Greater Anglia and Network Rail have teamed up to launch Liverpool Street Station’s first-ever online virtual tour.
The tour has been designed to support journey planning, give passengers a clearer picture of the station before they travel, and reduce anxiety about how they’ll get around. Virtual tours like this have been provided at other Greater Anglia stations and have proven especially useful for disabled people wanting to check accessible routes through the station.
Screen shot of the London Liverpool Street virtual station tour. Credit: Greater Anglia
Using the virtual tour, people can find out how to get to all public areas, including the main concourse, toilets, information point, customer lounge, ticket machines, platforms, taxi rank, and bus stops. In addition, aerial photography and an interactive map show the location of all the facilities in relation to each other.
Key features can be navigated directly through a drop-down menu system, while the ‘autopilot’ tool allows users to select their destination and be automatically guided to it.
London Liverpool Street is owned and managed by Network Rail. Customer service is provided in partnership with Greater Anglia, which runs services between the station and Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, and other parts of London.
Greater Anglia already has virtual tours in place online for 14 of its busiest stations for Passenger Assistance, as well as for its entire new train fleet. Members of Greater Anglia’s Accessibility Panel, a group of disabled customers who meet regularly with the train operator, offered feedback during the development of the virtual tours and supported the project.
The technology was provided by a company called The Virtual Tour Experts and the tour has been designed to be accessible. A spoken scene guide with closed captions plays on the home page at the station entrance and it features an accessibility widget that enables the user to change to high contrast, large font size or audio transcription. Future developments will look at incorporating British Sign Language videos.
The tours can be viewed here.
Incidentally, you can see that the main concourse was filmed on Christmas Day, when the station was closed, and yet, one of the sandwich shops has opened — on Christmas Day.
Greater Anglia’s Accessibility and Inclusion Manager, James Bonehill, said, “The idea was to create a tool for customers to assist them with their journey planning and reduce the anxiety about whether the station would create any accessibility barriers so that they can travel with confidence.
“We are committed to making rail more accessible and providing quality information to enable more informed journey planning.”
360-degree virtual tours are now available for 15 of Greater Anglia’s busiest stations – Bishop’s Stortford, Broxbourne, Cambridge, Chelmsford, Colchester, Ely, Harlow Town, Ingatestone, Ipswich, London Liverpool Street, Manningtree, Norwich, Shenfield, Southend Victoria, and Stansted Airport.
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