East-West

by Unknown

  But for mobile people with a commute and a dream, the Tube is liberating and affordable. You see students from everywhere, and tourists from everywhere. In the centre the Piccadilly has more key attractions than any other line. The Tube is deeply aspirational.

  My own aspirations have always been uptown, top-ranking ones; my own version of the urban dream. In my teens, for instance, I thought I’d like a flat above a shop in one of those Edwardian red-brick blocks around the Charing Cross Road (Leicester Square Tube). Nightlife, bookshops and cheap cafés. I’ve never really longed for the West Village loft or the artist’s redeemed industrial slum, I never wanted anywhere particularly vibrant (airhead euphemism for borderline ghetto-ish) or ‘edgy’ (safe proximity of law-breakers). I wanted the real early twentieth-century city centre, part-commercial, part residential. Living above a shop. The alienation of The Lonely Crowd was not a problem in this teenage dream. ‘Downtown … everything’s waiting for you.’ It was obvious that Pet Clark wasn’t on about … Shoreditch, or the West Village, Brixton or the South Bronx, she meant Piccadilly Circus (‘Linger on the sidewalk where the neon lights are pretty’).

  I’m so design-aware now it hurts. I’ve seen the Futurists and the Marinetti Manifesto. I know the route from Bauhaus to Our House, from Modernist to Moderne. I can see why my architecture and design friends are always on about the Tube; about the Map, Beck’s map, which is a constant of those Top Ten Graphic Design lists; about suburban stations’ architecture, and particularly about Arnos Grove – I’d never been there till 2012. And about Frank Pick and the design management history of the Tube. But design management was a new bit of corporate-speak I only learnt back when I was weaning myself off the Tube.

  I liked it for precisely that capital M for Modernist vibe I hadn’t understood before. The Tube, whatever its earlier shortcomings – being boiled, having to stand, a bit shabby in parts, though never as smelly as people said – was the Future that really worked (and for the many, not the few, to use a Blair-ism). Affordable, efficient, classless-seeming. It’s everything upstairs London isn’t. Someone was saying on TV recently how London’s poorest shopping streets were lined with Chicken Cottages, mini-marts, pound shops and betting shops. But their subterranean Tube platforms don’t reflect any of that; the Tube brings its middle-class, slightly nanny-state design values everywhere it goes. It could be Waitrose, with its partners and policies.

  The deep Tube aesthetic is distinctive, a more International Style than most of London. By 1906, when the Piccadilly Line opened, the Tube was mainly electric. It needed American and European help; a lot of the first technology, from electric motors to deep drilling machines, was bought in. (British Imperial overground trains were chuffing around, Stevenson-style, well into the sixties.) The first, late-Victorian phase of the Underground – from 1863 to the 1890s – had itself been about comic-looking chuffers in shallow ‘cut-and-cover’ tunnels. They look as if they were sulphurous hell to travel on, and there’s a lot of Victorian writing to confirm it. The truth is that, although Brits may have been first to put trains in tunnels, the real deep Tube, like so many key technologies of the modern world, was actually an Edwardian roll-out, a contemporary of the Paris Métro and the New York subway. So my Modernist/Internationalist fantasy wasn’t that fanciful after all.

  There’s a well-subscribed cult around Tube design. If you’re a proper Tube geek you recognize the historic and technical differences in different places, on different lines. And the different rolling stock. (I realize now that the ‘classic’ Tube trains I went on in the sixties and seventies will, some of them, actually have been made in the late thirties.) The nerds know their types and series, but, for me, flicking through the pictures right back to the first Edwardian electric trains, they all look pretty modern, inside and out. They’re from a different century compared with their contemporary, the overground steam train. Their low, red snakiness is apparent early on and it’s beautiful.

  The Tube’s aesthetics deserve attention because they’re so important: the Tube was once at the centre of British arts politics. My vague intimations of the Tube as an historic Modernist Project were completely right. I’d taken to describing myself – amusingly, I thought – as a Tubist, and then I found the word had really been part of the twenties intelligentsia’s vocabulary – as a play on Cubist.

