The end for Snow Hill came fast and brutally. Rail staff and passengers were shocked when it was announced that main-line trains would come to an end in the spring of 1967. By 1968 only one service was left in this huge echoing train shed – a single railcar to Wolverhampton which made its way through weeds so high that it was christened the Dandelion Express. Posters peeled and pigeons flapped as the building crumbled. The hotel had already been demolished when the final services ran on 4 March 1972. The journal of the Standard Gauge Steam Trust reported the event in melancholy tone: ‘Now the stage was set for the departure of the very last train of all. As one gazed around, one realised what a great place of activity Snow Hill had been. The imagination returned to the mid-fifties when a “King” or a “Castle” would sweep majestically into Number 7 platform on a London express, or even further back to the sound of troops singing as they went off to war …’
For some years afterwards, the decaying building remained a gaunt citadel of the past as Birmingham turned itself into an infamous concrete jungle. It was just waiting to die. As one local humorist observed, the next whistle to blow would be for the demolition men’s tea break. In the meantime, it languished in various guises – as a car park, a spooky set for films (famously used as a setting in the BBC TV series Gangsters) and a paradise for scavengers, who had a field day stripping out every piece of metal they could lay their hands on.
Snow Hill was not alone in its fate. In many of Britain’s other great cities majestic railway terminals went out of use and lay rotting for years – as one writer put it, ‘like great beached whales in the noonday sun’. Even those that have been saved for other purposes, such as Manchester Central, now preserved as an exhibition hall, have in a real sense ceased to be. Minus the ebb and flow of passengers, the arrival and departure of trains, they are little more than mausolea. The fire and steam that forged them has been doused, leaving them as dead things, devoid of spirit.
In mitigation it may be argued that some were victims of a necessary rationalisation, redundant products of that nineteenth-century railway mania during which rival companies insanely vied to block each other’s moves on the railway chessboard. In Britain as a whole, because of the intense rivalry of the train companies, only four major cities – Newcastle, Aberdeen, Stoke-on-Trent and Carlisle – managed to amalgamate their railway traffic into a single station. Manchester and Glasgow had four central stations, Leeds, Liverpool, Leicester, Belfast, Plymouth and Nottingham three, and Birmingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Bradford and Bath two. Few of these were actually in the city centre, Birmingham New Street, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central being the main exceptions.
Inevitable though it may have been, the cull was still heartless and brutal. Poor Nottingham Victoria, axed in favour of the city’s Midland station in 1967, was the most high-profile victim of Beeching’s destruction of the entire Great Central Railway route to London. Built in 1900 in glowing red bricks and Darley Dale stone, this Victorian extravaganza, with its hundred-foot clock tower, complete with cupola and weathervane, dominated the city centre. Its northern renaissance style ‘would have passed muster for a town hall in some Flemish port’, wrote John Minnis in Britain’s Lost Railways. ‘It was a glorious affair, beautifully proportioned in a slight asymmetry, and its facade given tremendous vigour by the heavy blocking of the paired attached columns at first-floor level and the rhythm set up by the repetition of elegant pedimented gables.’ Praise that might have been accorded to a cathedral, yet the site is now the faceless Victoria Shopping Centre. The tower survives, but these days presides over the emptying of wallets rather than the departure of trains.
Its namesake, Sheffield Victoria, further down the same line, suffered a similarly tragic demise, with the last trains running in December 1970. Never mind that its great glass roof had once been likened to that of the Crystal Palace, that it had been the destination for such famous expresses as the Master Cutler and the Sheffield Pullman or that it was the terminus of one of the most modern and superbly engineered lines in Britain – the Woodhead route across the Pennines to Manchester, electrified only fifteen years before. The politburo at British Railways HQ in London decreed its demolition and there was no reprieve. Now a hotel car park is on the site.
