Tube Heritage

St John's Wood Station - The signs say "Bakerloo Line" because originally it was on the Stanmore Branch of the Bakerloo Line which joined the other branch at Baker Street.


St John's Wood escalators 1939


Arnos Grove Station

Sixteen Tube stations were today granted Grade II listed status to protect their architectural heritage. The stations include Oxford Circus, Covent Garden, Aldwych and St John's Wood. The grading will protect station facades, including 100-year-old ornate tiling and brickwork, but allow internal changes for safety measures. Simon Thurley, English Heritage chief executive, said: "They are as valuable to London's architectural story as many more famous buildings like the Houses of Parliament."




Sudbury Town station

The stations include several designed by Leslie Green and have historic and architectural significance, illustrating the development of the capital's transport system as well as pioneering the use of a strong image which is recognised around the world.




Cockfosters Station

The stations given Grade II status are:

• Aldwych
• Belsize Park
• Brent Cross
• Caledonian Road


Caledonian Road

• Chalk Farm
• Chesham
• Covent Garden
• Hendon Central
• Oxford Circus (originally two separate stations on the north-west corner of Argyll Street and Oxford Street, and the north-east corner of Argyll Street and Oxford Street including the office above)


• Perivale
• Redbridge
• Russell Square
• St John's Wood
• West Acton
• Wood Green

Three other stations have had their listing upgraded from Grade II to Grade II*. They are:

• Arnos Grove
• Oakwood
• Sudbury Town

The listed stations include several of the tube stations designed by Leslie Green whose ‘ox-blood’ red tile facades, pioneered the use of a strong and consistent corporate image that’s recognised around the world. All the stations have historic and architectural significance, illustrating the development of the capital’s Underground system.


Arnos Grove ticket hall with Passimeter


Escalators with bronze uplighters

The Directors of London Underground in the 20s and 30s saw good design as good for business. By the example it set under Frank Pick the Underground was gradually able to change the public’s attitude to railway stations which had been seen as shabby and inhospitable places. Sir Nicholas Pevsner wrote that Pick saw in every detail a “visual propaganda” and he used this not only to improve the Underground but the environment as a whole. Charles Holden brought the Underground station to the forefront of modern architecture: This achievement is unequalled by any other transport company before or since.

As the Guardian Newspaper's Architectural correspondent (and former London Transport management trainee) Jonathan Glancey observed;

“The first of Charles Holden's tube stations for Frank Pick was Sudbury Town, on the Piccadilly line, opened in 1931. There had been nothing like this distinctly modern yet well-crafted building in Britain before. With typical modesty, Holden, a retiring, teetotal, vegetarian Quaker draper's son from Bolton, Lancashire, chose to describe his first modern masterpiece as "a brick box with a concrete lid. Possibly, just possibly, Holden meant something more.



I can't help thinking that this truly great and still under-rated English architect was thinking of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), who had instigated a revolution in British architecture in the reign of James I when he designed the country's first truly classical buildings. When his client Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, asked Jones to add a chapel "as cheap as a barn" to his smart residential development built around the new Covent Garden piazza, the architect replied "then you shall have the handsomest barn in England". Sudbury Town station is surely transport design's equivalent of St Paul's, Covent Garden.”


Covent Garden Station 1907

“Tube stations are great examples of the capital’s hidden heritage,” said Heritage Minister John Penrose. “Although listing does not mean these stations will remain unchanged for all time, it does mean that any redevelopment plans will have to take the sites’ heritage value into account, which seems entirely right and will ensure the best of design is preserved for the future.”


55, Broadway - London Underground's iconic HQ built in 1929 in the "airspace" above St. James's Park Station

For more on the architect Charles Holden see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/11/holden-goes-underground.html

For more on London Underground’s Grade 1 listed iconic HQ, 55, Broadway, see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/give-my-regards-to-55-broadway.html

For the history of London Underground and one of the world’s Great Railway Journeys see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/01/great-circle-line-journey.html

Though we take it for granted, and frequently curse it to high heaven, the London Underground is a wonder. The Tube network is the oldest and longest underground railway system serving a major city. Its history goes back to 1863, its conception even earlier.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/10/londons-wunderground.html


Aldwych Tube Station with the tiling showing the original name "Strand"

People in London also used tube stations during the Blitz. They would buy a platform tickets and camp on the platforms for the night. Sheltering in the tube was popular because it was dry, warm and quiet down there. The government was afraid that the overcrowded platforms would disrupt the movement of troops and tried to stop the public from using the tube stations as shelters. The people refused to give them up and the government was forced to back down. In some cases underground stations were closed down and given over to the public to use during air raids.

