, printed from the Looking at Buildings website on Friday 19th April 2024
Less well known are the stations built for the Southern Railway, which was busy electrifying its London suburban services on which much of its income depended. It followed the Underground in adopting a stripped, Modernist-inspired style, for instance at the rebuilt Surbiton station of 1937-8.
Although the four big private companies were nationalized as British Railways in 1948, their old identities survived within England as separate regions each with their own architects, which encouraged a variety of approaches to station design.
Harlow Town station, which serves one of the New Towns established to relieve pressure on London, has a glass-fronted booking hall with a great shelf-like entrance canopy linked to a broad footbridge or concourse over the platforms. The tower-like blocks rising above it housed lift machinery for handing the small goods such as parcels, an important tributary to railway traffic when the station was built (1959-60).
Oxford Road station in Manchester, rebuilt when the Cheshire suburban lines were electrified in 1960, was more experimental. Three conoidal shells of laminated timber make up the station building, a method chosen because the viaduct on which the lines ran could not take heavy loads. Though modest in scale, it catches something of the poetry of the great Victorian train sheds.
Other large stations were subsumed into rebuilding schemes affecting larger areas of town or city centres, especially after the disappearance of steam enginesGlossary Term [4] in the 1960s removed the need for large volumes of ventilation space over the tracks. That at Birmingham New Street (1964-71) is notorious for relegating passengers to a gloomy cavern of platforms beneath a concreteGlossary Term [5] slab supporting shops, offices and a car park.
Last updated: Saturday, 25th April 2009