Neither city, though, fared as badly as Liverpool, which lost two grand city-centre stations in the Beeching years. The last trains ran from the palatial Liverpool Exchange in 1977 (World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon stayed for long periods in the hotel there). It too ended up as a car park, although the frontage still survives. Liverpool Central, with its overall glass roof looking like a lesser St Pancras, had a superb position in the heart of the city’s shopping district – no wonder the developers wanted to get their hands on it. I recall its final days at the end of the 1960s, when I used its rare trains to get home to my university hall of residence in the south of the city. By then it was a ghostly, deserted skeleton of a place, where emaciated rats and pigeons had usurped passengers as the main occupants. Feeling sorry for poor Liverpool Central, I rather fancied that by using its largely empty trains rather than the more convenient buses I might help to save the place. What a hope! The final services were withdrawn in April 1972.
Just across the Mersey there was another tragedy when Birkenhead Woodside, terminus of the Great Western Railway’s services to Birmingham and London Paddington, was axed. Never mind that it was praised by Marcus Binney of Save Britain’s Heritage as ‘a station of truly baronial proportions and being worthy of any London terminus’. No matter that the father of the poet Wilfred Owen had once been stationmaster here. The station closed to passengers on 5 November 1967, and its two great curved train sheds were ripped down shortly afterwards.
When Manchester Exchange closed in 1969, the record books had to be rewritten since its link with one of the platforms at the neighbouring Victoria station formed the longest single platform in Europe – 2,238 feet. The platform has gone now and Victoria is diminished, although the mighty wrought-iron single-span roof at Manchester Central, terminus of the old Midland route to London, survives. The station beneath, however, has never seemed happy in its modern role as a conference centre, although it has fared better than that other great terminus of main-line trains from St Pancras, Glasgow St Enoch, all traces of which have been eradicated.
With its gorgeous glass roof, similar to its London and Manchester counterparts, St Enoch’s 1966 closure and subsequent demolition was the grossest act of post-Beeching vandalism north of the border. St Enoch had many fine features, including a special room for travelling salesmen to show off their samples – the only one in Britain. The scandal of its demolition is exacerbated by the fact that the shopping centre which replaced it has been widely reviled – even by many of the architects who design such things.
London was more fortunate, although there were several narrow squeaks. A terrible tragedy at St Pancras was averted in the 1960s when Sir John Betjeman fought British Railways’ plan for demolition – and won. Lavishly refurbished as the London Eurostar terminal, the restored ensemble of George Gilbert Scott’s fairy-tale Gothic hotel and William Barlow’s soaring single-span roof makes it, for many, the finest railway station in the entire world.
There were few tears when Holborn Viaduct closed in 1990 and was replaced by the prosaically named City Thameslink. Its charismatic hotel had already gone in 1963, damaged beyond viable repair in the war and subsumed into a faceless office block. Here was a rare example of a benign demolition, with the introduction for the first time ever of a proper through service for commuters from north to south through central London at the replacement station buried below ground. A sadder loss was the Nine Elms terminus of the old London & Southampton Railway, opened in 1838 but damaged beyond repair by Nazi bombers and demolished in the 1960s.
Far more cruel was the way Broad Street station, in the heart of the City, was killed off in the 1970s – the only major London terminus to be expunged entirely from the landscape. It is hard to belie
ve from the ravaged state in which it ended its life that this splendid Italianate cathedral of the North London Railway once had more passengers than any other London station bar Liverpool Street and Victoria. Armies of clerks commuted through here, while expresses would carry City businessmen to the Midlands, supported by railway typists churning out their memos on the way.
