Platforms and Pavilions - Full

The railway platform is both beginning and ending, familiar and strange. At first the platform may seem a banal necessity, rarely noticed except when we are waiting or delayed. Design of the station environment gives a sense of place and character, intangible qualities created from surface textures, architecture, form, style, materials, details, colours, signs, information, facilities, lighting, furnishings, and equipment, and the landscape of the station itself in its local context. Study of the platform as the central focus of the station is a record of innovation in design for people and transport and looks to the future as railways remain central to work and leisure. To better understand these essential railway structures and look to the future of railway passenger places, this book studies the railway platform and its associated buildings, colour schemes, signs, furniture and equipment, lighting, and environment including station gardens. The platform is every passenger’s place in the two-hundred-year narrative of the railway industry.

David Lawrence

£29.95

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture David Lawrence On behalf of Railway 200

This book is for Leila and Sylvia Lawrence

First published in the UK in 2025 by Transport Treasury Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved Text © 2025 David Lawrence Foreword © 2025 Tim Dunn Copyright in the images remains with the creators or owners of the images as listed in the Image Credits ISBN 978-1-915281-14-2 Design: Guy Eaglesfield Typeface: Rail Alphabet 2 Printed and bound in England by Short Run Press Ltd.

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‘The station is the introduction or prologue to the train… the frame to the picture’ 1

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Previous page spread: Throughout this book, there are pages illustrating that token of access to railway spaces which is the platform ticket. Introduced around 1870, when control of travel became located at stations rather than on trains or at special ‘ticket platforms’.

Platform tickets give admission to stations for people accompanying travellers or visiting the station refreshment facilities; they have also been collected assiduously by railway enthusiasts and may have values far in excess of their material worth. The format for many years was a piece of pasteboard cut to the ticket size standardized by Thomas Edmondson (1792–1851), printed with the twelve numerals of the hours on the margins of card. The hour of visiting was to be marked by removing the appropriate numeral. Bright overprinted symbols – red lines, solid ovals, outline diamonds, strips of colour – alerted railway staff to the ticket type.

Manual machines and ticket offices dispensed individual card tickets, and thin paper tickets were stored as rolls in the self-service machines. Changing ticket printing technology and attempts to modernise permits to enter platforms, altered the appearance of platform tickets too for some years and in some parts of the railway network, although the established form of printed card prevailed until the adoption of computerised ticket issuing machines from around 1982. Sales have now been reduced, although as long as staffed station ticket offices have the software option for issuing platform tickets, these small souvenirs of time and place will endure.

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Contents Foreword

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Introduction

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Chapter One: Platforms

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Chapter Two: Awnings and pavilions

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Chapter Three: Slow and fast food on the platform

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Chapter Four: Scene

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Chapter Five: Railway heritage and conservation

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Bibliography

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Endnotes

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Acknowledgements

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Image credits

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Index

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Foreword This book proudly joins David Lawrence’s others of the last two decades or so, in being one of the most thoroughly-researched and illuminating works on railway architecture and design to be found. As ever, he makes eye-opening connections and provides original analysis. At the time of writing in 2024, the management of the ever-evolving and ever-experimenting railway network is set for another great change: this book might remind those involved with the future that there is much to learn from the past.

The British have a unique relationship with their railway; indeed there have probably been more words written about it than the railways of any other country on Earth. They began building and travelling early, of course. Ever since the first hands grabbed the edge of a horse-drawn waggon and cadged a likely-illicit journey jolting along an iron plateway, railways have been a method of moving about the nation, and – since the Channel Tunnel – getting in or out of it too. After all, the British have always wanted to be somewhere else: anywhere, perhaps, than where they were.

Few early iron roads were intended for the carriage of self-loading cargo, since profits lay elsewhere. But towards the end of the nineteenth century the populace found itself united in the most profound and incredible new way: by two parallel strips of steel running through every landscape and life. Today, the places where we usually meet this extraordinary creation, stations, are where humanity and technology have faced each other down for two centuries, so it is no wonder that the structures built to facilitate this union of man and machine are so remarkable and varied. In this superb book, David Lawrence identifies some of the most fascinating examples, and makes sense of the oddly-complicated, often inconsistent, language of railway architecture.

I hope that this book reminds any of us working on the railway that whilst it was built mainly for shareholder benefit, today it exists to serve the public. It now relies on the self-loading cargo it once ignored, and that cargo can easily choose not to travel: the balance of power at human–railway interfaces has shifted. Where twin strips of steel arrive in a community now, stations still do provide a “portal to travel” or “front door to a town”, but if the railway wants to flourish, the next generation of platforms and pavilions need to be built thinking differently. Peoples’ needs must come before the railway’s. Perhaps too, with many features of 21st Century community life struggling, with joined-up thinking, additional purposes and roles might be realised for stations – they could become essential hubs. Understanding what we have – through books such as this – might be the key to turning what were once seen as liabilities into indispensable assets, at the heart of British life.

Tim Dunn Broadcaster, historian & railway employee

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Introduction The railway platform is both beginning and ending, familiar and strange. It is part of the rolling panorama of travel.

On the journey it may be a momentary and mysterious strip of colour and light too fast to be found. At first the platform may seem a banal necessity, rarely noticed except when we are waiting or delayed. But the platform is every passenger’s place in the two-hundred-year narrative of the railway industry. It is a special piece of design, engineering, and construction. Even in its most basic form beneath our feet, it was an early example of modernity and mechanisation, technology and rapid motion, hardly known outside the relatively small number of industrial settings, but increasingly visible in a world where animals and wind or water had been the main sources of power for centuries. By looking more closely at the railway platform and its diversity of pavilions which are the shelters and kiosks arrayed on platforms, we can explore the many and diverse spaces and activities of the railway station.

Across England, Wales and Scotland, Network Rail owns and manages more than 2000 railway stations. Each is distinctive in some way, representing architectural and industrial history and innovation, railway operating practice, styles of local building alongside international prefabricated systems, and changing patterns of information display, decoration, and use. The basis of the railway station as a public social and functional space is the platform, an ideally continuous horizontal route from street through the station spaces to the trains, giving easy connections and interchange between the wider world and the transport services. Design of the station environment gives a sense of place and character, intangible qualities created from surface textures, architecture, form, style, materials, details, colours, signs, information, facilities,

lighting, furnishings, and equipment, and the landscape of the station itself in its local context. This sense of place can be good, inspiring delight; it can be functional, so that the station is easy to navigate for everyone.

