Long exposure/lots of light shot of Liverpool Street station from the safe location of across the street. Check out the rest of last night’s photos here on Flickr.
Blimey, that’s three posts in a row now that involve this station. Do I get a prize?
Had something happen tonight that was a first for me. It has happened to lots of other people like me. I’ve attended get togethers that oppose this sort of thing happening. I’ve been lucky in not experiencing it thus far, until tonight.
I’ve taken loads of photos in and out of rail stations and various other public places in London. It’s kind of my hobby as most have probably figured out. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never been hassled about taking photos anywhere. I few odd ‘weirdo’ looks from staff members, like when I spent about an hour photographing the inside of Paddington Station a while back (that I don’t believe I’ve posted yet). But I was never troubled.
Enter my tripod. It makes all the difference. That and what side of the street you are standing on.
I set up my tripod and camera across the street from the Liverpool Street entrance of the station with the same name and was snapping away happily, moving around a bit with just the odd funny person dancing about in shot (I started to laugh, he apologised). ‘ I’d like to get a closer shot of the turrets’ I think to myself. Pick up the tripod, walk across the street and set down along the fencing as to not get in any one’s way. Start lining up my shot and I see a chap in a Network Rail jacket making his way over to me. Oh crap, how is this going to play out? There’s been lots of horror stories about these confrontations.
Menacing
‘Hiya!’ I say. ‘You’re not supposed to take pictures here’ he says back. ‘Oh really?’. Yeah, no photos on the station is the answer. ‘Oh that’s a shame’ I say, while chuckling a bit. He told me that he nearly didn’t see me. I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean. The guy sort of shrugs and walks away after I turn my camera off.
That wasn’t too painful, but still was just so silly. I know there’s the angle of him just doing his job and whatnots. But what is it about the tripod that made taking photos so bad? Is it that threatening that I just want a nice crisp shot of an architectural feature of the station?
I thought I’d get some possible flack when taking shots of Tower 42 or when I was stood in the middle of the Charles I statue roundabout at Trafalgar Square taking shots of Whitehall. Nope, nodda. Will be interesting to see if I run into the issue at any more stations. If I do, it could put a real damper on a project that I want to work on this year.
At least I can be thankful of one thing, he didn’t come right out with the excuse of it being anti-terrorism.
So, a lesson learned. That and don't use a tripod.
That headline will work so much better in four years time, but never-mind. One of my favourite London rail stations, Liverpool Street, was opened 136 years ago today. As I already made mention of King’s Cross birthday last year it’s only fair I do the same for Liverpool Street as I use both to travel to the capital.
The station that opened in 1874 was very different to the one that serves North East London and East Anglia now. Originally it was laid out in an L shape, with a long entrance way just off Liverpool Street, running along what what is now (was it then?) Sun Street Passage.
The station in 1896. Source: Wikipedia
Nearly the same view on Google Street View. I don't have a photo that was quite the right angle.
Goodness, the pigeons that are around the station in the morning always seem to be in such rough shape. Bits of wings missing, and most commonly bits of feet/claws missing or mangled.
Spotted this fellow on platform 4 this morning and felt quite bad for him. His left foot was missing a claw and the two that were left were looking worse for wear. His right foot was basically gone and he was hopping around on a stump.
Is this pretty common for pigeons? I never really take much notice or am close enough to them to notice except for when we share train platforms.
In Cambridge station there are four ticket machines. Three look the same. One doesn’t look like the others. This tends to kind of throw people off.
Let’s talk about the forming of the ticket queues. Sometimes there is one queue, other times there is a queue behind each machine. When we have the ‘uni-queue’ there tends to be a bit of hesitation in using the ticket machine that looks different. It includes looking around to see if other people are going to use it and looking at the screen distantly with squinted eyes. Eventually someone from the back of the queue (or in today’s case, someone who just walked into the station) will just stroll up to the machine and go about their business, with varying degrees of success as we will see.
When there is a ‘multi-queue’ scenario, the queue for the Mystery Machine is usually the shortest. Can it be trusted? It doesn’t look like the other ones…. can I buy the same tickets from it? The person who queue jumped to it today wasn’t able to work out how to buy a ticket, wondered around a bit, tried to queue jump to the Mystery Machine again before getting in the uni-queue with everyone else.
The Mystery Ticket Machine is on the left. The rest look like the one on the right. All of them do the same job. I wanted to get a shot of all 4 machines, but there was a couple who just wouldn’t move out of the way. That same couple passed on using the Mystery Machine moments before.
It’s terrible to see such ticket machine discrimination in the flesh.
