The new station caused my second timeslip.

I set the piece I am making as Writer in Residence at Wakefield Literature Festival in the vague present. Clara, a retired intelligence officer living in a new residential/office development near the station, muses about how architects love ‘lettraset/CAD people’, how the plans and the visualisations they place on hoardings look idealised and two dimensional.

At that stage - in the writing and the story - the real station was being developed and moved back along the track towards Leeds. Clara wonders how the public spaces of her development - still as quiet as an architect’s model - might be animated by the reconfiguring of the city’s pathways of desire.

Now the station is open, those pathways are beginning to warm up, and my story placed in a definite past.

Though in the low winter light and with a long lens, the lovely new station and especially the people inside or reflected by it, still look as strangely lettraset/CAD as the people on the visualisations we walked past while the new station came to life.