Study of the platform as the central focus of the station is a record of two centuries of innovation in design for people and transport and looks to the future as railways remain central to work and leisure. To better understand these essential railway structures and look to the future of railway passenger places, this book studies the railway platform and its associated buildings, colour schemes, signs, furniture and equipment, lighting, and environment including station gardens.

The railway platform is the unique space between the town and the train, the country, the suburb, and the city, and between the local and the world. It defines the main public and traveller areas of the station: the street, the ticket hall, the concourse, retail units and areas, refreshment points, toilets, operating staff accommodation, and space for parcels and other freight, the communications equipment, and cycle storage. The platform has two essential purposes. It identifies the space beside the railway track where the train will stop, and it reduces the vertical space between the ground and the access points of the train. Even in our time of digital media, the station and platform remain the shopfront of the system and its train operators. When railways compete with other transport systems for customers, the clean and easy to use station is a valuable advertisement for the rail system and train operators.

Platforms and their buildings were the physical, static presence of the railway, the first integrated passenger vehicle and network. The station had to acclimatise

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society to the new enterprise, to represent the system and reassure travellers that the frightening scale, speed, steam, and noise of the railway were only characteristics of an innovation which would transform lives and businesses. Constructed as either a wall with filling behind, or a system of vertical supports and horizontal panels, the platform is unnoticed architecture under our feet. It accommodates sheltered waiting areas and pavilions in the form of kiosks, cabins, and other enclosures. It reveals industrial archaeology in the design of canopied outdoor spaces, which can be extravagantly decorated or kit-built basic.

There are and have been many types of station: terminals and junctions with many platforms; stations for commuters, stadiums, airports, ports, military installations, factories, hospitals and asylums, cemeteries, holiday camps, religious shrines; stations for railway workers, and private stations made for a single family or large house, which the ordinary traveller might never visit. 2 In the platform buildings we see many styles and designs representing a whole field of architecture and industrial design which has rarely been studied. Platforms will have canopied areas too: perhaps small rain shields over ticket vending machines or extensive self-supporting awnings with highly decorated, or practical and plain, roofs made from timber, glass, cast iron, and sheet metals. Palettes of colour schemes have been devised to harmonise the shelters with their surroundings or highlight them on platforms. Provision of refreshment and retail on station platforms is as old as the railways. Mobile traders, trolleys, kiosks, bookstalls, newsagents, cafés, buffets, and vending machines are all solutions for selling drinks, food, and goods on platforms; online shopping

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pick-up/drop-off lockers demonstrate that the station is still a community focus.

For populations who had lived and worked according to the cycles of the sun, the station clock was frequently the first evidence of a standardised national and international time system. Signs communicate information and give directions; these static and animated communications will be visual and, when related to train movements, audible too. Historically, smaller stations are identified by one or two painted or vitreous enamel signs displaying the place name; more complex locations feature additional direction and information signs. Seats too reveal the history of industrial design for rail transport and have been awardwinning answers for improving the comfort of waiting.

Electronic systems display train arrival times, safety information, and power the help points.

The platform is the stage for all rail travel-related activities because it is the setting for the facilities and services provided to passengers, visitors, and railway operating workers. Across the width of the platform, we move from the personal to the superhuman, from here to everywhere else. Marked like a sports pitch, the platform’s coloured lines and symbols are silent organisers for regulating the trains and people: waiting, working, greeting and parting. It is the gateway for flows of people and objects. Raw materials and finished products exchanged places across the platform, from farm and nursery and sea and dairy and brewery to city markets and shops.

World news arrived into the local community through the station’s privileged status of hosting the public telegraph and telephone equipment. On the platform we are in the political space in which began journeys to divide the globe through conflict, colonisation, urbanisation,

exploitation: the creation and organisation of super states, and the place where we see the effects of these actions: depopulation, escape and refuge, migration, and deportation, each with dreams and fears, love, and loss.

We take time on the platform to wait for our train.

This is an opportunity to look around. On the platform we see the landscape or cityscape close-up and far away. We experience speed and sound more intimately than in a car or aeroplane. We see the people around us, because the platform is a hub for community activity, from informal conversations to planned events. As we know from films and photography, the platform is a microcosm of the life around it: Henry James’ English Hours (1905) finds the London railway station the place to see people ‘all together, with the rich colouring of their differences, in the fine flare of one of Mr W. H. Smith’s bookstalls’. 3 If stations are to represent society, then the platform as a place for catching the train is also a stage for encounters with the cultural expression and art of societies. War and other memorials have long been elements of railway places. When British Rail realised that it could do more to engage with the people around its stations, and in turn work with volunteer groups to improve station environments which were otherwise too expensive to maintain beyond safety requirements, arrangements were made to invite proposals for art created for the station, or decoration by local community groups and schools.

Commissioning of murals, mosaics, sculptures, and other works – to tell stories about people, events, and histories to help us understand who we are – has continued with Railtrack and Network Rail. Platform spaces may include more permanent sculptures or murals or be the site for films (think of Brief Encounter, Help!, Schindler’s List, The

Station Agent, the ‘Platform 9¾’ of Harry Potter movies), music performances, art installations [see Jeremy Deller’s ‘We’re Here’], ‘silent discos’, and ‘flash mobs’. On the margins platforms and around the station there may be undeveloped or neglected ground which can be used to cultivate plants for display or food. Railway workers have a rich tradition of prize-winning gardens and creativity in the use of surplus materials to enhance such areas. As we see ecosystems challenged by environmental and climate changes, the contribution of station gardens for health and wellbeing must not be overlooked.

Modernisation and rationalisation of railway networks internationally during the 1960s and 1970s reduced the evidence of railway design and architecture. Much was lost, but the actual and proposed demolition of station buildings generated a significant conservation movement campaigning in the general press and professional journals for the heritage of railways. 4 In the same period amateur groups formed to purchase redundant railway infrastructure, to preserve it; these organisations are valuable research resources and opportunities to encounter the experience of historic railway environments.