Broad Street’s demise was a case history in how to kill a station. Beeching condemned it in 1963 and the campaign to save it was undermined by a slow war of attrition – services slashed, facilities withdrawn, creeping dereliction. This was a technique used across Britain, deliberate and wanton neglect creating the justification for closure. The Victorian ticket office was shut and an ugly 1950s brick booth slapped up in the concourse. The great wrought-iron and glass roof was hacked down, forcing passengers to brave the elements to get to their trains. At the end, when the last trains ran in June 1986, it was an eerie place with a forest of small trees growing between the neglected platforms
As the inevitable end approached, Betjeman caught the mood, writing in 1972,
There is one station which hardly anyone uses at all – Broad Street, which is given over to ghosts of frock-coated citizens who once crowded the old North London trains from the steam suburbs of Highbury, Canonbury and Camden Town. Often do those sumptuous LMS electric trains swing across from the North London suburbs on that smooth, useless, beautiful journey to Richmond. At no time of day have I known it impossible to find a seat in their spacious carriages. And the frock-coated ones are dead and gone like the rolling stock which carried them, their houses have been turned into flats, their gardens built over by factories. The North London was the last line to use wooden-seated third class carriages as it did on its Poplar branch, now closed, the last line in London to use no trains during church time on a Sunday morning, and within living memory the General Manager of the line refused to allow Smith’s bookstall on Broad Street to sell any vulgar-looking papers. Still the train ran through haunted gas-lit stations, on the most revealing journey London can provide.
But Broad Street was never quite humbled – retaining its dignity to the end even as the facade crumbled – unlike some other historic London stations such as Paddington and Liverpool Street, which did Faustian deals to convert themselves into the railway equivalent of airport retail malls in Faustian exchange for their restoration. Once upon a time the Lawn at Paddington was a spacious area at the end of the platforms where you might meet your great-aunt up from the country; now it has been replaced by an ugly development of shops and bars, dominated by the usual corporate names. Some of these changes were clearly defined in 1995 by a character in Martin Amis’s novel The Information: ‘The railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime, its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and unlimited cappuccino.’ In this sense, Broad Street was the last of the unadulterated grimy old stations, macerated in the world of the traditional railway.
A Broad Street passenger during its last years might have appreciated the words of a writer in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1893, who saw in the great London termini something of the temples of ancient Egypt: ‘Go at night,’ he wrote,
at an hour when no trains are leaving. Walk along [the] platform as far as the first seat and then look back. If you are fortunate enough to catch … a hidden engine belching out clouds of steam that mingle with the fog overhead, it does not need a very powerful imagination to fancy you are in some great temple. The white clouds come in from the altar fire; above it, half lost in vapour is the great clock, its huge round dial like the face of a monstrous idol before which burn in solemn stillness the hanging lamps, silver, white and rose.
O tempora! O mores! But the biggest travesty, the grossest act of barbarism, even bigger than that at Broad Street or Snow Hill, or indeed anywhere else in Britain, was at Euston, whose mighty Doric Arch was demolished in 1962 as the world watched horrified. This, remember, was before Beeching, and had nothing to do with cuts to the railway network. It was a time when architectural philistines stalked the land, seeking out anything Victorian that they could cull in the name of modernity. Never mind the treasures the Victorians gave us – intricately wrought ironwork, sculpted columns, mullioned windows, stained glass, mosaic floors, tiled malls, delicate portes cochères, exquisite stone tracery, clock towers, crenellations, campaniles. Out too with wood-panelled booking halls, friezes, glass canopies, triumphal arches, balustrades, gables, chimneys, turrets, spires, drinking fountains, ornate platform seats, coats of arms, baronial fireplaces, even majestic gentlemen’s conveniences in monumental marble. To the devil with everyone who did not worship at the shrine of functionalism, whose gods were concrete, neon and plastic. Soul and romance were words used only by heretics.
Stations such as Birmingham New Street, Stafford, Plymouth, Swindon, Coventry and many others were rebuilt in the bland, soulless fashion of the day. But it was the new Euston – memorably described as an ‘all-purpose combination of airport lounge and open plan public lavatory’ – that was the supreme symbol of the new brutalism. But why object? In 1947 the Great Western Railway regarded even the possible demolition of Brunel’s masterpiece at Paddington with equanimity. Its prospectus for post-war modernisation cheerfully pointed out that ‘many will miss the Paddington of Brunel and Wyatt and Paxton with its aisles and transepts and its slim wrought iron arabesques … London will be the poorer for its passing; yet London requires that it must go.’
