The Railways

  The best-known of these agreements concerned the Great Western’s station at Swindon. It was a painful case of a self-inflicted wound. Seeking to reduce its direct costs, the company granted a ninety-nine-year lease of the refreshment rooms in lieu of payment to the contractors who built Swindon station, with an agreed ten-minute stop by all timetabled passenger trains. The builders first subcontracted the service to a Cheltenham hotelier, then in 1848 sold the lease outright for £20,000, which was already around £5,000 more than the construction costs of the entire station. Eager to accelerate its crack trains, the Great Western had meanwhile begun to chafe at the ten-minute-stop agreement. When the company tried to curtail these stops their caterers went to law, and won. The company then had to sit by for half a century, watching the lease change hands for sums of up to £70,000. Finally, in 1895, it swallowed hard and bought back – for £100,000 – what had been carelessly granted away. The restaurant cars the Great Western began running at just this time reduced the value of this non-investment still further, but at least the company was at last free to give itself permission to end the compulsory stop.

  Swindon’s refreshment rooms were grandly conceived; as usual, Brunel wanted to outshine everyone else. There were first- and second-class rooms on both up and down platforms. The finishes in first class evoked the civilised luxury of the fashionable clubs of Pall Mall, with columns and pilasters in the imitation marble known as scagliola, a ceiling of ornate plasterwork, and walls painted in the manner of Italian Renaissance palaces. Second class was sober by comparison, but the overall level of decoration and comfort far exceeded that of the ordinary waiting rooms. The rooms were smart enough to be borrowed at least once for a county ball.

  This mismatch occurred on other lines too. It was as if the delivery of food and drink made the companies eager to emulate the best rooms of the hotels and inns beyond their territories. Refreshment rooms at city stations sometimes developed a life of their own, competing with the businesses in the streets around them, on the model of Messrs Spiers and Pond’s establishment for the Metropolitan Railway (see Chapter 2). Photographs of the better sorts of facility from the early twentieth century show a decorous tea-room environment of upholstered furniture and spindly coat stands, lightened by tablecloths and floral displays.

  John Betjeman’s Metro-Land film of 1973 opens in one of the latest and most genteel of these spaces, the panelled Chiltern Court restaurant. This was an addition of 1911–13 to the Metropolitan’s Baker Street station. Spiers and Pond, then still flourishing, were the caterers. The space survives, subsumed in a giant block of 1920s mansion flats; it now trades as the Metropolitan Bar, one of J. D. Wetherspoon’s pubs. Another London survivor is harder to recognise as such. Visitors to the branch of Foyle’s bookshop at Waterloo, opened in 2014, find themselves in what was the Windsor Bar. Two curvaceous little cashiers’ booths are still in place by the entrance, converted to display cabinets (the bar itself, formerly equipped with an American soda fountain, has vanished). Now, the best place to experience the mingling of travellers and townies is probably the gleaming faience-lined refreshment room that was created at Newcastle Central station in 1893, now restored after a period of eclipse behind false ceilings and neutral paint. Honourable mention might also be made of the restaurant of 1909 at the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s Manchester Victoria station, although its present furnishings are unworthy of the thick Edwardian plasterwork and hovering coloured-glass dome overhead.

  These surroundings often belied the brusque exchanges that occurred in railway refreshment rooms, especially those of the Swindon type that depended for custom on brief passenger stops. The flurries at Swindon were far from unique. Passengers on the London & Birmingham Railway were likewise allowed just ten minutes at its midway stop at Wolverton in Buckinghamshire, and periods of five to ten minutes are described as the general rule in The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book. Anglo-Scottish travellers were allowed more time, having further to go, but even the customary stops for dining at York, Normanton or Preston were no more than twenty to thirty minutes long.

