The Railways

  The railways began to take notice too. This is especially a London story, starting on the deep lines of the Tube. The key figure was Frank Pick (1878–1941), who was appointed Traffic Development Officer of the amalgamated underground railways in 1909. He made an immediate impact, banishing advertisements for commercial clients from station exteriors, so that they appeared only on platforms and internal passages. Rather than spreading haphazardly, advertisements were also placed within carefully defined poster grids and kept at a clear distance from the station name-boards, so that they enhanced rather than disrupted the architectural outlines. Pick raised the visual standard of his own company’s advertising by commissioning bold pictorial posters, including early patronage of the brilliant modernist artist E. McKnight Kauffer. The posters were meant to help turn round the company’s fortunes by encouraging leisure travel and exploration, and they appear to have had some success.

  An up-to-date image was also fostered by the station signs themselves. Pick sharpened up the recently invented circle-and-crossbar design used on the nameboards, later registering the new version as a trademark. From 1916 these signs were lettered with a display typeface which Pick commissioned from the calligrapher Edward Johnston (1872–1944), who broke with convention by omitting the serifs, producing an effect of graceful, stripped-down clarity. No one had seen anything like it in the public realm before. Versions of the emblematic circle-and-crossbar signs and a gently tweaked variant of Johnston’s sans serif face are famously still in use today across the underground network.

  Pick did not – could not – stop there, for passenger traffic continued to grow apace. Wholly new underground lines were required, and many existing stations needed reconstruction. His mainstay for much of this work was the architect Charles Holden (1875–1960), a fellow northerner, with whom he shared a profound belief in the social value of rational design. They had much to do. Holden was responsible for the renovation of Piccadilly Circus in 1926–8, replacing lifts with escalators and making a sub-surface concourse big enough to cope with the growth in annual passenger numbers from 1.5 million to 25 million since the station opened in 1906. Suburban extensions to the Northern and Piccadilly lines allowed Holden and Pick to pursue an increasingly spare architectural language for the many new stations along the way. Those built for the Northern Line (Morden, Balham, Tooting Bec, etc.) were hailed by the Architectural Review in 1929 as ‘prophetic beacons of the new age amid a drab wilderness of Victorian edification’.

  Another milestone was the takeover in 1933 of the old Metropolitan Railway, which was subsumed into the newly founded London Passenger Transport Board. An internal report for the Metropolitan in 1927 had criticised the jumble of shapes and sizes, posters and enamelled plates on its routes. Now its network could be brought in line with Pick’s paternalistic vision of public design, which ultimately harnessed architecture, rolling stock, buses, trams and trolleybuses, street furniture, signage, ticketing and advertising to a single programme of integrated transport for the growing capital. Overall, Pick took municipal transport and made of it what would now be called a brand. London Transport was duly acclaimed as the best organisation of its kind anywhere and foreign visitors came to inspect and learn from it, as they had once come to see the achievements of the Stephensons and Brunel.

  The Big Four companies could only look on in envy. Here was a transport authority with a rising demand for travel, empowered to integrate bus, tram and trolleybus services so that they complemented rather than undermined those of its trains, all backed by ready access to government loans, and largely free from the shackles of common-carrier goods obligations. None of the main lines could match these advantages, but they could at least have a go at imitating London’s strong visual identity – as far as their budgets allowed.

  The Southern Railway managed most in terms of new architecture, as it rebuilt stations and even added a few branches to its electrified suburban routes. New Southern stations of the 1930s echoed Holden’s blockish lines and plain surfaces, but ventured into Art Deco styling here and there; Surbiton, for example, with its ridged, Odeonesque clock tower, or Horsham, described by the architectural critic Gavin Stamp as ‘a good example of the application of the wireless-set aesthetic’. The London, Midland & Scottish proved less excitable when providing its newly electrified Wirral route with modernist brick-and-concrete stations in 1938. The series culminated in a showpiece building at the seaside suburb of Hoylake, with a cylindrical booking hall and a broad outswept canopy to shelter passengers as they arrived on the road side – the commuter’s equivalent of the contemporary Midland Hotel at Morecambe. These were just a handful of the company’s 2,500-odd stations, however. For the rest, the cash-strapped LMS could offer only superficial modernity in the shape of new ‘Hawkseye’ name-boards, clearly in debt to London Underground’s circle-and-crossbar, with the novelty of little pieces of glass embedded in the surface to help them show up better at night. The Southern’s target-style nameboards of the period were even more blatantly derived from those of Frank Pick’s empire, rendered in the company colour of green.

