Sarah Sze is a specialist in dissonant realities, so the discovery of an abandoned railway waiting room, silently hunkered down between tracks whooshing with trains, posed an irresistible challenge. “What I love about it is this idea of a negative space that’s been sitting in plain sight for so long,” she says. “You’re actually sandwiched between the trains, so it’s like time has passed outside the windows, but it has been sort of preserved inside. You also have this real sense of anticipation there, because a waiting room is always about something about to happen, about to arrive. Most people who have used that station every day don’t know it exists, which is an incredible thing in a city like London, where every square foot usually has purpose, because there’s that need for a growing population.”
The once-grand first-class waiting room is at Peckham Rye station, which was built in the 1860s as a London junction for visitors travelling from the south coast to the recently relocated Crystal Palace. When the expected hordes of passengers failed to materialise, the station continued but the waiting room was converted into a billiards hall, which ran for 40 years. Since closing in 1962, it has lain vast and empty, stripped to its beams like the skeleton of a beached whale.
