The lack of protection for Waterloo raises the spectre of a future cash-in on the ‘air rights’ to the space over its platforms, and possibly over the concourse too. In the days of steam these spaces had to be kept open and spacious to allow sufficient ventilation, but diesel and electric traction are not so demanding. The consequences were first felt in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, when electrification released valuable tracts of inner-city real estate for redevelopment. This explains why New York’s Grand Central Station, as rebuilt in 1903–13, has grandeur only in its upper levels of circulation; the trains themselves are confined to a gloomy basement. Air rights – the concept, if not yet the name – in due course determined the form of the 1960s station at Birmingham New Street, which had lost its marvellous 1850s arched roof after wartime bomb damage.*** The Euston end of the old London & Birmingham was also reconstructed with a broad building on top, although this station is much less cramped than the 1960s New Street. Euston’s platforms are prefaced by a great circulation hall that was one of the more underrated public spaces of 1960s London; an intrusive shopping deck is under construction across one side at the time of writing.
After that the capital had to wait until the 1980s, when deep-plan office blocks were contrived over the platforms at Cannon Street, Charing Cross, half of Liverpool Street and the Brighton side of Victoria station. None of these projects involved the destruction of an admired train shed (Cannon Street, like Birmingham, having lost its fine arched roof in the aftermath of the Second World War), but the glum darkened spaces are none the better for that. As for the future shape of Euston, dependent as it is on the outcome of the HS2 scheme for a new high-speed route to the Midlands and points north, all bets are off at the time of writing.
It would be wrong to suggest that post-war railway architecture amounted to little more than opportunistic plonking of buildings over tracks. In addition, much had happened to the look of the network between the last Edwardian initiatives and the convulsions of the 1960s. Most of these changes were not architectural, but concerned the ways in which information was conveyed to the passenger, and the overall image that the railways sought to present. The narrative begins in visual disorder, culminates in a systematised national aesthetic and dissolves into bittiness once more, especially after privatisation. It all begins on the railway platform.
Footnotes
* ‘and this is how the railways are becoming popular’.
** The Warden is not travelling himself, but awaits the arrival of his bewitching niece Zuleika; so he must have bought a platform ticket.
*** Since rebuilt again, allowing merciful daylight to reach the tracks for the first time in half a century.
– 16 –
INFORMATION AND IMAGE
Back to Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ one last time:
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name …
‘What I saw’: Thomas knew where he was thanks to the station signs.* Adlestrop’s were lettered in the standard Great Western pattern of fat capitals on a contrastingly dark board. The name has outlived the station it served: rescued after closure in 1966, one of these 9ft-long signs now shares the village bus shelter with a salvaged Great Western bench and a plaque inscribed with the text of the poem that picked out station and village from rural obscurity, an ugly-sounding place made beautiful by association.
The oldest surviving photograph of a British railway station, taken at Linlithgow in the mid 1840s by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, already appears to show a nameboard under the eaves of the platform shelter. Nameboards are routinely captured at lesser stations as the photographic record becomes fuller in the 1850s and 1860s (big city stations seem to have done without for longer; the platforms at Paddington, for instance, stayed anonymous until 1933). Early-Victorian railways favoured dark lettering on a light ground, giving way to light on dark towards the end of the century. The usual form employed by that period used cut-out or cast letters of a standard pattern fixed to a backboard. Assembly, painting and repainting of the nameboard could thus be done on a semi-skilled basis, without calling on the services of a signwriter – quite a contrast with the ornate lettering displayed on locomotives and carriages. Still more durable were the enamelled metal nameboards that became the preferred type in the twentieth century.
Nameboards came in many sizes. The largest were often placed close to the platform ends, sometimes (as on the Midland Railway) in the form of double boards set at an angle to one another, so that they could be read more easily from a moving train. On a smaller scale, cast or enamelled metal nameplates were fixed to the backs of many station benches. Names might also be emblazoned on backlit transparencies gummed inside the glass panels of station gas lamps and in the windows of waiting rooms. British Railways liked to put up big enamelled name signs on station frontages too. The commitment to make station identities readily visible from the train was well advised. Dim artificial lighting by gas or oil made it all too easy for passengers to get out at the wrong station. Worse, unlocked carriage doors offered no barrier to an injurious exit at a signal stop between stations, or the fatal misidentification of a bridge parapet with a waiting platform.
Besides these visual cues, the porters at each station would shout out its name. The practice was familiar enough by the 1840s for the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) to borrow it for a simile:
I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one, who dreaming
Hears thro’ his dream the name of his home shouted out; hears and
hears not …
These shouts were not always very clear. As Baedeker’s guide had it, ‘the way in which the porters call [the names] out, laying all the stress on the last syllable, is seldom of much assistance’. Baedeker’s warning glossed over the diversities of regional speech, which still made things harder. Cuthbert Bede described in the 1850s how County Durham porters announced Ferry Hill (‘Faweyill’) and Fence Houses (‘Fensoosen’), and joked that ‘Change here for Doom’ (Durham) might cause alarm to uncomprehending southern travellers.
