Many of London’s smaller theatres preserved a charming quality of an Edwardian or late Victorian drawing room, with their whitewood or mahogany, plush seats and watered silk panels and electroliers. In the cheaper parts of these houses were the Dickensian fishtail gaslights in wire cages in long stone staircases and passages. But these little theatres of which the Criterion and the Comedy were outstanding examples, have been stippled, pickled, shaved, sprayed, chromiumed or simplified according to D.I.A. rules of good taste so as to have lost most of their character. Only the St. James’s survives as a charming period piece.
Fire is, until the next war, better controlled than before. The enemy of old-fashioned theatres today is fashion. Fashion has about it that impermanence which suits the impermanent architecture of entertainment. But if ever a man wants to study a popular style exaggerated to its vulgarest terms, let him look at the decoration of the buildings of entertainment. Cherubs will have chubbier cheeks and bottoms, caryatids have more protuberant breasts, art nouveau water lilies be more attenuated, cubes and triangles outstrip the ugliest followers of the worst of Picasso’s cubist period, and if the word goes round “be functional” wall spaces will be plainer, chromium shinier, off-white be more off-white in or upon the theatres, cinemas, music halls, exhibition buildings, bandstands, piers and restaurants of the kingdom.Only the fairs survive.
9 LONDON RAILWAY STATIONS
THE study of railway stations is something like the study of churches. It can be turned into archæological detection work. For piscina, read cast-iron lamp bracket; for arcading, read girder construction; for transepts, read waiting-rooms; for hangings, read tin advertisements.Then with very little practice anyone with an eye for detail can date the objects inspected.
Picture a disused platform of a rather forgotten station, let us say South Hampstead, the first station after Euston (2½ miles) on the old L.M.S. electric line to Watford. It opens late and shuts early and few people seem to use it. When I was a boy we called it Loudon Road and the booking office building stood, as it still stands, looking rather like a small mid-Victorian brick Vicarage, harmonising happily with the Gothic fancies of this lilac-shaded part of St. John’s Wood. I should think from the style of architecture it was built in the late ’seventies by which time enough platforms had been constructed at Euston to make it possible for the London & North Western to run an enlarged suburban service. I have never departed from nor alighted at South Hampstead. Not being modern, my hours are too long either side of the day to take advantage of its times of opening. I prefer to imagine the station. I like to think that it contains the various fittings of a former age for which my eye is always on the watch when I use an unfamiliar station. Perhaps there are some very old tickets in the booking office—a first-class return to Chalk Farm (which would mean going down to Euston and coming back again), would probably be printed with “Loudon Road” and the letters L.N.W.R. Under the treads of the stairs to the platform there may be those tin advertisements saying IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS, IRON JELLOIDS 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. Still in imagination, I walk right down to the end of the platform to the oldest lamp standard, a graceful thing on twisted columns with, perhaps, a six-sided glass cage for the gas-burner and the name of the iron foundry where it was made at the base of its column. Against the station wall there may be tin signs for MAZAWATTEE TEA and the still-familiar black and blue splodge of STEPHEN’S INK on a white ground. And, of course, there will be those two old friends VENO’S LIGHTNING COUGH CURE and DR. J. COLLIS BROWNE’S CHLORODYNE.
Then what waiting rooms may there not be! Gothic Revival cast-iron grates in which no fire has been lighted since the days when a mountain of glowing coal warmed the early-morning pin-striped bottoms of city gentlemen who used this station as the preliminary part of a journey from Boundary Road to Euston, thence by steam train on the inner circle from Euston Square to Aldersgate. (Ah, Aldersgate! alas the Refreshment Room has been bombed, the Refreshment Room at the top of the steps surveying all four platforms from the height of the great semi-circular glass roof, that Refreshment room where, as Mr. John Hayward once pointed out to me, the words AFTERNOON TEAS A SPECIALITY were affixed in letters of white china to the plate-glass window). The walls of the waiting room will be green. The lighting gas. There will perhaps be a framed collection of photographs, “Beauty spots” of the L. & N.W.R.—Killarney; Sackville Street, Dublin; Blarney Castle (the L. & N.W. always liked to give the impression that it owned all the Irish railways); George’s Landing Stage, Liverpool; Bettws-y-coed; Warwick Castle.These will be in sepia with gilt lettering on
