Hi, good afternoon, my name is Anna, and this is Ricardo, and together we have a design studio called Mufatura and Pined. In this talk we will try to explain a bit about a series of workshops that we started in 2013, and since then we've been doing them in different places, and each time iterating on the process of what we do during the workshop. So the workshop is called Type Bits, and what we wanted when we started building this workshop was to do a workshop where people would design a font together, that it would be open to anyone, so it didn't have to be a designer, and you could be there and learn how to design a typeface, that we would go through all the steps that are involved in font creation, and that in the end we would have a finished font that you could use. And we thought about this kind of workshop because we had our own experience of doing type design workshops where we would spend a lot of time discovering new things or exploring type font editors, but we would end the workshop without having produced the finished something, and also our own experience doing type workshops before, and the problems that we had to deal with, and so that's how we started. And we had a set of principles for the workshop, so we decided to go with a grid-based typeface design because we wanted the workshop to work for everyone, either designers or not designers, and vector outline fonts are harder to design, so designing within a grid is a good constraint, also a good constraint if you want to get, if you're getting creative, and you have a lot of decisions and possibilities to explore, and the grid helps you focus a bit more on what kind of thing you will do. So we went with the grid and we decided the workshop would be aimed at designing bitmap fonts. They also make it easy to understand the different parts that compose typeface, like the x-height, the descendants, the excendents, and this is also part that can take up quite a large chunk of a type design workshop, which is introducing type design in general because it's a very complex subject, and by going with this kind of approach we were able to make it much quicker. Yes, because I also forgot to mention this workshop usually has a duration of three to four hours, and in that very short amount of time we start from scratch and we end up with one or more fonts depending on the number of people that are participating. The grid is also a good restriction to to have consistency in the typeface because it's easy to maintain the width of the lines and the curves, and that's really important when you're doing a typeface together with other people. So we start using only pen and paper, and that's also a very important thing we found because if you go into the computer then you have all sorts of things that you can get distracted with, so we just have paper and pen and everyone starts drawing individually, and we go from there. Paper also makes it very easy to share the designs that you're doing. You can just show the paper and it's pretty easy. You don't need to send files or connect your laptop to to any kind of device. Paper also was our way to deal with with version control because when you have a lot of people working together in the same project you need to have some kind of system to organize the collaboration and to organize the process. So with paper we were able to create this kind of analog version control, and it was also a good way to introduce people to things like gits. It's a very soft way to let them know how to pick a letter that they want to draw and not having anyone else drawing the same character and also knowing who is doing what and what's already done and what's missing. So that's how we do it. We go through several quick rounds of drawing. We start with people drawing individually, and then as we go we have to make decisions on directions until we get to a phase where we put people together in groups and then they develop a single typeface together. So we start with people drawing letters individually. We pick some directions and then from there we try to consolidate on a direction. It's really hard to make decisions because it's not very objective what would be the best choice when you're presented with a set of possibilities that people just draw very quickly. And so we have some discussion with the participants where we see what each person has done and why they decided to do something or not. And then in most cases because we have large groups, me and Ricardo take the paper of the benevolent dictator for life. So we take the responsibility of making the hard choice and we say to people when we can't reach a consensus quickly which direction we will take. And we have no problem with that because it's the goal of the workshop to go from scratch to finished font in very short time. And we know that in the end the font that we published is an open font. So anyone can go back to it and do whatever they want that they didn't have the chance to do in the workshop. And it's something that comes from free software which is a field that we're close to. So we just borrow this methodology. We have people drawing together in groups as we go through the process. And it's really nice because they can show each other what they're drawing on paper and discuss. And from there we go through all the steps. So after drawing everything on paper we go through the digitizing process, then spacing, publishing the font, doing the font log, having the license. And then if there's time also working on a type specimen which is always a very red-fine thing. And so these are some photos of the letters. And in all the process we use only free and open source tools. We will go into further detail a little bit ahead. And the fonts that we that we do in the workshops they're always released under the open font license. While doing these workshops we also in a way went through this pad of trying alternate font editors to design in typefaces. So from our experience before we had a really hard time installing software in everyone in all the participants' computers at the beginning of a workshop. And that would take quite a lot of time. After that we decided to drive our tool machines. We had a good experience with it. But it was also a bit hard when it come when we come to the part of sharing the files that each person is working on and how we do that. And so in a way we came to this idea of working with a text editor. And it's been a really good experience because people are very familiar with this kind of interface. So you just explain the rules that they need to follow when they are digitizing the drawing of the character. And there's no interface scaring you or pushing you into trying something else because you just have this very specific and very clear task. And it was a line that we really liked and we continued on exploring this idea of designing typefaces without a font editor. These are some of the fonts that we did over the years. Well of course because our motto is really early, by the end of the workshop it needs to be out. We know there will be bots. We know it won't be perfect. And that sometimes is really hard when we have a majority of designers participating in the workshop. But we force people to just go ahead and deal with the fact that it's not perfect but it exists. And that's already really nice. Okay so I'm not going to move towards the more technical aspect of how we go from the paper designs into the digitizing process and the font generation. And where we were led to after iterating over the years on different ways of working. So everything that I'm going to talk about and also most of the points that Anna made are actually on a documentation website that will share the URL with you in the end. But where it all started. So this was one of our starting points for our current toolchain which is the Graphicware Bitmap Font Building Framework built by Lasso Fister who is over there and who we couldn't yet thank enough for coming up with this nice with this fantastic library which is pretty much a new font. I don't know how new it is but with a particular font format where each glyph of a bitmap font is described in a text file in ASCII art. So in that format like dots are empty spots the hash characters are the field spots. And each one lives on its own text file. And additionally it comes with a really useful generator that picks these text files if you've laid them out correctly and took care of the metadata which is still a bit complex but we'll get to that. You can actually generate several weights so not only can you build like the usual like the free as in