This is the second instalment of my ongoing survey of London’s major railway stations – their architecture and their spirit. In part one we examined some of the heavy hitters, Paddington, Euston, and Waterloo, but this time we’re starting with one of the smallest and quietest of all London termini.
Marylebone
The name Marylebone, pronounced Marry-le-bone or Mar-le-bn depending on your frame of mind, comes from the name of a local church dedicated to Mary which was on the banks of a stream or ‘bourne’. That was then processed through the French to become Mary-le-bone and eventually Marylebone. It is now the name of a rather charming district of London wedged between the demonic Oxford Street and the leafy Regent’s Park. This is where we find our station, and it does take a bit of finding! It is tucked away, not quite on the Marylebone Road and neither on the major thoroughfare of Baker Street. This location, coupled with its architecture, makes it as close to a provincial railway station as one will find in central London.
The station opened in 1899, one of the last new termini to be built in London, and was designed by Henry William Braddock, a civil engineer, not an architect. The Grand Central Railway, owners of the line, were short of cash by the time their tracks reached London and this may account for the rather humble appearance of the buildings. Marylebone has the aspect of an Edwardian terrace in redbrick and cream-stone, softly flowing up to the occasional Dutch style gable but never breaking above three stories.
The whole facade has a Jacobean restraint, working as a series of interconnected, yet unrelated, vertical sections. There is no thrusting central motif, no triumphal arch or classical portico, in fact as the station currently stands there is not even an accessible central door, one enters through the side wings like tradesmen. And within one finds a wholly utilitarian yet strangely beautiful set of gabled train-sheds of the traditional iron and glass construction. The clear vista down their length, whilst nothing on the scale or grandeur of other stations, has a reassuring comfort, it is somehow homely. This is because Marylebone, through restrictions of design, is on a perfectly human scale, it is exactly as big as it needs to be. The concourse has plenty of space for milling about and even a few tastefully incorporated shops, the platforms are lengthy and airy and not so large that intelligible announcements echo senselessly round them, and you are not at any point dwarfed by columns or clocks or advertising. After visiting Marylebone you begin to wonder why all the other stations need to be quite so huge when this station, with its feeling of minor but well appointed country house, does the job so very well.
It is an example of a different age of railway building. By 1899 the technology had become quotidian and ubiquitous, there was no longer any need for stations to be cathedrals to the new industrial gods of steel and steam. Marylebone tries to reconcile man and machine, to make the railways friendly and comforting, it is a station that could be lifted straight from the pages of Thomas The Tank Engine. Its diminutive size is also due to its confused history of use, it never really had an exclusive destination or monopoly on a route and thus never had the financial stability of other London lines. Birmingham could always be reached faster from Euston and so Marylebone’s role was relegated to commuter services from Aylesbury and High Wycombe. In fact, in many ways, the golden age of Marylebone is now, with frequent and fast routes to Birmingham, Warwick, and Oxford on top of its steady flow of commuters, this station has seemingly finally found its place in the pantheon of London termini.
A large glass canopy, attached to the front of the station and sheltering the taxis, runs across the yard to the back of what was originally the Grand Central Hotel. A private concern not built by the GCR itself, it faces out onto the Marylebone road with its rhythmic facade of gables and bays flanking an almost baronial-y stumpy clock tower, somewhere between a school and a town hall. The building material matches the station behind but here the ornament runs free. Particularly effective are the two renaissance style arcades that sit at the corners of the building, their light arches putting off the weight of what is otherwise a rather heavy block. The connection between hotel and station here is unlike anywhere else in London, the station acting as stables to the hotel. A visitor can arrive by train and cross into their hotel under the glass canopy without even having to open their umbrella. Marylebone is a station built with the passenger in mind.
Victoria
From the outside Victoria is made up of three distinct buildings, and on the inside its two. Despite a lot of modern knocking about there is still no sense of unity achieved in the interior, it is messy. This is somewhat underwhelming given its pedigree as being the most ceremonious of London stations. It has seen more crowns and heads of state pass along its platforms than any of the others, it was for many years the departure point of the Golden Arrow to Paris, the opulent Pullman services to the resorts of the south coast, and still to this day often hosts the Orient Express, or at least the English leg of its journey before the proper train begins in Calais.
And yet, to arrive or leave through Victoria feels much like using the backdoor, sneaking in or out of London quietly and unnoticed. It is almost entirely without the ceremony offered by other stations and the one arched doorway that does offer just a hint of the grand deposits you on a traffic island in the middle of a bus station, not the most regal entrance to London.
Victoria was constructed originally as two entirely separate stations, the part to the north-west being built and run by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, and next door the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, and whilst both halves were rebuilt a number of times it was not until the 1920s, when both companies came under the umbrella of Southern Railways, that the dividing wall was knocked through and the unified Victoria was formed. I use ‘unified’ generously here as the space feels anything but. The old Chatham & Dover side feels station-y enough, it has some rather elegant glass and iron train sheds that are high and short with a rather shallow arch. They are not entirely glass but rather a combination of corrugated iron with glass strips in between, this manages to evoke the goods shed or the provincial market hall rather than the imposing temple of transport that is achieved elsewhere in London with the same materials. The other side of the station is, however, almost indistinguishable as such, where once there were platforms under a zig-zag glass roof there is now just an enormous empty space and an expense of highly polished beige floor. The platforms themselves have been cut some hundred yards short and are now hidden in the basement of the adjoining shopping centre without any sense of ceremony or grandeur, and often barely even enough light to see your train by. This huge covered cloister is entirely function-less, other than providing an arena of commerce for the various branches of Paperchase and Costa that flank its edges. A scattering of highly designed furniture is unarranged around the space, which always seems to be filled with shoals of passengers circling aimlessly in search of their elusive train to Carsholton, Crawley, or some other anonymous subtopia. A station bereft of trains is a sad sight, and that is what the second half of Victoria is.
