History New terminus (1875) Liverpool Street station was built as the new London terminus of the
Great Eastern Railway (GER) which served and . The GER had been formed from the merger of several railway companies, inheriting as its London terminus. Bishopsgate was inadequate for the company's passenger traffic; its
Shoreditch location was in the heart of one of the poorest slums in London and hence badly situated for the
City of London commuters the company wanted to attract. Consequently, the GER planned a more central station. and it was fully opened on 1 November 1875, at a final cost of over £2 million. The original City terminus at Bishopsgate closed to passengers and was converted for use as a goods station from 1881. This continued until it was destroyed by fire in 1964. The
Great Eastern Hotel adjoining the new Liverpool Street station opened in May 1884. It was designed by
Charles Barry Jr. (son of the celebrated architect
Charles Barry who designed the
Houses of Parliament). Upon opening, it was the only hotel in the City of London. An extension called the Abercon Rooms was built in 1901, designed by
Colonel Robert William Edis. The hotel includes the Hamilton Rooms, named after former GER chairman
Lord Claud Hamilton.
Expansion (1895) Although initially viewed as an expensive
white elephant, within 10 years the station was working at capacity (about 600 trains per day) and the GER was acquiring land to the east of the station for expansion. An Act of Parliament was obtained in 1888 and work started in 1890 on the eastward expansion of Liverpool Street by adding eight new tracks and platforms. This gave the station the most platforms of any London terminus until
Victoria station was expanded in 1908. The main station was extended about eastwards; additional shops and offices were constructed east of the new train shed up to the parish boundary with Bishopsgate-Street Without. A new roof was built over the new construction. The outer wall was constructed with
Staffordshire blue brick and
Ruabon bricks. The four train shed roofs were carried out by Messrs.
Handyside and Co., supervised by a Mr Sherlock, the resident engineer; all the foundations, earthwork and brickwork were carried out by
Mowlem & Co. Electric power (for lighting) was supplied from an engine house north of the station. Additional civil works included three iron bridges carrying road traffic over the railway on Skinner, Primrose and Worship Streets. The bridge ironwork was supplied and erected by the
Horseley Company. John Wilson was chief engineer, with
W. N. Ashbee as architect. As part of the works, the GER was obliged by Parliament to rehouse all tenants displaced by the works, with 137 put into existing property and the remaining 600 into tenements constructed at the company's expense. By the turn of the 20th century, Liverpool Street had one of the most extensive suburban rail services in London, including branches to and
Woodford, and was one of the busiest in the world. In 1912, around 200,000 passengers used the station daily on around 1,000 separate trains.
First World War and memorials (1917–1922) Operation Turkenkreuz, the initial
First World War biplane air raid on London, took place on 13 June 1917, when 20
Gotha G.IV bombers attacked the capital. The raid struck a number of sites including Liverpool Street. Seven tons of explosives were dropped on the capital, killing 162 people and injuring 432. Three bombs hit the station, of which two exploded, having fallen through the train shed roof, near to two trains. One of these hit a carriage on a train about to depart, another hit carriages used by army doctors; the death toll at the station itself was 16 dead and 15 injured. It was the deadliest single raid on Britain during the war. Over 1,000 GER employees who died during the war were honoured on a large marble memorial installed in the booking hall, unveiled on 22 June 1922 by
Sir Henry Wilson. On his return home from the unveiling ceremony, Wilson was assassinated by two
Irish Republican Army members. He was commemorated by a memorial plaque adjoining the GER monument, unveiled one month after his death. The GER memorial was relocated during the modification of the station and now incorporates both the Wilson and Fryatt memorials, as well as a number of railway related architectural elements salvaged from demolished buildings. The station also has a plaque commemorating mariner
Charles Fryatt who was executed in 1916 for ramming a German U-boat with the GER steamer
SS Brussels.
"Big Four" (1923–1945) By the early 1900s, the success of deep-bore electric trains on the Underground suggested that local services out of London could also be electrified. Following the war, the GER needed more capacity out of Liverpool Street as it was at capacity (serving almost 230,000 passengers daily in 1921), but they could not afford electrification. They considered high-powered and high-tractive steam locomotives including the
GER Class A55 as a possible alternative, but these were rejected because of high track loadings. An alternative scheme was introduced, using a combination of automatic signalling and modifications to the layout at Liverpool Street. The station introduced coaling, watering, and other maintenance facilities directly at the station, as well as separate engine bays and a modified track and station layout that reduced turnaround times and increased productivity. Services began on 2 July 1920 with trains to
Chingford and
Enfield running every 10 minutes. The cost of the modifications was £80,000 compared to an estimated £3 million for electrification. The service was officially called the Intensive Service (as it allowed a 50% increase in capacity on peak services), but became popularly known as the Jazz Service. It lasted until the General Strike of 1926, following which services generally declined. The GER amalgamated with several other railways to form the
London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) as part of the
reorganisation of railway companies in 1923. Liverpool Street came under ownership of the LNER, and suffered from a general lack of attention and neglect throughout the 1930s.
