Edwin Seward: The Man Who Built Cardiff

Occasionally an architectural style can be so dominant in a city that it becomes a kind of local vernacular. Bath is given its identity by the Regency Neoclassical, Bristol has its own variation on the Byzantine, Oxford is high-gothic and Coventry is mid-century modern. York is known by its warren of medieval streets and Aberdeen has its own particular granite solidity. Amongst all these, Cardiff, capital of Wales, must be the city of mongrel architecture, an architecture of eclecticism that takes from all styles and sources to make something utterly original, and it would seem this can be traced back to one man, Edwin Seward.

London Stations: Part Two – Marylebone, Victoria, & St Pancras

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.

London Stations: Part One – Paddington, Euston & Waterloo

London has what must be the most varied and exciting set of railways termini of any city in the world, one would expect not less of the capital of the country that gave birth to the modern railway. Thanks to foresighted Victorian planning laws, they all sit in a ring around the centre of London, they make no ugly scars through the urban fabric but rather stand as the old gates of The City used to, each with their own character and each with its own unique purposes. For E.M. Forster each possessed, in its architectural fabric, the latent spirit of those far away destinations to which their rails stretched. 110 years after Forster’s ode to these palaces of arrival and departure, from the age of steam to the age of electric, what spirit, if any, do London’s stations still possess?