So that was Christmas. Very nice too. Now, the problem with this time of year is that it’s terrible for sketching. With a little time on my hands this morning I decided to go on a sketching trip, without leaving my sofa at home. Making the sketch of the West Pier as it used to be the other day led me to thinking about places I’d love to go and sketch if I had a time machine, places which are no longer there in real life. Then I realised that I do have a time machine, a time machine of the imagination. If you’re reading this, then so do you. It’s the internet. So I invite you to come with me, and we’ll sketch some of the buildings which will be on the itinerary when I finally get round to inventing a real life TARDIS.
1) The
Doric Arch – Euston – c. 1890
Yes, we’re going to start in my home town, good Old London
Town. If you’re only familiar with the depressing 1960s building which stands
on the site now, you might be surprised at my choice of first port of call. I
grant you, the current station building does resist all attempts to tart it up
an make it look more inoffensive. However Euston has only been like this for
about 60 years.
The original Euston was the first terminus to be built
north of the River Thames and construction began in 1837. Putting this into
perspective, this was the same year that Queen Victoria came to the throne.
London Bridge station, south of the River, had opened the year before. 1837 was
a mere 8 years after the opening of the world’s first inter-city railway, the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
By the time that the reference photograph I used to help
with this sketch was taken Euston was already over half a century old. It’s
tempting to imagine the awe that visitors exiting the station in those first
decades must have felt .
The first threat to the arch came in the late 1930s when a
radical plan to rebuild the station was drawn up, which would have involved moving
the arch at the very least. The second world war put paid to this, however it
only turned out to be a stay of execution. Despite the fact that both station
and arch were grade II listed, the plan for the current station wee put forward
in about 1960, and nobody in officialdom showed any appetite whatsoever for moving
the arch to a new home. The London County Council balked at the cost, and
Transport Minister Ernie Marples said all options for not demolishing the arch
had been carefully examined and rejected. This was the same Ernie Marples whose
company built motorways – not that he was at all biased, you understand. Pleas
from great men such as Sir John Betjeman to be given time to raise the money to
meet the cost of removing the arch and storing it until such time as a new home
could be found for it were ignored.
Contrary to how it might seem from what I’ve just written,
I do appreciate that you cannot keep things just because they have been there a
long time. Otherwise we’d all be living in Bronze Age roundhouses. But I do think that there was a very strong
case for keeping the Euston Arch and I point my finger at those who made the
decision and rushed to demolition, and am happy to say that you have let down
the people you were working for and sold all our birthright for a mess of
concrete.
Of all the places we’ll be visiting in our time machine,
this one is really a ‘near miss’. The arch and the original station were
demolished in 1962, just 2 years before I was born.
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