  Refreshment stops on fast stagecoach journeys had been hurried too, but at least the numbers involved were not great. Railways introduced a new problem: how to serve a crowd of hungry and thirsty travellers in a limited space and time. The solution – to require them to line up at the counter of a long bar – may sound self-evident, but in the 1840s this was still a relatively unusual way of serving food and drink. At that period customers in the average public house were attended to at their seats by waiters or pot-boys, and the ‘bar’ referred more often than not to an office-like space rather than a room with a public counter. Kings of these railway bars were Brunel’s installations at Swindon, with their long U-shaped counters projecting into the middle of the first- and second-class interiors, together making a shared central enclosure for the staff.

  Even the longest bar could not make up for rushed service or for having to eat and drink against the clock. A newspaper report in 1879 castigated

  the rush out and search for the buffet as soon as the panting locomotive draws up to the platform; the crush and confusion when the buffet at length was found; the frantic attempts to gulp scalding soups or hot coffee; the cries oft-repeated for fowl, or tongue, or ham, and the frequent fruitlessness of the demand; enough, in short, to chafe the patience of a saint, and impair the digestion of an ostrich.

  To make matters worse, the quality of fare was often low. The rot seems to have set in almost straight away. A comment from 1841: ‘Be very careful what you eat at Wolverton. Avoid pork-pies especially.’ Brunel himself sent a famously sarcastic letter to the first lessee at Swindon, wondering why the man should buy such bad roasted corn: ‘I did not believe you had such a thing as coffee in the place; I am certain that I never tasted any.’ For the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1865,

  Railway tea is liquid nausea, whether you get it in the common room or are served with it in the first-class room, out of a silver urn; and railway coffee is (except at King’s Cross, where it is really good) made with a slight suspicion of coffee, just as if a coffee berry had bathed in it early in the day.

  Sandwiches, too. For Trollope, the railway sandwich was ‘that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot’ (He Knew He Was Right, 1869). Other staples of railway catering were skewered by Dickens, in his journalist’s persona of the Uncommercial Traveller: ‘brown hot water stiffened with flour’, ‘shining brown pasties, composed of unknown animals within, and offering to my view the device of an indigestible star-fish in leaden pie-crust without’. On a shopping visit to a Birmingham silversmith during his last reading tour, Dickens spotted some ‘old friends’, dilapidated tea urns from the London & North Western; after inspecting their interiors, he could only wonder at the harm caused by the contents, ‘produced under the active agency of hot water, and a mixture of decomposed lead, copper, and a few other deadly poisons’.

  Customer service did nothing to make up for these shortcomings. The counters were frequently staffed by well-groomed, unmarried young women, who had no time for politesse and still less for flirtation. According to Sir Francis Head, the contingent at Wolverton were officially discouraged from conversing even with one another, let alone with the imploring faces across the counter; ‘But they may sometimes attempt to appeal to the generosity in travellers’ natures, when milk has turned or soup be over-peppered, with the hundred-thousandth part of a smile.’ Head also reassured readers that the girls were of unsullied reputation, although he did allow that four of them had managed to make ‘excellent marriages’.

  Head’s was an unusually sympathetic treatment, written in co-operation with the railway company and certainly skewed in its favour. For the Pall Mall Gazette in 1868, the normal attitude behind the counter wa
s mere ‘supercilious complacency’. This exposure to female beauty, haughtiness and inaccessibility, combined with the hurried eating and drinking of nasty, overpriced produce, made the refreshment-room experience especially indigestible for male travellers, from whom the surviving accounts overwhelmingly come. Why, asked Dickens in Household Words in 1856, did these attractive women, with their ‘glossy hair and neat attire’, always treat him with scorn?

  The canonical text among these protests is Dickens’s much-anthologised account of the facilities at Mugby (i.e. Rugby) Junction. In his other Mugby tales of Christmas 1866, he displayed understanding and admiration for railway workers – the industrious ‘Lamps’ in his oily hut and the haunted, doomed Signalman. Entering Mugby’s fictionalised refreshment room, Dickens left these sympathies at the door in favour of a gleeful settling of scores. The trigger was an incident at Rugby on his reading tour earlier that year. As his companion prepared to supply the correct change, Dickens had reached for the sugar and milk, only for them to be snatched away ‘with the remark, made in shrill and shrewish tones, “You sha’n’t have any milk and sugar ’till you two fellows have paid for your coffee”.’ To make things worse, the contretemps brought much laughter from a ‘boy in buttons’, another employee of the rooms.