Now routes are reopening to meet population growth and commuter/leisure habits. New stations link housing development with the railway. Station platforms and their shelters, kiosks, and pavilions, remain real and important physical presences and places of welcome for travellers, and can feature services, small businesses, and social activities. These places need free circulation for passengers and staff, good clear signs, effective lighting, waiting spaces, retail and refreshment, well-planned buildings, accessible communications, and information systems. Major platform renewal work is planned. Network

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Rail, with the train operators who have management of stations on their routes, must balance safety, accessibility, comfort, environmental and climate sustainability, decarbonisation and cost. A comprehensive set of documents specifies standards for station structures and facilities, to give design guidance to suppliers. 5 (Design for the railway competes with mass-produced equipment.).

For retail and other functions on platforms Network Rail is exploring the possibilities for multi-functional kiosks.6 As we will see, the platform, with its shelters, is the station.

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NOTE: Place names are shown only in the main text; the fuller geographical locations of places are given in the index. Where stations had features of significance for this book, they are included in the text although the feature itself may have been demolished. In these cases, reference to the list of research sources is recommended.

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Chapter One Platforms

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Starting on the ground The earliest railways – also known as rail roads or tramroads – were a mineral and freight-carrying addition to the existing landscape; they did not feature passenger stations. Like road coach and canal operators before it, the Stockton and Darlington Railway (first opened 1825) had agreements with public houses to sell travel to the public.

Places designated as stations for passenger carrying operations began to be provided in the early 1830s as traffic increased, when it was realised that railway companies would benefit from suitable facilities near the tracks, where commercial activities could be supervised more conveniently. People-carrying vehicles – again in common with the road vehicles they superseded and replaced – had permanent steps fixed to their sides and handrails for passengers to climb up into the carriages, as is still common today in certain countries.

Any railway buildings were placed near the tracks at ground level. The passenger platform might just be the ground alongside the tracks, or a defined area formed from earth, timber, or stone slabs. Heighington (County Durham, opened by 1827) is the earliest known structure purpose-built for railway business; its small outside area of cobblestones illustrates this layout.7 Passengers joined trains by climbing up the vehicle sides, as they had done with stagecoaches. Other early railways, such as the Leicester and Swannington (Leicestershire, opened 1832–3) and Garnkirk and Glasgow (Scotland, opened 1831) adopted this practice.

For rural areas where platforms were close to a road crossing the railway, it remained cheaper to build the limited station facilities by the road and next to the platform.

Opposite: Welford and Kilworth, opened 1850. Station house and railway offices built at ground/road level for operating convenience.

Above left: Townhead ticket office built at ground level for the Garnkirk and Glasgow Railway, 1831.

Above right: Heighington original station, with small raised area as a rudimentary platform.

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In its most basic manifestation, the station platform is a small area of brick or stone or loose material retained by timber, on top of the general ground level.

Any raising of the platform was historically achieved by increasing the height of the timber to form a retaining wall or building a wall in bricks, stone, or timber railway sleepers behind which rubble, ash, and earth could be

compacted to provide a stable surface on which to stand.

Various solutions to finishing the top of the platform have been used, determined by the availability, and cost of local or suitable hard materials, including small stones, Staffordshire blue paving bricks and blocks, stone flags with brick edging, artificial stone slabs,8 asphalt, ashes or clinker from burnt coal, mass concrete, or earth.

Station buildings at road level: Top left: South Milford.

Bottom left: Lidlington.

Above: Flaxton.

Opposite: Stone platform wall at Corofin.

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For areas where a solid mass of material could not be supported because of the ground conditions or the station’s position on an embankment, or where economy of time and labour was important, timber frames with timber board surfaces were a common substitute.

When the Great Western Railway introduced halts in 1903, to provide more convenient stopping places on existing routes to increase passenger numbers, it chose low platforms and equipped the passenger vehicles with fixed folding steps, or the platforms with portable wooden steps.

Opposite: Chesterton Lane Halt opened 1959. The platform is built using redundant railway track timber sleepers.

Above: Trouble House Halt, opened 1959. It was named after a local inn.

Left: Gwernydomen Halt, opened 1908.

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Curious names of halts across Britain included: Cemetery, Coldharbour, Defiance, Denham Golf Club, Ebley Crossing, Fleur-deLis, Goonhavern, Mount Hawke, Old Ynysybwl, Shaugh Bridge, Teigl, Trouble House, Wainhill Crossing, Watchingwell and Westmoor Flag.

By the 1860s higher platforms – still midway between ground and train floor – became common for new British stations.

The arrangement of a level connection to the train is not provided by all railway operators internationally, where the original practice of boarding or leaving a train using steps continues.

In Britain too, the platform is still a challenge for railway engineers, architects, and passengers; we need only think of the ‘mind the gap’ audio announcements and painted warning marks which have become a signature of London’s underground system.

Even so, many platforms have been rebuilt for reasonably easy movement between station and railway vehicle and may include special sections of platform raised to ensure accessible transfer between station and train.

Opposite: Steps for boarding the train from a low platform at Giggleswick.

Left: International examples of low-level platforms at Entlebuch, Switzerland and Chabris, France.

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Position of platforms From 1830

From 1840

From 1850

Terminal stations originally had only one waiting area for all passenger needs, an example being the covered ‘coach shed’ at Manchester, Liverpool Road (1830). This location only handled departing passengers; anyone arriving in Manchester completed their journey by road until construction of a separate arrival station in 1837. 8 Rapidly rising passenger volumes indicated the need for two platforms – sometimes called ‘stages’ – for departure and arrival, as at the first London Euston (1838).

The arrangement of platforms at intermediate stations depended on nearby roads, roads crossing the railway, bridges, other buildings, waterways, the availability of land, and the money available to buy land.

Early large stations with two lines of tracks would have a single platform to prevent passengers crossing

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the tracks. Wolverhampton Low Level (1854–5) was the last new station designed in this way; Cambridge was a long-surviving example of the arrangement. The general practice for two-line stations was to place platforms on either side of the tracks facing each other, or staggered end-to-end on opposite sides of the tracks, or back-toback as a single island between the railway lines. Stations on single track routes usually comprised one platform on one side of the track.

