Euston, Leigh has a problem

Acclaimed film director Mike Leigh walked into the room. Leigh, who directed Another Year (2010), stood almost dwarfed by the lectern. Dressed more for Paddington than Piccadilly, Leigh wore a thin, bottle green jacket hung over a chocolate brown corduroy shirt with slate grey cord trousers. 
   The West End room quickly filled with polite people and mild confusion. After all, Leigh's Piccadilly audience had come to listen to a film director speak about architecture at an arts event hosted by the Geological Society. 
   Leigh talked lovingly about two London buildings that featured prominently in his life; the British Museum, that resplendent must-do temple for tourists, and the long departed old Euston Station with its brash, classical Doric Arch, erected in 1836 but cruelly demolished in the 1960s with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's sanction.

   On one of several entertaining digressions from his written script, Salford-born Leigh said the old Victorian-built Euston - the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line - with its spectacularly decorated great hall, became Manchester's unofficial "embassy in London". 

   "I can still smell the steam trains when I visit Euston," said Leigh. "I ate my first curry in nearby Drummond Street."

   Leigh also recalled the barber's shop with great mirrors and marble sinks under Euston's Platform Six. "The barbers were nothing if not aggressive," said Leigh. "I was a drama student and went in for a haircut. Very inoffensively, I said to the barber, a great big fellow with tattooed arms, 'not too much off the back, please'.

   "The barber said to me, 'Don't fuckin' tell me how to cut hair! I was fuckin' cutting hair before your fuckin' Dad was born!...Shut up!'"

   That Euston barber wouldn't have been too impressed with Leigh's trademark hang dog look. Leigh's face is framed by a curly white beard with a bushy moustache concealing his top lip like ivy sprawling over a balcony. The barber might've preferred Leigh's energetic spinning of a good yarn. 
   Leigh avoided ranting about the newer Euston Station, built in the 1960s and dwarfed by Network Rail's former Orwellian HQ, a dark towering monstrosity known even to its staff as the 'Black Tower'. Instead, Leigh recited a much-loved quote from Richard Morrison, writing in The Times about the newer Euston most of us now recognise: "Even by the bleak standards of sixties' architecture Euston is one of the lustiest concrete boxes in London devoid of any decorative merit, seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst from passengers and a blight on surrounding streets.

   "The design should never have left the drawing board, if indeed it was ever on a drawing board! It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android raging against humanity and with a vampyric hatred of sunlight."
   Leigh's eyebrows danced up and down. His forehead furrowed frequently like an exposed geological fault, fitting as we were all scrunched inside the Geological Society. At this point, I remembered that ditched chunks of Euston's Doric Arch were fished out of the River Lea's Prescott Channel in 2009.

   Leigh ended his talk where his life in theatre and film began. Just over 50 years ago, in September 1960, Leigh began his scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on Gower Street, just around the corner from Euston Station. 

   "I stepped through the Doric Arch at Euston on a very special occasion. I'd come to London for good," recalled Leigh. "I also embraced the city that I was to love."

Films directed by Mike Leigh include Another Year (2010), Secrets and Lies (1996) and Vera Drake (2004).

Leigh delivered his talk, London's Unnoticed Gems, at the Geological Society, Piccadilly, London, W1 on Monday 24 January 2011, part of Critics Choice, London's Most Important Building, an element of the Architecture Programme of the Royal Academy of Arts. 
Other speakers who will talk about their narratives about London places include Will Self, Antony Gormley, and Monica Ali.

For more info: www.royalacademy.org.uk/architecture 

Paul Coleman, London, January 2011