More Underground Stations

 I've been pushing on with my London Underground Stations Project. In the last two days I've added another 4 pictures - which isn't bad going for the week when you consider that I spent 3 days of it in London. Here's the pictures:-

Top - Rayners Lane
Bottom - Hounslow West c. 1955

Top - Hounslow East
Bottom - Southgate c. 1940

I like each of these stations - 3 of them were designed by the great Charles Holden. No prizes for guessing that Hounslow East wasn't - that's a child of the 21st century designed by Acanthus Lawrence and Wrightson Architects. My current favourite among these three is the Hounslow West picture - I think that the two buses really make the picture. 

Rayners Lane -I am very sorry, but I still can never see the name Rayners Lane written down without feeling a little bit of residual irritation. Rayners Lane – Grrr. It sounds right. It goes back to the days of waiting footsore on Piccadilly line platforms, watching the next train boards flash up train after train to Rayners Lane of Uxbridge, with narry a one for Hounslow for ages. Despite my residual ill feeling towards it, this is a striking building. It’s a typically Holden arrangement, with the rectangular booking hall dominating the wide, low entrance. The distinctive things here are the semi-circular ends of the street level entrance. A little judicious googling shows that Holden collaborated with New Zealand born architect Reginald Uren, who could boast the John Lewis store in Oxford Street on his design CV. Uren also collaborated with Holden on an unbuilt design for Finchley Central.

Hounslow West, the end of this arm of the Piccadilly Line until 1975. To look at it you’d immediately say it was the work of Charles Holden, who is one of my architectural heroes.

 Charles Holden was a distinguished architect, who  designed cemeteries for the war dead of the First World War. He first came to know Frank Pick, general manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, through the Design and Industries Association. Although he’d never been involved with railway architecture prior to this, in 1923 Pick commissioned Holden to produce a new entrance for Westminster Station, and thus began an association which would last, on and off, for more than 20 years. As well as a large number of stations for the Northern and Piccadilly Line extensions, Pick engaged Holden to design the headquarters of the UERL at 55 Broadway, above St. James’ Park Station. This building resembles nothing quite so much as a modern ziggurat, a huge stepped pyramid.

 Holden did assist in the design of Hounslow West. In its glazed panels, and liberal use of Portland stone rather than brick it clearly shows the influences of Holden’s slightly earlier designs for what became the southern end of the Northern Line. However, the main architect was Stanley Heaps. Heaps had been assistant to Leslie Green in the 1900s, and his earliest designs very much followed the corporate style developed by Green, in stations like Kilburn Park. We’ll come to Green’s stations in the fullness of time. By the 1930s, though, Frank Pick wanted a more modernist approach, and brought in Holden, relegating Heap to less important stations, and less important buildings, although he worked with Holden on a number of occasions, Hounslow West being one. It’s a striking concrete structure, clearly of the same era as the slightly earlier Empire Stadium at Wembley. The heptagonal ticket hall forms a memorable structure and is reminiscent of the similar structure at Ealing Common station, for example. Holden’s stations are as often described as ‘modernist’ or art deco, and this can be briefly defined as a rejection of ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake, and an adoption of clean, geometrical shapes, of which the heptagonal ticket hall is a pretty good example.

Hounslow East is the cheese to the previous station’s chalk. Opened in the noughties, this is a striking demonstration of what can really be done with steel, chrome and glass. It’s far removed from the design of Hounslow West. When I was growing up in the late 60s and the 70s, artists impressions of cities of the future were full of buildings which looked like this. During my research for this first section of the challenge, I tried to find photographs of what Hounslow East looked like prior to the rebuilding. I can see the back of the old building from the platform on which I alight, and it looks perfectly inoffensive. This is all the more surprising when I google the building on my phone and find a very interesting Hansard debate from 1961, in which the station was described as – and I apologise for the language used here – “an abortion of a station”. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a great fan of modern architecture. This is gorgeous, though.

When it comes to Southgate station, I would imagine that my first reaction to the station when I walked out of it was pretty similar to most people’s, that is that it looks as if a flying saucer from a 1950s B movie has landed in suburban North London. I absolutely love this station. I can only imagine what the reaction of people was when it first opened in 1933. It must have been like walking onto the set of Metropolis, or the Flash Gordon movie serials. I make the connection to movies of the time deliberately, since I’m convinced that movies in part influenced Holden in his design. The story goes that the structure on the roof was inspired by the tesla coils which help bring the monster to life in the 1931 movie “Frankenstein”. This station is about as far as you can get from Holden’s own appraisal of his stations as ‘brick boxes with concrete lids’.