As railway services expanded and further tracks added for fast and slow services, additional platforms could be linked by footbridges, lifts, subways or a combination of connections.

Opposite: Wickham Bishops station (1848) demonstrates the complete separation of building and passenger platform.

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Making platforms: where architecture and design meet engineering and technology In addition to forming low-level waiting places from available materials, the Great Western Railway specified a design of halt platform assembled from standard timber pieces for the programme of halt building which began in 1903. It had also started experimenting with a novel material: cast reinforced concrete (also known as ferroconcrete). Fabricating items in concrete needed less skilled labour and equipment than were required for similar activities in timber or steel, because from a single mould made once by a craftsperson, workers using raw materials could create stocks of items. Production of concrete platform slabs was begun by the Great Western Railway around 1898 and continual innovation at the company’s Taunton depot would result in over two hundred reinforced concrete parts for railway use: lamp post bases and posts, fence posts, and caps for station nameboard posts ensured a ready supply of construction parts. Complete small stations were designed as kits of pieces. Paving slabs and truss frames for support walls were built up into platforms; panels and beams interlocked and bolted together created staff and passenger buildings.

Reinforced concrete products were a quick, functional, and durable way to modernise and then maintain many aspects of the railway scene. The London and South Western Railway developed a facility for manufacturing concrete items at Exmouth Junction, Devon, in 1913; this passed to the Southern Railway in 1923, when it was making five thousand items a week.10 Of interest to this study are the platforms, fences, nameboards, and lamp Opposite: At Trewerry & Trerice near Newquay, Great Western Railway platform truss pieces have the dual function of supporting the platform surface and forming an open wall towards the railway tracks.

standards designed by engineer W. H. Shortt and his team, all of them elements of a prefabrication system ready for diverse locations and sizes of station.11 At Melton Constable, Norfolk, the Midland and Great Northern Railway had a similar installation as part of its engineering works led by William Marriott.12 The London Midland and Scottish, and London and North Eastern Railway companies also operated concrete manufacturing works at Newton Heath and York respectively.

By 1920 architects and engineers saw concrete as having its own aesthetic value, it being a white, yellowish, or grey substance which could be cast in forms to reflect modern trends in design, particularly flat or curved surfaces with stepped or ribbed embellishments. As we will see in Chapter Two, this style – sometimes called ‘moderne’ or ‘art deco’ – would influence the design of concrete platform awnings and associated components through the 1920s, and by the following decade entire railway station environments would be made with reinforced concrete. Use of concrete in concrete increased substantially after 1945 when there was a shortage of imported hardwood timber.

The Southern Railway, an early adopter of electric train services in the suburbs of London and adjoining counties, knew that efficient and attractive stations made for excellent advertisements and encouraged passenger travel. In 1923 its platforms presented a very varied mix of heights and materials. The Exmouth Junction works devised a set of parts to rebuild platforms and be the foundation for new stations. When compared to the relatively small scale of buildings, the extent of new, bright concrete platforms made for a very good impression of modernisation. Two main permutations – open and closed

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platform faces – ensured the system was sufficiently adaptable to different locations and ground conditions.

The arrangement of parts was ingenious and simple: vertical support brackets incorporating bracing at the rear

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and a smaller bracket at the front, stabilised at the base by concrete slabs and at the top by the platform coping or edge pieces. Spaces between each support could be open or infilled with a further concrete panel.

Opposite: Southern Railway concrete prefabricated system at Posloe Bridge Halt, Exeter, Devon.

Top left: Pre-war timber platform for Dilton Marsh Halt near Westbury, Wiltshire.

Top right: Watergate Halt, Devon.

Bottom: Southern Railway concrete prefabricated system at Meldon Quarry Halt, Devon.

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Above: Examples of pre-fabricated platform construction in timber, pre-cast concrete and concrete blocks demonstrate the ingenuity of railway company engineers and architects in devising economical and durable building systems.

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So successful was this design that it found use for more than thirty years. Platforms were made in different lengths to suit passenger numbers by adjusting the

number of supports; it was straightforward to add more units when numbers increased, and the platform could be dismantled and moved if necessary.

Opposite: Railway companies devised several systems for making station platforms using standardised components.

Above: Concrete platform system at Birmingham New Street.

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British Railways inherited the Exmouth Junction reinforced concrete platform-assembly technique and refined it as a lighter weight version with open structure based on three parts: a platform support trestle fixed to a back leg combining rear support and handrail and bearing a combined deck slab-coping stone.10 Use of the other pre–1948 platform building systems continued until British Rail devised more economical variants or purchased products from other suppliers.

A survey of platforms constructed or extended will show solid types, commonly with precast concrete slabs, strips, or blocks – or sometimes timber baulks – between concrete pier or steel beam vertical supports, and open frameworks of concrete, steel, and timber supporting platform decks comprising sheet or strip materials.

Today, many new stations are currently being planned to enhance access to rail services and address road congestion. At other locations platforms are being extended for longer trains (Helensburgh Upper, Garelochhead, Arrochar & Tarbet, Ardlui, Crianlarich, Bridge of Orchy, Tulloch, Roy Bridge).

Building a station requires considerable resources.

To ensure safety and consistency in construction and use, railway station platforms are defined by many Standards, Regulations, and Codes of Practice published by several public agencies: Acts of Parliament, European Union Directives and Regulations, the Department for Transport, the British Standards Institution, European Standards, International Standards, Railway Group Standards of the Rail Safety and Standards Board, and rail industry associations. From these requirments and guidance Network Rail compiles its own framework of policies, standards, technical user manuals and guidance

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to manage platform provision (and its other activities).

Now, platform systems have developed considerably from masses of solid material piled against a retaining wall.

Several prefabricated systems and components have been designed to support the weight of passengers, vehicles where required, drainage, movement of trains, ease of movement for all rail travellers between the platform and trains, allow installation of lighting, equipment, and barriers, incorporate safety markings and tactile warnings, and limit unauthorised access. In addition to meeting all of these criteria the system has to show a reduction in carbon production during manufacture, assembly, and use.

Opposite: Platforms at Horden (opened 2020) were constructed from precast concrete blocks forming the solid platform walls and corbels supporting the platform edge coping pieces.

