Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool Street, EC2

Liverpool Street Station is mainly a commuter station, servicing Essex (with the Great Eastern Line), East Anglia and Stansted Airport (with the Stansted Express). The station was given a radical makeover, including some rebuilding, as part of the massive Broadgate development in the Eighties.

The bright, airy concourse is hardly recognisable as the smoke-blackened, 19th-century edifice of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, but this is indeed where John Merrick (John Hurt), arriving back in London from the continent, is chased by a roaring mob down into the toilets: “I am not an animal. I am a human being.” The decayed Victorian splendour of the station would have been reason enough to film here, but Liverpool Street really is where Merrick arrived from Brussels. Look up at the delicate wrought iron spider webs to imagine what the station once looked like, and at the sparkly clean brickwork and gothicky windows above Platform 1 to see the shell of the building as it was in the movie.

The bright new station with its modern facilities is a boon for the traveller, but it’s hard not to feel the loss of the original wooden walkways. A cheekily framed shot transforms Liverpool Street Station into ‘Liverpool Station’ for Sam Wanamaker’s 1969 thriller The File of the Golden Goose, when Yul Brynner and Edward Woodward head ‘up North’ to track down a gang of international counterfeiters.

And the revamped station is changing already. A row of cash-machines at the foot of the stairs from the Liverpool Street entrance has replaced the telephones where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) meets up with Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) in Mission: Impossible. The film’s ‘safe house’ can be seen, above Liverpool Street Usnderground Station, opposite the main terminus. And just when we got used to the idea that the entrance to MI6 was on Westminster Bridge, Stormbreaker puts the entrance to its vast underground complex in a Liverpool Street Station photobooth.

Trivia: Broadgate Arena, alongside the station, became the ‘Turin’ arena where the girls perform for Italian television in Spiceworld – The Movie.

Liverpool Street Station
Stansted Express

The Elephant Man (1980, dir: David Lynch)
Mission: Impossible (1996, dir: Brian De Palma)
Stormbreaker (2006, dir: Geoffrey Sax)
The File Of The Golden Goose (1969, dir: Sam Wanamaker)