Commentariat

We have always visited railway stations for reasons other than making a journey. In the early days people would go to stations not so much to find out the time as to marvel at the sight of the clock; later, they might go to buy a meal, deposit a chopped-up body in a trunk at left luggage (there was a brief vogue for this in the interwar years), buy a racy novel at the bookstall, or watch the trains.

Today, railway visionaries talk of new stations serving high-speed lines and functioning as exemplary community hubs. The theory is being put into practice at St Pancras in London, where it was noted on a public holiday last year that a third of those present had no intention of catching a train.

In the north-east, however, something more churlish is happening. A publicity genius at National Express East Coast proposed closing Darlington station to those wanting to see off the new steam locomotive, Tornado, on its first run to London today. This was on the grounds of health and safety, and the decision was reversed after a swingeing denunciation in the Northern Echo: “Silly Buffers”.

But at Grantham, Newark Northgate, Wakefield Westgate, York, Darlington, Durham, Newcastle and Berwick, the company is turning “open stations” into permanently closed stations by installing gates that will cut off the platforms to those without tickets. This is mainly for “revenue protection”: to stop people getting on or off trains without paying.

It is the trend throughout the network, and National Express East Coast, a good operator in many ways, is required to put in the gates by the typically grasping terms of its franchise - terms against which, according to a recent report, it may be chafing badly. The company contends that “honest passengers won’t object to the gates”.

Well, I’m an honest passenger and I object, especially to those planned for the beautiful grade II-listed station at York, and in this I’m joined by more than 300 individuals and organisations.

I spent half my boyhood on York station, either looking out for Deltic locomotives, going to the gents, drinking tea or just watching people. It was interesting to earmark someone waiting on a platform and see who came up to kiss them when the train came in. A visit to, say, Paddington in London can still be enjoyed in this way, especially on Friday evening, when a brass band plays and the place is full of life. Some of the platforms there are closed off but, it being a terminus, most of the bustle is concentrated on the concourse, whereas if you shut off the platforms at a through station like York and the others mentioned above, you attack the heart.

It’s true that, for much of its history, York’s platforms were protected by gates, the movement for opening stations being a product of British Rail staff cuts in the late 1980s. But early photographs show, by the gates, machines dispensing platform tickets of a kind rarely available now. I asked a National Express spokesman if these tickets could be reintroduced, and he said they would “add another layer to an already complicated ticket-pricing structure”. Perhaps I overestimate the difficulty of administering a machine marked “Platform tickets, 50p”.

Platform passes are to be issued at the discretion of a guard. Many young men with cameras and notebooks, I fear, will not make it through. After all, they could be al-Qaida members. I asked another spokesman what would happen if I approached a platform guard and said I just liked wandering around on platforms, and he replied: “I think we’d look very sympathetically on that request.”

Yeah, I bet.

• Andrew Martin’s novel, The Last Train to Scarborough, is published in March

andrew.jmartin@virgin.net

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When Viv Nicholson won the football pools, her vow to “spend, spend, spend” had a certain transgressive power, and her story of rags to riches and back became a morality tale of the times. But that was the 60s, when the remnants of a puritanical mindset dictated that you didn’t boast about spending money; you didn’t eat for the sake of eating or shop for the sake of shopping. If Nicholson had won her money this year, by contrast, she might have been a poster girl for Gordon Brown’s campaign to get us out of the house and into the shops.

It is apparently our patriotic duty to go shopping. We neurotically monitor the retailers’ latest financial results and our identification with the fortunes of the big stores seems absolute. Toys really are us; John Lewis is a close personal friend; and we were all guilt-tripped about our neglect of Woolies. I envisage posters in our city centres featuring the face, and pointing finger, of Sir Stuart Rose, and carrying the legend: Marks & Spencer Needs You … To buy some underpants.

But perhaps we are beginning to think that we’ve seen enough of the interior of Sir Stuart’s premises for a while. We certainly don’t seem to have taken the hint from Alistair Darling’s VAT cut, and I suspect that Britain is waking up to an absurdity I identified when I was about six years old.

The logical aim of shopping is surely the removal of the need to go shopping, at least for a while, after the need or desire is met. Shopping as a way of life that is now the British way of life carries with it the admission that the itch can never be scratched; that the enterprise is doomed from the start.

I don’t claim any moral or intellectual superiority for those of us who minimise our shopping (well, perhaps I do a little). We just don’t happen to care for the lighting in shops, or the music. At this time of year, it always seems to be some munchkin-like crew singing about how happy they are, which contrasts poignantly with the faces of the actual shoppers. On the supermarket bookshelves, the omnipresence of the matronly Jamie Oliver, or the mysterious, eternally leotarded Rosemary Conley and her Complete Hip and Thigh Diet is perplexing to the point of a headache. We always pick the queue featuring the man who wants to pay for his apple with a credit card, or the woman who only begins searching for her purse some time after being told the amount due - and then with a look of affront, as though where she came from all groceries were supplied free of charge.

We shopping refuseniks have traditionally, if not exclusively, been men. In researching her book of 1974, Housewife, Anne Oakley discovered that, while many working men were willing to help their wives with the shopping, most refused to be seen carrying a shopping bag. They didn’t want to be identified as shoppers. It’s an essentially passive pursuit, after all, and one transacted in contemptibly mealy-mouthed terms. The shop assistant’s “Can I help you?” means “Give me your money or get out”, and the shopper’s “Thank you”, at the completion of the purchase, is equally loaded with resentment, according to the degree to which he or she has been ripped off.

We who would like shopping to be more marginal in our society would prefer to see a factory in place of the out-of-town superstore. A factory, with its fierce customisations and mysterious leakages of steam, has a mystique and glamour compared to a shop. It also offers the prospect of more interesting and highly skilled work, and a better chance of advancement. Having seen where an economy that is overreliant on services has led us, the government, in the form of Lord Mandelson, has started to talk up British manufacturing, or what’s left of it. Perhaps his rueful awareness that New Labour has allowed a million and a half jobs to be lost from the sector lies behind his apparent willingness to bail out Jaguar Land Rover, whereas Woolies staff are deemed as disposable as many of the goods they sold. This is a tacit admission of what has long been denied: there is an irreducible core of manufacturing that must be retained.

Micheal Gallagher, a clinical psychologist with a background in labour studies, has spoken of the need for a study of the effect on young men of working in the services as opposed to industry - “especially given the high rates of suicide and depression among them … Large-scale manufacturing brought many forms of certainty now lost. You were given identity by your place of work, the associated trade union, brass band, sports club, social club and so on”.

It’s not very surprising that the government has identified a problem of low aspirations among white working-class boys in northern cities. Their current fate, if they find employment at all, is likely to be a job in services, and years of asking strangers that craven yet resentful question: “Can I help you?”

• Andrew Martin is the author of How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts

andrew.jmartin@virgin.net

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