First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  These early stations, you must remember, are part of the Georgian age. They are stately but not sumptuous. They are spreading but not soaring. They suggest coaches pulled by iron horses. They are merely another sort of posting inn, not something private, railed off and of another world, which railways have now become. They are the stables of the iron horses and they blend naturally with the drays which clatter over cobbles towards them and the carriages which are unloaded from them and pulled away by horses to the noblemen’s houses of Mayfair. Euston (1837), London Bridge (1838), Paddington (1839) are still on their original sites. Philip Hardwick’s magnificent Doric Arch of granite (1837) at Euston originally had two lodges flanking each side and was visible from the Euston road; the outer pairs of these have been destroyed. It was the gateway not only to all the country houses of the North, but also to a new age. The little iron sheds of the station behind it, so ridiculed by Pugin, are rather an anti-climax. Successive generations have treated this noble arch scurvily and its glory has been hidden by the Euston Hotel. As an essay of the Greek Revival, I consider the arch even now, almost shorn of its lodges, the noblest thing in London, nobler even than St. Pancras church or the British Museum or the Hyde Park Screen. Only one building rivalled it and that was Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge. The L.M.S. made determined efforts to remove Euston Arch altogether. British Railways will probably succeed in doing so, for no one, except you and me, dear reader, yet believes that there can be anything beautiful about a railway station.

  London Bridge, now a shattered collection of girders and temporary-looking platforms, has little to show of the old terminus of the Greenwich Railway, that remarkable line carried on 878 brick arches, which was merged with the South-Eastern and Chatham. There is a spacious dignity, created by white brick walls and an arching roof, about the Terminus part of the station whence trains depart over a loop line via the Crystal Palace (Low Level) and Norwood to Victoria, through Italianate stations and brick cuttings and sudden elevations from which one may see the brick Italianate houses of Ruskin’s South London, the prehistoric monsters of the Crystal Palace Park and perhaps glimpse Sherlock Holmes hiding amid the laurels, lamp posts and ivy-clad clinker of a merchant’s private drive.

  The severe nine-arched entrance of Paddington has disappeared entirely, though the space in front of where it stood, now under glass, is still known as “the lawn.” But two others of these six early stations survive. Nine Elms, erected in 1838 by Sir William Tite (architect of the Royal Exchange) as the terminus of the South Western Railway, may be found standing, classic, stuccoed and deserted, amid the gas-works, goods yards and factories of that district where strikes seem often to originate. There are no passengers and the more important goods yards seem to be in another part of Nine Elms, so that this building and its platforms are an early station survival. I know of no more complete example except Philip Hardwick’s Great arch at the old and disused terminus in Birmingham of the London to Birmingham Railway.

  A smaller London station of this period is now out of reach of the public. It is the Blackwall terminus of the old London and Blackwall Railway. Those frequent and quite empty trains of the Blackwall Railway ran from a special platform of Fenchurch Street. I remember them well. Like stage-coaches they rumbled slowly past East-End chimney pots, wharves and shipping, stopping at black and empty stations, till they came to a final halt at Blackwall station, a handsome building in white brick and Portland stone, from an Italianate design by Sir William Tite. When one emerged there was nothing to see beyond it but a cobbled quay and a vast stretch of wind-whipped water, over one of the broadest tidal reaches of the Thames.

  There may be, among the bomb damage, some remains of Bricklayers’ Arms Station (1840), long demoted, like Nine Elms, to a goods depot. Bricklayers’ Arms was known as the “West End Terminus” of the South Eastern Railway and marks probably the first and last time the Old Kent Road has been described as the West End of London. It was a classic structure.

  Somewhere, too, among arches, goods yards and stables down a side street off Shoreditch one may still be able to find remains of the old Terminus of the Eastern Union Railway (1839) which was designed by Sancton Wood. It was the precursor of Liverpool Street and its architect was a pupil of Sir Robert Smirke and like his master a bold classicist. He designed the palatial Roman terminus of Kings-bridge, Dublin (1845), with its twin cupolas, and Leinster Square, Paddington, and part of Hyde Park Gardens.