Different arrangements came into force at large stations with the arrival of public address systems, which allowed a single, King’s-English voice to ring out over the vernacular cries of the railwaymen. The Great Western’s first such loudspeakers were installed at Paddington in 1936. (The ‘refeened’ pronunciation of one company announcer later made a private joke for John Betjeman and his wife, regular travellers through Berkshire from Paddington, for whom Didcot became ‘Deedcoate’.) Announcements at termini at least had no need to remind hearers where they were, but they did have to convey masses of information of every other kind, supplementing or correcting whatever could be shown on the station’s fixed destination boards. The grandest of these visual displays were things of wonder, the passengers’ nearest equivalent to the giant, multi-armed signal gantries that guarded the station approaches. Early destination boards were built of wood, and displayed information on demountable panels or swivelling lettered bars, manipulated by a specialist staff who moved constantly around the internal passageways. One of the last survivors – in daily use, amazingly, up to 1985 – was the installation above the gracefully shaped oval booking office at Glasgow Central. This Edwardian structure has been converted to shops, with a bar in the old destination-board storey above, from which drinkers can look over the passing show on the concourse.
By the time that modernisation overtook Glasgow Central, the standard type of destination board in use elsewhere on the network was operated electrically, and was made up of thin, hinged slats that dropped down vertically from a rotating spindle. Each slat could be lettered on both sides, and the characters were typically split along the middle so that every panel in the display comprised one slat above another, together spelling out the name. Before more advanced electronics took over, the boa
rds were controlled by punch cards, as at Charing Cross in the late 1960s. The riffling clatter of their slats, endlessly updating the display of arrivals and departures at busy concourses, has been silenced in its turn, and various types of electronic screen now keep the passenger up to date. Paddington was again in the technological forefront, in the experimental form of a 27-inch television screen linked to a teleprinter, installed in 1962. Its successors can now display any text, including such vital details as last-minute changes of platform, and so there is less need for station announcements to be made at all.
The electronic revolution has also transformed these announcements themselves. Instead of the scratchy push-button tapes of elocutionstiffened voices that were the newest thing fifty years ago, eerily affectless announcements are now assembled automatically from digitised words and syllables. Minor stations are quieter still, with no loudspeakers to make up for the abolition of the old Rule 130, which required guards to call out the names at every stop (together with connecting services at junctions). Besides, the introduction of public address systems on the trains themselves has made the task largely redundant. Routine announcements can now be triggered automatically by GPS signals as the train goes on its way, although the method is not faultless, as anyone learns who has ever gazed out over a radiant West Country landscape while the speakers calmly advise of the imminent approach of Clapham Junction or Wimbledon. For the technologically advanced (or technologically dependent), all the relevant information can be downloaded live from Network Rail, and supplemented by text-message alerts and Twitter feeds from the various operating companies. In effect, the personalised, hand-held destination board is now within the reach of any traveller with a smartphone.
All the nameboards, nameplates and transparencies that bedecked Victorian stations could not prevent complaints that the railways were making a bad job of letting passengers know where they were. The root of the problem was the lack of clarity caused by competition from other notices. Some of these were the railways’ own – all those directions to waiting rooms, refreshment rooms and telegraph offices – but the principal distractions were caused by advertising. As one American visitor noted in 1885, it could be difficult to pick out a station name amid the insignia of whiskies, soaps and mustards. Worse, advertisements were often placed on any available surface without regard for overall effect. The resulting visual chaos, captured in photographs, comes as a reminder that railway space was ultimately summoned into being by the imperatives of capital. Station buildings might adopt prestigious historical styles, staff might dress in smart uniforms imitative of the police or armed forces, carriages and locomotives might be painted with as much exquisite care as the conveyances of the elite – but all these displays of prestige had to coexist with endless insistent messages on behalf of Messrs Pears (‘Good morning! Have you used Pears’ soap?’), Beecham’s Pills (‘Worth a Guinea a Box’), Dr Williams (‘Pink Pills for Pale People’) and the thousand other branded goods of the consumer economy.
Advertising takes over, as depicted by Punch in 1883
The railways took some time to wake up to the potential of income from advertising. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early watershed, when schematic images of products such as Brogden’s watch-chains and Heal’s bedsteads began to appear on poster hoardings to catch the eyes of railway pilgrims to London. As with refreshment rooms and book-stalls, railway companies preferred to farm out display space to agents, prominent among whom was the empire-building W. H. Smith Jnr. A typical contract, such as the one arranged with the Chester & Holyhead Railway in 1855, gave Smiths sole rights of display on walls and fences, in waiting rooms and booking halls. Smiths was responsible for providing poster frames and canvassing for business; on its part, the railway company retained the right of approval over what was shown. Outsourced advertisements of this kind should be distinguished from the railways’ own notices, timetables and the like, which were customarily stuck up on dedicated boards headed with the company’s initials. So the situation remained, until the railways began to take the advertising business into their own hands in the twentieth century.