  Dickens made this youth our insolent guide to the facilities at Mugby, where the staff maintain a ‘proudly independent footing’ and offer as little help as possible. He explains how the serving girls are marshalled by Our Missis and spend their time between trains bandolining their hair. When the telegraphic signal announces the imminent arrival of a train carrying ‘the Beast’, alias the travelling public, ‘you should see their noses all a-going up with scorn, as if it was a part of the working of the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery’. We learn of Our Missis’s research trip to France, from which she returned with ‘Orrors to reveal’: cleanliness and tastefulness everywhere, soup without flour in it and the outrageous sale of baskets each containing a tasty cold lunch for one.

  Satirical drubbings of this kind seem to diminish after 1870. For one thing, there was more choice for travellers after Spiers and Pond introduced luncheon baskets to British rails. The company’s growing empire of leases – 211 buffets and refreshment rooms on seventeen different lines by 1888 – was another force for improvement. Perhaps the Food and Drugs Act of 1875, which criminalised the practice of adulteration, also made things better. Yet the failure of the railways and their chosen contractors to do better from the start remains slightly mysterious. For they had supplanted the old coaching inns for more than just the provision of snacks: the companies themselves were also hoteliers on the grandest scale, and most of their hotels were incorporated within the station buildings.

  Railway hotels represent the supreme instance of adding a commercial service to the basic necessities of travel. That there would be a demand to stay overnight close to many of the new railway stations was anticipated almost straight away, and local entrepreneurs jumped at the chance. Many self-styled Railway Hotels belonged in this private, independent category, as did the multitudes of Railway (or Station) Inns, Railway (or Station) Taverns and the odd Railway Bell. The type is still a familiar sight, especially in the form of a mid-Victorian building that is noticeably older than the houses and commercial architecture that have grown up around it. Other early hotels began as private undertakings but were later bought up by the railways, like the big Midland Hotel that was built across the road from Derby station in 1841.

  By that year the railways had already made their first venture into the trade, in the spectacular form of the hotel erected in front of the London & Birmingham’s new terminus at Euston – two hotels rather, because the facilities were divided into large matching blocks. Each was operated independently at first, although the blocks were later combined, and then linked by building a cross-range that obscured the view of the station’s mighty Doric entrance. The split arrangement favoured symmetrical grandeur over convenience and was not repeated. Other early one-offs included Brunel’s facilities at Swindon, where the hotel rooms were apportioned between the two upper storeys over the pair of refreshment rooms, with a covered bridge across the tracks by way of access. One half of this odd Siamese-twin building survives, looking neutral and non descript now that its counterpart has been demolished and the resplendent refreshment-room interiors destroyed.

  Not until G. T. Andrews’s station at Hull was built in 1847–51 were the functions combined in a way that allowed the hotel to make a grand architectural display towards the station approach. This arrangement arrived in London with the second Paddington station, where the Great Western Royal Hotel, a grandiose design in a mid-seventeenth-century French style, opened its doors in 1854. It was an instant success, justifying the company’s outlay of £59,500 (furnishings included) and encouraging others to follow. A terminus was especially suited to the type of grand frontal composition employed at Paddington, and London had several other examples, of which the South Eastern Railway’s Charing Cross (opened 1865) and the Midland’s St Pancras (opened 1873, completed 1877) are the best preserved.