  By the ’fifties, the old coaching view of railways was out of date. They were establishing an architecture of their own and as keenly as Tractarians and Evangelicals they joined in the Battle of the Styles, Classic v. Gothic. On the whole the Classic style won. Euston, long a pioneer in railway architecture, set the tone with the Euston Great Hall which was completed in 1849. It was the joint design of old Philip Hardwick and his son Philip Charles Hardwick. Never had there been and never has there been since in England so magnificent a piece of railway architecture. This huge hall is now ruined with filthy little kiosks and enquiry bureaux built in a jazz-modern style by the L.M.S. But not even these destroy its proportions and it is still possible to note its double staircase, its rich ceiling, its figured consols supporting the ceiling and carved by John Thomas, who made the figures and bosses in the Houses of Parliament. At the top of the staircase, and not open to the public, is the room for the Shareholders’ General Meetings, an untouched specimen of Roman Revival of the late ’forties. This sumptuous hall and offices set the fashion for railway architecture. Even the chairs of waiting rooms and desks in the offices had a Roman grandeur about them, executed in oak and mahogany, solid and heavy as a Christmas dinner. To compare with Euston, there is nothing. Other lines as they built their termini and chief suburban stations went in for classic, but the classic style preferred was that of the French Renaissance. It may be seen in those stations of the ’sixties, Charing Cross, Cannon Street, Broad Street, Farringdon Street, Aldersgate, Highbury, Bow, Camden Town, and it even survived into the next decade when Holborn Viaduct Station was built.

  The architect of Charing Cross and Cannon Street was Edward Middleton Barry, a son of Sir Charles, the architect of the Houses of Parliament. Edward’s masterpiece is undoubtedly the Charing Cross Hotel (1864). I know few pleasanter meeting places than the first floor of that building. A broad staircase leads to corridors done in the manner of Sir John Soane, unexpectedly Graeco-Roman when there is so much French Renaissance about the exterior. On this floor is the suite of rooms I call “the club.” There is a smoking room with bar attached and billiard room adjoining and one can walk on to a balcony, drink in hand, to survey the crowds and trains of the station below. There are horse-hair seats in the smoking room, a bookshelf with a set of Shakespeare and a guide to the Southern Railway, and one has the place to oneself, while all around in stately dining rooms, private luncheons are being held by old-fashioned boards of directors, the Ouse Catchment Board, the Blackwall Tunnel Company, the Tower Hamlets Development Society, the United Kingdom Union of Persecuting Protestants. Much of this activity used to occur at the Cannon Street Hotel (1866) designed by the same architect. The station itself at Cannon Street is a far finer building than that at Charing Cross which has been deprived of its original semi-circular roof. Barry’s towers and cupolas at the river opening of Cannon Street compare well with Wren’s steeples and blend this great structure into the steepled outline of the City.

  The only time the Great Western went in for Classic in a big way was when it employed Philip Charles Hardwick to design the Paddington Hotel in the ’sixties. The dining room here with its curving caryatids, probably by John Thomas, was almost up to the standard of Euston’s Graeco-Roman office buildings. Just before the Hitler war this dining room, or “Coffee Room” as it was called, was ruined by being streamlined with plywood in a jazz-modern manner, so that it is now like any semi-smart new restaurant. The Great Western otherwise has been fairly loyal to Tudor, a style which it first adopted at Temple Meads, Bristol, and
still employs there. The only nearly untouched examples of a Tudor station on the London to Bristol line which survive are Shrivenham and Box. There was an unfortunate period in the nineteen-thirties when the Great Western went “Modern” in the Great West Road sense of that word, with its new office buildings at Paddington. It adopted at this time too that hideous monogram on its engines. When Paddington Station was rebuilt the company employed Digby Wyatt on architectural effects.