Paper posters were joined by bright, imperishable signs of enamelled metal. The initial patent for these was granted in 1859 to Benjamin Baugh, manager of Salt’s enamel works in Birmingham. Enamelled signs were best suited to branded products, which sold year in and year out. Once fixed, they could be left for years on gable ends, retaining walls, bridge parapets and such-like locations that bill-stickers could not easily reach, as well as on platform fences and other spots with straightforward access. Advertisements of this kind provided the household words used by E. Nesbit’s Railway Children for their thoroughly modern version of charades, played in an empty waiting room (answers: Fox’s umbrellas and the ubiquitous blot that advertised the Blue Black Writing Fluid patented back in 1837 by Dr Henry Stephens – mimed by Peter, face blackened with coal dust, in a ‘spidery attitude’).
What was good fun to the Railway Children was distressing to many grown-up members of their class. For Arnold Bennett, writing slightly later, there was no allure in a ‘dirty platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots and aperients’. Railway space was especially receptive to the formula which took a name or emblem, boldly presented, and repeated it to death – what the Saturday Review in 1907 called ‘The dreary drip of constant iteration.’ At Rugby station, for instance, a frieze of enamelled advertisements for Hudson’s soap, with its emblem of light flooding from a lamp, ran below the first-floor windows on the platform side. Other product names that may seem comforting and dependable in retrospect – Reckitt’s Blue, Brasso, Pratt’s Motor Spirit, Mazawattee Tea – were merely banal in their day. Especially insistent were the little enamelled panels fixed to the risers of station staircases, such as the ‘IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS’ remembered by Betjeman, ‘in blue on an orange ground, insisting, as one ascends, on the weakness of one’s heart and its need for the stamina which those pills supply’.
The railways’ increasingly active publicity departments joined in the display. Many of their productions are now regarded as classics of commercial art, as advertising moved away from ‘informative’ text-based formats and into ‘creative’ pictorial modes. The best-known is the beaming Jolly Fisherman created by John Hassall for the Great Northern Railway in 1908 (‘Skegness is so bracing’), since adopted as a sort of mascot by the grateful Lincolnshire resort. Not everyone at the time was so appreciative, however. ‘No. 251, bigger boiled than ever, leers at us from every hoarding!’ – thus the response of one viewer to another Great Northern poster, showing a prototype express locomotive. And for every colourful Jolly Fisherman, the traveller could expect as many commonplace banners for commercial hotels, or depressing palliatives for anaemia or halitosis, stuck all too often anywhere and everywhere.
It was not always necessary to take the train to be exposed to this advertising binge, for some of the railways’ urban displays were grossly intrusive. In Aberdeen, for example, where the showpiece of Union Terrace Gardens was (and is) bounded on one side by the Denburn railway cutting, drab and sooty commercial displays lingered until a civic pogrom after the Second World War. Worse, the potential of the railways’ passing audience stimulated freelance advertising within sight of the line, so that visual pollution followed the physical pollution caused by the smoke and noise of the trains. Station approaches were obvious targets, but rural settings by busy lines did not escape. George Gissing’s novel In the Year of Jubilee (1894) features an advertising agent called Luckworth Crewe (the surname surely no coincidence) who brags of a garden by the ‘South Western Railway’ where he managed to put up an advertising board, ‘as ugly as they make ’em … a certain particular place, where the trains slow, and folks have time to read the advertisement and meditate on it’. Four years later, Max Beerbohm deplored the ‘texts about pills and soaps’ that were spreading through English meadows.
A few were concerned enough to fight back.
In 1895 the Board of Trade floated the idea of a minimum distance between station signs and advertisements, to create an area of visual calm that would allow the names to stand out better. A Society for Controlling the Abuses of Public Advertising (SCAPA) had been set up two years before. William Morris, the poet Robert Bridges and the artist Holman Hunt were among SCAPA’s founding members, and Rudyard Kipling later lent his support. The railways must have seemed a hopeless lost cause, but the society and its allies had successes elsewhere, fighting off schemes for illuminated signs on Edinburgh’s Princes Street (Bovril) and the White Cliffs of Dover (Quaker Oats). An Act followed in 1907 allowing by-laws to regulate hoardings and protect amenities from invasive advertising for the first time, and by 1936 the various local and national restrictions in force were counted at over 250.
The Railways Page 61