I once missed the last train home and had to spend the night on Kings Cross Station. As the shadows lengthened, indistinct figures appeared around the pillars.

Some seemed lost, like prey. Others at ease, like predators, moving slowly, snarlingly in the gathering gloom. I felt cold and vulnerable. My train was hours yet.

Across the concourse was a beacon of light, in the Dickensian darkness. It was the Casey Jones Burger Bar. I went in.

Making my cup of coffee last, sip by sip, I opened an Aldous Huxley novel, and forgot the time. As the lights were dimmed, one by one, I looked up to see a man pushing a wet mop across the floor. The tables were empty. I was the last customer. That’s when the small miracle happened. Instead of casting me out, the staff took me in. Off the restaurant was a small room, where the staff took rare breaks. Inside was a sofa, a couple of chairs, and a few dog-eared magazines. A space on the sofa was cleared. I sat down, and put my feet up. Then I napped.

Waking up, I saw them brushing the floor. “We didn’t want to use the hoover. Too noisy,” one said. Before the milk train at 5am, a milk shake, bun and copy of my favourite newspaper was put into my hand.

It’s no good looking for it – the Casey Jones Burger Bar. Kings Cross’ glittering, brand-packed concourse is now unrecognisable from its smoky, sinister past. Yet the kindness of strangers has never left me. Who were those people who sheltered me that night?

Walking past a gallery in Summertown recently, a dramatic etching caught my eye. It exactly captured something: the feeling I have had ever since my despair at Kings Cross. It was that stations are places of individual dramas, played out beside one another – even within touching distance.

Yet we rarely have a jot of insight or understanding – or even sympathy towards those other lives in flux, all around us.

It was by John Duffin, a Cumbrian-born London-based artist who studied at Goldsmiths with Damien Hirst and other celebrated British Young Artists (YBA). Originally trained as a draughtsman and Naval architect, Duffin’s eye is more like a cameraman than a photographer. He looks above and below, through and around a scene and the solid objects within it.

“I’m drawn to places which have a strong emotional resonance for me. Stations are one of them – a site of meeting and departure, good and bad memories, old friends, loss and separation,” Duffin said.

Duffin’s meticulously observed spaces between people – the way their shadows fall – all this is part of the evocation of emotional as well as visual memory.

Mine is of kindness unsought – but always remembered. The coffee was good too.

John Duffin’s prints can be viewed at Sarah Wiseman Gallery, 40-41 Parade Street, Oxford