freedom so that's like the simple output with little squares as the pixels but then you can come up with these fantastic variations. And this this was a revelation for us to begin working around and building our pipeline around. So one of our problems as well in this workshop so we started using this but we always needed like half an hour at the end of the workshop to get everyone's files put them on our system run the build command hope that everything gets built and then push it back to put it online documented by hand and that was kind of a bit of friction in the process that we tried to solve. We all also used git in our own computer we would pass out a sp stick so that people could copy their text files and then we put them we would put them together this this was really I mean it worked but it was really stressful because then you had really anxious people wanting to see their files and you're like sorry I mean this will take a bit so we refined our process and came to something that we are kind of really happy about and wanted to share. So again in this line of we would really like people not to touch a font editor. So we tried our hand at using GitLab which for its various features became a really useful tool for us. So a font repository comes with a folder with the glyphs and each text file is a letter and the cool thing is like GitHub and GitLab have this browser editor you can edit text files directly there so you can actually edit the characters in the browser itself which was excellent for us like I mentioned we were struggling a lot with getting people to use to be able to run a font editor that took a lot of the initial time even with virtual machines which were a really great tool for workshops because they make sure that everyone is running the same thing but first you have to get people to download the virtual machine software whatever it is to download the virtual machine itself or pass it around and by means of it being at least two gigabytes in size it takes a lot of time in the beginning of the workshop. Right here then everyone just needs a laptop with a browser and they can actually work on the on the time. So what we do is we create a skeleton empty repository but then people go in and fill out as you see like it's the glyphs slash the g.txt file so they just go through each one and it's really easy to explain this way. So one of the things that we recently like last year took to make was documenting all this process and also the technical framework and one of the things that we are also working on is documenting the font format itself which is getting there and it's still a bit of a work that we need to do but if you're curious about it we are documenting it besides the documentation that you will find in the original package but we use a lot more we like using went beyond just using GitLab as a version control system because we realized that another source of friction was generating the font files and then we commit them to the repository so people can download them. That's fine but it requires manual work so we would have to run the program like the generator we still had to do that. Pull the repository at the end of the workshop run everything hope for the best and then recommit that. So we solved the problem of the USB sticks but we still had the last minute dependence on ourselves to finish things but then we started reading about this really cool thing called continuous integration which I see cringing from part of the audience but it can be a huge field but basically and the very layman's explanation is if you have a Git repository on every commit do something usually that's done to test your software package like to run tests every time someone makes the changes to make sure that nothing broke or if something broke it just emails you right away instead of you finding about that a year later but you can use it to build like packages from your website build the binaries but essentially you can run anything on continuous integration pipelines so basically you can you can put in whatever collection of tasks and things to do that you can that you want and GitLab I suppose GitHub has similar stuff but we're sticking to GitLab. They are pretty okay with us posting like a docker file and again we're thankful enough to have friends who understand docker because we certainly don't. Well actually it's not that hard terrible to understand so this is basically a docker file for GitLab to tell what the continuous integration look like so what we do is basically it creates a new computer and GitLab server installs the dependencies and runs stuff so we decide okay so it installs all the dependencies it like font for which is used behind the scenes to generate the font and then it generates the font itself in GitLab's computers not on ours anymore and it does that on every single change so someone changes a letter and they click okay on the GitLab interface it gets committed and it gets built immediately into a font file and so yeah you get like this terminal from the GitLab interface that's running your pipeline and in the end you get what they call artifacts which are the generated files so not only do we generate the TTF, SFD and OTF file but we also make like this mini specimen with font forge I think it's called font image program that shows you the whole characters and that brings us to a really nice automatically generated reading that comes with like this tiny specimen the font downloads that link to the canonical links of the artifacts they have like a fixed link and so as they get generated everything gets updated to to the most recent version and I'm pretty much about to end the last thing that we have been also working on in this on this pipeline well so far this really makes our work completely painless because now we don't have to generate anything we can just keep going until like the last minute of the last minute of the workshop and we can still insert new stuff and it gets built by GitLab in a minute and then the font is unloadable and this is a pipeline that we're really excited about it took a few years to fine tune and a lot of support by by friends and organizations who invited us to to do these workshops and test these principles and also helped us like for the docker stuff and so now what we the most recent one was there's actually a specimen page so we included a html basic website with CSS and all that finishing and it also gets built with the pipeline so as soon as you start the font and start working on it actually if you fork our fonts and you'll find them on the URL that I'm showing here right now if you fork them you get all of this for free so you can actually go in there fork one of the fonts that I was showing changing characters and your fork will generate all of this for yourself which we found as we were showing this was pretty precious to have such an autonomous pipeline for building fonts again we're not designing fonts for I mean these are bitmap fonts for teaching for educational reasons like an outline and we're interested more than producing the tight faces with all the checkboxes tick we're really more interested in how can we still design tight faces but avoid some of what we think are the kinks in the type design process namely in this case specialized software to to make tight faces so yeah this is pretty much it so this is our documentation website which we are still building up but you can find more if you're interested in the little details so there's stuff like I didn't talk about like the template for a new font if you want to generate it there is a command line tool that you can just run so it generates the base of the font and you can just do a workshop like we did and a lot more stuff so if you're curious about the the process behind the workshop behind beyond what you mentioned that's the website and that's uh thank you for your attention