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Chapter Two Awnings and pavilions: platform shelters and kiosks

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Pangbourne (1840) shows a typical Great Western Railway small station with a complementary waiting shelter on the opposite platform.

Because the first railways were devised for moving minerals and goods more easily, and passengers were not seen as essential business, the first stations were little different to domestic buildings of one or more rooms. Even these were an innovation, because the railways came to

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replace horse-drawn coach services which had used inns and hotels for the selling of travel services to the public, and the need for special structures was neither apparent nor welcome as additional expenditure.

When it was accepted that workers and passengers

Charlbury (1852), the timber version of I. K. Brunel’s roadside station building.

on this novel and relatively complicated mode of travel needed shelter, brick, stone, or timber structures were added on, or near to, the platform areas. For convenience, the buildings were often located where the railway and road met; I. K. Brunel’s early passenger facilities for

companies associated with the Great Western Railway have been termed ‘roadside’ stations. It was not ideal for passengers to share interior space with the railway offices where money was stored, so a new type of building which was both private – the railway workers’ offices – and public

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– a place to buy travel tickets and wait for trains, was devised by railway architects. The outward appearance of stations reflected building styles, the finances of the railway company, and the image it wished to present to the public, but the interiors of most small stations – the majority of railway passenger buildings – were based on reasonably standard plans featuring one or more offices, a ticket sales window, a waiting area, and lavatory rooms.

Even allowing for sales of tickets away from station sites, these needs have not changed.

Many railway companies in Britain – and those in other parts of the world either managed or influenced by British railway operators – provided some form of external shelter over sections of platform. There are several configurations for covered outdoor space on railway platforms: shelter as a lean-to against a building’s corner, recessed corner, or one or more façades; shelter over a space between projecting parts of a building covered by an extension of the roof; and the most common two solutions for awning provision from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: an

Shrivenham, opened 1840. A stone version of I. K. Brunel’s roadside station. The canopy is cantilevered on timber beams to provide unobstructed shelter on the platform and street.

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Commonest permutations of external shelter at British railway stations. The black outline represents the building, and the red outline the covered platform areas.

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awning projecting from the building and carried on beams, brackets, or both, or an awning supported on wood or metal columns and may be attached to the building by beams or brackets or be free-standing and self-supporting.

I. K. Brunel’s early stations, of which Culham is a surviving example now conserved in private commercial use, conformed to a catalogue of types, and provided for operating and passenger requirements in structures built from stone, brick, stone and brick, or timber with awnings on two, three, or four sides.12 Brunel used the engineering

Lean-to roof at Ham Street, 1851.

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technique of cantilevering for including awnings outside the buildings. At Pangbourne (1840; demolished), Shrivenham (1840/1, demolished), Chippenham (1841, demolished), Culham (1844), Aldermaston (1846/7, demolished), Mortimer (1848), Kidlington (1850, demolished), and Charlbury (1852/3), awnings surround the station buildings.

The designs of Pangbourne, Shrivenham, Culham, and Kidlington include horizontal awnings on beams and brackets; at Chippenham, Aldermaston, Mortimer and Charlbury an alternative means of sheltering exterior space

around the buildings is achieved by extending the hipped roof eaves outwards on shaped supports. No awning edges are decorated in these examples.

For other operators standardised timber or corrugated sheet metal-clad buildings with passenger rooms were a cheap solution to housing the private and public station spaces. The London and North Western Railway (from around 1860),13 and South Eastern Railway (from the 1840s, revised through to the end of the nineteenth century) made standard wooden buildings to provide economical

shelter at many locations. Other small railway operators chose some form of basic, often prefabricated, station building, frequently without female toilets and unheated.

Lean-to roofs are a feature copied from late eighteenth century estate homes. These can be seen at Woburn Sands (1846), Ham Street (1851), and Bucknell, Shropshire (1860). Small gables projected on brackets, as at Bucknell (1860), are an alternative to the lean-to shelter.

Examples of a covered area or arcade created by an extension of the building’s roof are Belford (1847, closed

Hathersage, 1852.

Standard prefabricated timber platform shelters and station offices.

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1968), Chathill (1847), Faringdon (1864, closed 1951), Llwyngwril (1867), Askham (1868), Golspie (1868), Woody Bay (1898, closed 1935).14 More elaborate versions of the colonnade type shelter are represented by Furness Abbey (1847, closed 1950) and Loftus (1875).

Of the many stations with shelter formed by a set-back in the building façade, examples are Kings Nympton (1854), Powerstock (1857, closed 1975), and Nantgaredig (1865,

Powerstock, 1959.

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closed 1963). Examples of shelter between projecting bays of the building include Audley End (1845), Acklington (1847), Luffenham (1848, demolished), Saxilby (1849), Hampton (1864), Watlington (1872, closed 1957), and Shackerstone (1873, closed 1965).15 Later in the nineteenth century railway companies explored ways of providing cheaper stations on routes operating with trains in different directions. An effective

solution was to locate one ‘island’ platform between the tracks and provide one or more buildings on the island containing all station offices. The Great Central Railway made good use of this arrangement on its line through Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire.

Examples of island platform shelters with awnings on four sides are Whittingham (1887), Lanark (about 1900), Merstone (1897, demolished), and Quorn & Woodhouse (1899).

A desire to provide passengers with shelter on platforms engendered another important railway innovation: the self-supporting and permanent awning.

Awnings are an ancient method of making temporary cover using textiles; their use to shield windows for shops and other buildings was extensive from the early nineteenth century. Awning edges are often fringed with decorative devices: rows of smaller pieces of fabric with distinctive

Lanark, built about 1900.

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shapes. Verandahs are a more substantial version of awnings; they are an important feature of buildings wherever exterior space requires shelter from climate conditions. It is likely that the use of these shelters in Europe derived from examples seen in India and Asia. The details of how railway architects made awnings a characteristic feature of station buildings is under-researched: this text offers a fuller account. There is no single factor determining the extent of awnings on railway platforms; criteria for awning extent include the availability of space inside the building and expected passenger numbers. A consistent approach to awning provision is not evident: companies with limited budgets might construct shelter of a greater area than would ever be required to suggest affluence or status, whilst in contrast some wealthier operators considered that station users should instead occupy space inside the buildings until the train arrived.