  The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), the pre-eminent architect of his time. Costing £437,335, it was the apotheosis of the British station hotel, just as the train shed immediately behind it (of which more later) remains the most daring and spectacular in the country. Its grandiose scale is amplified by Scott’s use of a modern Gothic Revival style, in which boldly patterned arches derived from medieval Italy are mixed with motifs from France, England and the Low Countries, culminating in a magnificently spiky skyline of pinnacles and towers. The torch then passed to Edinburgh, where the flagship hotels of the rival Caledonian and North British companies squared up to one another from opposite ends of Princes Street. The Caledonian Hotel of 1897–1903 has survived the closure and demolition of the terminus it served, which the buildings enclosed by means of angled wings that stretch back from a symmetrical, eight-storeyed entrance front. The North British Hotel, opened in 1902 and now pretentiously renamed the Balmoral Hotel, trumps this display with its soaring four-square mass and thoroughly municipal clock tower, placed just north of Waverley station. The architectural historian Charles McKean regarded the Edinburgh hotels as a representation of the ‘approximate draw’ between the two greatest Scottish companies. Likewise, the Midland Grand at St Pancras was a spectacular gesture of rivalry towards the adjacent King’s Cross station and the underwhelming Great Northern Hotel that stood awkwardly – and, until recent renovations, unconnectedly – alongside its parent terminus.

  It would be a mistake to regard these hotels simply as trophy buildings. They were expected to run at a profit, and generally did. They offered a valuable service to passengers, with calibrated sizes and standards of rooms to suit different means. They also set new standards of comfort and display by which existing hotels were found wanting – another instance of how the railways’ financial muscle allowed them to set the pace. Almost every large British city felt the impact: by 1914 only Plymouth, Portsmouth, Bristol, Cardiff and Dundee were without a railway hotel, and Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh all had more than one. More subtly, railway hotels helped to foster the growth of civic life, because their public rooms offered neutral ground for meetings and celebrations. That could not be said of the older type of private hotel, with their individual proprietors and known political alignments. The function rooms at some London hotels were especially busy with political conventions, shareholder meetings, annual dinners and the like, and the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street even found room for two Masonic temples within. This ecumenical attitude extended to the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920 in the hotel at the former South Eastern Railway’s City terminus at Cannon Street.

  By the time that the British communists came together, the railways had taken the management of their hotels into their own hands. The Midland proved to be a particularly enthusia
stic hotelier, mirroring its achievements in raising standards of comfort within its carriages. Its hotels were latterly managed by Sir William Towle (1849–1929), from offices within the top storey of the Midland Grand’s west tower. Towle sought to fill gaps in the company’s hotel network, which at Manchester and Liverpool meant building close to its existing stations, rather than integrating hotel and station together. The Midland Hotel in Manchester, opened in 1903, fell only slightly short of its Edinburgh cousins in its scale and degree of architectural embellishment. Advertised in Bradshaw’s back pages as ‘The most complete hotel in the world’, the hotel used an early form of air conditioning by means of linen filters to protect its guests from Manchester’s thickened atmosphere. Its ‘tropical’ level of warmth was noted by J. B. Priestley in his state-of-the-nation travelogue English Journey (1934).

  The next great Midland project was the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, opened in 1914. By that date the hospitable Midland had accounted for 41 per cent of the total of £5,758,836 expended on building England’s railway hotels. Elegantly plain where the Manchester hotel was busy and ornate, the huge Adelphi would have been even larger, but falling levels of transatlantic custom and shortages of capital after the First World War kept these plans on the shelf. Sir William Towle had retired by then, leaving his sons to take over the hotel and catering division.

  One of these sons, Arthur Towle, found himself at the head of the largest hotel business in Europe once the Midland became a constituent of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway in the amalgamations of 1923. Arthur Towle’s greatest project in the LMS period was the Queen’s Hotel at Leeds City station, built in 1936–8. However luxuriously appointed, station hotels had to contend with the dirt and round-the-clock commotion generated by trains, and the architect responded accordingly. The hotel’s multi-phase air conditioning used both oil and cotton-wool filters, delivering a supply Towle described as ‘clean and pure as the air of St Moritz’. Guest rooms were centrally heated and noise levels were kept low by the use of double glazing, rubber-cushioned doors and soundproofed flooring. Every bedroom also had its own bathroom; sixty years before, the five storeys of bedrooms at the Midland Grand had made do with just nine shared bathrooms between them, plus movable hip-baths for those guests who wished, at the extra charge of one shilling, to take a hot bath in their own room.