  The other two companies avoided this imitative flattery. The Great Western left its station signage largely alone, but began to adorn locomotives, carriages, bench-ends and printed publicity with a little roundel containing angular versions of the august letters GWR. Guardians of taste hated this ‘shirt-button’ logo; Betjeman called it a ‘new and hideous monogram in distorted lettering designed to save space’. It was certainly at odds with the time-honoured slab-serif lettering that had been used on the Great Western’s locomotives ever since Brunel’s day.

  The London & North Eastern came up with a little monogram too, its initials squeezed into a pointed vesica piscis or fish-like shape; but its main initiative was the adoption in 1929 of another classic modern type-face. This was the celebrated Gill Sans, then barely a year old. Its creator was Eric Gill (1882–1940), a former pupil of Edward Johnston who had developed into another luminary of the Arts and Crafts movement, moving with ease between the roles of sculptor, letter-cutter, calligrapher and graphic artist. By a happy chance, Gill’s first love had been railways. As a child growing up by the line in late-Victorian Brighton, he had made drawing after drawing of bridges, tunnels, signals and locomotives, concentrating finally on the last in a mission to capture on paper ‘their character, their meaning’. As the LNER extended its use of Gill Sans from posters and publicity to liveries and signage, these dormant enthusiasms revived. The culmination was a public relations event at King’s Cross in 1932, when the stockinged and beret-wearing artist fixed his own newly painted head-board inscribed FLYING SCOTSMAN to the front of the waiting express. He then travelled part of the way on the footplate – ‘something like riding on an enormously heavy solid-tyred bicycle’ – a treat he had requested as part of his fee.** Along the way, the Flying Scotsman would have passed many of the superlative posters commissioned by the LNER, which had absorbed the graphic lessons of the London Underground better than any other main-line railway. What it did not have was money for many new buildings; unlike in Frank Pick’s London, good design was no more than a top-dressing for an ageing, investment-starved network.

  The London & North Eastern Railway’s systematic use of Gill Sans, from the Monotype Recorder, 1933

  What did the nationalised railway make of this rather mixed legacy? Alas, not much. Gill Sans was favoured for signage and posters, mostly of a heavier weight than the slim form preferred by the LNER, and as often as not with some coarsening of Gill’s lissom lines (the angled leg of the upper-case Rs is one giveaway). Applied to locomotives, the bald legend BRITISH RAILWAYS seemed drab and prosaic after the shaded lettering and crests of the old companies, as if to cause deliberate affront to established loyalties. The Archdeacon of Lincoln wrote a letter of protest on the matter to The Times, which responded with a half-serious editorial endorsing his suggestion that locomotives need no longer be inscribed at all, now that they all belonged to one body.
The BR livery crest that succeeded this blunt lettering not long afterwards won few plaudits either, with its malnourished, 1920s-looking lion straddling a spoked wheel. Nor were the new ‘totem’ signs for stations universally admired. These suggested an Underground circle-and-crossbar rolled flat, so that the name-bar had rounded ends and the backing was flattened at top and bottom. Comparisons were drawn with a schematised hot dog. This pudgy emblem also appeared on notices and stationery, lettered with British Railways’ name.

