Great Railway Stations No. 22, York

Many years ago Michael Palin pointed out the association between railway towns and footballing mediocrity. There are exceptions - Derby and more recently Brighton have played in the Premier League, but for York, Darlington, Crewe, Gateshead, Doncaster, Swindon, Eastleigh, Ashford and Horwich, success on the pitch has been hard to come by. Not to mention Newton Abbot, Melton Constable and Woodford Halse.  The railway arrived in York long before football was organised into leagues and the North Eastern Railway built a station of epic proportions, in the process demolishing significant portions of the old city walls in the casual manner that Victorians displayed toward ancient relics that got in the way of progress and profits.  York was well connected with both East Anglia, the Midlands and the industrial North West from its position on the main route linking London with Edinburgh and developed into a major railway town.

The station we see today dates mostly from 1877 and a modest exterior of no great merit is no guide to what lies within.  A curving track dictated 13 curving platforms and a triple span curving roof built to awesome proportions. Polychromed Corinthian capitals support the roof and tapering iron ribs, elegantly perforated to save weight.  Spandrels are decorated with the letters NER (for the North Eastern Railway) and the white rose of Yorkshire. The roof trusses make a glorious sight soaring overhead in repetition, especially when viewed from the station footbridge. On platform 4, to the right of the entrance is a repurposed signal box that contains a WHS shop and a café above. Bracketed to the roof structure over the steps to the footbridge is a massive clock with three faces.

The other great station built by the North Eastern Railway with a broad curving roof is Newcastle Central, completed in 1850 at which date it had 6 platforms. Following a series of expansions, by 1877 when York opened, Newcastle had 12 platforms (by 1892 there were 15). Interestingly though Newcastle is listed at Grade I by Historic England, York is listed at Grade II*. Newcastle has by far the best entrance (designed by John Dobson) and there is nothing at York to equal the extended sweep of the curving portico with its catering and retail services at Newcastle.  Despite the York Tap’s interior of restrained elegance, it’s easily upstaged by the scale and ceramic splendour of the Centurion Bar at Newcastle.  But having recently visited both stations on the same day, my impression is that a comparison of the train sheds alone favours York in terms of magnitude where the slender iron ribs almost deceive the eye into anticipating its imminent launch into the stratosphere. For a better written and more detailed comparison, I recommend this from the great Beauty of Transport blog.

 

London Stations - Southwark (Jubilee Line)

Opened in 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) to Stratford, Southwark has a unique design thanks to the physical constraints of its site close to Waterloo East, the only station to which it has a direct link.  Sir Richard MacCormac, who designed the controversial  Hampstead home of Thierry Henry, was the architect and somehow came up with a subdued theatrical presentation that combined spatial intrigue with formal elegance, all of which is achieved in an understated way, free of grandiose gestures and set pieces.

The ground level entrance is a compact homage to Charles Holden and his preference for circular ticket halls (Arnos Grove, Southgate etc), from which escalators descend to an unexpected  tall and top lit concourse. On one side is a shimmering deep blue wall of triangular glazed tiles, opposite is an austere block built wall pierced by openings for up and down escalators - the sight of the escalators folded into steep dark apertures is strangely unsettling as if they were links to a sinister underworld.  The blue wall is the work of Alexander Beleschenko and has the effect of leading the eye upwards following the tonal trajectory to the crescent of light overhead.  For Simon Jenkins writing in Britain’s 100 Best Stations (Penguin, 2017), Southwark is the jewel of the JLE and he describes it as “idiosyncratic and hard to place in the modernist spectrum”. 

 

Past and Present No. 13: Berlin Bülowstraße Bhf

The station at Bülowstraße was on Berlin’s first U-Bahn line and opened in 1902.  It is now on line U2 on a short section of elevated track that runs from Gleisdreieck as far as Nollendorfplatz after which it continues underground. Despite heavy war damage and a 20 year period out of use (1972-1993) due to geo-politics, the building exterior is as close to original condition as any other example of its age.  Comparison with the period postcard shows that little has been lost other than ornamental flourishes on the train shed and some decorative ironwork.  Bruno Möhring (1863-1929), Jugendstil specialist and skyscraper enthusiast, was the architect - elsewhere in the city he designed the Swinemünder Brücke (1902-1905) that crosses the railway tracks to the east of the station at Gesundbrunnen. Another of Möhring’s notable achievements - the Jugendstil Machine Hall at Zeche Zollern colliery in Dortmund - was featured in this blog in 2017 and can be seen here.