  This story is all about more than just some exemplary Design Management. The Tube, its twenties and thirties MD, Frank Pick, and his arts patronage were at the absolute centre of the style wars. At some point, Pick, the solicitor from Spalding, the management trainee who was considered good at statistics, started to morph into a man with a mission about Good Modern Design. At first there was the communication alibi – that good design attracted attention. Then it moved into an altogether more zealous phase, one where Pick was forever on platforms, telling anyone who’d listen that good design was fundamental to what MBAs now call the corporate brand. And he became very directly involved in the company’s choice of architects, artists and designers. He took on the roles we’d call marketing director, advertising manager and public affairs director precisely as he was rising to the top in central management (becoming CEO and Vice Chairman). And then he became a sort of one-man Design Council. He was president of the Design and Industries Association and the first chairman of the Council for Art & Industry in the thirties. The Transport Museum archive has reams of Pick’s speeches and position papers on design and urban planning. He was central to the struggle for ‘ownership’ of the visual arts in Britain between the wars. In a period when the major European developments barely got a look-in in Britain, when Academicians denounced European Modern Art from the pulpit of the RA, the Tube was London’s new museum of modern art. It gave modern architects, artists and designers a new, vastly bigger audience through stations, advertising, the maps and trains themselves. And a Tubist was a popular Modernist.

  Behind all this lay the between-wars debate about Britain’s future, about the nature of British art and its relationship to the fiendish European avant-garde. And politics. Back then Frank Pick had been centre stage in the battle as a leading … Medieval Modernist. According to Michael Saler, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, one of those American academics who knows us better than we do ourselves, Medieval Modernists were an important group of influential British arts patrons, curators, collectors and administrators operating in the first half of the twentieth century.* They were typically born in the late nineteenth century, outsiders, often Northern and Non-conformist, brought up on Ruskin and Morris (the ‘medieval’ grounding). They then developed into proselytizers for a particularly English kind of Modernism in the early twentieth century. A toned-down, commercially practical, socially useful, improving kind. A nanny state, mixed-economy kind. The opposite of those Bloomsbury ‘Art for Itself’ Formalists, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, with their effetely un-English attitudes. And both, of course, a mile away from the Daily Express Little Englander views on any European design.

  Funny, forgotten, uptight Frank Pick, MD of the Tube, was central to English cultural politics then: through his patronage of a group of modern fine artists, like sculptors Henry Moore, Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein, who otherwise wouldn’t have reached a mass audience (the rude Epstein sculpture on Charles Holden’s 1928 London Transport Westminster headquarters was especially controversial. Protests forced a swift stonemason’s penis reduction). It’s difficult to think of a figure in public life with a remotely comparable role now. Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate crossed with Sir Stuart Rose, perhaps, if Rose had decided to turn all the M&S stores over to contemporary art shows when he was in charge of the company. Anyway, there was the Tube, centre stage, battling for your granny’s artistic soul. Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Art, Architecture and Design: Victorian and After, said of Pick: ‘He was, to add a last word, the greatest patron of the arts whom this century has so far produced in England, and indeed the ideal patron of our age.’ Ernest Turner, in his Sho
cking History of Advertising, made an extravagant comparison, describing Pick as ‘the nearest approach to Lorenzo the Magnificent that a modern democracy can achieve’.

  Frank Pick died in 1941. After the war the Medieval Modernists, Pick, the curator William Rothenstein and the critic Herbert Read, were either dead or hopelessly unfashionable – and forgotten by the sixties. But, in 1978, interest in Pick and the between-wars Tube revived dramatically with a V&A exhibition on his patronage, ‘Teaspoons and Trains’. Those Charles Holden tube station buildings are mainly listed buildings and are endlessly photographed now, the Underground posters are constantly revived and reproduced – the Underground Map is one of the most admired graphics in the universe and the whole Frank Pick achievement is seen as a homily about our National Character.

  The key architects of that pre-war Tube-station Look were Leslie Green and Charles Holden. Green did the Edwardian stations on the first stretch of the Piccadilly. (He also designed my childhood station, Hampstead, on the Northern Line, in 1907, and Belsize Park and Chalk Farm nearby). They had his characteristic first-floor arched windows and glazed, liver-coloured faience tiles.