Station staff 1935 The station master in 1935 was H C R Calver and he had 395 staff under him with his direct reports, including ticket office, parcels staff, signalmen, platform inspectors and porters. Of this number, 75 were passed for fogging duties for when additional staff were required for safe operation of trains in
foggy conditions. In addition to this there were many other staff employed at the station on a variety of duties including policemen (uniformed and plain clothes), locomotive staff, permanent way staff, carriage and wagon examiners, steam heat examiners, electric and gas examiners, telegraph staff, linemen, signal fitters, Goods Manager's Despatch Office staff, outside porters, hotel porters, staff from the continental office and GPO staff. The former headquarters building of the GER (still a railway office in 1935) was adjacent to Liverpool Street and some departments in that building also had roles in the operation of the station. Further to that the newspaper companies provided their own staff to load newspaper trains.
Signal box operation 1935 In 1935 the approaches to Liverpool Street and the station itself, were controlled by seven signal boxes, which fell under the responsibility of the Liverpool Street station master. The boxes were: •
East London Junction - this was primarily for traffic to and from the
East London Line and in 1935 a route onto the Southern Railway via
Whitechapel •
Bishopsgate North - this box controlled the suburban line only; it was situated on the former (closed 1916)
Bishopsgate Low Level down suburban platform. •
Bishopsgate South - stood on the former Down Local platform of
Bishopsgate Low Level and controlled traffic on the Local and Through lines. •
Liverpool Street West - was the controlling box for the station working. All trains were block signalled, irrespective of whether they were running into the west or east side of the station. The box had 203 active levers and 37 spare and during the busiest period of the day there were six signalmen on duty along with a telephone and booking lad. A train to Liverpool Street East Box would be block signalled from the West box. •
Liverpool Street East - situated at the country end of Platform 11; it had 127 active and 9 spare levers, and controlled traffic passing on or off the Local or Through lines, into or out of platforms 11 to 18. Departing trains would be despatched to the west box. • The remaining two signal boxes were platform boxes whose purpose was to electrically lock a platform out when a train had arrived in it. The platform would not be freed (so other trains could not be routed into it) until all the vehicles brought into it were cleared and the platform was again ready for another train to be accepted. These boxes were located at the country ends of Platform 4/5 and 14/15.
Second World War Thousands of Jewish refugee children arrived at Liverpool Street in the late 1930s as part of the
Kindertransport rescue mission to save them in the run up to the
Second World War. The Für Das Kind Kindertransport Memorial sculpture by artist Flor Kent was installed at the station in September 2003 commemorating this event. It consisted of a specialised glass case with original objects and a bronze sculpture of a girl, a direct descendant of a child rescued by
Nicholas Winton, who unveiled the work. The objects included in the sculpture began to deteriorate in bad weather, and a replacement bronze memorial,
Kindertransport – The Arrival by
Frank Meisler was installed as a replacement at the main entrance in November 2006. The child statue from the Kent memorial was re-erected separately in 2011. During the war, the station's structure sustained damage from a nearby bomb, particularly the Gothic tower at the main entrance on Liverpool Street and its glass roof. As a precautionary measure the large and weighty West Side hanging clock was brought down to platform level and served as an enquiry office for the duration of the war.
