Public squalor

The Great Eastern Railway built their main London terminus at Liverpool Street. It's a cliche to describe these vast Victorian termini as Machine Age cathedrals, but that doesn't mean it's not true:


Those soaring pillars lead to exuberant crowns gaily painted in the company's colours:


In Thatcher's Brave New World, all that public space was a waste of money and had to be flogged-off cheap to property developers. So it came to pass that one half of Liverpool Street was left with the soaring roof, while the other half had a vast bulk of cheap offices built over the top, crushing the platforms beneath depressingly low ceilings -- you can see the claustrophobic effect through a gap in the wall dividing the two halves:


All the overly bright lighting and shiny ceiling panels in the world can't disguise the meanness of these spaces:


And it makes photographing a train -- here a delightful Class 360 -- almost impossible, the oppressive space and the bouncing light flattening and distorting everything:


That's my excuse, anyway. Maybe I'm just rubbish at photographing trains.