and first up I'm going to play a little video that we just shot of the SAMD 51 pretty pins. Hey, I wanted to work on some pretty pin stuff while the picking places are running. This is a SAMD 51 so what I've been doing is going through the massive data sheet and turning this table, massive table with all the different things you can do with every pin, into a spread sheet so you can see every type of pin usage and all the pin names are now in a pretty spreadsheet and then I got it working with pretty pins so you can see every pin here has all of the counters and the PCC lines and the I2S and if it has canvass and special capabilities and analog pins all labeled out so we can make these really beautiful fritzing generated pretty pins diagrams for the SAMD 51 family. Okay and then I thought so we posted this you know here's a board that we're working on and then I put the text in tiktok so I'm just gonna let tiktok say it. QTPY with CH-552 ultra low-cost microcontroller any CH-55x experts out there who want to take a look and see if we got it all wired right anything we missed? So what is this lady? So this is a QTPY and I thought it would be interesting to make one with this CH-552 which is this 8051 like ultra low cost like 30 cent microcontroller and I thought it would be kind of funny this is a single-sided QTPY that uses this chip I've never used it but you know I was like well what's the cheapest QTPY you could make and it would be like using this component so you know I just whipped it up on Tuesday and I thought I'd boost up and see what people thought of it. Okay yeah we have this schematic and I did a blog post and you can check out and you know if you're an expert and you have lots of thoughts about this now's your chance and then we're working on the Qube project so here's another preview of the latest and greatest you can see very QB QB things yeah just Cuban doing stuff and things and that is this week's top secret okay


Good evening and welcome to those of you who are here and the audience at the British Library and those of you watching this event from wherever you may be around the world online. So it's very nice to have all of you here. Finally we're getting audiences back into the theatre at the British Library. We're delighted to see you all. Thank you for coming. I have many of you who are out in the world beyond or will be able to join us at some point in the future. So tonight's event is, our title is Paddington to St Pancras London's Cathedral of Steam. And it marks the paperback launch of Cathedral of Steam by our tonight's speaker Christian Walmar. And the book is exclusively available two months early tonight with a special deal with the publisher. It's coming out in November in paperback and there's copies outside for those of you who are here. And there's copies on the Books tab if you're watching online you can go there and you can click and you can find the book to buy. So please do. We called the event Paddington to St Pancras because of course we are in St Pancras here in London. The site of the British Library is on the former Goodyd Yard of St Pancras station. So we're in the heart of Railwayland where we are sitting and standing. And also Paddington because we are currently running an exhibition about Paddington Bear over in the main building up until 31st of October. So it was too good an opportunity to miss to reference Paddington yet again. And it's probably I don't know you can debate this as to whether the character Paddington has made the station one of the most famous in the world possibly. So we're also able to take your questions later on again if you're watching online there is a tab below the video screen or form for questions. You can send those in at any time and we'll be able to put some of those live to our speaker Christian this evening. And those of you of course in the audience can ask questions in the normal way. Also at the top of the screen if you're watching you have a tab to give your feedback about the event or if you want to make a donation to the British Library. So our speaker tonight Christian Walmar he's spoken for us many times here before. We're delighted to have him back. He's a writer, broadcaster. He writes for the Independent Evening Standard and Rail Magazine. And of course he is one of our finest writers on transport now and any time in history I think it's fair to say. So he's a great communicator as well. His books have included everything from the Subterranian Railway, History of London Underground, to Fire and Steam, History of How the Railways Transformed Britain. And of course tonight our topic is London's Railway stations. Thank you very much and please introduce Christian Walmar. Thank you John. I hope I can live up to that billing. Just a couple of words to extend about what I've done. I've now written a series. This is the eighth book in a series about railways and history which started with, as John mentioned, the Subterranian Railway, which is about London Underground, Fire and Steam, which is about Britain's railways, Blood Island Goal, which was a slightly ambitious book about the whole of the impact of the railways across the world. And then Engines of War, which was a book about the strategy of warfare and how that was affected by the railways. And actually it's my own personal favourite. So do look it up. And then I did the Trans-Siberian book which I gave a lecture here some years ago, History of the Trans-Siberian. I did Railways and the Raj, which is obviously about Indian railways. And I did the Great American Railway Revolution, which is about America's railways, which is the biggest railway system in the world, which not many people know that. It's still bigger than China's. And finally this one. And this one, in the way of happenstance, was suggested to me on the cricket field.  And First Slip gave me this idea of, have you done a book about the railway stations in London? And of course the fascinating thing about the railway stations in London is that there's more of them than anywhere else. There's more terminus stations, big mainline stations. We don't count the 200 or so little stations, but the dozen terminus railway stations is something that's unique in the world. Parish has six or seven. Most other major cities have two or three at the most. So how did that come about? Well, partly I will explain that and partly both the inconvenience and convenience of the fact that there's so many. And the first one, this is not a railway station, but it's just to show the first railway. In London, which was 1836, the London and Greenwich Railway. And now this is an extraordinary structure. This is part of the 800 plus arches that creates the viaduct on which trains are still running out of London Bridge Station, 180 odd years later. And they form a huge line through South East London, which has completely transformed the nature of that part of London. As all these stations have done, they've all been transformational. There are all big mega projects that these days would take many years to build and cause all sorts of hassle. All these stations, but one of them was built between 1836, this one in 1874. So they built a dozen stations in just less than 40 years in a major city that was already one of the biggest cities in the world. And it became the biggest city during this period. So the London Greenwich was an exception in many respects because it's a suburban railway. And most of the subsequent railways and terminal stations served a much longer distance traveller, whereas this one was exclusively initially. Of course nowadays London Bridge, which became its terminus, does serve coast and a few other places further afield like Canterbury or whatever. But for the most part it's still a suburban railway. The London Greenwich was a four-mile-long railway built entirely on viaducts built as all these stations are built with private investors risking their few Bob by putting money in it. And it's an amazing structure. And this is the first terminus, which of course is not counted in my cathedrals of steam because it hardly looks like a cathedral of steam. And there are some remnants of this. It's about half a mile from the eventual terminus at London Bridge and the reason they had a temporary terminus was because as we will see with all these stations, the last mile or two into central London is both the most expensive to build, but also the one that the developers, the railway companies, really wanted to build. Because the nearer they got into the centre of the capital, the more people they could attract onto the railway and the more profit they could make. So this was a little terminus that when the line opened in 1836, which incidentally had a pedestrian walkway next to it at the time, which fortunately was later used to widen the viaduct. The viaducts had been widened in several times. But it shows that they were hedging their bets. They would charge a shilling or so to walk along the viaduct. Sorry, it was tuppans for the viaduct and a shilling for the railway. So it was cheaper to walk, which is fair enough. This is one of the early versions of London Bridge Station. This is typical in a way of the design of future stations. What one could call Italianate. Italianate comes through in this story many times. I suppose it really means mock