The ugly intervention of a kind of arcaded rood screen, that seems to want to separate the two sides of the station once again, houses ‘exciting retail opportunities’ but also, elevated above the concourse, a particularly soulless Wetherspoons pub. The saving grace of which, and in many ways the saving grace of the station, is the terrace at which one can sit and observe from above the throngs of downtrodden commuters flowing around the station like murmurations of starlings. Occasionally, picking out a certain group of individual, one can being to invent whole narratives around there appearance, the meeting of a clandestine affair, German, no, Austrian tourists on a rail holiday, the lads from the office off for a weekend in sunny Surrey stockbroker Tudor villas. It’s quite a charming way to pass an afternoon.
The outside of Victoria is even more of a collage than the inside. Made up of three units, the lowrise Portland stone baroque of the old Chatham station, the tall Wren-pastiche central block of the Brighton station, and at the end the Haussmann-esque hotel building whose main facade faces onto Buckingham Palace Road. There is no stylistic unity between them and thus no iconic skyline that can be identified as Victoria Station from afar. The Brighton building, with its comically large cast iron shelter at the front, suffers from its position wedged between the rather sensitively handled meeting of art nouveau, art deco, and classic baroque that make up the motifs of the Chatham station, and the elephantine, bold, but elegant Parisian copy of the hotel.
The best aspect one can gain of this ensemble is to stand at the corner of Wilton Street. From here the perspectives a-line and their strange sisterhood creates an unexpectedly satisfying set piece. There is, in the facade of Victoria, something typical of London as a whole, the confused mix of styles and periods, the unusual neighbours that the waves of differing development create, that the city, in her ancient wisdom, seems to make harmonious in their cohabitation.
St Pancras
Surely the most glorious station in all Britain, if not the world. This building comes from an age of unlimited faith in the future and its technologies whilst also being, to its core, a building that belongs to the past. The style which parades itself as the ‘gothic revival’ can be seen in many places across the UK. Pugin, Burges, Butterfield, Waterhouse, Gilbert Scott – these are the names of some of the greatest British architects and they all were exponents of the gothic in the nineteenth century. If we have an idiosyncratic ‘national style’ of architecture on this island, the Victorian gothic revival would have a good claim to that title. There is no building which embodies the spirit of this movement more succinctly and purely than George Gilbert Scott’s magnum opus.
St Pancras Station takes its name from the ancient parish church that lies just to the north west of the site. The church, in turn, takes its name from a Roman saint, a christian convert beheaded at the age of fourteen in the year 304AD. It is through this ancient land that the railway lines from the Midlands cut their way into London to terminate under William Henry Barlow’s jaw dropping glass canopy, the largest structure of its type anywhere when completed in 1868. To avoid supports and foundations interfering with the space both on and below the platforms, Barlow chose to span the entire station in one arch, slightly pointed for strength and to reduce the overall radius. The whole structure springs from the walls of the station with wrought iron brackets, and then leaps up to the slightly pointed apex before floating down to the opposite wall. The sheer volume of glass throws and refracts light at every angle, diluting its intensity and casting the station with a silvery grey sheen no matter the time of day.
The Midland Grand Hotel, which now forms the iconic facade of the station, was only in its nascent state when Barlow’s train shed was completed, the hotel would not open for nearly another decade, but the perfect pair they make is exemplified but the subtle gothic tones that Gilbert Scott’s palatial folly grants to the pure engineering of Barlow’s point arch. The hotel takes its cues from all over the playbook of medieval architecture, it is at once as early English as Salisbury Cathedral, as regimented as the Palazzo Medici in Florence, as sharp as the cathedral at Cologne, and as if it were lifted straight from the banks of the Loire and the pages of the Hours of the Duc de Berry. Finial follows finial, crockett after crockett, and amongst all this the hundreds of chimneys, for there was a fireplace in each of the 300 rooms. When fully occupied it must have had the appearance of a fairy tale castle with a mill town on its roof.
But this Neuschwanstein on the Euston Road was not just a sentimental nod to the past, with its hydraulic lifts, concrete floors, revolving doors, and supposedly fireproof design (useful with all those fireplaces) this building, despite its appearance, was one of the most innovative in Europe. And, let us not forget, that there was one of the largest railway stations in London in the backyard, for once one is caught in this building’s ever enchanting spell, it is easy to forget that it exists for such a mundane purpose as a railway hotel.
When the midland route became outmoded by the faster connections from King’s Cross and Euston on either side, St Pancras fell into decline. The hotel shut, the services became less and less frequent and the station took on a derelict appearance. For some years the British Rail offices squatted in the faded glory of the ex-Midland Grand Hotel, but in the 1960s, that decade of great vandalism to our nation’s railways and their infrastructure (see Beeching cuts, Euston Arch), the station was listed for demolition. How anyone with even an iota of soul could ever consider destroying such a building, a building that out reaches any matter of taste by sheer scale and sublimity, it’s beyond my understanding but that was the reality. It is only thanks to the powerful campaigning of the Victorian Society and, once again, the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman, great champion of the railways and their architecture, that the building was saved and still serves us today.
Its new life was secured when Eurostar services to the continent were moved there from Waterloo, as well as the high speed line to Kent and the route to the east midlands. To arrive in London from continental Europe at St Pancras is an experience not to be missed, since its significant overhaul and restoration, the work of Barlow and Gilbert Scott is once again at its prime and for a moment one gets a hint of the golden age of the railways.
Morgan Haigh 