Post War (1946–1991) After the formation of the
London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, work to electrify the line from Liverpool Street to
Shenfield began in association with the LNER. Progress had been halted by the war but work resumed after the end of hostilities. The line between Liverpool Street and
Stratford was electrified from 3 December 1946, and the full electrification of the Shenfield line at 1500V DC was completed in September 1949. At the same time, electrification of
London Underground services in Essex and in northeast and east London led to the withdrawal of some services from Liverpool Street, being replaced with LU operations. Electrification continued with the line to
Chingford electrified by November 1960. In 1960–61, the overhead electrification, which had been extended from Shenfield to Southend and Chelmsford, was converted from 1500V DC to 6.25kV AC. The proposed demolition met considerable public opposition and prompted a campaign led by the
Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, leading to a
public inquiry from November 1976 to February 1977. In autumn 1980, the overhead electrification was converted from 6.25kV
AC to the standard supply of 25kV AC. The inquiry recommended that the western (1875) train shed roof should be retained in new development; consequently it was repaired and reinforced between 1982 and 1984, followed by repairs to the main roof completed in 1987. Initial plans included adding two additional tracks, with 22 platforms in a layout similar to that of
Waterloo station; the combined Broad Street and Liverpool Street station was to be at the level of the latter, with relatively low-rise office developments. The development was reassessed in 1983/4, when it was decided to retain the existing six-road exit throat and 18-platform layout, in combination with resignalling; this resulted in a station confined to the Liverpool Street site, with ground space released for development. British Railways signed an agreement with developers Rosehaugh Stanhope in 1985, and work on the office development, known as
Broadgate, began. Railway work included the construction of a short link from the
North London Line to the Cambridge main line, allowing trains that had previously used Broad Street to terminate at Liverpool Street. The station was reconstructed with a single concourse at the head of the station platforms, and entrances from Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, as well as
a bus interchange in the south west corner. The Broadgate development was constructed between 1985 and 1991, with of office space on the site of the former Broad Street station and above the Liverpool Street tracks. Proceeds from the Broadgate development were used to help fund the station modernisation. In 1988,
The Arcade above the underground station on the corner of Liverpool Street and Old Broad Street was due to be completely demolished by London Regional Transport and MEPC, who wanted to develop the site into a five-storey block of offices and shops. More than 6,000 people signed a petition to "Save the Arcade", and the historic Victorian building still stands today. The campaign against the development was led by Graham Horwood, who owned an employment agency within the Arcade at the time. In 1989, the first visual display unit-controlled signalling operation on British Rail (known as an
Integrated Electronic Control Centre) became operational at Liverpool Street. The redeveloped Liverpool Street was officially opened by
Queen Elizabeth II on 5 December 1991. At that time a giant departures board was installed above the concourse; it was one of the last remaining mechanical
'flapper' display boards at a British railway station until its replacement in November 2007.
Recent history and privatisation (1991–present) stations In 1991, an additional entrance was constructed on the east side of
Bishopsgate with a
subway under the road. The station was "twinned" with
Amsterdam Centraal railway station on 2 December 1993, with a plaque marking this close to the entrance to the Underground station. The station was badly damaged on 24 April 1993 by the
Bishopsgate bombing and was temporarily closed as a result. About £250,000 of damage was caused to the station, primarily to the glass roof. The station re-opened on 26 April 1993. In 2013, during excavation work for the
Crossrail project, a mass burial ground dating from the 17th century was uncovered a few feet beneath the surface at Liverpool Street, the so-called Bedlam burial ground or
New Churchyard. It contained the remains of several hundred people and it is thought that the interments were of a wide variety of people, including plague victims, prisoners and unclaimed corpses. A 16th-century gold coin, thought to have been used as a sequin or pendant, was also found. In early 2015 full-scale excavation of the burials began, then estimated at 3,000 interments. In advance of the full opening of the
Elizabeth line, precursor operator
TfL Rail took over from
Greater Anglia the Liverpool Street-Shenfield stopping "metro" service from 2015. At the same time, services on the
Lea Valley Lines out of Liverpool Street to Enfield Town, Cheshunt (via Seven Sisters) and Chingford transferred to
London Overground. The central section of the Elizabeth line opened on 24 May 2022 between Paddington and Abbey Wood. The Elizabeth line platforms are to the south-west of the existing tube station building.
Services In the 12 months to 31 March 2020, immediately before travel restrictions were introduced as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic, Liverpool Street was the third-busiest railway station in the United Kingdom, after
London Waterloo and
London Victoria, with an estimated 66 million passenger entries and exits. Patronage fell by 83% in the 12 months to 31 March 2021, to 11.2 million entries and exits, as a result of the pandemic. In 2022 / 2023, it was ranked as the busiest station in the UK, with 80.4 million entries and exits, the increase being attributed to the opening of the Elizabeth line in May 2022. Trains depart from the main line station for destinations across the
east of England, including , , , , , , , , , , and many suburban stations in north and east London,
Essex and
Hertfordshire. A few daily express trains to provide a connection with the
Dutchflyer ferry to
Hook of Holland.
Stansted Express trains provide a link to and Southend Victoria-bound services stop at . Most passenger services on the
Great Eastern Main Line are operated by
Greater Anglia. Since 2015, the Shenfield stopping service has been operated by
Transport for London (first under the
TfL Rail brand, now the
Elizabeth line), and the
Lea Valley Lines to Enfield Town, Cheshunt (via Seven Sisters) and Chingford are operated by
London Overground (now under the
Weaver line name). A small number of late-evening and weekend services operated by
c2c run via
Barking. The station is split into two “halves”: the "west" side for the Lea Valley Lines services and the "east" side for services via Shenfield. Trains on the central section of the Elizabeth line run west towards and east to in south-east London. The typical off-peak weekday service pattern from Liverpool Street is:
Service table ==London Underground station==