  But the real glory of the architectural Grand Design for the Tube came later, starting in the early thirties. It was further out too, when the Piccadilly Line was extended from Finsbury Park to Cockfosters in the North-east and Uxbridge in the West. The Tube’s definitive inter-war architect, Charles Holden, built a line of stations that were embassies of Modernism. They carried a message to rough working-class areas and suburbs built in Tudorbethan and pebble-dash Bypass Variegated alike. If you wanted the symbolism of a newer world, Charles Holden was making those shapes against the sky. The shapes and styles he and Frank Pick had seen in their tours of Northern Europe’s New Architecture in the late twenties.

  Pick and Holden, an odd uptight couple of Northern Quakers, reported back on Modernist buildings in Germany and Sweden. They saw Weimar and Stockholm, and they brought them to suburban London. From Bauhaus to Manor House. Holden’s key Modernist Tube stations were in undistinguished outer suburbs, because only in those developing areas could you work practically from scratch. In Central London Tube stations had to fit in physically and stylistically with their cramped, important surroundings. There, they might have stone-clad frontages and more conventional fenestration forced on them. But in most of the suburban locations they could go for broke.

  The Piccadilly Line has more of Charles Holden’s Modernist inter-war stations than any other line, as every design-literate type but me has known forever: the only coherent group of home-grown English Modernist public buildings of its period in London. There are twenty-four of them actually, more than on all the other lines put together, famous and referenced in architecture schools. Fourteen of them are listed. The Holden stations are the outward and enduring symbols of that great inter-war arts battle.

  Out There – how to say this nicely? – there’s practically an inverse relationship between the distinction of the area and the singularity of the Piccadilly Line station. What else can you tell me about Arnos Grove? The Holden drum (1933) is the defining logo for this otherwise low-wattage area (like the Chermayeff De La Warr Pavilion for dull Bexhill). And the escape route out of it.

  The stations were the only really Modernist buildings for miles. Between the wars architectural Modernism was endlessly discussed but not much built in Britain. There’d been a little in those untypical villages, Hampstead and Highgate, designed by European refugees on their way to America, and a fair bit of cod Deco and Moderne in suburban cinemas and seaside villas. So to commission the Holden stations – even toned down and Anglicized as they were by a more modest scale and russet-brick outer skins – was decidedly brave of Frank Pick.

  For people in the thirties suburbs, those new Tube stations must’ve been as exciting as if a flying saucer had landed on their town. There’s a famous photograph of Charles Holden’s 1933 Grade II*-listed Southgate Tube, all lit up at night, glowing like a sci-fi apparition. Around it – if you’ve done Southgate like me, you’ll know – are Englishmen’s Castles, contemporary small semis so Edwardian-looking they could’ve been designed in 1910. Those stations must have been fantastically aspirational, with a message as clear as that old Harrods advertising line ‘Enter a different world’. The thirties Tube was modern, glamorous and clever, a metaphor for a new world.

  The Blue Riband

  When I lived in Marylebone, near Marble Arch, I always used to say I lived ‘at the centre of the world’. It was brilliantly located for practically everything there. But I knew perfectly well I’d stolen the line from Piccadilly Circus. Piccadilly Circus, at the very end of the nineteenth century, after several reconstructions and the installation of Alfred Gilbert’s aluminium Eros, with the fountain and steps below, was officially the centre of the world. It was the village green of the largest empire ever known, ruled over by the dumpy Queen Empress just along at the end of the Mall.

  If you pore over the picture postcards (they were conveniently invented in 1894, the year after Eros went up) collected in David Oxford’s little book Piccadilly Circus you see that, in a typically British way, it was never all that. Scale, planning and architectural quality all look completely pony and ramshackle compared with any triumphalist Euro-capital of the period. Berlin, Vienna – but especially Paris. The London Pavilion, the only surviving Victorian façade in the Circus (1885), was a purpose-built variety theatre with the look of a giant boozer with cod-classical aspirations. The stylistic connection with Nash’s Great Curve of Regent Street was lost early on. All that remains of the notional quadrant is the former Swan and Edgar corner building, rebuilt in the twenties.