Italianate. But you could imagine that building in a little piazza somewhere in Umbria or Tuscany. The absolute lack of respect for their own heritage by the Victorians was that this only lasted about five or six years. They just demolished this building and built another one because they needed to expand the station. So there's absolutely no remnants of this kind of quite quaint little station, which was probably the first decent station that had been built for the London Greenwich, because the first terminus was really just an incline up to the viaducts and not very much else. So going across from there, we now look at some more conventional railways, more what you imagine in terms of their long distance railways, and the first to reach London. I say reach London advisedly because actually the money came from the north and it was really about building railways into London, rather than the idea of building railways from London. And there was not that kind of same dominance that London has today that there was at the time. And Houston has this arch. Now I'm a bit controversial about this arch. This arch was later demolished as we all see in the 1960s, and I think it's a pretty useless thing actually. I don't really think it's very attractive. It's really called a propilanium, and it's like a Greek temple, isn't it, with Dorit Collins. Frankly, it served no purpose. The building is on the side with the ticket offices and the goods offices and the likes. And the railway initially couldn't actually climb up the hill under its own steam. The trains were just not powerful enough. If you're familiar with Houston, you will know that this actually goes straight into tunnel and it actually goes up towards Camden. So initially, those two chimneys were actually the chimneys for the static engines that hauled up the carriages up to Mrs Camden, and then where there were fixed locomotives in those buildings and then went off up to Birmingham. It was the London and Birmingham Railway which later collected or soon connected with the Grand Junction Railway which then connected with Liverpool and Manchester and so on. So that, which is the West Coast mainline today, largely unchanged. And of course, on the way down, it was a bit of fun. They just rolled down the hill with a breakman at the bank just pulling it to a halt. And when they had to haul them up, initially they did have to be pushed onto the rope and clip onto the rope and then hauled up. So it was quite a physical effort to operate this railway. This is not a terminus, but I included this really to show the trouble with which the early railway companies had to make sure that they appeased the local landlords. This is Primrose Hill, Primrose Tunnel, which goes under land owned by Eaton College. In fact, there are some roads around there called Eaton College Road and they still own that land. And they were very intent on the fact, well, they didn't really want the railway to go for it. It could have actually gone in an embankment. You probably didn't really need that tunnel, but they didn't want to lose the value of the development land above so they insisted on a tunnel and they insisted on this grand entrance to show who they were and how important they were. And of course, Euston itself, initially the hall was added a little bit later, a few years later along with a couple of hotels, two hotels. We will come back to hotels many times in this story. And it had this great hall which was the passengers would actually come through here and go up to the platforms there and sit and wait in this amazing, over-the-top, possibly baroc, sign of a star in a hall, which of course was sacrificed in the 1960s because it was in the wrong place. It would have prevented any expansion of the station, but we can debate whether it really was necessary or not. But it was a fantastic waiting room. I only just vaguely remember it from the early 1960s when I was, I confess, but don't tell anyone a train spotter. Sorry, I also mentioned, also above that there was another fantastic room called the board room, which was where the directors met. And the whole thing was actually partly that the investors were from the north and the midlands and it's really a bit of showing off, particularly the Dorring arcs. It's basically saying we are this great railway company, which actually became the biggest company in the world briefly in the 1860s, 70s. So they were showing how great they were, how important they were. And the Dorring arcs was very much part of that. We've landed in London, folks, and guess who's boss? They couldn't go any further into London because of this. They would have wanted to, I mean all these companies, as we all see, would have probably wanted to go further into London. But what happened was that as a result of having a commission on which the railway interests were not allowed to dominate, very important fact. And they basically said that effectively what's in zone one, they didn't call it zone one in those days, but what is zone one, you are not allowed to build any railway stations. So this was in response to an idea that there might have been one station in Farringdon that would have spread out in all the directions, which would have been very handy, but I think probably unworkable in the 20th century when rail usage went up so massively. And it would have required an enormous amount of demolition. So instead, you know, we get the situation where pretty much all the stations, and even Houston is sort of on it, you know Paddington, Victoria, a black project which was briefly a terminus station, Cannon Street and Liverpool Street are all on the Circle Line, which wasn't actually built till 40 years after this, but they envisaged the Circle Line. And that also is interesting because as British we don't do planning. We don't like the idea of kind of working things out in advance and the results we see today with the lorries, but that's not my subject here today. But essentially we don't do planning. And so this was quite an exception because by and large the British railways, as with the Americans actually, were built by people developing kind of railway plans to build a line between a particular place and other place, going to Parliament and saying please, sir, can we build this line? And if they had lots of chums in Parliament and if they had enough money they would be given permission and if they didn't then they would have to come up with some different idea. And so this was quite exceptional that they planned. And London, it's a testament to the power of London, to the power of the big landlords that Duke of Bedford and all those people who had the power to stop the railway companies who themselves were powerful in cursing right into the centre of London. And now we don't do planning, we do competition. And nothing illustrates that more than where we are now, just the other side of St Pancras. But having two huge railway stations, we're not the only ones guilty that. If you've been to Paris, the Garderlès is the stone throw from the Gardinor and it serves different destinations. So we're not unique but I think we have taken this to the most extreme. And the fact is that we ended up with 12 major railway stations because of competition. Because if they ever had been coordinated, we'd probably have four or five, maybe six but really we don't need a dozen but we've now got them. And as you will see, it's amazing that they all survived with one exception and there was one addition in 1899. So obviously this is King's Cross built by the Great Northern in 1853 and St Pancras built by the Midland Railway in 1869. And the reason that the Midland Railway then built its own term, its trains initially went into King's Cross but it built its own railway station because the Great Northern treated its trains as kind of second class citizens and gave them less priority. And the train paths and eventually they said, no, no, we've had enough. We're the Midland Railway, we've got to show that we've got Cahonys as well and so we're going to build our own station. And of course it had to be superior to or allegedly. Now actually I confess my favourite station is not St Pancras but King's Cross. And I showed this picture just, you know, this is a contemporary early picture and it just shows the pure simplicity of it, the elegance, again it's Italianate, it's got a tower in the middle with a clock and so on. But just those clean lines which have survived through to this day and there was clutter in front of it in several different types of clutter. This was actually called, possibly slightly racist kind of