  One concession to territorial feeling was the use of colour coding for the new station signs, to represent the regions into which the network was divided. These were based on the old Big Four empires, with a few differences. Western Region signs were chocolate brown, a colour used on the Great Western’s old brown-and-cream signage, building paintwork and carriage livery. Southern Region signs were green, like the old Southern Railway’s signs, carriages and express locomotives. The London Midland Region had maroon signs, again reminiscent of the carriage and locomotive liveries of its LMS predecessor. The rest were more complicated. Scotland was now a region in itself, with the former LMS and LNER sectors uniformly re-signed in a fetching Scottish-bluebell blue. The English domain of the LNER was split into the Eastern Region, whose signs were a much deeper blue, and the North Eastern Region, where a rather nasty tangerine colour prevailed. Not only station signs, but station paintwork, seats, timetables, cap badges and other miscellanea were also colour-coded across the regions.

  All these shades belonged firmly within the mid-century palette, as lately recycled and commodified ad nauseam with the slogan KEEP CALM AND CARRY on and its variants. By the time Dr Beeching arrived, these Attlee-era station signs were looking distinctly dated, as were most of the liveries of the trains serving them, the 1951 generation of staff uniforms – in fact, almost everything that represented the public face of the railway. The Design Panel that had been set up in 1956 was already doing its bit to improve matters, with the Blue Pullman trains of 1960 (see Chapter 7) and Glasgow’s new suburban electric trains among its showpieces. Regional colour-coding had been relaxed and was now kept to a minimum when stations were replaced (not yet a large group: as late as 1961 the nationalised railway’s tally of rebuilt stations had still not reached the hundred mark). Selected older stations were facelifted according to the Design Panel’s Code of Practice booklet, with fluorescent lighting, new waiting-room interiors and smartly designed benches, litter bins and other essentials. Timetables for all regions were issued to a new standard design, replacing various superannuated Bradshaw-esque settings with lucid tabulations in Gill Sans – a strange destiny for this late product of the Arts and Crafts movement, with its roots in the teachings of John Ruskin. A public exhibition at the Design Centre in 1963 showed off BR’s new uniforms, the first on the railways to incorporate some man-made fibres. They were based on research into Continental practice as well as contemporary trends in menswear; Design magazine was not alone in detecting a ‘perceptible Germanic influence’ in the neat peaked caps and Wehrmacht-grey colours (although this was officially denied).

  1964 was the culminating year. In April, Beeching announced in the Financial Times that an entirely new corporate image was impending: ‘… powerful enough to symbolise the service it stands for, a distinctive name style and logotype for the title of the undertaking, with subsidiary letter forms for secondary and subsidiary purposes, and distinctive house colours for use throughout the system’. The ghost of Frank Pick must have raised a cheer; here, at last, was the plus side of Dr Beeching’s new railway, a modern network able to look its Swiss or West German equivalents in the (sans serif) face.

  What this corporate image would be like emerged in stages over the next two years. In June 1964 a blue-liveried prototype train dubbed XP64 began running between King’s Cross and Leeds, its new-built diesel locomotive adorned with an unfamiliar emblem rather like a two-way arrow. It was then announced that this mysterious emblem – derided by some for its suggestion of coming-or-going indecision, or for looking like a bit of barbed wire – was to be the universal symbol of British Rail, as British Railways was renamed at the start of 1965. Later, it was decreed that all passenger trains would be painted in a slightly darker version of the XP64 blue shade (all-over Rail Blue for local services, Rail Blue with a light grey band around the windows for main line trains). Carriages in the old regional colours would no longer appear. By a further ruling, locomotives and multiple units were to have full yellow ends, for easy visibility out on the line – the equivalent of the red buffer beams sported by BR’s fast-vanishing steam engines. What railway enthusiasts call the ‘Blue Period’ was on its way.

  The double arrow was the creation of Gerry Barney, then a twenty-one-year-old employee at the Design Research Unit. By the 1960s the DRU was the favourite port of call for any large organisation seeking to transform its corporate image. A private consultancy, it had been co-founded in the 1940s by an unlikely triumvirate comprising the anarchist poet-critic Herbert Read, an ad-man named Marcus Brumwell and the Russian-born architect and industrial designer Misha Black (1909–88). Its central place in the history of British public design is often overlooked, despite a client list that included the Festival of Britain, shipping companies, breweries, airlines and even the post-Pick London Underground, for whom the DRU acted as consultants on the Victoria Line. Misha Black in particular became quite a power in the land, combining his DRU work with a professorial chair of industrial design at the Royal College of Art.

