There are three stations featured, all built at about the same time by one of the most inventive architecture practices then at work. Barking, Harlow Town and Broxbourne are now all listed buildings.
BARKING
Barking featured on here a while back in its own right, but let's have another look at it as part of this group.
Designed in 1959, the three-part roof soars over the booking hall in an homage to the hugely influential Roma Termini by Montuori and Calini, a canopy projecting out over the front of the building.
The booking hall it encloses is light and spacious, and even today (cramped by inappropriate intrusions by "retail opportunities") it feels like a grand public space.
The hall was built to coincide with electrification work, so the design needed to reflect that modernisation. After an era of slow and filthy steam, electric trains were the swift, clean future.
The project architect was John Ward, who went on to become Chief Architect of the Eastern Region (replacing the somewhat relaxed Harry Powell in that role).
The booking hall was built on a platform over the tracks. From here you passed through the ticket gates to a long, generous walkway at the back of the station:
From here, you took one of the four sets of steps down to your platform, which ran at right angles (underneath the walkway):
My one criticism of the scheme would be the failure to glaze the entire wall on one side of the walkway, letting passengers see the platforms (and perhaps their waiting train) laid out below. But that's a small criticism of what is a well-lit and generous set of public spaces.
On the platforms there's not much here that the Victorian users of the station wouldn't have recognised, albeit tidied-up or supplemented in fixtures coloured to more modern tastes.
At the rear of the booking hall you can see the windows of the walkway and the angled roofs of the stairways leading down to the platforms.
Despite everything the grubby commercial railway has tried to do, this is still a glorious piece of architecture. Pevsner described it as "unquestionably one of the best English stations of this date".
HARLOW TOWN
Harlow Town is usually regarded as the pinnacle of station design from this period (the slightly later station at Coventry uses many of the design principles developed here, although Harlow, in turn, used some of the conceptual thinking developed for the earlier rebuilding of Banbury station).
Harlow was the first of the New Towns designated after the Second World War, and a new station was built to cope with the expected demand.
The lead Eastern Region architect was Paul Hamilton, with John Bicknell and Ian Fraser (Hamilton and Bicknell later moved to the London Midland Region where they designed the extraordinary signal-box at Birmingham New Street, before setting up in private practice).
Where the entrance and booking hall at Barking were built on a bridge and floated over the tracks, at Harlow they were placed, more conventionally, to one side of the tracks. A grand staircase then carried passengers up to a covered walkway -- a bridge -- over the tracks:
The spaces were all light and generous, finished with natural wood ceilings to counteract some of the harshness of the inevitably more hard-wearing materials used on the other surfaces.
Unlike Barking, you can see out of the windows to the platforms and tracks below, helping you to understand where you are in the station and to be reassured by the sight of where you are going.
Even though the purity of the design is a little compromised by the sheer number of lamp standards and catenary wires, it's still possible to get a sense of the immense compositional strength of Harlow: long, low horizontal spaces punctuated by three dramatic vertical lift-shafts.
These lifts were originally designed to cope with mail and parcels traffic but have found a new use in giving easy access for people with mobility problems. Harlow needed very little work to adapt it to the most modern disability access rules.
On the platforms, the horizontals are emphasised again. The architects were apparently influenced by the Japanese pavilion at the 1957 Brussels exposition, although there also seem to be faint echoes of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The architects created a light, easy-to-use space that Pevsner described as "crisp and entirely ungimmicky".
Disgracefully, the station owners allowed the structure to decay badly, peeling paint being the dominant motif of their decorative approach. It is now showing signs of being restored (the walkway over the platforms is being particularly well opened-out), and I hope the station gets the love and ministrations it deserves.
BROXBOURNE
The last of our three stations, Broxbourne, was a development of the Harlow Town design.
A whole new site was found for this station, which was required as part of the electrification of the main line. It was erected in 1959 to designs by project architect Peter Rainiers (working under John Ward, the architect of Barking). The station, like Harlow, has an entrance and booking hall to one side of the railway lines, and a long walkway bridging the tracks and providing access to each pair of platforms.
The single-storey ticket hall, forming a projecting porch at the front of the station, leads into a dramatic triple-height hall:
The effect has now been a little spoiled -- ludicrous numbers of cable ducts have been screwed to the walls, offensively ugly (and not very practical) departure screens have been slung up, vicious fluourescent lighting has been tacked on, hideous oversized advertising placed on the walls, and putridly-coloured, nanny-state hand-rails have been bolted onto the subtle and sensitively designed wooden originals.
But it's hard to destroy totally a volume as generous as this.
If you take the stairs up, you reach the long, light walkway, with toilets and a warm waiting room off the main passage, and easy access to the platforms below:
Windows are everywhere, to enable you to orientate yourself easily and to work out whether or not you need to run for your train:
The platforms themselves are dominated by the sculptural form of the stairways:
But they are also designed to be aesthetically consistent and to provide decent levels of passenger comfort:
Broxbourne was the last of the major new stations on the Eastern Region, and it can be seen as the next stage on from Harlow -- with the same triple-lift composition over low horizontals, but using a simpler layout with fewer masses and even simpler materials.
The listing describes it as "one of a very small number of post-war railway stations of clear architectural distinction". That seems to me to nicely sum-up these three stations.
5 comments:
How do you do it? How can a post about 3 bloody railway stations in London be so captivating? The imagery is so pleasing to the eye (your photography is excellent)and the text so neatly crafted (Johnsonian in its economy). I am deeply impressed! Wayne W.
Blimey.
Thanks, and all, but if you praise me so highly people are just gonna think that I'm writing these comments under a pseudonym (as opposed to writing my normal pseudy comments under my nom de plume... er... you get the idea).
I found a program a while back where, if you paste in something you've written, it told you which author's style your writing was closest to. Mine was, apparently, Cory Doctorow (who I've met several times but I've never read any of his sci-fi).
Bizarrely, when I entered text I'd written for work my writing style was closest to that of HP Lovecraft.
Actually, come to think of it I don't know whether or not that was a comment on the fantastically unbelievable elements of my supposedly very serious committee reports, or just generally on the horrific nature of my writing style.
Forget the comparative computer programme. In a world where too much is said and too much is written its charming to encounter writing that is concisely connected with the thought behind it but playful in its effect. Perhaps this blog permits you the style that pleases you most but it is still labour, of course. Please do continue to labour for our benefit! Wayne W.
As ever I'm entralled by your prose and I do agree that these stations are indeed striking, fine for their purpose and exemplars for their period. But, if they're not rapidly to look seedy and unloved, buildings like these, their construction materials, their finishes and subsequent additions and "updatings" need infinitely more thought, love and care than ever they're given or likely to be given. The ability to grow old gracefully is indeed a blessing and seems to have been beyond our grasp in an age so dominated by the money men .
I agree: for example, whoever thought it was a good idea to dump that little wooden shed by the main entrance at Broxbourne?
All three stations have had additions which are not just unsympathetic they are positively thoughtless, and the approach to cable ducting is simply witless.
But, on the positive side, at least there is now some evidence of more sympathetic interventions: I mentioned the work on the bridge at Harlow and that really is looking rather good. Which is in stark contrast to the line of ticket gates they've installed int he main hall.
Give with one hand, take with another...
Post a Comment