GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY ARCHITECTURE IN COLOUR

VOLUME 1 BUILDINGS FROM BRUNEL TO BEECHING

Evocative and well produced. Nothing of note.

Back in 1980 when my book GWR Country Stations was published there were grave doubts that a book about minor stations, which included lots of black and white photographs of abandoned or derelict railway buildings, would find any kind of a market. We need have had no doubts, as demand kept it in print for nearly 20 years. Now, in these more enlightened times, comes a book in similar vein but large format and lavishly illustrated in colour throughout. For me, what makes this volume particularly attractive is that the photographers (among them author, Crump, and railway artist Sean Bolan) seem to have been hot on my heels in their visits to stations that had, mostly, been closed by Beeching. Here we have the story of the smaller GWR stations traced from the designs of Brunel, through buildings that are long gone. For instance, Brunel’s Elizabethan style (of which the only pure survivor is Culham) is here represented by Minety & Ashton Keynes. It is illustrated already closed and with the platform being torn up. I must have been there only a short time earlier, as in my black and white photograph, the platform is intact. Later on, at the exquisite Berks & Hants Extension Railway station at Savernake Low Level, our photographs are almost identical save for our respective cars on the forecourt! Accordingly, this is a book which takes me back in a way that nothing before has really done, to the days that were a mad scramble to beat the bulldozers by driving 1,500 miles in a week doing nothing but ‘bashing’ stations, most of them closed. So, what’s covered? There’s Brimscombe, which I missed, and the Italianate chalet at Mortimer in its GWR state with slate roof and later restored to Brunel condition with red pantiles. It was in this condition that I once judged it for the Best Preserved Station Competition. Heyford, later dismantled by the Great Western Society, is well covered. Let’s hope that one day it will be rebuilt, and there’s the tragedy of Stonehouse, a 1970s loss that should never have been. In 172 pages, some with two pictures, most with just one, the author covers both GWR-built stations and those inherited from a variety of private companies, from Brunel to the severe Art Deco Parson Street.

A personal favourite? Perhaps the Banbury & Cheltenham Direct line, of which two long-gone stations, King’s Sutton and Hook Norton, are illustrated. I cut my hand and lost a ring, climbing through a broken window at nearby Adderbury. For me, and anyone of my generation interested in the whole railway rather than just the locomotives, every picture will evoke a memory.

Apart from one or two pictures pushed just a little too large for the original quality, and the rather minimal coverage of the Severn Valley lines, I can’t fault it. (CJL)