On the Movements of People
Stuck waiting for a late-night flight home, Tom Galvin talks a load of shite.
Alright, I’ve held this in too long. I’ve stumbled across a revelatory and apocalyptic (in the traditional sense) realisation and the people need to know. Too long have they been kept in the dark, going about their days in obliviousness and it is my duty to share it. To pierce the veil. Are you ready? I hope you’re sitting down. Airport restrooms are truly awful. Train station toilets too. There, I said it. Brave of me I know. Take a few moments to adjust to your life as it is now, your eyes open, your path through reality indelibly changed henceforth.
Practically, I understand that transport hubs are generally high-traffic nexuses, so with the best will in the world the overworked and understaffed custodial teams might struggle to keep up on occasion. But my point is not that these restrooms are dirty, it's that people tend to commit inhuman acts of waste elimination within them. Effluvial sins that mere flushing cannot absolve. Sounds that can change a man. And let's not even get on to the smells. If, on the evening of his invention of the modern flush toilet, Sir John Harrington had received a portent of how his creation would be used in, say, Terminal 2 of Manchester airport, or the labyrinthine bowels of Birmingham New Street station, then like Oppenheimer he too would have spoken words from the Bhagavad Gita and taken a hammer to his porcelain progeny before anyone found out about it, let alone install one round the back of the local carriage stables. No, something more than poor housekeeping is going on here.
Airports, train platforms, bus stations – as well as being transit hubs, all fall under a broader category of liminal spaces: areas that act as extended thresholds between two other areas. Transitional spaces. If you think that sounds like a boring concept, you're apparently in the minority. Media based on liminal spaces, more specifically the aesthetic of (typically empty) liminal spaces have exploded in popularity in the last few years, with the 2025 film (and 2023 game) Exit 8 being a recent example, as well as the wildly popular Apple TV show Severance and the imminent release of the film Backrooms. Those (like me) of a terminally online persuasion will know this has trickled down from the general obsession with liminal aesthetics in online spaces like Tumblr, Reddit and 4chan over the last 8 or so years (Backrooms is based on a common meme in such channels).
Popular images and media of liminal spaces online tend to skew towards the creepy and unsettling; the uncanny – abandoned malls or vacant car parks at night. Often empty, uncomfortably lit, and lost in time, it’s no wonder that the media derived from these spaces mostly fall into the horror category. At its most on-the-nose, liminal horror has the protagonist (or the player in a video game) becoming trapped in a fantastically heightened and otherworldly liminal space from which they must somehow escape, else falling prey to eternal loneliness or a worse end at the hand of some jump-scare-y liminal monster or something. Often the protagonist or player has no tools or defense, and is somewhat helpless. It's a powerful metaphor for crippling indecision. It’s also like being in an airport.
You're never alone in an airport but it's certainly easy to feel alone in one. Everyone is stuck there, united in the sole desire to get out as soon as they can, but unlike a prison that’s where the kinship ends. These people are strangers to you, and aren’t here to make friends. Surrounded by the simulacrum of community and feeling terribly isolated, jet-lagged, hungover or half-cut, full of exotic victuals not sitting so well. Subconsciously, and digestively, the social contract starts to break down. Leviathan? I'll show Hobbes a fucking Leviathan. They say you shouldn't ‘shit’ where you ‘eat’ – and one most certainly does not metaphorically ‘eat’ at an airport (and may be wise to not literally eat, either, not least because it's so expensive these days). I still don’t think that’s all of it though.
There’s a catharsis that often comes with using the toilet at a transport hub, more so than with a regular visit. Remember the crippling indecision? Thanks to all the waiting around and pseudo-solitude, one has a lot of time with one’s thoughts – an increasingly rare phenomenon – no matter how much brainrot the apps try to throw at you. Those struggling with internal conflicts may be afforded the time and space to think things through a bit. I’m going to leave him; I should phone my parents; I’m going to quit drinking; I’m going to tell her I love her; I’m going to be a present father to my kids; I need to go to therapy; I’m gonna move to France. I imagine watershed moments in people’s lives happen frequently in these spaces, especially when travelling alone. Internal conflicts resolved (if not fully then at least set on the road to resolution by the animus of decision), one undergoes a metamorphosis, and the need to resolve another internal conflict bubbles to the surface. From the cocoon of the cubicle one is reborn and emerges a new, different, better person, leaving behind a bowl of one’s own liminal horror and angst. Catharsis, a loanword from Ancient Greek meaning purification (in a spiritual sense), feels right on the money here.
I think that loneliness has a lot to do with the current obsession with liminal spaces. We have never been more connected to our fellow humans and yet a deep loneliness pervades every echelon of our society: we are all alone in the unyielding and unending crowd, desperate for whatever human connections we can make. I know that’s not a searing revelation (not like the toilet bit earlier) but it is definitely true. We seek media that speaks to this loneliness, to the general unease of it all, the feeling that something is wrong with the way things are. The transit hub epitomises these feelings, a microcosm of modern life, and horrible toilets are a part of life. Maybe they aren’t so bad? Well. Objectively they are, but I mean in a metaphysical Lynchian sense, that you have to take the bad with the good, and that one doesn’t mean anything in isolation without contrast from the other. Life is shit sometimes, but other times it’s great and it’s great to look back at when it was shit from a position of when it isn't. So next time you’re in the bathroom of one of these spaces, judge not too harshly the bloke in the stall next to you, emitting threnodic grunts as he fights for his life with some tepid calamari he ate a day prior. He’s probably just working through some stuff. Perhaps better to say some stuff is working through him? ⚭
Tom GalvinManchester Terminal 2 is open Monday—Sunday, Manchester M90
Birmingham New Street is open Monday—Sunday, Birmingham B2
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