Leeds was the last great flourish of the British railway hotel, reflecting the shift in expectations away from high ceilings and ornate public rooms, towards private comfort and convenience. As such, it was almost in a class of its own. Complete replacement of an older railway hotel was rare, the work at Leeds happening only because of a general reconstruction project in which two existing stations were merged. In London especially, railway hotels between the wars slipped down the ranks of smartness. When the Midland Grand opened, its best rooms were the most expensive in London, but lavish new establishments such as the Dorchester, the Savoy and the Ritz all overtook it. The Travellers’ Guide for 1930 records that average charges at railway hotels began at 7s 6d for a room, 4s 6d for lunch and 6s 6d for dinner, all no more than half the equivalent rates at ‘First Class Hotels’. Outside London, railway hotels still had few rivals as superior places to stay and socialise until the 1960s, although they have not always escaped contagion from the relative decline of their host cities. The Adelphi, in retreat from the palmy days of the Atlantic crossing, is one instance of diminished prestige. A BBC fly-on-the-wall series in 1997, full of mishaps and bickering senior staff, did nothing to change this perception.
Among the railway hotels that retained their lustre best were those which served tourists rather than travellers. Some of these were not at stations at all, nor were they necessarily even built as hotels. The Great Western was early into the field, leasing Tregenna Castle near St Ives for hotel use in 1878. Cultivating tourist traffic to the outermost end of Cornwall had an obvious value to the company, which shortly afterwards coined the advertising phrase ‘Cornish Riviera’ and produced a rather spurious poster in which the outline of the Duchy was mirrored by that of Italy, under the slogan SEE YOUR OWN COUNTRY FIRST. Railway hotels in northern destinations began earlier still, including one built at Poulton-le-Sands in Lancashire as part of an archetypal railway-dependent plan to develop a bathing resort there. Under the more familiar name of Morecambe, this town grew into one of England’s busiest seaside attractions, and Arthur Towle decided in due course to invest in a replacement hotel for the LMS. The new building of 1933–4, now restored after near-terminal neglect, projected a thoroughly modern image thanks to the white, streamlined design provided by the flamboyant society architect Oliver Hill.
The east coast of Scotland was especially well provided with railway-owned resort hotels, which differed from the urban kind in that they did not necessarily stay open all year round. The popularity of Scottish hotels reflected the rising enthusiasm for golf, and at resorts such as Dornoch (Caithness), Gleneagles (Perthshire) and Cruden Bay (Aberdeenshire), new courses and new hotels were created together. Gleneagles and its course have become internationally famous, but the Great North of Scotland Railway’s Cruden Bay Hotel failed to flourish, hampered by a shorter than average season and by the lack of a direct railway connection. After closure in 1932 the building continued in use for several more years on account of its well-equipped laundry, served by the little mile-long electric tramway that connected with Cruden Bay station, on which the bedsheets and napery of the LNER’s Northern Division were shuttled up and down.
The final addition to the ranks of railway hotels belongs in this Scottish golfing group. It is the Old Course Hotel at St Andrews, built in 1967–8 to the designs of a New Orleans architectural practice whose best-known work is the exactly contemporary Louisiana Superdome. The hotel was the creation of British Transport Hotels Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of British Railways, from which it enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. Certainly, the Old Course Hotel was not planned in any close relationship to the rail network, opening its doors less than a year before the branch line to St Andrews closed to passengers. Like its older railway-owned siblings, the Old Course Hotel was sold off in 1983–4. Today it belongs in the Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) group, whose website keeps silent about the hotel’s origins as a venture by the nationalised railway – an ancestry that now seems as remote as the lost societies of the Eastern Bloc.
Station hotels were places of architectural display because they had to appear worthy of the well-off traveller’s patronage. Hence the Great Northern Hotel at King’s Cross, the least ostentatious of London’s terminus hotels, adopted a version of the Italianate classical manner then in favour for the terraces of Pimlico and Belgravia. But the most distinctive structures developed to serve railway stations had little to do with conventions handed down from architectural styles of the past. These were the train sheds, all-over enclosures large or small, which sheltered platforms, passengers and traffic alike – the fullest development of the various structures by which stations offered outdoor protection from the weather.