Timber and steel beams have limits above which either they have insufficient strength to bear the weight, or the dimensions of the beams become too large to be aesthetically appropriate for the intended design. At this point the structure becomes more sophisticated by the addition of brackets and free-standing vertical supports on which rest timber or metal frames of varying complexity and design. Terminal stations of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway included horizontal awnings with supporting columns aligned with their outer edges, which coincided with the edges of the low passenger platforms.

This practice was repeated elsewhere until it was acknowledged that the columns obstructed train doors.

As facias, valances protect the ends of supporting beams and conceal any awning structure; they give more shelter from sun and rain. Extending the approach of I. K. Brunel

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and Sir William Tite, early patterns of valance were formed as deep architraves, with multiple horizontal mouldings and pronounced concave profiles without shaped lower margins.16 Micheldever (Sir William Tite, 1840) is an early example of a sheltered space sufficiently deep to require slender cast iron columns. Other early railway architects Francis Thompson and John Livock also specified plain awnings for their stations designed in the 1840s.

Railway companies considered it important to style the stations to suit the local context. This could be done by using appropriate building materials and paint colours.

A popular and successful solution was to treat the station offices and accommodation as a house. One movement in design and architecture was very helpful for this process – the Picturesque. Picturesque, also called cottage orné, is a mid-eighteenth-century concept for making landscapes with buildings which flourished towards the end of that century and into the nineteenth. Proliferation of railways in Britain during the early nineteenth century – and it is important to be aware that this was the Georgian period, not the Victorian – coincided with the Picturesque style.

Picturesque buildings emulated modest English domestic and vernacular architecture.17 Because the source of the design was domestic, architects and builders chose styles associated with houses, and particularly those built in the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods which were associated – in the historical imagination at least – with a positive English social identity. Gothic architecture also appealed to some architects as being most truly English.

Aspects of these different building patterns, sometimes with neo-classical elements added, could be combined to assemble the Picturesque style. Use of cottage orné was designed to achieve two main visually pleasing effects,

Endsleigh Cottage, Devon, 1810–16.

which worked by being apparently in conflict with each other. Picturesque buildings had to look as though they were naturally part of the landscape; they also had exterior ornament details which would be pleasantly eye-catching without overwhelming the viewer or challenging the naturalistic scene.

An exemplar of the Picturesesque style which brings this discussion to the focus of railway platform awnings is Endsleigh Cottage, Devon of 1810–16 by Jeffry Wyatt, built as country residence of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.

Its appearance features decorated chimneys, roofs, and gable bargeboards. To be suitable for recreation in all seasons, the south side of Endsleigh Cottage incorporates

an awning with a valance trim in a repeating pattern of points and arcs cut from timber. The intricacy of this decoration was encouraged by influential designer John Claudius Loudon because it added to the Picturesque styling by contrasting with the harder surface texture of the walls and the horizontal plane of the patterning gives visual harmony to the variety of roof forms above it.18 Shaped timber, metal, and stone valances became a popular feature in buildings of the early nineteenth century, one of the most exuberant uses – where the decoration is in two tiers, both suspended and pointing upwards – being the Indo-Saracenic influenced design of Brighton Royal Stables (by architect William Porden, competed 1808), and

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Brighton Royal Pavilion (by architect John Nash, built 1815–22/3). Many early Victorian buildings, particularly in coastal towns for pier buildings, bandstands, and promenade shelters, emulated these details in some way.

The effect of Picturesque styling has been described as romantic, rustic, and vernacular. These qualities were perfect for the innovation of railway station buildings, where the modernity of the railway had to be made more familiar and less startling to prospective travellers. The edges of an awning occupy a similar position to the frieze in classical orders of architecture, except that there is

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no surface directly below the canopy margins so there is freedom to add embellishments. The practice of including shaped or fretted valances with platform shelters or adding them to existing awnings, is evident from around 1851, although illustrations suggest that they were present at the first Ealing station in 1838.19 The Devon stations of 1860 by Sir William Tite began with plain awning fascias; to these were added broad and shallow decorations similar to gable bargeboards, comprising alternate concave curves and points, or alternate concave and convex curves, fixed in front of the awning support beams.20 In Sussex

at Barcombe Mills and Isfield (opened 1858), a similar design can be related to vernacular building features and the crescent and disc motifs of early horse amulets or ‘brasses’.

Practical yet of impressive character, valances were a perfect opportunity to add decoration to awnings on even the most basic railway buildings.21 Set high above platforms, valance designs rely for effect on repeating patterns

Above: Culham (1844) and Opposite: Barccombe Mills (1858) had shaped timber ornaments added to the original plain edges of the awnings.

of fretwork and the contrast of light and shadow. The decoration contrasts with brick or stone walls; it can make a bulky shelter appear lighter, especially when painted in stone colours: brown, cream, or off-white. Designed by architects, or procured from contractors, valances combine geometry and carpentry, standardisation with diversity.

Where many shelters for different settings were required in a short period of time as competing companies developed the network, it soon became common practice to fabricate valances from strips of wood, usually 6”/152mm, 7”/178mm, 8”/203mm, or 10”/254mm wide, and up to 32’’/813mm deep along the awning edge parallel to the railway tracks.

Symmetrical repeating patterns of varying complexity would be made by cutting and shaping pairs of strips together. Horizontal timber mouldings added over the strips imparted stability and further decoration. The permutations of valance design have never been fully documented, but it has been reported that there were at least three hundred different patterns in southern England alone.22 Those are the practical details, but what about the patterns along the lower margins of the valances? There are two likely sources of inspiration; one is architectural, the second linked to textiles. For architects working during a time when suitable British building styles were the subject of argument, and exploration of many overseas cultures was underway, the possibilities for ornament were extensive. Decorations found and recorded east of the Mediterranean and in Asia, many of which imitated the fringed features evident on Indo-Islamic tents and buildings gave particular inspiration to the embellishment of valances. (Festoons of bunting flags are another derivative of these sources.) Shaped board ends range from the simplest straight edge, through the half-circle, semi-ellipse,

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Edwardian window box circa 1905. The curtain margins are embellished with scalloped lace work; across the top of the window is hung a lace valance.

