Hello everybody and welcome to today's independent travel podcast which is a special

outside broadcast from Waterloo Station. This is absolutely the busiest station in the UK

and I wanted to take you on a little tour of it so that next time that you are here you will be able perhaps to appreciate it a little more.

So I am now at the southern end by Platform 1. I'm going to go all the way through the platforms have no fear.

And this is actually where the London Necropolis railway used to be based.

They would have a funeral home effectively on what's now Westminster Bridge Road and people would go there mourners

and then they and the coffin would be taken to Brookwood in Surrey and laid to rest in

the cemetery there that no longer happens from here but what you can do instead is what I've just

done which is go up on the escalator by Platform 1 up to the mezzanine floor which is is an absolute joy. Partly because you can see the whole

magnificent sweep of the station and partly because there's lovely touches such as the sunbaters.

Now what's the sunbaters? This is a sculpture of two figures, naked, and enjoying some sunshine clearly, and maybe just a little bit racy for when they were created, which was for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

And the idea was that people would look down from above at this happy couple. It was lost

like so much from the Festival of Britain, which took place very close to here, and found

ultimately in the garden of a hotel in Blackheath. So that is a little piece of joy of joy loads of shops and restaurants up here as well

just walking past the original part of the station now Waterloo station was created in 1848

before that the London and Southampton railway which was started in the 1840s, used to terminate at nine elms,

which is a complete pig of a place to get to. It's got its own underground station at last, but a long way out of town.

And it was officially opened 1848 as just the central station here pretty much in the middle of it

platforms one to six serving of course southwest london surrey and then going on from there into kent

into hampshire into Dorset.

You can get to Kent, but only from the adjacent Walter Louise station,

which is a bit of a semi-detached station, which I won't be going into today.

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