Treasures saved from British Rail’s iconoclasts
Anyway, among the 10 five-star stations in Sir Simon’s list, the only one not a metropolitan behemoth like York or Paddington is Wemyss Bay, built in 1903 by the dominant Scottish railway architect, James Miller, for passengers from Glasgow to catch the ferry to the Isle of Bute. Not only is it one of the few stations that Sir Simon thinks a coherent work of art, but it could shift a trainload of passengers from platform to ferry in five minutes. Miller, who had studied crowd management in America, had travellers at Glasgow Central debouching from darkness up a slope from Gordon Street into the hopeful light of his concourse, lit by the glassroof of a reused train shed.
At Wemyss Bay, Pevsner’s architectural guide sees “sinuous skeletal geometries, effulgent with light filtered through filigree roofs”. From a central drum, the station roof ’s “tentacles coil along the rail tracks as platform canopies, and spill on to the pier in a slow-ramping gallery of light”. Sir Simon generally chooses less lyrical language for his own clear-eyed judgments.
But a good game to play, as must be intended, is to see if he has included one’s own favourites. Yes, here’s Ribblehead, and here’s Hull. And here is Whitby, from the archway of whose booking hall one remembers seeing the masts of fishing vessels in the harbour, as in the 19th-century photographs of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe. The boats remain, though the platforms “much blighted by seagulls, have had their view of the harbour unkindly blocked by a supermarket in the old goods yard. It is a small price to pay for so splendid a location”. Well, I don’t know about that.
Sir Simon’s enthusiasm agrees with the historian Christian Barman’s judgment: “No country in the world has a collection of minor stations that begins to compare.” None, we are told, “has a Stamford, a Box Hill or an Eggesford”. Again, I don’t know if that’s true. Spain has an astonishing variety of stations, from Toledo’s breathtaking Moorish roof to Avila’s strange mural-filled booking-hall. Or if those aren’t minor enough, think of the rusticated domesticity of Puebla de Sanabria or the displaced Moroccan charms of Babilafuente in Old Castile. The ruination of so many Spanish stations is even more tragic than our own Devastation, for they lost more.
No matter. Stamford is lovely. Built in a Railway Tudor style near the River Welland in the 1840s from the stone that makes the town such a joy, it sports stone slates on gabled roofs and a bellcote humbly reminiscent of the Abbot’s Kitchen in Glastonbury, topped by a lively weather vane. The great loss from the station buildings recently has been Robert Humm’s railway bookshop, which has moved into the town. It had kept the place occupied and vandal-resistant.
Sir Simon’s skies tend to be blue and he shows no abandoned stations or platforms bared of all but a windowless smelly metal hut seemingly designed for passengers bound for the Gulag. Privatisation, he argues, saved station buildings.
“Historic buildings went from liability to marketing asset,” he says. “The renovation of Paddington in 2000 was like that of a cathedral.” There was no more talk of managed decline. Look at the figures. In 1947 there were 30million passengers and in 1982, 17million, but by 2015 numbers had soared to 64million.
We are not out of the woods. Waterloo possesses Britain’s largest expanse of glass roofs – 20 acres – but the station, Sir Simon regrets, is “polluted by commerce”, with a gantry of information boards and advertisements blotting out the view. I fear worse. As Simon Bradley points out in his enjoyably learned chapter on stations in The Railways (2015), much of the station is unprotected statutorily. Railway stations were begotten by commerce and may be killed by it, too.
Was BR ‘the biggest corporate vandal since the dissolution of the monasteries?’