By the ’fifties, the old coaching view of railways was out of date. They were establishing an architecture of their own and as keenly as Tractarians and Evangelicals they joined in the Battle of the Styles, Classic v. Gothic. On the whole the Classic style won. Euston, long a pioneer in railway architecture, set the tone with the Euston Great Hall which was completed in 1849. It was the joint design of old Philip Hardwick and his son Philip Charles Hardwick. Never had there been and never has there been since in England so magnificent a piece of railway architecture. This huge hall is now ruined with filthy little kiosks and enquiry bureaux built in a jazz-modern style by the L.M.S. But not even these destroy its proportions and it is still possible to note its double staircase, its rich ceiling, its figured consols supporting the ceiling and carved by John Thomas, who made the figures and bosses in the Houses of Parliament. At the top of the staircase, and not open to the public, is the room for the Shareholders’ General Meetings, an untouched specimen of Roman Revival of the late ’forties. This sumptuous hall and offices set the fashion for railway architecture. Even the chairs of waiting rooms and desks in the offices had a Roman grandeur about them, executed in oak and mahogany, solid and heavy as a Christmas dinner. To compare with Euston, there is nothing. Other lines as they built their termini and chief suburban stations went in for classic, but the classic style preferred was that of the French Renaissance. It may be seen in those stations of the ’sixties, Charing Cross, Cannon Street, Broad Street, Farringdon Street, Aldersgate, Highbury, Bow, Camden Town, and it even survived into the next decade when Holborn Viaduct Station was built.
The architect of Charing Cross and Cannon Street was Edward Middleton Barry, a son of Sir Charles, the architect of the Houses of Parliament. Edward’s masterpiece is undoubtedly the Charing Cross Hotel (1864). I know few pleasanter meeting places than the first floor of that building. A broad staircase leads to corridors done in the manner of Sir John Soane, unexpectedly Graeco-Roman when there is so much French Renaissance about the exterior. On this floor is the suite of rooms I call “the club.” There is a smoking room with bar attached and billiard room adjoining and one can walk on to a balcony, drink in hand, to survey the crowds and trains of the station below. There are horse-hair seats in the smoking room, a bookshelf with a set of Shakespeare and a guide to the Southern Railway, and one has the place to oneself, while all around in stately dining rooms, private luncheons are being held by old-fashioned boards of directors, the Ouse Catchment Board, the Blackwall Tunnel Company, the Tower Hamlets Development Society, the United Kingdom Union of Persecuting Protestants. Much of this activity used to occur at the Cannon Street Hotel (1866) designed by the same architect. The station itself at Cannon Street is a far finer building than that at Charing Cross which has been deprived of its original semi-circular roof. Barry’s towers and cupolas at the river opening of Cannon Street compare well with Wren’s steeples and blend this great structure into the steepled outline of the City.
The only time the Great Western went in for Classic in a big way was when it employed Philip Charles Hardwick to design the Paddington Hotel in the ’sixties. The dining room here with its curving caryatids, probably by John Thomas, was almost up to the standard of Euston’s Graeco-Roman office buildings. Just before the Hitler war this dining room, or “Coffee Room” as it was called, was ruined by being streamlined with plywood in a jazz-modern manner, so that it is now like any semi-smart new restaurant. The Great Western otherwise has been fairly loyal to Tudor, a style which it first adopted at Temple Meads, Bristol, and still employs there. The only nearly untouched examples of a Tudor station on the London to Bristol line which survive are Shrivenham and Box. There was an unfortunate period in the nineteen-thirties when the Great Western went “Modern” in the Great West Road sense of that word, with its new office buildings at Paddington.It adopted at this time too that hideous monogram on its engines. When Paddington Station was rebuilt the company employed Digby Wyatt on architectural effects.
The richest Gothic station is, of course, St. Pancras (1868). The enormous iron and glass roof with a clear span of 240 feet, 100 feet high and 700 feet long, makes the trains and platforms below it look like a model railway. It was designed by P. W. Barlow, the Civil Engineer. The tie beams that hold it are below the station and form a roof for the enormous vaults, which are under the whole area of the station. The hotel which is attached to the station, but not related to it, is by Sir Gilbert Scott. Ferguson much objected to it. “There is no proportion between the shed and its uses, and everything looks out of place, and most of all the Gothic mouldings and brick work, borrowed from the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, which thrusts itself between the gigantic iron ribs of the roof.”
Ferguson did not like the Gothic Revival, and even Sir Gilbert does not seem to have been wholly enthusiastic about St. Pancras Hotel. Never one to underestimate his own work, he says of it: “My own belief is that it is possibly too good for its purpose, but having been disappointed, through Lord Palmerston, of my ardent hope of carrying out my style in the Government offices, and the subject having been in the meanwhile taken out of my hands by other architects, I was glad to
