Minnis John - Britains Lost Railways

Liverpool Street is one of the great conservation success stories, the present station combining the best of the 18745 station, with its soaring iron roof, with all the convenience that passengers and staff expect of a station today. Inevitably, in the process of reconstruction, there were losses: the roof of the east side extension of 1894 and the charming Edwardian tea rooms that used to run off the footbridge linking the disparate parts of the old station. But what has also gone is something much harder to define, the extraordinary atmosphere of the place. Deep gloomy patches, suddenly lit up by a shaft of light like this one shining on a railway policewoman, were to be found all over the station, especially around the cab road and the booking office, brilliantly captured in a Fox photograph of 27 March 1952. It was this combination of light and shade, adding an element of the sublime, that made Liverpool Street special. Fox Photos/Getty Images

Britains Lost Railways is not an exercise in nostalgia. There is more than enough nostalgia about railways, as a glance through any booksellers catalogue will prove. Some of what is pictured here had to go, and with good riddance it was simply not worth keeping. But much lost railway architecture was so good that, by its destruction, we are all the losers. And not all the losses are tangible. Today, romance is the last thing that comes to mind when waiting for a train at one of the great London termini. They are clean and efficient (certainly compared with fifty years ago) but extremely busy and, above all, incredibly noisy with constant warnings and advice, some necessary, some profoundly irritating, every few minutes.

But it wasnt always like this.

Railway stations were once intensely romantic places. There was a sense of otherness to them, as though they were in some way detached from the outside world. True, there were kiosks of W. H. Smiths, Wymans or John Menzies selling little but newspapers, books and magazines, the stalls of the Empire Fruit Co. and the sweet shops of Maynards. But these were merely a prelude to travel; one did not go to stations for a retail experience to buy stuff. They were not extensions of high streets or Oxford Street. No, they were a point of departure for far-off places, a process accompanied by arcane ritual even into the 1960s, the stationmasters of the great London stations wore silk hats.

It was at the great London termini and provincial stations that one encountered this romance, this sense of possibility, to the full. The names of the trains helped the Royal Scot, the Queen of Scots, the Cornish Riviera Limited, the Cathedrals Express, the Red Dragon, the Golden Arrow, the Atlantic Coast Express as did the names of the steam locomotives themselves Wolf of Badenoch, Hyperion, Quicksilver, Lord of the Isles.

The architecture added to that sense of anticipation. Today, we have bright, even lighting seemingly everywhere on the station, certainly around the concourse, if not on the further extremities of the platform. What we have lost, above all, is chiaroscuro, the bright gleams of sunlight shining through patches of utter darkness that gave the great termini in the 1950s and 60s so much of their mystique. The soaring roofs were often half obscured in a sepulchral gloom, an intoxicating if unhealthy mix of locomotive exhausts and fog. Colours, too, were generally muted and layers of soot covered most of the surfaces.

G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1909 that:

you will find in a railway station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral. It has many of the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building; it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and above all, it has recurrence of ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration of fire and water, the prime elements of all human ceremonial.

Along with chiaroscuro, it is this quietude that has largely vanished but along with it, so have many of the stations themselves, either wholly or in part.

The old Euston may have been an awkward place to operate but it had an almost palpable grandeur that came partly from age but more from the magnificence of its architecture. Coming by foot from Euston Road, one walked through what might almost have been a series of stage sets past the two outer lodges (still there) where the view was blocked by the bulk of the Euston Hotel. Passing under this, the arch (I will call it that although, strictly, it is a propylaeum) stood before one in all its sublime splendour in what was almost a square. Passing through it, one entered an inner courtyard, covered with an awning, before walking through into the architectural climax of it all, the Great Hall, one of the most magnificent Victorian interiors in London, presided over by the large statue of George Stephenson. From here one would walk to the impressive, if grimy, train shed. In passing from one enclosed space to another, with views blocked, one experienced classic townscape of the type advocated by Gordon Cullen.