Dave Hill 

John Schlesinger’s very old London Waterloo

As the capital’s busiest railway station struggles to cope with soaring passenger demands, a classic 1961 documentary transports us to a very different city
  
  

A young couple at Waterloo Station, 1955.
A young couple at Waterloo Station, 1955. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Getty Images

“London’s busiest rail station is creaking under the strain of handling more and more passengers” and has “an out of date infrastructure that is in parts unchanged since the 1930s,” says London TravelWatch, the capital’s transport users’ watchdog. This view was expressed following a presentation by the managing director of South-West Trains, who said that overcrowding is severe with demand having more than doubled to an annual 230 million passenger journeys since 1995 and expected to rise by a further 40% in the next 30 years.

I mention this firstly because those numbers make you think and secondly - and, in truth, primarily - as a pretext for bringing you John Schlesinger’s famous 1961 film Terminus. It’s about a day in the life of Waterloo. It’s 33 minutes long. It’s good.

Uploaded to You Tube by David Bromage.

Read London TravelWatch’s worries about Waterloo station here. Read about Terminus here. Read about John Schlesinger here.

 

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