intonation that it was called the African village and it was a sort of cluster of buildings in front of King's Cross. And then, and I don't bother showing this but in the 1960s there was another incarnation of kind of rather shabby buildings in front of it which a few years ago were taken out to leave this. And you know, 1853 it's exactly the same and it survived and it looks so elegant, so clean, so modern looking. I mean you couldn't guess when this was built and that's why it's my favourite. And there's a whole kind of cluster of railway lines behind and underneath it and only recently reopened one of these tunnels and I'm not quite sure which one it is. I think it's called the Gasworks Tunnel because to expand services to enable more trains to use it and more trains to go through on terms of it and of course it connected in with the underground. The early underground was really about connecting the mainline stations so the circle line you could run from Paddington onto the circle line you could run from King's Cross onto the circle line could run from Liverpool Street onto the circle line. That was the idea and of course then it got too crowded and they stopped doing that and closed most of those connections. So this is St Pancras, look I'm not doing St Pancras down, it is a fantastic building and you know this is the Barlow train shed which was built before the main bit, they tell in the front a couple of years because you know did they run out of money or they were short of money as this story and actually every the railway company that did this ended up being short of money but so they put this wooden framework on which you can see that the initial arch is being built. Eventually they built another one of these wooden frameworks but you can just see the scale of it, I mean it's just quite extraordinary and that's the hotel which was at the front which was built later. I always think that even today that this area in front they don't quite know what to do with, there's now a nice pub there but it's kind of rather underused and there's parts of it that are not quite really I think kind of well used now. Of course that there is a great northern hotel which exceptionally of the hotels built with each of these stations and virtually everyone had a hotel going with it was not built right in front of the station which is great because they would have covered those arches and it wouldn't be the building today. That was it during the reconstruction for the Eurostar and the Eurostar Terminus and of course they cut out some bits of the undercroft and so all the shops are actually down the bottom underneath where this is the underneath as it was the undercroft. The arches that were designed to enable beer barrels that was one of the main forms of freight that arrived enable beer barrels to be pushed through so that that determined actually the size of the arches and there were rail lines that both went down into this area as well as rail lines which went up. Of course there is, as I'm sure you know, an important difference between King's Cross, the lines out of King's Cross and the lines out of St Pancras which is that the lines out of King's Cross go below the canal, we'll see the canal in a minute, go below the canal and the ones out of St Pancras go above the canal which is why you have to sort of climb up to get the trains and in King's Cross you don't. And again that was almost a kind of statement by the Midland Railway so well you've gone underneath, we're going up, we're going above it and of course they've done a wonderful job of the refurbishment today and it's a great hotel, there's the Gilbert Scott restaurant, there's various kind of wonderful function rooms and so on. Okay so we're still only in the 1850s, we've gone back to the 1850s, Paddington was actually the one that was built consciously as a cathedral, it even has a transept and a nave which you can see in another picture and it was built, difficult to say, it was built, there was an architect but Brunel was involved with the architect and can you imagine working with Brunel and him not kind of bossing you around and saying what you had to do and what you were not allowed to do, so I suspect that there was a lot of Brunel went into this and it was built really in the fashion of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition which of course was not in Crystal Palace at the time, it was in High Park and was moved out to Crystal Palace and then burnt down in the 1920s but so it was quite consciously kind of a similar style of development and this is a photo that I got wrong in the initial edition of the book but it's been corrected in the paper which I hope you'll all buy because it will really help because the kind books others come all the way from Newham to sell books so please do buy the book afterwards and it's your first chance to get the paper back but I made a mistake and thanks to Getty Images which is that I said this was the 1900s and in fact it looks rather like the 1900s, the clothes are fairly Edwardian so that loco looks pretty ancient and some but I made a mistake and the mistake, the eagle-eyed readers that I have spotted that the statue in the corner there was a memorial to the First World War so it couldn't possibly be in the 1900s, it had to be in the 1920s and it wasn't, I tried gamely saying it might have been the Borough War but it wasn't Anyway, it's delightful that I have readers who correct it and it has been corrected in the paper version but I think this shows what a wonderful, airy, fantastic station. From the outside it's not very, the hotel's kind of okay but the station is really hidden, easy in a kind of cutting but below and underneath the hotel and I mean the way I always go to it is from Prade Street and you go down and incline into the station so it doesn't have a kind of grand entrance and that's a feature of many of these stations and they don't really have the entrances they deserve and I think that's a feature of the fact that we did not develop a vernacular that went with the railways. We adapted various styles such as Italianate and Bozar and Gothic and so on. Without ever designing what should a station look like and what facilities does it need and how do you accommodate those. So a lot of the stations were quite higgledy-piggledy and when we come to Warsaw Lou you'll see that that was kind of the one that was most poorly designed. So another feature of this is that there's a series of stations that we've already seen, Spa Road, that were the initial terminuses of particular lines and as I mentioned they were all trying to get into the centre of London. The city was of course the main kind of target where they hoped they could tap into all the city works to grow in financial sector but also the west end and none of them really achieved getting the perfect kind of area for their station. They're kind of still slightly on the outskirts of both the city and the west end and so Nine Elms was the initial terminus of the London and Southampton and it was next to the Thames so you could get out and take a boat along the Thames to both the west end and the city but it was all a bit of a slow process and so it wasn't very satisfactory. So about a decade later it was replaced by Waterloo and as I give that little quote from Three Men and a Boat it was a mess and it had kind of three different sections and nobody quite knew, it didn't have the great indicator boards that we have today and so on, nobody quite knew where they were supposed to catch a train and so on and Waterloo became the biggest station because it built up kind of incrementally as the demand went up, it was serving a whole chunk of the south-eastern commuter traffic and as we'll see horse traffic and the like but it was not a very successful station until it was rebuilt and famously it served the dead which there was this little station next door that ran trains down the same lines of course and to Brookwood which is on the sorry Hampshire border where a huge, this company London, the Acropolis company set up this huge cemetery hoping that they would fulfil the task of becoming London's main cemetery. They didn't quite succeed in that but every day at 12 o'clock there was a train that would have different carriages for different classes of people, different carriages for different religions and it might have one of two carriages where the local golfers might hop on because the train was actually cheaper than the normal trains for passengers as a concession to the bereaved and they did quite a good business in sort of children's homes and old people's