  The Design Research Unit was not the only outside body helping to transform old British Railways into new British Rail. A system of universal signage was also introduced, finally doing away with regional colour-coding. The signs were lettered in the Rail Alphabet, a sans serif typeface designed by Richard ‘Jock’ Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. After a spell at the DRU, Kinneir had set up his own design practice in 1956. One early commission was the signage for the new Gatwick Airport. Soon after, he was appointed chief designer to the Advisory Committee on Traffic Signs on Motorways, with Calvert as his assistant. Breaking with tradition, Kinneir recommended mixed-case rather than wholly upper-case lettering, arguing that this was at once easier for the motorist to read and more in tune with the spirit of post-war Britain, which had ‘moved on from the Victorian concept of empire’. The resulting road signs were lettered in Kinneir and Calvert’s new Transport font, beginning with white texts on a blue or green ground for motorways and A-roads, then from 1963 on minor roads, in black on white. BR’s version was a slightly weightier development of this Transport font, with closer spacing between the letters. When used on station signs, it likewise appeared in black on white. The new mixed-case signs were rarely large, and there were no direct equivalents of the old super-sized signs at the platform ends. Passengers hurtling through stations now had to rely on other landmarks to work out their location. The railways’ ferry services – renamed Sealink in 1970 – were brought into line too. So that the top arrow would always appear to point towards the bows, a mirror image of the standard BR symbol was used on the port side of their red funnels. Across the sea, BR’s Transport font was adopted in 1971 by the Danish State Railways – a reversal of the usual direction of flow of modernist public design.

  The correct proportions of the British Rail symbol, from BR’s Corporate Identity Manual, 1968

  New signage was just one aspect of a continuing campaign of rationalisation. Also in the management’s cross hairs were the plonked-down-anywhere assemblages of kiosks and stalls that cluttered up larger stations – what the architect Donald Insall in 1967 called the ‘self-righteous little platform “buildings”, each with its individual anxiety to appear respectable and weather-worthy’. The resulting jumble is captured in the opening minutes of the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964): the Fab Four elude screaming fans by dodging behind poster hoardings and into telephone boxes and photo booths, intercut with shots of their long-suffering manager as he grapples with a plastic-wrapped pu
rchase from a giant milk-vending machine. (The departure station is meant to be Liverpool Lime Street, but London’s underused Marylebone terminus did duty for both ends of the fictional journey.)

  Overall, the aims of BR’s station campaign were essentially positive and humane: clarity, ease and visual restfulness for the traveller, improved morale for the staff. The renovations were also meant to reveal and celebrate the lines of historic station buildings. However, the impact was sometimes vandalistic by the standards of present-day conservation, as decorative details were shaved off or rendered over. New railway architecture was not always inspiring either. The best sequences belonged to the all-too-rare electrification programmes of the period, as on the West Coast main line or the Lea Valley route in Hertfordshire. The firm modernist lines, expansive glazing and generous circulation spaces at stations such as Coventry, Stafford and Broxbourne still convey this sense of purposeful progress. The worst included the bleak platform shelters already described, but also some fully staffed buildings. Among the more dispiriting were those of the Southern Region after 1965. For smaller reconstruction jobs, the region adopted an off-the-peg steel-framed system known as CLASP – an acronym of Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme – which had been developed for schools in Hertfordshire in the 1950s. These boxy, flat-roofed CLASP stations varied in size and facilities, but the effect was of interchangeable uniformity, done on a shoestring and without specific railway character. Other rebuilt stations had speculative office blocks attached; even proud Swindon sprouted a twelve-storey office slab. No wonder that the railway enthusiasts’ press in the 1970s began to celebrate the survival of station signs, benches and other details from the days of the old companies – anything to distract from the homogeneous, cool-blooded paternalism of BR’s corporate image.