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point, and half-hexagon to the lancet (an inverted ‘gothic’ arch derived from Islamic and Venetian examples) and the ogee (again based on gothic door and window surrounds).

Stepped and sawtooth forms were reminiscent of mediaeval stone carving. Sinuous profiles resembling the cyma recta and cyma reversa profiles and ‘Dutch’ gables seen on vernacular houses, in miniature and inverted, are also evident in valance margins. Yet more elaborate motifs were built up from several shapes and strips next to each other or placed over others. Additional shadow effects could be obtained by cutting vertical gaps between strips.

A second source of inspiration for valance fret patterns is the varieties of lace textile which featured extensively in Victorian and Edwardian women’s fashion and domestic decoration in windows and on mantelshelves. Lace is a translucent textile made by the intricate knotting, plaiting, twisting, stitching, and weaving of cotton or silk threads by hand and by machine to create ornamented cloths for garments and for furnishing building interiors. Early nineteenth century lace included strips for adding features to dresses. These pieces showed how a geometric pattern could be developed as a shaped border. As lace became more intricate through the nineteenth century, and the garments to which it was applied were made with more complexity in their design, so lace manufacturers in England (Devon, East Midlands), Ireland, Europe, India, and China sold products with more pronounced elements, not least the shape of motifs in the collars, cuffs, and flounces used to exaggerate dresses, in veils and shawls, and in torchon and crochet borders. The Great Exhibition of 1851 and International Exhibition of 1862 in London – showcases of innovation in design and industry – included lace and lace-making machines.

Architects saw these sophistications of fashion paralleling patterns in building decoration, and emulated them for valances. Here is the convergence of lace and the architectural picturesque to further the ambition of fashioning apparently light and finely detailed awning valances which would complement and contrast with the solidity of the buildings. To add opulence and sophistication, round, oval, teardrop, diamond, star, and stylised floral apertures – trefoil, fleur-de-lys, teardrop – were cut through the boards at joints or on the board centrelines. (Stop chamfers – the cutting away of board edge to form an angled plane – was an alternative to vertical slots.) To save money and as form of introducing a visual identity (or branding) to stations on a route or in a region, certain railway companies did adopt limited variations on a pattern – the Great Eastern Railway specified one design across Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, the Great Western Railway had one model (with minor variants) for the majority of its awnings across England and Wales (possibly from 1855, seen at Kidlington) and included valances on covered footbridges. Until at least 1903 the London and South Western Railway used a common valance profile from London to the west of England, although even these cases were enlivened by individual examples of quite different decorative treatments.23 By adding fretted valances to station structures – smaller shelters, and signal box roofs, where valances were on occasion provided above windows, over doors, and around the lavatory cabins – the railway companies’ fondness for ornamenting buildings continued through the nineteenth century a trend which had been a feature of house design until the 1850s. Awnings at railway stations in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas also featured valanced awnings.

Even the most modest stations could feature an awning decoration. This is Horderley (1866), early in the twentieth century.

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Top: Lahinch, Ireland, 1887.

Valance fret pattern added to footbridge: Taplow, 1871.

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Bottom: A station with awning valance in Turkey, 1983.

Thornhill after 1850

Marton 1851

Culham circa 1856

Robertsbridge after 1851

East Ham 1858

Topsham (added to original canopy edges after 1861)

Acton Central (N&SWJR) 1853; (NLR) entrance (cast iron)

Barcombe Mills 1858

Great Malvern cast iron 1862

Acton Central (N&SWJR) 1853; (NLR) platform (timber)

Roydon after 1900

Penge East 1863

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Silvertown 1863

Fulwell 1864

Gainsborough Lea Road 1867

Taplow 1872

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Horderley 1866

Camden Road (NLR) 1870

Iron Acton 1872

Thrapston Bridge Street circa 1867

Kineton 1871

Bournemouth West 1874

Battersea Park 1867

Westbourne Park 1871

Stanner 1875

Yarmouth Beach 1877

Grantham ‘up' side (GNR) 1878

South Acton (N&SWJR) 1880

Bush Hill Park 1880

Ladywell circa 1880 also St John's, Maze Hill

Middleton Towers 1882

Lingfield 1884

Weymouth Quay 1889

Wimbledon Park 1889

Snaresbrook 1893

High Brooms 1893

Great Ormesby 1894

Dagenham Dock 1908

Horham 1908

Carstairs 1914–16

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Detail of the substantial valances forming end screens to the train shed at Liverpool Street.

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At Fenchurch Street, London (1853–4), a gabled timber canopy of eleven bays shelters access to the rebuilt interior.

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Cast iron There would be no railways without cast iron. This mouldable yet hardwearing product of smelting iron ore, made possible the manufacture of railway vehicles and the rails on which they move. Until the discovery of plastics and other polymers, no other material cold be made to permanently retain almost any form and ornament desired by the designer. Until reinforced concrete became widespread in construction in the early twentieth century, cast iron was the only viable choice for mechanical and civil engineering projects. With growing knowledge of millennia of worldwide cultures, the Regency and Victorian love of enriching surfaces and objects with decoration could be

indulged through cast iron manufacturing, where even fine and intricate details modelled in the wood patterns used to form the sand moulds for the metal were retained in the process and could be reproduced in large numbers without a decline in quality. Cast iron does not oxidise (rust) as quickly as steel; the components of a structure require only painting to complete the cast decoration. Extensive structural systems can be formed from cast iron parts – an early example of prefabrication in architecture – with the characteristics of being both strong and seeming light.

Columns cast in iron enabled architects and engineers to design multi-storey warehouses and factories. The

The partial demolition of the Merstham awning reveals the structural arrangement of cast iron columns and brackets supporting timber beams.

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material’s association with the steam engine industry and its viability for complex forms would culminate in the creation of extensive and floridly decorated structures such as the interior of the Abbey Mills Pumping Station in east London, designed by C. H. Driver, the architect who devised ornamental platform awning brackets for the Midland Railway at Kettering and other stations.