For the unique place which is Aldwych Tube Station and its role in the Blitz see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/11/blitz-on-underground.html

For more see ARCHIBLOGS, TUBE BLOGS and TRANSPORT BLOGS in the Blog sidebar >>>>>

Paolozzi @ Tottenham Court Road

Anybody who has been up around London’s Tottenham Court Road Tube Station lately (known to Tube aficionados as TCR) will have noticed that the Astoria Ballroom, venue for many hedonistic concerts and druggy 21st. birthday parties, and much else has gone to be replaced by a huge building site in preparation for Crossrail. One consequence of the £1 billion transformation of Tottenham Court Road station (to expand the ticket hall by almost six times and prepare the station for Crossrail) is the threat to the fabulous murals by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. The late Scottish sculptor and "pop artist" was commissioned by London Underground in the early 1980s to help brighten up its stations. He took his inspiration from the jazz clubs of Soho, and the mosaic on the westbound Central line platforms features saxophones echoing nearby Denmark Street which is full of musical retailers. Other mosaics reflect the hustle and bustle of the city with running legs and other motifs of the busy lives of commuters.




Sir Eduardo unveiled a giant Newton statue at the British Library in 1997 in the presence of prime minister's wife Cherie Blair

His designs help passengers to momentarily forget that Tottenham Court Road is, in the main, an overcrowded interchange between the Northern and Central lines (it is used by 147,000 passengers a day). Instead they feel like they are part of Underground history, the murals having the look of something far older than their 27 years (the work was completed in 1984). However these are very important artworks as the mosaic murals that adorn seemingly every available surface at Tottenham Court Road station are the work one of the great British artists and sculptors of the twentieth century, whose work is often considered a forerunner to that of the later Pop Artists. Indeed he was the first artist to use the word “Pop” in an artwork. Paolozzi's I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) is considered the first standard bearer of Pop Art and first to display the word "pop". Paolozzi showed the collage in 1952 as part of his groundbreaking Bunk! series presentation at the initial Independent Group meeting in London.


"I was a rich man's plaything" - 1947


Bunk!


Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA (7 March 1924 – 22 April 2005), was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art world working without compromise on his own interpretation and vision of the world around us all. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization through imagination and fantasy. By the dramatic juxtaposition of ideas in his work, he let us see the confusion as well as the inspiration.




Paolozzi's Head @ The Design Museum


Northern Line passage


Born to Italian Immigrants in 1926 he had a long association with London prior to his death in 2005. He studied at both St Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art and, after spending several years in Paris in the late forties, returned to London and ran a studio out of Chelsea. Beginning with his work on cooling tower panels in Pimlico during the seventies, and ultimately culminating in the truly wonderful Newton at the British Library in the nineties, Paolozzi left an impressive imprint on the Capital.


Main Entrance to the station before demolition




Paolozzi's signature



For eight months from April 2011, Northern line services will not stop at Tottenham Court Road to allow essential works to be completed at the station. Contractors will be working 24 hours to rebuild sections of the tunnel lining and dig new connecting passages. This will allow new escalators to be connected to the platforms. The station will remain open and Central line services will run as normal. Customers wishing to use the Northern line should use nearby Leicester Square or Goodge Street stations. Something similar will happen with the Central line after the Olympics. The station is due to be completed by 2016 (and will remain open for as much of the project as possible). Project engineers admit they have no idea what effect the construction work will have on the tiled walls.




Escalator entrance


Face

London Underground, which dates from 1863, of course have many Listed Buildings including their iconic HQ at 55, Broadway and an active Art on the Underground programme and are well used to conservation issues. They have issued this statement.


