The hotel is now, alas, offices. But the splendid intertwining double staircase of ironwork survives (in the well of this there used to be a Turkish kiosk for coffee) and the huge Arthurian style wallpapers are to be found here and there. The refreshment rooms have all been jazzed and only the station booking hall remains as an untouched Scott interior. Alongside St. Pancras is the Midland goods station whose brickwork is undoubtedly the best in London. Sir Gilbert, like his grandson Sir Giles, was always interested in brick and stonework and for the goods station he had bricks specially made of varying sizes. You may see in the screen wall of the building (with its exquisite iron grilles) that the bricks grow smaller as they go higher, giving an effect of solidity to the wall.
Of the exterior of the hotel I am myself enamoured. The clock tower has always seemed to be a highly picturesque outline and the rows of middle-pointed windows along the whole curving sweep achieve an effect of unity with diversity. As a practical plan for an hotel, the building is appalling. But as an exercise in scale and the skilful use of brick and stone it is unsurpassed in railway architecture. All other Midland stations in London are an anti-climax, as though the company had ruined itself on St. Pancras and had to be content with mere wooden sheds and brick booking halls for the rest of the system. Fenchurch Street, which it took over from the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway, is a humbler affair more in the manner of (and but a few years later than) the Great Northern Railway terminus of King’s Cross.
This building, which Ferguson describes as the more successful and pleasing “plainer sister” of St. Pancras, is entirely the work of the engineer Joseph Cubitt. It was built in 1851 and the materials are white brick, glass and iron. The purpose at once is plain. One great semi-circular archway is for departure, the other beside it is for arrival. Between them on the main front is appropriately placed a clock tower. A colonnade of brick arches runs along the base of this front, between vast brick buttresses, and acts as a shelter for those awaiting their carriages. The booking office is on the departure side of the building and opposite this is a crescent-shaped hotel in a simple white-brick and stone, classic style. Office buildings balance this on the arrival side of the station. The coherence of the design is now much hampered by an underground station and by shops which hide its truthful simplicity from the Euston Road. Ruskin said in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, “Better bury gold in the embankments than put it in ornaments on the stations … Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own, if it were only left to its work.You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.” He must surely have approved King’s Cross, though he makes no specific mention of it. It is certainly the only London station which is pure railway architecture. I have always thought the new Underground stations (except that at Hammersmith) self-consciously simple in comparison with King’s Cross. They are so much aware that they are in the “modern style,” so tastefully arranged with red brick on the street level, and so streamlined that they smack more of the advertising agency than the railway.
King’s Cross started no new style, except at different stations on its own line beyond London. The nearest approach to it, other than Fenchurch Street, is Liverpool Street which was built in the ’seventies. It is civil engineer’s Gothic, rather than architect’s Gothic, and none the worse for that. The Gothic-style iron pillars support many-vistaed arcading, the flattened arch of the roof is crenelated on its own hanging edge and many mouldings and capitals in ironwork are to be found by the careful observer. Indeed, on a foggy evening, when those pear-shaped arc lamps used to hang down low from the roof, casting a purplish-white light, Liverpool Street had quite a resemblance to an ancient abbey.
The last large station to be built in London was Marylebone (1899) for the Great Central Railway. Its buildings are of hard pink midland bricks with yellow terra-cotta dressings and all in Flemish Renaissance style. They look like a public library from Nottingham which has unexpectedly found itself in London. A beautiful description of this station and of the Great Central Railway is to be found in Mr. Hamilton Ellis’s The Trains We Loved. The weakness of the Great Central for gorgeous decorations in its carriages did not extend to stations; but its luxury is commemorated in Colonel Edis’s gorgeous Great Central Hotel on the Marylebone Road. This entirely dwarfs the quiet terminus behind it.
There is no doubt that Marylebone set a new tone to London Railway architecture. Henceforward something more tasteful than the flimsy wooden constructions was considered suitable for suburban stations. The L. & N.W.R. employed the noted domestic architect Gerald Horsley in 1901 to design stations at Harrow and Pinner in a style half-way between that of a bank and a medium-sized country house. Harrow, with its tower, was remarkably successful. Termini were thought to be ornate in the wrong sort of way, too like the Louvre and not enough like Michael Angelo. So there were the great rebuildings in an Edwardian monumental Renaissance manner starting with the L.B. & S.C. in 1908 at Victoria. The most ponderous effort of all was Waterloo with its twenty-three platforms and vast, useless entrance arch, approached by flights of steps unlike Euston, symbolical of nothing. Baker Street by Charles W. Clarke was a quieter rebuilding for the Metropolitan Railway in the neo-Georgian style (1914). Its refreshment rooms are still untouched. The most charming of all the Edwardian and neo-Georgian Renaissance stations is