 

Great Railway Stations No. 21, Penzance

The westward rails run out at Penzance, there’s nowhere else to go except back.  After 326 miles from Paddington it’s the end of the line. A first station opened in 1852 and in 1859 it was connected to London with the opening of the Royal Albert Bridge across the River Tamar. In 1876 a new and larger station was built and for a century or so, the Cornish Main Line was the first choice of travellers and holiday makers heading for the resorts of the far South West. When traffic declined sharply as passengers piled into family cars for the journey west, rail managers responded by cutting services and track work to balance the books.  Today’s station is substantially the layout built by the GWR in 1937 but despite all the rebuilds and extensions nobody ever thought it worth providing the sort of grand entrance its importance might have merited.  The single modest entrance to the cramped concourse is via the side of the building.  Only the overall roof offers any sense of occasion.  If the Thatcher government had implemented the recommendations of the Serpell Report in 1983 there would now be no railway lines in Cornwall (or Devon and Somerset for that matter).

The overview below of Penzance Station approximates the vantage point of Stanhope Forbes when he painted "A Terminus in the West" in 1925 when it was a 2 platform station. The GWR commissioned Forbes to make paintings of Cornish subjects for publicity purposes and the Penzance station painting is now in the collection of the National Railway Museum. Forbes was born in Dublin where his father was manager of the Midland Great Western Railway of Ireland suggesting an affinity with railway subjects. He also produced poster designs for the LMS in his characteristically robust realism style, all of which brought some relief from the pilchards and fisherfolk.  Penzance is a station to be valued for its remoteness, its individuality - the only overnight sleeper train to run in England terminates here - and the blunt fact that there’s no further to go.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 112, Starcross

Captain George Peacock was born in 1805 into a naval family in Exmouth. He served in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy as well as pursuing a career as a surveyor and inventor.  In 1831-32 when sailing in the Royal Navy in South America he surveyed some potential  routes for a future Panama Canal.  The value of his pioneering work was recognised by de Lesseps 50 years later when the canal was finally constructed.  Four years later he surveyed the Corinth Isthmus and proposed a route for a canal, for which he was, many decades later, honoured by the Greek sovereign. By 1840 he was sailing with the Pacific Steam Navigation Company in South America for whose benefit he set about developing business opportunities. In Chile he established the first coal mine in the continent, after which he explored nitrates in Chile and located guano deposits in Peru.  In 1841 he supervised the construction of the first railway on the west coast of South America. Inventions were many and various, including an improved screw propellor for steamships, a desalination treatment for sea water on board ship, an early form of life jacket and anti-fouling paint for the protection of iron hulled ships.

Not content with all this, after retirement to Starcross on the Exe Estuary he designed and built the Swan of the Exe in the 1860s, a 10 berth sailing yacht in the form of a swan, equipped with two large wings that served as sails. Internal fixtures and fittings were said to be comparable with those in a First Class railway carriage. Four small swan-shaped launches were built, one of which, known as Cygnet was employed to ferry passengers from the shore to the yacht and can be seen in these postcards.  This eccentric vessel became a celebrity in the Exe Estuary and was written up in the press.  By the time these postcards were on sale the Peacock Swan was over 50 years old and in the care of his descendants.  There’s a mass of conflicting information about its ultimate fate, some witnesses claim to have seen it afloat in the 1930s after which it seems to have become unseaworthy and downgraded to the status of garden ornament. Cygnet did survive and is now on display at the Museum of Topsham on the opposite bank of the Exe.  Artist and designer Enid Marx (1902-98) made a colour linocut of the Starcross swans in 1936 that can be seen by following this link.