  And from the very first pictures on, the Circus is wildly commercial! With everything advertised to everybody in the most unregulated, unedited way. The horse-drawn buses are advertising hit shows – Shaftsbury Avenue had been built in 1885 – the Pavilion itself is advertising German beer (later of course, there was a wall of illuminated signs next to it). It will have looked utterly garish to a sophisticated European eye. None of that mattered because it wasn’t built for glory, but for business – retail, entertainment, catering, sex – and so nothing is sacred, part of a Grand Design. It’s changing all the time, reflecting new entertainment and new technology. After the Second World War it becomes a sort of miniature Times Square, where the neon advertising has become an attraction in itself.

  By 1906 the first Piccadilly Line Tube station was up and running in the Circus, part of the original stretch (from Hammersmith to Finsbury Park). It was set into an existing Victorian building (later rebuilt and ‘façaded’) with a wide blue fascia running across between the ground and first floors. It wasn’t the station we know, but an Edwardian affair, with the Leslie Green look. Leslie Green was the architect-designer for the Piccadilly Line entrepreneur Charles Yerkes.

  The Piccadilly Circus station we know now is a marvel. It’s a lovely underground Deco drum lined out in travertine marble, all detailed in bronze. It replaced the Leslie Green one in 1928 and was seen as an astounding Modernist flagship. But nobody really looks any more. It’s just faintly shabby; the floor looks like a replacement. It’s slightly underlit. And the shops and concessions – original in their time – look like painful survivals. But just think how it will have looked to its first users. Anyone up West then will have recognized the style as like something out of the American movies, where the designers borrowed freely from that European look that said Modern Luxury. Or from the new illustrated magazines that showed the Houses of the Stars.

  In 1928 Piccadilly Circus Station stood for Things to Come. The drum concourse and the original escalators with their reeded bronze column uplighters will have said The Future as clearly as the vast Jubilee Line extension steel-and-glass cathedrals of 1999 do now. When I was first going up West to Piccadilly I vaguely knew it was something I might just have called Deco. But I wouldn’t have stopped to look. I didn’t have the design vocabulary, I wouldn’t
have known the materials, the references. And I certainly wouldn’t have known about Holden, Charles Holden, its architect.

  Charles Saumarez Smith, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy, pointed out to me that the glory of Charles Holden’s 1928 Piccadilly Circus Station underground concourse could happily sit under Holden’s famous overground Arnos Grove station of 1933. The same drum shape and dramatic Modern-for-the-People styling. For Saumarez Smith the four station exits on the Piccadilly ‘quadrant’ – it isn’t really one now – give on to four different kinds of London. Shaftesbury Avenue is old (1885), middle-class theatreland, now with its High-Concept big hits and imported stars. The Haymarket and Lower Regent Street exits give on to Old Establishment London from St James’s down to Buckingham Palace and Whitehall. Regent Street is nineteenth-century, middlebrow shopping; while Piccadilly itself marks the line between St James’s, where the Ruling Class did their serious work of running the show, and Mayfair, where they had houses and whores. It’s Burlington Bertie’s – the musical half-fictional toff – great parade ground. Grand London’s central artery.

  Piccadilly itself, as Saumarez Smith points out, is oddly disappointing. It’s a long, wide, straight historic road lined with masses of hugely important buildings – and the ghosts of others, now demolished. Some are important for what goes on there, some for their architecture, many for both. It ranges from Wren’s St James’s Church and the former In and Out Club, once Palmerston’s house, to BAFTA’s rather Deco-ish spaces. It’s got Fortnum and Mason’s marvellously detailed, Gainsborough-Films-Georgian store of 1926 and Hatchards’ 1909 rebuild of its original 1797 site. There’s a giant Waterstones bookshop in what was originally the Simpson clothing palace, built in the most elegant restrained Euro-Modernist way for Dr Simpson in 1935 (lots of travertine marble echoing the station concourse below. It makes the High Street Kensington Deco-ish stores look pretty crass and overweight.)