Schoolchildren’s voices inspire new poetry at Grand Central Station

Trains sigh, doors clatter, announcements ricochet off glass and steel.

But then, suddenly, beside the ticket office, a poem stops you in your tracks.

Read a few lines and you realise this isn’t one writer’s private reverie - it’s Belfast, in its children’s voices.

For the past year North Belfast poet Niamh McNally has been Translink’s Poet in Residence, but her residency has been anything but solitary.

Instead of writing in isolation, she spent months working with 300 primary and post-primary pupils from schools around the station, asking them to write about movement and belonging - what it feels like to travel, to wait, to pass through.

The result is Moments in the Station, now installed on the concourse.

Pupils from local schools including St Joseph’s Primary School, Slate Street, Donegall Road Primary School, St Louise’s College Belfast and Belfast Royal Academy came to the station as young writers, along with their notebooks.

Also participating were youngsters from St Mary’s Primary School, Blythefield Primary School and Fane Street Primary School.

In workshops led by Niamh, they were asked to notice what most commuters miss, namely, the rhythms of footsteps, the choreography of arrivals and departures, the way light falls across new architecture.

They listened for overheard fragments, learned about the area’s heritage and mapped the surrounding streets - Grosvenor Road, Sandy Row, Bruce Street and Hope Street - as part of the station’s wider story.

“These sessions were about letting young people see that their observations matter,” Niamh said.

Teachers watched the station become a classroom, where poetry and everyday life met in real time.

For many pupils, it was also an invitation to see the building as something that belonged to them.

“For many of our pupils, this was their first time being invited to see a space like the station as something that belonged to them,” said Caroline Moretti from St Joseph’s Primary School.

“Niamh created a calm, inclusive environment where our pupils felt listened to and where their words were treated with real respect.”

Hilary Woods, Principal of Belfast Royal Academy, says the project naturally aligned with classroom learning in terms of literacy, observation and critical thinking, anchored in a real place rather than a textbook.

“The station became a classroom and our pupils saw that their words could represent their area with pride,” she said.

When it was time to write, Niamh worked directly from the children’s words.

What struck her was the precision of their observations, including how they viewed the station as a place shaped by routine and history, where private moments unfold inside a larger current of movement.

In the poem, the building becomes a living organism - a heart with ‘terminal ventricles’ and ‘valve tracks’ - capturing how public transport keeps a city circulating.

The poem’s references to neighbouring streets echo how pupils described the station as a meeting point between communities: a threshold where different parts of Belfast overlap, even if only for the duration of a platform announcement.

A recurring figure, ‘the Millie’, a fictional linen worker at a loom, grew from classroom conversations about Belfast’s industrial past.

For Niamh, the character offered a way to stitch eras together, letting the past sit alongside the present’s ticket machines and departure boards.

“It’s a crossing of time,” she said.

“She’s weaving in the past and I’m printing tickets in the present - both of us moving through the same space.

“One place can hold different stories at once.”

At its core, Moments in the Station is about liminal space: the in-between where people are neither here nor there, but briefly together.

The workshops tried to reflect that sensation by showing that public spaces are made not only by architects and engineers, but by the people who move through them and by the words we choose to describe what we see.

The poem also carries an environmental message, shaped by the pupils’ instinctive sense of shared responsibility.

Niamh’s advocacy for public transport is both distinctly personal and practical.

She has never learned to drive, by choice, and doesn’t plan to.

“I love the calm of public transport,” she said.

“Just sitting, relaxing, looking out the window.

“It surprises people, but I’m simply not interested in driving.

“I believe in sustainable travel - the climate crisis is real - and choosing the train or bus is one way to make more ecological decisions.”

As her residency wraps up, Niamh is completing the final stages of People, Play, Space, a year-long project that took writing workshops to towns and villages she visited through the Translink programme.

She is also working towards her first poetry collection, five years in the making.

“I’ve been collecting poems for a while and I think I’m nearly ready,” she said.

For now, commuters can appreciate Moments in the Station as they queue for tickets or cross the concourse.

“A train ticket gets you to a destination, but words can travel further,” said Niamh.

In a place built for movement, the poem offers stillness and a reminder that Belfast’s story is shaped not just by where people are going, but by who speaks in the spaces between.