  The richest Gothic station is, of course, St. Pancras (1868). The enormous iron and glass roof with a clear span of 240 feet, 100 feet high and 700 feet long, makes the trains and platforms below it look like a model railway. It was designed by P. W. Barlow, the Civil Engineer. The tie beams that hold it are below the station and form a roof for the enormous vaults, which are under the whole area of the station. The hotel which is attached to the station, but not related to it, is by Sir Gilbert Scott. Ferguson much objected to it. “There is no proportion between the shed and its uses, and everything looks out of place, and most of all the Gothic mouldings and brick work, borrowed from the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, which thrusts itself between the gigantic iron ribs of the roof.”

  Ferguson did not like the Gothic Revival, and even Sir Gilbert does not seem to have been wholly enthusiastic about St. Pancras Hotel. Never one to underestimate his own work, he says of it: “My own belief is that it is possibly too good for its purpose, but having been disappointed, through Lord Palmerston, of my ardent hope of carrying out my style in the Government offices, and the subject having been in the meanwhile taken out of my hands by other architects, I was glad to be able to erect one building in that style in London.”

  The hotel is now, alas, offices. But the splendid intertwining double staircase of ironwork survives (in the well of this there used to be a Turkish kiosk for coffee) and the huge Arthurian style wallpapers are to be found here and there. The refreshment rooms have all been jazzed and only the station booking hall remains as an untouched Scott interior. Alongside St. Pancras is the Midland goods station whose brickwork is undoubtedly the best in London. Sir Gilbert, like his grandson Sir Giles, was always interested in brick and stonework and for the goods station he had bricks specially made of varying sizes. You may see in the screen wall of the building (with its exquisite iron grilles) that the bricks grow smaller as they go higher, giving an effect of solidity to the wall.

  Of the exterior of the hotel I am myself enamoured. The clock tower has always seemed to be a highly picturesque outline and the rows of middle-pointed windows along the whole curving sweep achieve an effect of unity with diversity. As a practical plan for an hotel, the building is appalling. But as an exercise in scale and the skilful use of brick and stone it is unsurpassed in railway architecture. All other Midland stations in London are an anti-climax, as though the company had ruined itself on St. Pancras and had to be content with mere wooden sheds and brick booking halls for the rest of the system. Fenchurch Street, which it took over from the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway, is a humbler affair more in the manner of (and but a few years later than) the Great Northern Railway terminus of King’s Cross.

  This building, which Ferguson describes as the more successful and pleasing “plainer sister” of St. Pancras, is entirely the work of the engineer Joseph Cubitt. It was built in 1851 and the materials are white brick, glass and iron. The purpose at once is plain. One great semi-circular archway is for departure, the other beside it is for arrival. Between them on the main front is appropriately placed a clock tower. A colonnade of brick arches runs along the base of this front, between vast brick buttresses, and acts as a shelter for those awaiting their carriages. The booking office is on the departure side of the building and opposite this is a crescent-shaped hotel in a simple white-brick and stone, classic style. Office buildings balance this on the arrival side of the station. The coherence of the design is now much hampered by an underground station and by shops which hide its truthful simplicity from the Euston Road. Ruskin said in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, “Better bury gold in the embankments than put it in ornaments on the stations … Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own, if it were only left to its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.” He must surely have approved King’s Cross, though he makes no specific mention of it. It is certainly the only London station which is pure railway architecture. I have always thought the new Underground stations (except that at Hammersmith) self-consciously simple in comparison with King’s Cross. They are so much aware that they are in the “modern style,” so tastefully arranged with red brick on the street level, and so streamlined that they smack more of the advertising agency than the railway.

  King’s Cross started no new style, except at different stations on its own line beyond London. The nearest approach to it, other than Fenchurch Street, is Liverpool Street which was built in the ’seventies. It is civil engineer’s Gothic, rather than architect’s Gothic, and none the worse for that. The Gothic-style iron pillars support many-vistaed arcading, the flattened arch of the roof is crenelated on its own hanging edge and many mouldings and capitals in ironwork are to be found by the careful observer. Indeed, on a foggy evening, when those pear-shaped arc lamps used to hang down low from the roof, casting a purplish-white light, Liverpool Street had quite a resemblance to an ancient abbey.

