Important Alert: How to Fix Your Hangover in a Train Station Toilet

Every so often you come to work stupidly hungover, absolutely reeking of the previous night.

Take your clothes, for example, which stink – the cuffs of your jumper coated in the lingering scent of bygone Amstel. Or your mouth, resembling the waste of a burned down Marlboro factory. We've all been there (or at least I have, as shamefully evidenced in the photograph above, where I am also cruising through on the hopeful hair of the dog).

The problem, of course, is that you missed the opportunity to get cleaned up in the morning. Maybe you ended up crashing somewhere after a date and didn't want to risk breathing in the limescale coating the walls of their shower, or you just decided to sleep in as much as possible. Whatever the case, it doesn't matter – I have the answer. A tip that not even Time Out will give you: the knowledge that there are showers in three train stations across London: one in King's Cross, another in Paddington, and the last in Euston (although you need a first class ticket to use these).

So here we are – you, the reader; me, the hungover husk – walking into King's Cross station in search of warm and wet respite. We'll get to what needs to happen and how to use the showers in a minute, but first: some information.

Who actually uses them? "We get all sorts of people coming through here," says one of the staff members at King's Cross station, who doesn't want to be named. "Sometimes people come before work – maybe they went for a run or something and need a shower. Homeless people come here, too; addicts of different sorts; tourists… it's a whole mix of people."

Yet, despite this opportunity to cleanse – for tourists and city-workers and everyone else to wash their filth down the plug-hole – these absolute saviours are rarely used by anyone.

"We only have about ten or 15 people come here every week," explains the member of staff. And he should know: it is him, among a few other staff at the baggage claim area, who you hand the money to whenever you want to use the showers (price: £5; towel, included).

And here it is: The Great Shower. It is not, as one would expect, dank and gross (although, if you don’t bring flip-flops, it could be a self-inflicted prerequisite to a horrible case of athlete's foot).

There are two of these in King's Cross station, and both are guarded, so don't think about coming here to indulge your public sex fetish. This also made it relatively impossible to take photographs, but here is what the shower looks like in case you were wondering if it's a next level one (it is not):

As you can see, good drainage system, the water works, you got some hooks to hang your bag and clothes, everything is in order: slap some Imperial Leather on your body and get yourself washed up.

Other than the information I was able to discover in person, historical information and facts about the London showers are few and far between. Perhaps they were inspired by the bathing trains of Europe – specialised carriages packed full of showers and suds that were used throughout the First World War to keep the troops clean – or they just knew that people like being clean.

To find out more, I reached out to the National Rail press office, who said that, historically, the showers have been used by people using "sleeper services" (i.e. the trains that run all the way through the night).

I called out on Facebook to see if anyone had showered in a station after an all-night train (they hadn't). Looking through Twitter provided similar results. That said, one woman tweeted in 2016: "Just had a shower at kings cross station and I regret absolutely nothing." Shout out to you, living a life of no shame (still, I'm not going to link out and incriminate you).

So there you have it: next time you're stuck, and providing your work a) doesn’t have a shower; b) you've been out somewhere far from home; and c) you're hungover (or, for some reason, just really unclean?) and in the vicinity of King's Cross, Paddington or Euston, these places will sort you out. If you need evidence of their efficacy, just compare the top photograph to the one below, like some sort of weird Blue Peter before and after experiment, but with a man who was once feeling very shitty and has now been reborn like a damp baby lamb.

@ryanbassil / @Jake_Photo