‘Shoreditch’ by Alan Gilbey:

Yes, I remember Shoreditch –
The name, because one afternoon
Confused – I took the wrong train
From Whitechapel. It was late June.

And we trundled and jogged – the truth and I
Through cuttings that cut through – who knows?
Till we stopped at a single platform
And sat there in repose.

Then for one minute, a blackbird sang
Just that – and peace and calm
Till the whinny of a horse arose
From some nearby farm.

The air brakes hissed. Someone cleared his throat
No one left and no one came
On that country station platform
A stone’s throw from Brick Lane.

This poem by the local poet Alan Gilbey was hung in the (Pedley Street) Shoreditch Station until the station’s closure in 2006. Today it reads as a lament to a once former Terminus… interestingly there is no mention of the station building itself which was rendered a ‘ghost building’ the day the railway tracks were pulled up, the single platform was buried, the cuttings infilled and the arches demolished. That the poem refers to Spitalfields Farm reinforces our belief in a ‘Sustainable Heritage’: one whereby the dead Station supports the living Farm, the proposed beneficiary of any Section 106 agreement.

The former (Pedley Street) Shoreditch Station  is also conspicuously absent from this 2011 ‘Heritage’ map by The Gentle Author which hangs in the Golden Heart, a local establishment. This map includes notable local points of interest and with respect to Pedley Street indicates Spitalfields Farm and a ukelele shop, the Duke of Uke. In the mapping of ‘Brick Lane’ today by a local historian, Shoreditch Station is indicated yet in its current location on Bethnal Green Road. The former (Pedley Street) Shoreditch Station (as a Terminus) has been bypassed, in both this map and todays London Underground map, as the Conservation Area / city has evolved in the collective consciousness. The Gentle Author recognises that Shoreditch Station has had at least 4 different East London locations over the past 150 years: Liverpool Street, Shoreditch High Street, Pedley Street and today Bethnal Green Road. The UCL Institute of Archeology confirms this in their report: that the former (Pedley Street) Shoreditch Station had literally no foundations – it straddled the now non-existent tracks – and so was always considered, in Heritage terms, a ‘chattel’: a mobile object, building-as-train, that changed location.

Tweet