Euston's scruffy platforms in early 1970s. Doesn't seem all that much different now!
Euston, just post-rebuilding. Lovely great high airy concourse, beautiful green stone floor. Both still there, but both somewhat encroached-on.
+1 for early 1970s Euston for me.
My first experience was as one of a small school party being taken from Wigan to London to visit the Science Museum and the like.
It was winter and got dark long before our train got close to London, so I was already disappointed at missing lots of interesting railway scenery along the southern WCML.
I knew Euston had an impressive, ultra-modern concourse from seeing BR publicity photos & magazines, but was not prepared for the stark, concrete platforms when the train pulled in. The platforms were so cluttered with dozens of empty BRUTE trolleys we had trouble making our way to the ramps.
It was evening rush hour and, even back then, Euston was very busy. Our teachers hustled us quickly across the concourse and down the escalator to the Tube before I had chance to look around at anything.
One of my biggest shocks was in the Underground Ticket Hall. Up until then, my experience of men who wear suits had always been polite, middle-class gentlemen - such as the well-mannered young man behind the bank counter who served my mother when she wrote a cheque for "Cash", or the avuncular optician, smelling faintly of pipe tobacco as he fitted my National Health glasses.
Here in peak hour Euston were dozens and dozens of middle-aged men with suits and briefcases, all of them in an ill-tempered, impatient rush - pushing and barging past us youthful northern oiks as we got in their way whilst struggling to work out how to buy a ticket from the line of machines, then the right way to put our yellow magnetic tickets through the automatic barriers.
The experience didn't get much better after we'd got down to the claustrophobic platform and our whole party tried to get into the same rammed, hot Victoria Line carriage. It was amazing no-one went missing or lost their overnight bag before we arrived at our hotel near Victoria.
In addition to a shiny, new Euston station, before arriving I'd had this idea that most of London would be all modern, well-organised and slick - unlike the shabby, sooty, workaday Lancashire towns of that era. Of course 1970s London was nothing like that! (see post #37)
My first arrival in Euston probably gave me a mild, short-lived, dose of
Paris Syndrome, which apparently can affect Japanese tourists. But by lunchtime of the next day I was loving being in London, even if a lot of it was a chaotic dump, and have done ever since.