St. Pancras is a station apart, a Royal Station. The old idea that the Midland was the most comfortable railway in the world still holds good despite the strenuous efforts of the L.M.S. to kill it. There is a suburban service, but it is of no importance. I have the impression that St. Pancras is still the aristocratic route to Scotland. Gun-cases and fishing-rods go north with tweed-clad lairds, salmon and game returning in the guard’s van without them. I have little doubt that British Railways will do away with St. Pancras altogether. It is too beautiful and too romantic to survive. It is not of this age. Euston has stolen its trains but not its atmosphere. Except for that concealed platform where the Irish mail leaves of an evening, there is no personality left about the trains from Euston. To the Irish, Euston is the chief of English stations. Even lesser stations on the line are written on their minds for I know of an Irish Peer who woke up during a Wagner Opera at Covent Garden and exclaimed: “Just like Willesden Junction!”
Except for Broad Street, Marylebone is the quietest station. Only two expresses leave it in a day, the “South Yorkshireman” and the “Master Cutler.” There is hardly room for more and the suburban service to Buckinghamshire seems like an after-thought. I have never met anyone who has used one of the Marylebone expresses, but lately I had the pleasure of coming into Marylebone on a semi-express which stopped at Brackley. We rushed through late Victorian cuttings and under bridges of glazed brick, nearly merging with the Metropolitan. When I reached London I found I was one of fifteen passengers.
Paddington has the strongest personality of all the larger London stations. Its passengers are nearly all country people. There is the one exception, a large contingent of South Welsh who seem always to be travelling in trains. There is a lessening section of old-fashioned people, too poor now to travel first, who come up on the cheap day fares from Wiltshire and Gloucestershire to visit the Army and Navy Stores. Relations from further west stay a night or two at the Paddington Hotel. There are some Oxford dons and at holiday times more schoolboys than on any other line. Add to them a final section of commuters who have transformed Newbury and Maidenhead, Reading and Henley into suburbs of London.
I am aware that this attempt at the atmosphere of London stations is sketchy. Sketchy and no doubt unfair, for there must be many to whom King’s Cross and Euston are charming places and others who detest Cannon Street, St. Pancras and Liverpool Street as I do not. To them I apologise, but if I have-caused them to think of these stations as places with the strong personalities that only those who use them can know, I will have achieved my object. To me they are people, and people have sides to their characters that they reveal to some and not to others.
10 NONCONFORMIST ARCHITECTURE
THE church of the medieval village or town was the centre of life. Houses were squalid and uncomfortable and it would have been as odd for a villager to say his daily prayers at home with all the family crawling about the single room, as it would be odd to find a villager saying his prayers on a week-day in the village church today. Church was where one went for everything. Schooling and business in the porch, festivals and plays in the church and churchyard, games in the churchyard (headstones in a graveyard were almost unknown until the seventeenth century and the poor were buried one on top of another in the graveyard, without a coffin, so that the quick danced upon the dead), and only the chancel and guild private chapels and priest’s part were screened off from the noisy, much-used nave, the people’s part of the church.
Nor were the guild chapels entirely apart from the people. The maltsters, let us say, of a district would erect an addition to their Church in honour of the patron saint of malting; they would subscribe for a window depicting the saint’s life, less rich guilds would subscribe to keeping the candles burning, to a panel of stained glass, or a carved figure, or to part of the priest’s stipend or the care or making of vestments. So it happened that the cottager of Catholic England looked on the church as his true home and took the same pride in his little bit of the church as he takes today in a new three-piece suite at home, or as his wife takes in the ornaments on her mantelpiece.
Churches really were the architecture of the people.
Since Elizabeth’s day the church has become more and more remote, in architecture, from the people. The private chapel of the squire’s family became the squire’s pew, and when the squire was sold up in the last century it was cleared away by a “restorer” and became an awkward corner of ill-placed seats filled only on harvest festival or at the British Legion service. The rest of the church became the province of the incumbent and many a country church today is little more than an additional drawing-room for the rector’s wife to which the family at the manor has presented some new but ecclesiastical ornaments.
Yet it is wrong to suppose that the Calvinism of Edward VI, the Romanism of Mary, the compromise effected by Queen Elizabeth, killed people’s interest in God. The continual change in church services, the destruction of many ornaments for which the people had paid and which was part of their life, harmed the Catholic Church in England, and Cromwell nearly killed it. But though they were no longer