Leg





“London Underground highly values the Paolozzi mosaics within Tottenham Court Road Underground station, and alongside the Tube’s ‘Art on the Underground’ programme, we have been working closely with the Paolozzi Foundation as the Tottenham Court Road upgrade progresses. We are taking great care to protect and preserve these wonderful mosaics as we upgrade Tottenham Court Road station.





"As part of the upgrade of the station, major engineering works are required in the platform tunnels to strengthen them before new passageways are dug. This will mean that some sections of existing mosaic tiles will have to be carefully removed and reinstated once the tunnelling work is finished. Where small sections do have to be permanently removed from their current location, they will be preserved with the aim of being used elsewhere on the station in the future.”



The new TCR underground




My own view is, as wonderful as the murals are, they should never have been done. A deep Tube station is fundamentally a utilitarian pipeline for people and trains and simplicity of finishes and ease of circulation is really what people want with the design statements confined to the entrances. This is what the great architect Charles Holden achieved with his iconic work, especially on the Piccadilly Line on the 1930’s. The new stations on the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999 also took this approach and achieved a new architectural standard with Westminster Station winning the “Building of the Year” award and Canary Wharf and North Greenwich in particular providing a great sense of spectacle. The Tube has a great tradition of wall design with many of the early stations having unique tile designs which served as a visual location indicator to arriving passengers.


Northern Line mosaic


Cow






However covering every surface with artwork like at Paolozzi’s TCR makes you something of a hostage to fortune. For in what is essentially a utilitarian context you will need to make changes, add / remove equipment rewire, retrunk and so on and every time there is a danger to the mosaics. If you ask TCR users what they want they will tell you it is a station with better access, less claustrophobic and with more sense of space. The renovations will undoubtedly provide this and in making for a better ambience they will hopefully allow Paolozzi’s vibrant and exciting murals to be better seen and appreciated in a more comfortable and less stressed environment. For, whatever about the advisability of doing them in the first place, they are a unique and exciting legacy of one of Britain’s most exciting 20th Century artists. Indeed they are rendered even more exciting by being in such a mundane and unexpected location, one of London’s busiest Tube stations. This is a magnificent display of “Art for the People.”


Bird


Rotunda




Entrance to Crossrail at Centrepoint TCR

London Underground appears mindful of protecting the murals but fans of Paolozzi, and of the unique character of much of the Tube, may need to remain vigilant as the huge construction works at Tottenham Court Road station continue over many years.


The new TCR station


New Dean Street Entrance



For more on London Underground and its rich design heritage see TUBEBLOGS in my Blog sidebar >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Grade I protection for London Underground’s iconic HQ

55, Broadway



First use of cruciform plan for a London office building



London Underground’s iconic HQ and the Tube station it was built over today took their place alongside Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London as one of the capital's most important buildings. 55 Broadway and St James's Park station have been awarded Grade I listed status, granting it extra protection from redevelopment and recognising its “great historical significance”. The building above the platforms, known as 55 Broadway, was built as the headquarters of London Underground. When completed in 1929 it was the tallest building in London at 174 feet. Holden also used a team of emerging young artists to embellish the building, including Eric Gill and Eric Aumonier, as well as Moore and Epstein. English Heritage said: “The sculpture significantly boosts the case for upgrading 55 Broadway to Grade I.” Ten decorative features were carved by artists into its Portland stone facade but one, called Day, had to be altered as it showed a naked boy. Its sculptor, Jacob Epstein, chiselled one-and-a-half inches from the boy's penis in a concession to Twenties sensitivities.




Henry Moore "West Wind"








Jacob Epstein "Day"



When it was completed in 1929, The London Underground's new headquarters, named after its postal address of 55, Broadway, was London's tallest office block. A skyscraper of its day, it is now dwarfed by almost every major office building in the city. But that doesn't stop it from appearing monumental. Inside it houses the headquarters of London Underground, St. James's Park Station and the small Broadway shopping arcade.