homes and various mental institutions and so on in burying people but it never was quite as successful as they hoped for but it stayed, it remained until the Second World War so from about the 1860s so it survived for quite a long time. In fact my mother was buried in Brookwood because they had, they divided the cemetery in different sections so that my mother was Swedish and in a Swedish section and there's kind of various Middle Eastern sections and German sections and so on so they still, but there's still a lot of space in there if you're looking. So again another example of a station that wasn't quite in the right place which is Bishop's Gate and this one survived for 34 years until Liberty Street was built. It was in a poor area on the eastern side of the city, rough area of beggars and tramps and so on and was unpopular for that reason. But the Great Eastern Railway which built it and which merged with a couple of other railways was always impoverished, not a good railway area to the east apart from actually what did develop as a good area was London suburbs and lots of suburbs grew out. As a result of the Great Eastern running a lot of workman's trains, as we'll see in a minute, but running out to Norwich and Ipswich and the like and the coast, not good railway areas, fairly underpopulated, not very well off areas and so on so the Great Eastern was always a railway that struggled. But so that's why it took 34 years to get enough capital to build Liverpool Street which was a bit of a mess and you can see that really from this picture because there are different bits of it where some platforms are longer than others. It was not a kind of happy station. I do remember trains spotting there and getting very lost kind of in there. There was a walkway at the top and you couldn't find which platforms were where and so on. But it was hugely heavily used by the workman's trains and there were different classes of workman's trains so there were the very early trains which were for the labourers who would have to come to work early then there was sort of a slightly superior one for the clerks who would actually pay a little bit more. And then there was the bankers and the more affluent commuters who would pay the full fare who would come through later. So it was very heavily used and they developed a whole series of suburban services. And the suburbs that built up were really determined by the fact that they had easy access to the railway so Walthamstow and Enfield and all those Edmonton all those sort of places built up as a result of Liverpool Street. And then there's the cute little station of Fentah Street which really only, it initially did serve more than the play but it's only got four platforms and it served, it now serves self-end really but it did kind of actually go to a few other places. And again you know was it really necessary you know as an addition it was a bit of competition with Liverpool Street built by a different railway company and so on but you know but now it survived pretty much intact except this bit above which rather ruined the kind of view and the feel of the station at the top. But again you have to climb upstairs. Like many of the stations it was the initial run was built on viaducts and so you have to walk up to the platforms but it's pretty much survived unscathed. Dave Don Bettsman who wrote a book and will hear more about that about the stations kind of really loved it. He thought it was London's hidden gem and it's bloody difficult to find. I mean when I went to go and research it and stuff even then I still found difficulty finding it on my bicycle you know because it's just tucked away. It's not actually in Fentah Street. Doesn't help not being in Fentah Street. And then we have the three sisters which I've called them the three sisters which actually broke one of the cardinal rules of the Metropolitan Commission on Railway Terminus Terminus is as I call them which is that they all involved bridges over the river to reach north London. And each of these three stations Victoria, Charing Cross and Canons Street all required a bridge being built. They were all built in the 1860s. And in fact Victoria was two stations as you can sort of see from this picture really which was the London Brighton and South Coast which operated on the right of our picture there. And London South Eastern which operated the rest of the trains. And even today you know there's still the vestige of a wall between the two and you know I took the train to Brighton yesterday and you still have to kind of walk to a slightly different place to get the trains to Brighton and this was kind of great rivalry again that was also there. It didn't become the station for the continent until between the wars actually. Charing Cross was the initial station that was used in the First World War to take people to soldiers to the coast. And Charing Cross again sorry Victoria did have you know a hotel in the front as they all do, Greven Hotel, pretty boring hotel but hey. And the Charing Cross hotel pretty much the same sort of class. It didn't have this slight different look and it's sort of possibly slightly bozar look about it. You know quite French. And that was the railway station that got closest to the West End. And you know that was that was the best effort as it were. The South West of what the London South Hunter which became the South West of the railway had plans to build a station in Whitehall which never materialised and they even started building the bridge across the river at Whitehall but it never happened. As with many, many such projects one could write another book about the failed projects but it would be less interesting because none of them would be there but there was certainly a whole host of failed projects. And the best story about Charing Cross is that was about a seven minute ride to Cannon Street. Most of the trains went just from Charing Cross to Cannon Street and then out to Kent or whatever. And the ladders of the night did a roaring train apparently because it was all compartment kind of trains and in the seven minutes it took them. They could offer their services and make a few Bob and all done very quickly. And apparently this was quite a well-known kind of quite a well-known feature of Charing Cross and meeting under the clock at Charing Cross which had certain romantic meaning also had a rather loose meaning. That's what it looks like today. They've taken over the sort of mansard roof and other bits and kind of cleaned up a bit which I don't think is an improvement at all. But anyway, at least it survived which the station at Cannon Street did not survive which is probably the only one I think that has been demolished. Those two towers on the side were initially water towers to provide water for the engines and now they're merely decorative. Again as I say they stretched out across the river and there's this complex series of lines south of the river linking trains out of Charing Cross, Waterloo East, Cannon Street and London Bridge. Really complicated kind of series of lines in the centre of London and this really I only used because I used it in the book it's just a fabulous picture. This was also built by the South Eastern Railway so the South Eastern actually built the half of Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street and not surprising it was in financial difficulties and eventually merged with the London and Chatham which built Black Fires which is no longer a terminus but you can see the insignia of the London and Chatham on next if you go over Waterloo Bridge and look to your left and it's still there. So those are the three linked railways, linked stations on the North Bank along with London Bridge all serving kind of suburban market. Broad Street was the one that has been demolished next to Liverpool Street. It was the torrents of the North London Railway, quite a successful railway for a while. It was kind of the third largest in terms of passenger numbers but very much got squeezed out by British Rail which wanted to redevelop Liverpool Street and so pretty much did what British Rail did which was to stop using it, putting trains into it letting it die and say oh well nobody's using it and say well there's no trains but no nobody's using it so we need to demolish it. But actually I think as you'll see from the picture Liverpool Street I'll for later I think that it's pretty good development. And then the last one which is Marilabon and 1899 just in time there's a neatness about the last main line which was the line, the great central line built to Marilabon and went