Join the campaign: Death to London’s ugliest station!

I WALKED over to Euston on Friday to see if I could catch up with Swampy.

It inevitably turned out to be a bit of a wild goose chase since the veteran environmental campaigner’s latest protest is taking place mainly out of sight and underground.

Eco warrior Swampy, a.k.a Dan Hooper, was more visible in an earlier protest when he occupied the top of a tree to prevent it being chopped down to make way for the HS2 high-speed rail link from London to the north.

Presently he’s the front-man for a dedicated band of urban burrowers dug in beneath the fenced-in lawn in front of Euston Station as bailiffs try to dig them out. One 20-year-old called Lazer concreted his arm into the ground inside a metal tube. He successfully made a break for it when the bailiffs came to get him.

The protestors, who dug a warren of tunnels beneath the lawn last month without anyone apparently noticing, are once again trying to halt HS2 because of the environmental damage they say it will cause.

Above ground, there was little evidence of the subterranean standoff apart from a large “NHS not HS2” banner hanging from the portico of St Pancras New Church.

The two press snappers sunning themselves at the foot of the war memorial almost outnumbered the street-level Swampy acolytes, who were so desperate to get themselves nicked that they were doing press-ups on the pavement.

They were certainly outnumbered by the squads of hi-viz coppers whose expressions of combined suspicion and boredom must surely be part of the Met police training course. It was somewhat more unsettling to see the black-uniformed private bailiffs, who were kitted out like the SAS.

The police are staking out the station entrance, questioning everyone in order to weed out Swampy followers who might be planning to chain themselves to the tracks.

I’m not sure what to think about the HS2 demos. If you’re worried about climate change, surely rail must be better than road. Then again, you can already get to Birmingham and beyond pretty quickly by train. If you absolutely have to.

Our friends in the North complain, meanwhile, that they need more local trains for local people, not soom looxury service aimed at metropolitan businessmen heading up their way to plunder the last widow’s mite.

Politicians have been wrestling with the HS2 plan for years and appear to have settled on a “well, we’ve started so we might as well finish” solution. The price tag has already tripled since the plan was first mooted in 1996 and the first train to Manchester won’t run till at least 2040, so don’t try booking just yet.

It involves chopping down a lot of trees, which has upset Swampy’s lot, and ploughing through a bunch of pristine villages, which has roused rural Tory voters from their customary slumbers.

Hence the anti-HS2 movement has drawn support not only from Swampy’s crusties but also from a familiar crop of backbench Tory swivel-eyed loons.

But that’s enough national news. What does it mean for us Londoners, particularly those of us who have no intention of venturing anywhere north of Watford?

For a start, it will mean a big revamp for Euston Station. There’s already a lot of digging going on around the back, as an argument continues to rage over how many platforms it needs.

Euston is unquestionably London’s ugliest mainline station, having been rebuilt in the 1960s after its Victorian predecessor was torn down and its Great Hall and majestic entrance arch removed by the planning vandals.

The government of the day, obsessed with cutting the ribbon on the latest stretch of motorway even us it was shutting down half the railways, wouldn’t even cough up the cash to have the arch moved elsewhere.

What stands in the place of the former neo-classical gem is something resembling a retail park in Chorleywood, wherever that is. “Even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture, Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London,” according to one critic writing in The Times.

For Monty Python star and trainspotter Michael Palin it is “a great bath, full of smooth, slippery surfaces where people can be sloshed about efficiently”.

Fortunately, the campaigners who failed to save the Euston arch did succeed in saving St Pancras, a soaring Gothic Revival masterpiece down the road that looks more like a medieval castle than a railway station. The striking but less flamboyant King’s Cross Station next door has also since undergone a tasteful regeneration.

And then there’s Euston, an alien carbuncle that continues to scar one of London’s most stately thoroughfares. It’s a blot on a landscape that includes the imposing Wellcome Institute opposite and St Pancras Church nearby with its pagan caryatids, a group of upright maidens copied from the Acropolis.

There’s a lot of other good stuff nearby, but I’ll save it for a future trip.

Suffice it to say, if there were a campaign to rid us of the urban eyesore that is Euston Station, I’d be down in the hole with Swampy.