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Tag Archives: Charles Holden

34. The old platforms at Highgate

8 July 2012
Architecture, Northern line, Numbers 26-50, Zone 3
4 Comments

Platform? Shoo!Once there were grand plans for Highgate station. Once it was intended to be a spectacular multi-storey interchange, with entrances on three different levels and platforms above and below ground, all housed within a shimmering giant of a building designed by Charles Holden. Once this was to be the hub of the Northern Heights. Once this was to have been very special indeed:

Highgate to heavenInstead, no-one departs and no-one arrives. It is a ghost station. Platforms and buildings survive, but no passenger train has passed this way since 1954.

The desperate poignancy of this location is compounded by the sight and sound of people flocking into that bit of the Highgate interchange that did get finished: the deep-level Underground platforms, from where travellers today have a choice of two, but only two, destinations: north to East Finchley or south to Archway.

Once you could catch a train from this place to five other destinations. Now, if you want a connection to Cranley Gardens, or Muswell Hill, or Alexandra Palace, or Crouch End, or Stroud Green, you must look elsewhere. The nerves and sinews of the railway network at Highgate have snapped and decayed; the infrastructure is still, wistfully, maddeningly, intact:

The last train has already departedTrains first came through here in 1867. The Underground arrived in 1939. But so did the second world war, along with matters more pressing than the realisation of a triple-decked suburban transport interchange.

What we’re left with today is the top and bottom layers of that triple-decked sandwich, but no middle. There is a gaping hole. You enter or exit Highgate station above the disused platforms, then – via steps (down) or escalator (up) – pass directly over and around them to get to or from the deep-level Underground.

But you can see them – quite well, as it happens, though you can’t get quite near enough to enjoy a clear view.

And there is one unexpected treat. The former entrance to the station, along with the cottage once belonging to the stationmaster, is beautifully maintained and tended:

Station masteryLife, of sorts, still goes on at old Highgate station. And I must say, I’m rather glad.

A rockery runs through it

32. The miniature roundels at Gants Hill

3 July 2012
Central line, Designs, Numbers 26-50, Zone 4
2 Comments

Baby roundelLike a film camera slowly pulling back and building up for the big reveal, I am holding off from celebrating the full glory of Charles Holden’s Gants Hill for a just a bit longer.

Instead, after first concentrating on the platform clocks, I have zoomed out a little more, to bring into view the dainty Underground logos that sporadically line the walls of the station’s concourse:

Vaulting ambitionlgnore, if you can, the plastic bag lying on the floor and focus your gaze on those tiny Underground symbols embedded within the tiles on each of the pillars. They deserve their own moment of glory. For I imagine they are barely glimpsed, at least knowingly, and let alone acknowledged.

Granted, these petite designs can’t really complete with what else is going on by way of architecture inside Gants Hill (of which more another time). Yet in their own way they are discreetly charming and rather becoming: attributes to which all the very finest parts of the Underground successfully aspire.

They’re also cute, in a statutory kind of way. Apologies if that sounds vaguely perverse. But I do love Gants Hill station. It’s the Muscovite modernist monolith that keeps on giving.

Back, further back...

30. The stained glass at Uxbridge

23 June 2012
Designs, Metropolitan line, Numbers 26-50, Piccadilly line, Zone 6
6 Comments

Colour me smittenI think this might be the only station on the Underground that has stained glass (though I’m more than happy to be proved wrong).

The three panels sit above the exit and are only visible to people leaving the station: a fitting location for what is essentially a translucent multi-coloured equivalent of a “Welcome to Uxbridge” slogan:

Which window shall we go through today?They were created by the Hungarian artist Ervin Bossányi, who emigrated to the UK in 1934: just four years before Uxbridge station was rebuilt in its present form to a design by Charles Holden.

During a hugely successful career in this country Bossányi would make stained glass for, among others, the University of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum and York Minster.

But the three designs he produced for Holden must count statistically as his most viewed – and perhaps simultaneously, like Oliver Hill’s bus station at Newbury Park and Eric Aumonier’s archer at East Finchley, his most under-appreciated, by virtue of their home being not an imperious seat of learning or popular tourist attraction but an ordinary railway terminus.

Of course I would argue that Uxbridge is anything but ordinary, and I’ll return to rave about some of its other stunning features another time.

For now I’ll merely sing the praises of this trio of handsome gems, which depict, from left to right: the arms of the old Middlesex County Council, an institution abolished by Tory minister Keith Joseph in the early 1960s; the arms of the Basset family, esteemed local landowners of centuries’ standing; and a historic emblem of Buckinghamshire.

And were there ever need for a more contemporary representation, may I suggest something to do with Press Gang, which was filmed in Uxbridge and which remains the finest children’s TV drama series ever made.