Even small stations commonly provided a sheltered area alongside the platform. One influential type was developed on the London & Brighton Railway, for which the architect David Mocatta devised a symmetrical plan for thirteen lineside stations built in 1839–41 (all now destroyed). These had a central, open-fronted waiting area towards the platform, enclosed by projecting rooms or simple screen walls on either side. The roof slope of the main building was carried down over the sheltered space. A similar configuration was still recommended for small stations by Alfred Cole Adams in 1886. But the type had a weakness, for its compact, self-contained form left an exposed gap between the train and the building. Better coverage could be provided by means of an awning or canopy that stood proud of the station walls, even if it could not always protect the platform right up to its edge. At Adlestrop, for instance, the timber canopy stuck out for just over 6ft from the eaves of the little station building, offering about 166 square feet of protection from the Gloucestershire skies.
Brunel was especially attentive to the value of shelter. For his smaller stations, he developed two standard types that could offer protection on all four sides. The more elegant kind, now best represented by the little station at Culham in the old county of Berkshire, juts out generously on deep brackets from a level close to the base of the main roof-slope. Another version exploits the hipped roof of the main building as the sheltering medium, achieved by means of a steroidal exaggeration to the eaves. Among the few survivors is Charlbury in the well-set Oxfordshire Cots-wolds, where regular travellers once fought off a proposal by British Rail to replace the coal fire in their waiting room with an electric one. Kindred designs are widespread on other, non-Brunellian lines. Exemplary sequences remain at the late nineteenth-century timber-built stations of Glasgow’s Cathcart Circle, where the canopies are glazed, and on the island platforms of the West Highland Railway route to Fort William and Mallaig.
To cover a still larger area it was necessary to give canopies and awnings a structural life of their own, so that they could extend down the platforms. Sometimes these canopies are supported by a wall backing on to the platform, especially where a station sits in a cutting or somewhere built-up. When island platforms are present, the canopies necessarily stand free. Depending on the date, these linear umbrellas may be of timber, iron or steel, concrete, glass or some less heavy and brittle translucent covering, variously combined. From the late 1850s until around 1920 canopies of timber were usually finished with shaped vertical slats known as valancing, a cheap form of ornament (because the ends could be machine-cut) which also served to direct the run-off of rainwater. Or the boards might be pierced higher up, leaving the bottom edge straight or arranged in gently arching profiles. There used to be a specially good set at Christ’s Hospital station in Sussex, as rebuilt in 1902 by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway; the architectural critic Ian Nairn commended its ‘taut and suave loping rhythm’. Other ex-LBSCR stations, including Battersea Park, preserve the type. Valancing also serves to break and diffuse the sun’s rays at the edge of the canopy’s shadow – a minor but appreciable enhancement of the experience of travel, which is lost every time a canopy is trimmed, or replaced with something straight-edged and utilitarian.
Twyford station in 1852, showing the expansive p
latform canopy designed by Brunel. The track is of his broad-gauge type, with continuous longitudinal timbers under each rail and cross timbers spaced at wide intervals
Most medium-sized British stations, many smaller ones and quite a few of the largest were given individual platform canopies. The seaside resorts of Kent and Sussex still have them in plenty, as does the old Midland Railway main line (Nottingham, Derby and Leicester stations included), and hosts of multi-platformed suburban stations on the main lines from London. Their epitome is Clapham Junction, where the seventeen numbered platforms are sheltered by eight open-sided canopies, of wildly varying age, length and design – essential components of this giant station that nowhere quite presents itself as a giant building.
If a station were to achieve architectural grandeur rather than mere extent, a train shed was essential. ‘Shed’ has an odd ring in this context, suggesting a small improvised enclosure rather than a giant marvel of engineering. As it happens, the first example – built at the Liverpool end of the Liverpool & Manchester in 1831 – was indeed a makeshift. Here the station’s single platform originally had a straightforward flat canopy on iron columns. To make the train shed, the canopy was extended all the way across the tracks to a supporting wall on the far side, by means of an open-ended roof of simple timber trusses. In this form the station served passengers for just five years, until handsome municipal funding secured a grander and better-placed new terminus at Lime Street.