  The last large station to be built in London was Marylebone (1899) for the Great Central Railway. Its buildings are of hard pink midland bricks with yellow terra-cotta dressings and all in Flemish Renaissance style. They look like a public library from Nottingham which has unexpectedly found itself in London. A beautiful description of this station and of the Great Central Railway is to be found in Mr. Hamilton Ellis’s The Trains We Loved. The weakness of the Great Central for gorgeous decorations in its carriages did not extend to stations; but its luxury is commemorated in Colonel Edis’s gorgeous Great Central Hotel on the Marylebone Road. This entirely dwarfs the quiet terminus behind it.

  There is no doubt that Marylebone set a new tone to London Railway architecture. Henceforward something more tasteful than the flimsy wooden constructions was considered suitable for suburban stations. The L. & N.W.R. employed the noted domestic architect Gerald Horsley in 1901 to design stations at Harrow and Pinner in a style half-way between that of a bank and a medium-sized country house. Harrow, with its tower, was remarkably successful. Termini were thought to be ornate in the wrong sort of way, too like the Louvre and not enough like Michael Angelo. So there were the great rebuildings in an Edwardian monumental Renaissance manner starting with the L.B. & S.C. in 1908 at Victoria. The most ponderous effort of all was Waterloo with its twenty-three platforms and vast, useless entrance arch, approached by flights of steps unlike Euston, symbolical of nothing. Baker Street by Charles W. Clarke was a quieter rebuilding for the Metropolitan Railway in the neo-Georgian style (1914). Its refreshment rooms are still untouched. The most charming of all the Edwardian and neo-Georgian Renaissance stations is the entrance to Charing Cross Underground by H. W. Ford (1913). Marble columns in restaurants, stained glass, thick and crinkly, and adorned with wreaths, Turkey carpets, bronze or beaten copper electroliers, mahogany screens with panels of bevelled glass, plaster-work in the baroque manner, external sculpture in the manner of Sir Hamo Thorneycroft as at Waterloo—all these are characteristic of the last age of Railway Architecture. Redecorations in this manner went on in nearly every station. The hotel at Liverpool Street sustained such refittings and even at the St. Pancras Hotel a dining room was redecorated in a “Georgian” style.

  Such is the stylistic development of the London railways until the dismal grouping and the even more dismal eclipse of all individuality which has now occurred. But just as in a church architecture is not so important as the worship which goes on there, so in railways the associations of a station and of a line are part of its beauty. The personality of most stations in London survives, even through British Railways, and will conti
nue to do so until everyone in England is exactly the same as everyone else.

  Waterloo is the “services” and race-goers’ station—for “Pompey,” “Soton,” Aldershot, Epsom, Ascot. It has a rather high-class suburban connection. Civil Servants who have reached C.M.G. and knighthood stage find it near Whitehall and convenient for Esher and in pine-clad Southern Electric suburbs their wives play cards with wives of rich city gentlemen. The humbler Civil Servant uses the Metropolitan and moves outwards beyond to Rickmansworth and Northwood as his salary increases. He probably knows he is not going to reach the heights of Esher Civil Servants and there is no point in establishing a railway carriage connection on the Southern Electric. The commercial people who use the Metropolitan are in their turn slightly less rich than the city gentlemen who use Waterloo.

  The flashiest of all suburban travellers are those who travel daily from Victoria by first-class Pullman trains to Brighton. Indeed, Brighton so dominates Victoria Station that though continental trains depart from its South Eastern Section, though many of the inner London suburbs are served by puzzling loop lines which start here and end at London Bridge, Victoria is the station of what moneyed leisure is left in London. Though it is meant to be associated with the South Coast and summer holidays, the sea is not what one associates with those who use it regularly. They do not look as though they took a winter dip in the English Channel. Warm flats, television, cocktail cabinets and bridge seem to be more in their line.