Surviving Liverpool Street Station

In times of old(e), the first port of call for any warlike and savage foreigners would be the provinces of East Anglia and Essex. These were the Club 18-30 destinations of choice for the Vikings, Jutes, Saxons, and anyone else with a giant helmet, fearsome axe, and a passion for late nights and mead. The tour boats would drop them ashore, and they’d rampage and pillage on through the night before finally slumping in a pool of their own vomit and someone else’s viscera. And they next day (well, afternoon) they’d kick off again, partying like it was 999. Which it probably was.

Once they’d put their youthful exuberances behind them, many stole a holiday home and settled down to a more peaceful life (once they'd killed the original owners, of course). Like modern British retirees in Spain, they never got around to learning the language or the culture, but unlike them, they generally got along through periodic culls of any dissenting locals.

Time has generally worn down the sharp edges of these once fierce invaders. Those in the northern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk devolved into peaceful swamp dwelling creatures that can be safely poked with a stick. Not so, the residents of Essex, their sharp edges remain such. The chariots of their hotblooded youth still roar along the seafront of Valhalla-on-Sea, each a screeching death yell of overheated Corsa; their exotic villas assemble on the broad avenues of Chigwell, built in the style of a six-year-old with blunt crayons.

This marauding tide gushes through the gates of Liverpool Street station each morning and then recedes each evening, leaving a trail of moral wreckage and lukewarm vomit behind. They’re like Vikings without the flashy hats and finely honed moral sensibilities. Fuelled on Stella and a job in the city, they make for a fearsome foe.

Fenchurch Streets also offers services to Valhalla-on-Sea and connecting stations. Generally, this is the safer of the two stations, since very few people know quite where it is, and it gets no easier to find after eight pints of Stella.

Survival tips. Spilling Stella on a lad from Essex on a Friday evening is the equivalent of throwing a Mogwai in the shower after midnight. I know that Billericay sounds like it might be populated by Hobbits. But it’s not, unless they’re ferocious, bitey little hobbits, who have somehow contracted rabies and decided to treat it with PCP. You can’t even fit one in a blender. Unless you have a really big blender. Note that this is illegal and you should not enter Essex with either an oversized blender or this thought in mind. There are far more of them than you and in all probability you won't survive past Shenfield.

Surviving King's Cross

There’s no better place to start our survey of London’s great train termini than the gateways to the North and the Midlands (the Midlands are the undecided bit of the country that everyone regards with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for Frenchmen) – King’s Cross, St Pancras, and Euston.

King’s Cross and St Pancras stations are helpfully sited next to other for no better reason than to confuse the unwary. They merge underground in a devious and unpleasant psychological experiment. Those unfamiliar with the subterranean geography can scuttle around a warren of tunnels like a frantic rodent that’s been force-fed large doses of stimulants. Several hours later, you’ll either find the correct tube line or reach the surface. If you do locate the Northern Line you get a food pellet. Or a very severe electric shock, depending on how clumsy you were at the platform edge.

King’s Cross and Euston act as the gateways to Scotland. As such, if you spend any time (longer than one minute) outside of either you’ll eventually be accosted by a drunk Glaswegian. He’s either insulting your parentage or asking for directions. Linguists, after exhaustive study, have yet to figure out which. It’s not the Scottish accent, believe me absolutely everyone in Scotland talks like Miss Brodie’s slightly posher aunt, it’s the result of a lifetime of being steeped in Buckfast Tonic Wine and the eight cans of Tenant’s Super than enlivened his journey down the spine of the country. He’ll be readily identifiable by the fact he’s wearing a t-shirt whatever the weather and will have a carrier bag (presumably with more industrial-strength lager, but you ask him). He’ll also be followed by several distraught and confused families. They’re not his, they’ve just been confined in the same carriage since Birmingham New Street. Generally, despite standing on the streets of London, he’ll still be of the firm belief that he never left Scotland and the bagpipers have been kidnapped by the English in some weird inversion of the Pied Piper myth. There are sober Scots, they remain in Scotland inventing things like televisions, penicillin, and the macadamised road.