Despite the obvious fire risk, timber-roofed train sheds were far from being a false start. Brunel and his followers adopted the type for many small-to-medium stations, of which the best remaining example is at Frome in Somerset, opened in 1850. Thurso, the northernmost station in Britain, and its sister station at Wick, on the other end of the two-pronged termination of the Highland Railway’s Far North line, are other examples. But for anything more ambitious, the future ultimately lay with iron.
The crucial building for the introduction of iron to station buildings was the train shed opened in 1837 at Robert Stephenson’s terminus at Euston, an early work by the brilliant engineer-entrepreneur Charles Fox (1810–74). In its first form this had three parallel spans of lightweight wrought-iron trusses. Each truss was braced by spindly tie rods and hangers below the roof slope, which were carried on two arcades of slim cast-iron arches set on no less slim columns. Roofing was by slates secured with copper wire. The basic form was a development of fireproof iron roofs already in use at some of the workshops, warehouses and mills of the new industrial economy. By far the best place to see this primal type of iron train shed is Dublin, where several of the termini built in the 1840s have escaped rebuilding. The finest British survivor is at Scarborough, where the 1840s parts were designed by G. T. Andrews for George Hudson’s York & North Midland Railway; these were brought back to something like their original form in the 1970s, when enlargements were chopped away.
King’s Cross station, photographed in 1898
Trusses of this type could be made to span up to 80ft, although at Fox’s Euston the figure was less than half that. As traffic levels increased, and railway construction became more ambitious and assured, station designers turned instead to arched trusses in order to span much greater distances. Arches also supplied an increase in overall height, and thus an enhanced potential for ventilation – a valuable asset by the 1860s, as smoky coal replaced cleaner coke as the usual locomotive fuel.
Among the best-known early arched train sheds is the Great Northern’s terminus at King’s Cross, opened in 1852. This has twin arched spans each measuring 105ft across. The double volumes are expressed with beautiful clarity in the arched windows of the severely plain end wall. These double volumes also suited the way the station originally functioned: just one platform each sufficed for departing and arriving trains, and the rest of the enclosure served for the storage and shunting of rolling stock. Structurally, however, there was a catch: the trusses were of laminated timber rather than iron. The material proved structurally unstable, and in less than two decades the Great Northern began replacing the timber arches with wrought-iron ones. As a result of these alterations, it is Brunel’s second station at Paddington, opened in 1854 with an iron-framed train shed from the outset, that is now the earliest London terminus in something close to its original form. Paddington is also memorable for its unique plan, with a central span of roughly equivalent width to one of the King’s Cross arches, and lesser spans on each side. (A fourth span is an addition from the 1910s.) The triple form raises spatial echoes of the nave and aisles of a great church, and these echoes are amplified at Paddington by a bewitching arrangement of double transepts, also arched, each of which cuts through the triple arches of the main axis.
Brunel was not the first to enlist wrought iron to make an arched train shed. Earlier by a few years were two showpieces from the northern heartlands of the railways, at Newcastle and at Liverpool. Newcastle Central station was provided with a three-span structure, built in 1849–50 and later enlarged with a fourth span, Paddington-fashion. Newcastle has a spatial magic all its own, because the train shed follows an even curve with a radius of 800ft. Liverpool’s train shed was a replacement for the timber installation provided at the first Lime Street station of 1836, which was a mere 55ft wide. Its successor of 1849 managed 153ft 6in in a single span. This soon proved too small as well, so the London & North Western Railway pulled down the train shed in 1869 and put up a still more spectacular arched roof, 212ft across. Even this did not make Lime Street big enough, so an additional span measuring 191ft was erected alongside in 1879. Yet Lime Street pales beside the greatest of the iron train sheds, the pointed-arched volume designed by the engineer William Henry Barlow (1812–1902) for the Midland Railway at St Pancras and finished in 1867. A worthy companion for Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel, it measures 246ft 6in across – a world record for a clear-span enclosure, not bested for nearly thirty years afterwards – and rises 102ft to the peak of the arch, making it the tallest as well as the widest train shed ever built in Britain.