out to Leicester and Nottingham and even Sheffield and Manchester and was the mad idea of Watkin who also built the Metropolitan Railway and it really was an unnecessary extra line. It's idea was that it would provide a better service, the gauge was bigger so it could have bigger trains and of course it's a great shame that the main line out of it was closed by beaching the line out to the East London and stuff because boy they could have used it as the basis of HS2 but hey they weren't to know that. Marilabon was one of the ones that was most threatened by closure because at one point there was this mad idea that you could replace railways with coaches and run them through the existing tunnels and you could concrete over the lines and run them through it. Actually Alfred Sherman who's one of Thatcher's advisers was a great fan of what was called the Railway Conversion League and which in my forthcoming book which is about British Railways I go into some detail about that story and it's quite extraordinary that it didn't happen but it was actually given serious kind of thought for quite a long time. Eventually it was chucked out by Peter Parker and it was never really a viable idea but Marilabon was almost a victim of this crazy idea. So just to sum up at the end these projects that I say they're mega projects they're not just about the railways there's so much more to the way they affected London. I mean they are such an integral part of London's history that it's surprising actually that more books haven't been written on them and more kind of credence paid to their importance in terms of all these things in terms of some clearance and land use and et cetera stimulation commuting as we see. I mean some clearance estimates vary between about 60 and 90,000 homes are demolished to make way for all these stations and of course it was claimed that they were all slums. A lot of them were and a lot of them were in poor condition Summers Town and the like but some of them were not quite as badly off and initially the railway companies didn't have to pay any compensation at all. They could just ride rough shot over them but as time went on they were forced to provide some compensation by various bits of legislation and even then and in Marilabon they actually were forced to build some housing around it. And this was the sort of housing back to back housing that they actually demolished. But as I said it did so little for the people displaced that often the areas round railway stations attracted all these people to being tucked out and became quite kind of run down areas. So even though the railways were the great prosperous companies of this era it meant that the areas around them were often quite in decline prostitution, drugs and so on. I mean one can remember King's Cross 20 years ago. This area round here was appalling. I do remember getting impotuned by drug addicts and whatever wandering around King's Cross. And this is here. This is Midden Railway Milk and Fish Depot. I'm probably standing exactly on this spot which was part of every station. So every station that we've talked about had a goods yard that accompanied with it. And some of those still survive. Some pancreas for example has that area kind of just outside it which is still quite large. And some of these areas have been actually well redeveloped. Notably this one which is behind us now which I think is one of London's great developments. You know it's sometimes criticizes being private space and so on but they built a lot of social homes. They've made use of the existing railway structures. This is a coal drop yard. So the wagons used to kind of go up here and then drop their coal into great big hods. And this building was a granary square and was a huge warehouse. And there was a large number of railway lines that kind of went in a curve kind of around here. That's about 40 sidings or something. And of course there was no coincidence that the canal was there because they took stuff from the canal onto the railway. And I think the redevelopment has been absolutely fantastic. So railway has stimulated the growth in commuting as I mentioned before. I mean massively and the circle line kind of contributed to that. Hotels, every one of these stations had a hotel that went with it, nearly everyone. And they were actually mostly pretty posh hotels and they actually ended up improving the quality of London hotels immediately. There were a desirable place to stay. And of course it was obviously needed hotels for people taking early trains or people arriving late at night and so on. So the hotels and the stations really went together. I say that's a great northern which fortunately was not built in front. And then kind of special events, Wembley, horse racing. I mean Waterloo dealt with both of course the Ascot and the Epsom Derby and had great links with horses. There were a lot of, there were actually horse trains out of Waterloo because there were so many trainers who lived in that area that they used the railway services and so on. And of course the London Underground. I mean one could say that the London Underground was built to support those stations. The circle line was, as I say, 1884 was pretty much the first to be completed and then all the rest sprouts out from the circle line. So one could argue that it was thanks to this huge number of stations that the underground was so extensive. So just to cover between the wars there was only really one major development which is the Waterloo which I think is hideous. I'm never gone for this victory arch. It has all sorts of bizarre statues there. It has the names of various places we've had wars. It's got a huge memorial inside on both sides to soldiers who worked for the railway company and were lost in the First World War and the Second World War and it's got victory at the top here. By and large it was opened by Queen Mary because King George V was ill on the day in 1922 and I think it was the result of 10, 12 years of development and I think some compromises were made in the designs. It's not one of the best. The war damage, amazing none of the stations got completed. There was one night in May 1941 where virtually all the main railway stations were bombed, clearly the Luftwaffe were after them. Although this one outside Victoria was damaged quite extensively, they all got working within a month or so which is pretty amazing really and a testimony to the resilience of the railway workers. Of course then there was the deliberate demolition of the ddoig arch which has been plonked in some canal somewhere and they've numbered the bits and there's kind of people who want to put it back together again. And with HS2. I mean maybe HS2 will think that this is a great PR exercise but it will cost several million pounds and given how much HS2 is costing I'm doubt whether they will actually in the end do it. And I took a series of pictures. I broke the lock down and I went round all the stations because I had to go round them all too for the final chapter of the book. And what's out of the book is my conversation with or my pretend conversation with John Bettsman. John Bettsman wrote a book called London Historic Railway Stations which was published in 1970 or 71 and he was deeply depressed. He thought that what happened to Houston would happen to all the railway stations and in fact it didn't. As I say only Broad Street was demolished and the redevelopments have been much better. This was Houston though and nothing I can't forgive Houston. I mean it's just too awful and however much they dry and they put some seats in. Famously there were no seats initially and there was no waiting room. I really don't think they can do anything with it. So it might get totally demolished for HS2 but they haven't yet decided what they're going to do with it. But thanks to Bettsman who advised on this one and BR took to heart his ideas they started to do some really good redevelopments. They were given permission to exploit the air above stations and that gave them the money to redevelop stations well. I think this is Liverpool Street and I think there was a great effort and they did up these columns beautifully. They kind of restored all the metal work and they got rid of the walkway and created this. It's a very simple design and I think very effective and it was a great job. This is the Eurostar that was terminal at Waterloo what's called Waterloo International. The extra five platforms which took them ten years to put into use for suburban services but they haven't done that just as COVID kind of happened and reduced usage. And this is undoubtedly the best redevelopment. I just think this is stunning and as I say I prefer it to next door. It was done about ten years ago now or twelve years ago and we re-aligned the station so that the main entrance kind of was down the side instead of the front and that left the front to be it's actually clear and modern self. And this is the last one that has been done recently which is London Bridge which is a total mess and again all these projects cost four, five, six hundred million pounds. These are big mega projects but I think this is beautiful and it's still not entirely coherent station because there's an up and a down and whatever. It's still quite difficult but beautiful. And then as my last picture there are old John Benjamin looking at the above bit and that's one of my criticism of the St Pancras. If you use St Pancras you'll know that this upper area is barely ever used.  