The hauntology, psychology, and ecology of Crewe railway station

Historically, Crewe station is one of the most significant in the world. It opened in 1837 and originally linked the four major cities of the UK - London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Phenomenologically, Crewe exists as hyper-transitory space - it is a space one passes through or waits at as they continue their journey to their desired destination. Crewe's actual existence recedes into the background. In a wider, sociopolitical sense, Crewe exists as an absent point in the haunted plans of the axed section of HS2. Crewe today feels empty, it feels eerie, and it feels haunted - haunted by a past in which the railway network of the UK was a promising and progressive image. As one enters the station from the south, and explores its platforms and boundaries set up for commuters, one can see freight trains at different states of usage and disrepair. Large paved areas of no apparent purpose are seen at the back of the station, slowly being colonised by moss, and beyond them disused railways and platforms that have grown into forests.

As I travelled on the Avanti West Coast service today, formerly Virgin Trains, I had planned to go direct from Euston to Chester. Crewe would have been a two minute stop on this route that would have merely passed me by, signalling little more than a spatiotemporal proximity to my desired destination (about 20 minutes from Chester). However, on route to Euston I was alerted via my mobile phone that the train was cancelled and that I had to get a later train to Chester. In fact, what had happened was that the journey plan of my desired train had been truncated: it was now due to terminate at Crewe. From here, I could get on a local service operated by Transport for Wales to get to Chester. I could then get another train to Shotton, near my home. I learned from eavesdropping and direct conversation with one of the staff, and eventually an over-carriage announcement, that the reason for the truncation was a shortage of staff: there was no driver to take us to Chester. My disembarking at Crewe today manifests as the inverse signifier than what arriving at Crewe 150 years ago may have meant: lack of infrastructural progress vs. infrastructural progress, disinvestment vs investment, a system becoming fragmented rather than one aiming for unity and integration. My stop at Crewe was forced through a thoroughly neoliberal flexibility. Avanti bought the contract to run this service, but now cannot afford to run the service itself. The consumer, the atomised individual, is abandoned in the operator's ad-hoc logic of cancellation and disruption. This is not an argument about entitlement to specific services, about resent for lack of refunds for disrupted plans. It is an account of the UK's railway system and its ongoing precarity. In terms of the station itself, Crewe's railway architecture has been partially eaten and digested by a series of overpriced convenience shops and restaurants, alongside garish advertisement from Avanti West Coast, whose stickers barely cover the Virgin ones they intend to replace. One facade covers another. The plastic architrave and signage everywhere overlaying solid bricks of historical arches and supporting beams.

Today, Crewe exists at the threshold of visibility. As a railway hub and transfer point, trains very often pass through here at top speed, and thus the station recedes into the periphery of the subject's experience - existing at its edges, first at one, and then at the other. At other times, as with me today, one has to disembark, wait at Crewe, and change onto another train to reach their desired destination. Yet, even when one has to alight at Crewe, it remains kind of invisible: all one ever sees of Crewe is the train station - raising the question of whether Crewe actually exists beyond the train station. Whilst waiting, one is absorbed into the ambience of their mobile phone or the slightly warmer welcome of the waiting room. Crewe breeds a state of suspended animation. Cryptobiosis. No one really exists here, they are waiting to exist at some later point and in some different space. Let me be clear that this is not a critique of Crewe as a place (which of course, does really exist), but is an account written from the psychological perspective of the journeying subject who passes through here. For them, Crewe becomes less a point in actual space, a localisable geography linked to other points on a Cartesian plane, than a wormhole, a non-spatial point that must of necessity be traversed, and often, reluctantly so. The photo above was taken inadvertently - as I was trying to capture a panoramic image of one of the walls, my train pulled into the platform and my phone spontaneously captured this image as I abandoned my original aim and hastily walked to board it. The image captures my journey from that wall to the train, and of my phone from my hand, positioned precisely and intentionally, to my pocket, moved reactively and hastily. I think this image captures something of the eeriness of Crewe station, of its existence as a hyper-transitory space in the phenomenological sense.

However, I did explore the station during my 40 minute wait and here I found a number of slimy micro-ecologies on its walls and grids: algae, moss, small plants. Slime. The ecologies peppered around Crewe station reflect the station's wider existence at the threshold of visibility. Unless one, like me for instance, is purposefully looking for them, these moss and algae covered walls and dripping pipes are easily overlooked. Clearly, these ecosystems have emerged over long periods of time - years most likely. At what point did they emerge as clearly and visually noticeable decorations on the brick walls? In what system of records and inventories do they (not) exist? And how do they relate to the other fluxes and flows through the station - of water, people, and commodities? For these organismal assemblages, Crewe station represents the inverse of what it does for me and other transitory subjects: it is a colonisable space, a concrete space, one with clear geometry, geography, and environmental conditions. It is the opposite of a vacuum. For these organisms, we are the ones who do not exist, as they witness (through whatever means they might - or might not) our comings and goings. In fact, it is likely that some of these ecologies and their lineages - like the station itself - predate and outlast the precarious vicissitudes of successive train operators in their energetic frenzy to capitalise on a gutted-out system of public transportation.