Even after the engineers’ arms race had peaked at St Pancras, arched train sheds continued to rise outside London. The Midland and its allied companies provided Manchester with a 210ft-span example in 1880, long since devoid of trains and now in use as the Manchester Central Convention Complex. The Glasgow & South Western Railway’s St Enoch terminus of 1876–9 at Scotland’s second city, now destroyed, was only slightly less wide. Both designs depended in many details on St Pancras. Likewise, the parallel arched spans of Newcastle Central were echoed by the North Eastern Railway’s rebuildings of York, Darlington and Hull stations from the 1870s onwards. The York train shed even adopted the gently curved plan of Newcastle, although it lacks the minimal lightness of the prototype.
The curved train shed at Newcastle Central station, in a lithograph of c. 1850
But there was a halfway house between arching grandeur and the workaday platform-canopy type, and the future belonged to it. For it had never been essential to raise giant arches in order to provide all-over coverage at a large station, given the potential of the simpler and cheaper upand-down roofs of the kind pioneered at Euston. The lesson is pointed up by stations in France, where pitched-roofed enclosures were pushed to extraordinary widths by introducing extra colonnades to support each sloping side at midpoint. By this method, the Gare du Nord of 1861–5 in Paris includes a single span of 238ft. Late-Victorian stations in Britain preferred instead to support small-scale ridge-and-furrow roofs on colonnades of straight horizontal girders. The 40ft-high roof of the Great Central’s underwhelming Marylebone station (1899), the last terminus built in Victorian London, is of this type. A slightly higher ridge-and-furrow roof covers the platform acreage at the North British Railway’s rebuilt Edinburgh Waverley station in its sunken site between the Old Town and New Town, completed shortly after Marylebone opened.
These are spacious and efficient structures, in a neutral, boring sort of way. Only at Waterloo, where the station that
had grown by muddled increments was almost completely rebuilt in 1901–22, did the type achieve a level of grandeur to challenge its arching London cousins. Here the train-shed roof runs aslant across a wedge-shaped enclosure covering more than twenty acres, with ridges at an altitude of 60ft. The concourse is generously wide and curves gently along its 770ft length, and the entire space is flooded with light that even the murk of steam locomotion could not overcome. Although its external architecture is feeble by comparison, Waterloo remains the closest thing on the British railway network to the great early-twentieth-century stations of the Continent, where the fusion of civic pride and public investment gave cities such as Milan, Leipzig and Helsinki a new image of railway travel.
What the future holds for Waterloo is not yet clear. As the final British development of its type, the train shed was recommended for listing by English Heritage in 2010, only to be turned down by the minister in charge. The decision has left the Victory Arch, a combined war memorial and grand entrance that stands at the far end of the concourse buildings, as the one part of the complex with statutory protection. Painful echoes from Euston in the 1960s begin to reverberate at this point. Almost everyone agreed back then that the Euston Arch was at once a treasured London landmark, a masterpiece of design and a key building from the dawn of the railway age. The only problem was that neither the railways nor the London County Council could stump up the funds necessary to reconstruct the arch on a different site when rebuilding began. A last-ditch deputation of architects and architectural historians (Sir Hugh Casson and Nikolaus Pevsner among them) attended on Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1961 with a plea for clemency. Macmillan said that he would consider the matter, then did nothing. Official records show that his previous meeting concerned likely death rates among the nation’s children in the event of a nuclear holocaust; perhaps he may be forgiven a little for having failed to ride to the rescue. But the naughty thought also occurs that if the Euston Arch had been dedicated to the victims of war, it would still be standing today. Instead, it was levelled in 1962–3, for the want of a sum described by the Victorian Society as ‘rather less than the Treasury ungrudgingly paid out around the same time for two indifferent Renoirs, which no one was threatening to destroy’.
The Railways Page 60