Of course, followed by the Scots, are the people of the North.

Northern people generally don’t like being in London. They will tell this to anyone that will listen. Even if they’ve lived in London for the last thirty years, they’ll still tell you how much they hate London, usually while sipping their cappuccino. The North, of course, has fewer people than sheep and you can leave your doors unlocked at night, mostly so the neighbours in the terraced house next door can come in and steal your TV to buy more drugs without having to kick the door in.

The North is obviously a fantastic place if you like wool and dislike keys. For some though, being Northern just isn’t enough, they have to be from Yorkshire, oddly often referred to as "God’s Own County” despite no evidence that either He or any of his prophets (including the angel Moroni who unaccountably skipped the entire county on his gap year trip to the US) ever visited. By and large, the people of Yorkshire don’t even like being in the North, since it’s contaminated by the filthy red rose-touting non-Yorkshire parts. Even some areas of Yorkshire aren’t Yorkshirey enough for them. “That’s not really Yorkshire,” they’ll disdainfully declare as though you’ve just handed them a turd, “that’s SOUTH Yorkshire.” Truth is though, even if they had located the perfect, unadulterated northern heart of Yorkshire-ness, a confection of whippets and flat caps, the average Yorkshireman would be too tight to pay the bus fare to get there.

Surviving the King’s Cross area has become easier. Eurostar trains now wend their way into St Pancras to add a little bright and be-scarfed continental chic to a once grim, boarded-up slab of London. Now dozens of confused French tourists and Midlanders can mix it up with addled Scotsmen. It’s not unlike a deranged barman (or Tom Cruise) mixing a cocktail of Chateauneuf du Pape, Buckfast, and then adding a splash of dandelion and burdock. Even the area itself has been rebranded Regent Quarter (an uncommon modesty from the developers in not claiming an entire regent), with contemporary lateral living spaces, bars and restaurants displacing the more traditional local attractions of readily available crack cocaine and prostitutes.

Survival tips. Don’t attempt to go underground without a map and ample supplies. Don’t attempt engage the Glaswegian in conversation on the basis that you have read Trainspotting and it can’t be that hard, can it? And for the love of God don’t ask anyone about Yorkshire.

How to Survive Arriving

If we are going to discount the mushroom-in-manure option as the origin of the people of London (which probably wouldn’t even appeal as an explanation to a US school board), then the first place to start with any modern urban survival guide is the process of arriving in the great, smoky metropolis. That difficult birth into the urban sprawl.

When Martians first arrived on Earth, they came in spaceships, and owing to a map-reading error landed in Arizona (of course, every self-respecting alien plans to land in Los Angeles). Spaceships being less of an option for the Earth-bound, we may as well start with a more usual method of arriving.

The train station.

Not all London train stations are created equal. They are called termini for a reason. They’re the cruel, hard lump of punctuation that throws the unsuspecting head-first into the urban metropolis. There’s no air bag and contrarily to the literary view, the streets are more typically paved with dog shit, chewing gum, and comatose drunks than gold. At least they're generally softer than the concrete pavement.

Surviving both arrival and the mere visit of a London train terminus requires an understanding of what you may encounter.

Welcome to the Jungle

London. Home to significantly more people than you could ever count, and the largest urban zone in Europe. It’s quite likely that if you can survive in London, you can survive anywhere that has oxygen and water. Possibly even Slough.

Very few people are born within the traditional dinging distance of the famous Bow Bells. Even if they appointed Motorhead as campanologists-in-chief at St Mary-le-Bow Church to extend the aural catchment area, you’d probably only end up with enough self-declared pearly kings and queens to count on the remaining fingers of a man who still faints at the mention of agricultural machinery. Let’s face it, the population of London is either spontaneously generating like mushrooms in a Victorian manure pile or they come from the mythical lands of Elsewhere. Most of the remaining dwindling population of native Londoners have been caught in recent years by strategically placed Eel and Pie shops. Once trapped, they are taken away and released back into the safe environment known as Walford. It’s genuinely better that way.

No, most Londoner’s come from Elsewhere.