It says much about the relative values of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – as Richards and MacKenzie observe in their social history of the railway station – that ‘where the Victorians modelled their stations on cathedrals, temples and palaces, Modern Man models his on shopping centres and office blocks’. The demolition of Euston station – the world’s first railway terminal in a capital city – ‘signalled conclusively the end of the age of giants and the arrival of the age of pygmies’.
That was precisely how it turned out. Half a century on from the pulling down of the arch and station, I’m sitting writing this in what passes for a public square outside Euston, where scrawny pigeons peck at half-eaten burgers from Ed’s Easy Diner and defecate on the shoulders of the statue of Robert Stephenson. Equally emaciated commuters gasp on their last fag and slurp down a Pret A Manger Americano before heading into the dungeon of the platforms to catch the train to Milton Keynes. I am reminded of the newspaper commentator who wrote that the station design gives the impression ‘of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight’. What a squalid and unprepossessing gateway to the most historic, and one of the busiest, of main lines in the world.
Hard to believe how magnificent it once was. The opening of the terminus of the London & Birmingham Railway on 20 July 1837, according to Betjeman, who would fight in vain more than a century later to save it, was simply the greatest railway event in the world. Euston’s magnificent design reflected the view that the buildings of ancient Greece and Rome radiated a higher nobility – which is exactly how the railway promoters liked to see themselves. Brass-headed moneymen though they were, they were also romantics in the spirit of their time. They quite rightly regarded the railways as achievements without previous parallel, eclipsing everything that had gone before and completely revolutionising society. It was therefore entirely fitting that stations should become the symbols of the new age.
Nothing expressed this better than Euston’s great Doric arch. The railway’s directors saw it as the beginning of a ‘Grand Avenue for travelling between the midland and northern parts of the kingdom – well adapted to the national character of the undertaking’, as they put it to their shareholders. And why not? Napoleon had been trounced and Britain’s rapidly spreading influence confirmed her status as leader of the world.
Philip Hardwick, the Duke of Wellin
gton’s architect, was given the brief to design this gateway ‘from England’s capital and heart, London, to her stomach and toyshop, Birmingham’, as Betjeman put it. The finest hard sandstone in the land was used – lugged in great blocks almost as if for the construction of the Pyramids or Stonehenge. The four great columns of the portico were heroic in themselves – 8 feet 6 inches in diameter at the base, with one cleverly containing a spiral staircase so staff could reach the offices and storerooms hidden inside the pediment. It says much about the lavishness of its construction that the contractors, William, Thomas and Lewis Cubitt, were then invited to build King’s Cross station, although they remarked that ‘a good station at King’s Cross could be built for less than the cost of the ornamental archway at Euston Square’.
The grandeur did not finish with the arch; either side of the portico were pairs of square stone lodges, adorned with flat pilasters. Each lodge had a Doric grand central door, and the whole composition was joined together by a lofty ornamental cast-iron screen of gates by J. J. Bramah, one of the most famous locksmiths of the day. ‘The railway builders were moved by the spirit of the conqueror, and nowhere is this spirit more clearly visible than the portico of Euston,’ wrote the architectural historian Christian Barman. ‘Moving southwards for the attack on London we can see they understood the greatness of their mission. And so when finally they had invaded the greatest city in the world, they built the portico to proclaim as a memorial their victory to posterity. For this portico, though designed in the manner for porches attached to buildings, is by virtue of its starkly isolated position a genuine military arc de triomphe.’
People from across the land flocked to see it. ‘It is seen not as a railway station, but a spectacle,’ wrote one commentator in 1896. Aubrey Beardsley was even more ecstatic when he wrote in 1920, ‘I can never understand why people should seek Egypt in search of the Sphinx and the Pyramids when they can visit Euston station and survey the wonders of the stone arch.’
The Trains Now Departed Page 24