Traders protesting high rents in the Broadway shopping arcade




55 Broadway - Original Ground Floor layout



In 1926 The Underground Group commissioned 55 Broadway, over St James's Park station, as its new headquarters. It was to replace Electric Railway House, whose offices were too cramped for the growing organisation. The headquarters was to symbolise the company's vision of public transport being at the heart of London's social and commercial life. Frank Pick, assistant managing director of the Underground Group, commissioned the architect Charles Holden of the firm Adams Holden and Pearson to design the building. On its completion in 1929, 55 Broadway was the tallest building in London on one side overlooking the Houses of Parliament and on the other side overlooking Buckingham Palace. The Directors had a clear idea of their place in the world! However, building restrictions prevented the floors above the seventh being used as offices. The modern and assertive design was considered an architectural masterpiece with the cruciform layout enabling natural light and ventilation throughout. It was awarded the London Architectural Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1929.




Charles Holden 1875 - 1960



Designed by architect Charles Holden, and considered to be his finest work, 55 Broadway was inspired by the skyscrapers of New York and heralded the construction of tall buildings in London by helping to loosen height restrictions. Listings Minister John Penrose said: “When this building opened it represented the height of sophistication. It remains one of the most unaltered Underground stations on the network and a fantastic example of London's architecture at its best.”





Platform kiosk, St. James's Park 1935



The site was challenging because of its irregular shape, and the District line was only 24 feet below the surface. The solution was a cross-shaped layout, which allowed passengers to walk through the ground floor of the office to reach the ticket hall. It also incorporated Henry Moore's first public commission and his only work to show the human figure in motion. The building was granted Grade II status in 1970. Despite its west wing being damaged in the Second World War, it remains largely unchanged. It has the only Underground concourse with original platform finishes from the Twenties, namely the vitreous enamel cladding to the walls, and enamel signs announcing the name of the station. There are also original platform benches and an original timber kiosk, now a display cabinet. The rest of the building is in a remarkably good state, with the original travertine marble-clad landings on each floor, ground floor lobby, stair hall, and shopping arcade all intact.




1929 - The tallest office building in London



The builders of 55, Broadway saw good design as good for business. By the example it set under Frank Pick the Underground was gradually able to change the public’s attitude to railway stations which had been seen as shabby and inhospitable places. Sir Nicholas Pevsner wrote that Pick saw in every detail a “visual propaganda” and he used this not only to improve the Underground but the environment as a whole. Charles Holden brought the Underground station to the forefront of modern architecture: This achievement is unequalled by any other transport company before or since.











As for the Grade I listing your correspondent observed prophetically in April 2008;



“With property values in London becoming more unreal due to Non Doms. and the like, no doubt some wide boys (Generally called “consultants” or “rising stars”) will look at the possibility of asset stripping this unique listed building and creating a “new culture” in some god forsaken rented cubicle factory. No doubt this will promote co-operative working by having an atrium with some poor imitation of a Calder mobile representing a tube train and a statue of an ordinary tube worker looking up at it saying “this costs a fortune and we’ll never own it!” The same wide boy asset strippers would never think it is sensible to sell their own house and move into a trailer park. “




St. James Park Station entrance











English Heritage probably clocked the threat to 55, Broadway in an article in the Estates Gazette in February 2009 where TfL’s Property Chief claimed bragging rights;



“Property chief Anthony Bickmore has now put the property under the spotlight for the first time as part of his far-reaching plans to modernise the portfolio.” This was accompanied by the usual anonymous dose of toe curling Property Puffers propaganda. “The building is no longer fit for purpose. TfL is taking advice on the potential for a major redevelopment of what is a prime West End site and this could lead to a sale.”



Indeed, not fit for purpose? Fully paid for, naturally ventilated award winning modern building which won a RIBA Gold Medal and is centrally located and built in the airspace above a Tube station? Not fit for purpose? First building in Britain to put all the services in a central core minimising corridors and maximising usable space? Certainly such a building wouldn’t generate fees for the asset strippers, property churners and predatory consultants. Hopefully the decline in the commercial property market combined with the protection of Grade 1 listing will put a damper on such quick buck thoughts and 55, Broadway will continue to proclaim the purpose stated on the early Underground poster “Always at your service.”









For more about 55, Broadway;



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/give-my-regards-to-55-broadway.html



For more about Charles Holden;



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/11/holden-goes-underground.html



For more on Architecture and Design see ArchiBlogs in the Blog sidebar>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.