But it's very irritating that when you get off the US start train you can't just walk into London and you have to walk downstairs and walk sideways into the throng but nevertheless it's a fantastic redevelopment. And so sorry that's actually out of date that you get the book for 1099 over there. That's the hardback but thank you for listening to me and I hope you enjoyed that and happy to answer questions. Right, right. Okay we'll start with you sir. Do you think HS2 is a white elephant? People always ask me that. The answer is yes. I mean what is extraordinary is that HS2 has been developed at a time when, I mean I didn't emphasise this enough in the presentation that the use of railways is going to change and commuting is not going to come back in the way it's come back before. And overall usage is at 60%, road usage is at 105% of pre-COVID levels. I think spending £100 billion on that particular railway is misspent. They should be spending it on improving existing lines and whatever but my views are well known on my website. First of all thank you very much for a fascinating talk. You said one thing that particularly made me prick up my ears. And you went talking about my personal favourite London station which is Marylibbon. I just like the feel of it inside. And indeed my daughter who lives in Birmingham chose today to go from Marylibbon rather than Euston. Good choice, good choice. But you mentioned that originally they had a wider gauge. Well I've travelled a lot in Russia so I know about trains with a wider gauge but why on earth? No, no, it's sorry. It's not that four foot eight and a half was any different. It's called a loading gauge. In other words the tunnels are bigger and able to take larger trains but still on four foot eight and a half. In Russia they have five foot three, I think it is, isn't it? And so they actually have a wider track width. But the thing they want, they thought that if they have bigger tunnels and the like, more expensive to build of course, but that you could then provide better facilities on the trains. Thank you. Perhaps afterwards I could tell you a story about why the Russians have a wider gauge. Okay, I'll be very keen, I have written about that and I have various theories about it but I'll be very keen to hear that. Sir, the front here. Sorry, sorry, an online one, yes. You just wait for the mic. Oh, okay. Okay, sorry. At the front. Yes. Sorry, wait for the mic, sorry. Thank you. The purpose of the large loading gauge on the Marillibyn line was for Watkins plan, which you may know about, to build a railway from Manchester to Paris that would take continental rolling stock. And he owned various railways that he was going to stitch together and build a channel tunnel. Which he started, which he started about half a mile of it. The war office, I believe. Yes, right. Yes, days two. He was going to build a line all the way from London to Paris. From Sheffield to Paris actually, Manchester and Sheffield to Paris. Sorry, John, you got about... It's an online one. Yes, an online question. I have heard that there is one station with 13,000 horses based in King's Cross to service the deliveries. Is that true or something like that? Yes, no, I've seen similar numbers. I mean, it was a complete... That picture I showed, which I can go back to, is a very neat kind of picture at this stage. And in fact, I mean, it was... It was complete chaos of goods being taken onto the canal, warehouses where you loaded up three or four flights of them, coal drops, so on. It employed several thousand people. So I can quite happily believe the figure of 13,000 horses. And as ever with the problem with horses, it must have been not a very pleasant smell. Cos we all have this rather romantic idea that everybody wants a manure. In fact, London in the late 19th century accumulated vast amounts of manure that they didn't need for any purpose and was a major problem kind of clearing. So if there were 13,000 horses, it must have been kind of quite difficult to breathe there. You mentioned the development at London Bridge and King's Cross. Which station would you pick next to have a development, a significant development, if the money was available? Oh, that's an easy question. I mean, I think Victoria really could do with sorting out. It's not a particularly pleasant environment. It's got a rather tacky shopping centre halfway above it and so on. And it could do with... Actually, it could do with the lines from Brighton being extended so that you didn't have to kind of go into it. So Victoria is my choice. Sorry, John. Another online question. How did the railway companies get the right to demolish so many houses? And what does that say about the Victorian age? Very good question, Mr or Mrs online. Essentially, they would go to Parliament and they'd get permission to build the railway line. And that included essentially demolishing anything in the way. They sort of had to come to some agreement with the landlords but not with the tenants. And they would have to possibly buy the landlord's land but not at a kind of market value, really just at a kind of fixed price because they had the right to do it. And that's why some of these lines were objected to by people in the way and particularly, as ever, it was the rich who managed to stop the lines being built through their territory and the poor got very little stay in it. And of course, what's interesting about this, there's a whole history to be written here because it did change over the Victorian period. So in the 1830s and 40s, the railway companies were able to ride roughshod over these poor people. By the back end of the Victorian era, they were still building and expanding some railway stations and the like. It was much more difficult to do that. The developers of Mariland, the Great Central Railway, had to pay vast amounts in compensation. And also, they got stopped from digging up lords. They had wanted to dig up lords, cricket ground, and create a kind of embankment there. And that got stopped and they had to go underneath lords. And they had to dig the tunnel and fill it in again between September and April, so it wouldn't disrupt the cricket season. So if you were the right sort of person, you could kind of influence the process. But if you were just at the bottom of the pile, it was very difficult to do so. It was ever thus, though, and it's probably still the same now. Any more, John? I don't think there's any more in the audience. I've got one more. The names of the stations, why are they so more interesting? I haven't done much thinking about that. King's Cross is actually in Battle Bridge, which it could have been called at St Pancras. It's named after the church that was there and is an obscure shepherd boy who was murdered by the Romans for refusing to give up on Christianity in something like 600 or 700 AD. A really obscure saint. Chary Cross is an obvious one. I mean, there is the cross, right? That is the distance marker for the mileage away from London. So that's obviously a Victorian homage, of course, to the Queen. And then there's some fairly dull names like Fentyr Street and Liverpool Street and Black Fires, which are all named after the streets they're in. So, yes, a very good point. I think we could have a competition to give more interesting names to London's railway stations. Right, I think that's it, John. Any more for now? Nothing more online? OK, then thank you very much. Thank you for taking the trouble to be here and thank you online audience for listening. I hope you enjoyed the talk and next time I might see you here in person, because it's much more fun. But I do appreciate that not everybody can get here and thank you for attending. Thank you.