels, or the glass, or the fact that you feel like you’re in a bubble suspended above the water or that the windows look out on such a grand expanse. But I suppose it’s not useless, even if I don’t know exactly why, to point at it and say, “Hey, Blackfriars station is really cool!”