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Architecture

62. The exterior of West Kensington

3 November 2012
Architecture, District line, Numbers 51-75, Zone 2
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The sun always shines on Charles HoldenA bit of luck with the clouds, plus a bit of derring-do with the traffic, led to this picture. Granted, the station is strutting rather shamelessly in the light. All its finery is on display. But what’s not to love? West Kensington spends its life squeezed among buildings squatter in size and inferior in style, a plucky player in the jamboree of architecture that unfurls along the North End Road. Why begrudge it an occasional moment in the sun?

Go, West!Vehicles pummel the tarmac yards from the entrance. It’s possibly one of the least best locations for a generous slab of between-the-wars Charles Holden. You can’t fully appreciate it on your way in or out. You have, like an aesthetically-picky aircraft, to be on the right approach.

And one of these approaches is, to be granted, not especially practical if you’re hastening for a train:

Barbed remarksBarbed wire had to be navigated to take this picture. No, there was no trespassing involved. And there was no loss of dignity either – only a few stitches.

You can see how West Kensington dwells in less than exceptional street-level surroundings. But it’s always nice to come across a bit of the Underground’s lower anatomy exposed for perusal.

That’s a fine set of alcoves, as the draughtsman said to the stationmistress.

61. The Thames crossing at Putney Bridge

29 October 2012
Architecture, District line, Numbers 51-75, Zone 2
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Nought but crossesFor the most part, all you get to see of the Thames while on an Underground train is its reincarnation as a cartographically-challenged blue line on a map above the head of the person sitting opposite. And even this wasn’t possible for a short period a few years ago, before wiser heads prevailed and all was soon again for the best in the best of all possible diagrammatically-realised worlds.

It’s even more exciting, therefore, when the actual Underground meets the actual Thames in the open air, which it does only twice, at Kew and here, by Putney Bridge station.

This is the Fulham railway bridge, whose splendour can be sampled either when you’re rattling over it or, and this is the real treat, ambling alongside it. For not only is this a rail crossing, it is also a pedestrian crossing, thereby allowing the spectator a close-up view of London’s two most agreeable forms of transport going about their business atop each other.

That’s not meant to sound voyeuristic, though frankly anybody loitering in a place like this with a camera isn’t exactly an innocent bystander. And yes, I did have to do quite a lot of loitering to get a shot that was free of people using the bridge for walking rather than ogling.

See? Span!It was designed by a former assistant of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and it shows.

Iron works - as it always doesThe bridge was built between 1887 and 1889 for the London and South Western Railway, and got sympathetically refurbished just over 100 years later. It’s still in pretty good condition, and bears the twin reassurances of intelligent craftmanship and tasteful embellishment.

By defying logic and allowing your brain to process information from an illogical point of view, i.e. suspended above water, bridges inevitably alter your mood. A bridge that doesn’t entertain a continual procession of traffic, with unending, uncompromising noise, leavens this process with beauty.

In a location like this particular Thames crossing, in the silences between the romantic roar of passing trains, notions percolate, fancies take hold and ideas take flight.

Like how the river commands a pace of life unlike anywhere else in London. Like how it has become inseparable from people’s internal imprint of the Underground.

And like how it’s fun to have carriages pass alongside you above eye level: a hedgehog’s view of a train, only safer.

Mind THIS gap

60. The concourse at Gants Hill

26 October 2012
Architecture, Central line, Numbers 51-75, Zone 4
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Gants for the memoryArchitecture was one of the few things the Soviet Union got right*.

For Cold War connoisseurs, a quick flash of a Zil lane or a snatched view of a towering tenement can stir the senses almost as potently as the opening of The Third Man or that bit in Octopussy when giant red arrows run amok over western Europe.

But Londoners don’t have to rely on photographs or travel brochures or even journey all the way to the former kernel of the Warsaw Pact to get a whiff of your actual Comintern chintz.

A whole 50 years before Sting and Billy Bragg tried to promote detente through song, the staff of London Underground were doing just that with slide rules. The likes of Charles Holden gave the Soviet authorities a big hand in helping realise the Moscow Metro, the first dazzling chunk of which opened in 1935.

With its gargantuan vaults, colourful tiling and chandeliers, it’s easy to understand why it proved so popular with the locals: here, at last, was a socialist paradise that a) most people could afford and b) didn’t involve mud and marching about.

Holden and co didn’t have a trouble-free trip to the USSR, being (inevitably) accused on several occasions of spying, sabotage and good old-fashioned imperial treachery. But Charles went on to commemorate the experience in a station on our own London Underground – one that, ironically, it took the assistance of Stalin and several million Russians to get finished.

More than a Hill of beansWithout the efforts of the USSR in helping win the second world war, Gants Hill station may never have got to look like this.

It was started before 1939 but got put on hold for the duration of the conflict, bits of it ending up doubling as air-raid shelters and workshops for the manufacture of munitions. Only when war was over could Holden resume work and put the finishing touches to one of his greatest creations.

Vaulting ambitionIt’s maddening that such a fabulous building is not right in the heart of London where millions could and would lap up its majesty. Instead it’s tucked away on a branch of the Central line up in Redbridge.

How typical of someone like Holden to lavish such charm and imagination on a place so far from the ostensible “cultural heart” of the capital. How frustrating for someone who wishes they could sit and gaze up at its spectacular design more regularly than once every few months.

Still, Holden’s magic is scattered liberally through suburbs all round the outskirts of Greater London, so if you’re one of those who – wisely – lives at safe remove from the city centre, you’re never that far from a slice of wonder. Somewhere like Gants Hill confirms my prejudices about all the best Underground architecture lying far outside Zone 1.

Up the uplighterI could go into even more detail about Gants Hill, but I’ve already saluted its platform clocks and miniature roundels, and if I didn’t stop now, I wouldn’t know where to.

Ура!

*That, and not killing Shostakovich. Oh, and turning their ships around on 25 October 1962.