The evident success of these structures benefitted hotel and office development before steel frame construction proliferated. Evidenced by much of the cast iron present in Britain and overseas and by extensive trade catalogues, the Scottish foundries around Falkirk, Glasgow, and Kirkintilloch contributed bridges, seaside piers and shelters, street furniture, clocktowers, fountains, ‘pillar’ and other postal letter boxes, telephone kiosks, drain covers and gratings, coal chute covers, and millions of domestic items for hearths, rainwater goods, and plumbing fittings.

Railway companies were one of the largest consumers of cast iron. Development of cast iron as a durable, mouldable material made the steam locomotive possible, because it could be shaped to create the cylinders and valves through which steam pressure is converted into force to move wheels and other mechanisms. As we see throughout this book, cast iron was used extensively for railway platforms: footbridges, structural columns and brackets, signs, lighting, seating, fencing and railings, complete urinal enclosures, drinking fountains, automatic machines, ticket dating presses, signs, and letters or symbols to form words for signs as three-dimensional versions of typographical devices. Cast iron is discussed in detail at this point in the present study because new problems arising from railway needs – of which the covering of opening spaces is most significant to this

discussion – encouraged architects and engineers to explore structural solutions using metal components.

According to available building budgets, railway architects designed entire awning structures or worked with parts from manufacturers’ catalogues. Drawings of platform shelters reveal the precision of interlocking parts necessary to fabricate the awning supports. Simpler systems, from single items to multiple pieces, provided metal brackets for timber and iron or steel awning support columns and beams. Some foundries supplied individual cast valance trims with levels of detail impossible to reproduce economically in timber. Practically, cast iron components could be plain in design and fulfil their purpose.

John Ruskin criticised naturalistic ornament; Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, an advocate of cast iron in architecture, argued for appropriate decoration which did not conceal the functional parts of a structure. Neither of these positions discouraged the aspirations to beautify industrial materials which inspired manufacturers to overlay the functional pieces with motifs of increasingly sophisticated detail, much like the mediaeval stonemasons refining and testing the ability of their material to make church windows of ever-greater dimensions. Awning columns are diverse in variety; they may be slender and smooth, cylindrical, square, hexagonal or multi-faced, with detail limited to rings at base and top for strength and stability.

Others, revealing the aspirational tastes of their makers, are thicker and marked with vertical flute grooves, reeded flutes, concentric mouldings, bases and elaborate capitals, all versions of classical orders adapted to suit the casting methods. Where railway companies preferred not to spend money on columns, redundant rails would be employed.

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Awning brackets styled to resemble vegetation can be compared with similar wrought-iron examples of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; others contained the initials of the railway company building the station, or geometric devices including concentric circles and stars, diamonds, hearts, and curvilinear apertures. William Forsyth made one of the most delicate series of capitals at Great Malvern (by E. W. Elmslie, 1861–2), where twelve different groups of plants are set at the meeting point of

columns and roof girders.24 Ridge-and-furrow glazing, developed for horticultural ‘glass’ or ‘green’ houses, is a structural system attributed to Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), a director of the Midland Railway. A sophisticated alternative to the flat awning with valance for sheltering platform areas, the ridge-andfurrow pattern sets the planes of roof at right angles to the station building. These ‘folded plate’ glass roofs, carried on elaborate cast iron brackets with wide spans on slender

Early example of ridge-and-furrow awning at Kettering, described as ‘ornamental and picturesque’. The facing platform was sheltered by the hipped form of ridge-and-furrow awning.

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columns for freedom of movement on the platform, are a distinctive element of many Midland Railway stations from London to the north of England; they proved popular with other railway operators including the Furness and Highland railways. One version of the ridge-and-furrow awning is based on shallow hipped roofs (Kettering by C. H. Driver, 1857; Matlock Bridge by Sir Joseph Paxton, 1849–50; Dumfries, 1863; Ulverston by Edward Paley and Hubert Austin, 1873; Tynemouth by William Bell, 1882); a

second type has open gable ends, as at Ashchurch (1864), Kettering, Strathpeffer (1885) and Dingwall (1886).

The modular nature of assembly provided for all expected levels of passenger traffic: from two bays at Ashchurch, to sixteen bays at Kettering.

The Great Eastern Railway chose to decorate the gable ends of their ridge-and-furrow canopies with elaborate timber valances; these can be seen at several locations including the eighteen-bay, solid awning at Ipswich (1883).

Ridge-and-furrow awning at Bedford Midland Road (1857, redeveloped 1978).

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A replica of the Great Eastern Railway pattern is present at Bruce Grove (opened 1872).

With very few exceptions, valances with individual shaped boards ceased to be part of station design by 1918, because of labour and material shortages after the war, and because of changing ideas about decorating buildings.

Soon the use of steel and simplified designs resulting from the modernising of architectural aesthetics, also stopped provision of decorative valances. When railway companies modernised older buildings, many awnings had their patterned margins cut away. After 1945 the maintenance Above: Two bay ridge-and-furrow awning at Ashchurch, built circa 1864.

Left: Extensive iron and glass awnings at Ulverston, built 1873.

Opposite: Detail of the cast iron columns, brackets and awnings at Hellifield, 1880.

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required to restore buildings for safe operation prompted removal of some awnings; post-1948, and especially in the late 1960s, numerous awnings were demolished when free-standing small, prefabricated shelters replaced station buildings.

The significance of awnings with valances is recognised by Network Rail and railway conservation agencies, and following a report of 2019 methods are being studied for replacing worn or damaged timber valances with facsimiles in other materials.26

For the Far Tottering and Oystercreek Railway built in Battersea Park Pleasure Gardens for the 1951 Festival of Britain, Rowland Emett used the fretted timber valance as one of the most recognisable elements of English railway station design, to parody what were then regarded as ramshackle and redundant Victorian station buildings.25

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Awnings after iron and timber We have seen in Chapter One how reinforced concrete enabled railway companies to manufacture building components economically in large quantities. The same building technology, combining steel bars, cement, and an aggregate material such as shingle or stone chips, had been shown by European engineers to be successful as a replacement for construction in iron, steel, and brick. The additional attraction of reinforced concrete was that – with the correct design of thicknesses and strengths for each

part of a structure – almost any shape of wall or roof was possible. Awnings without direct vertical support could be made to project over uninterrupted space on platforms, or as smaller canopies for station entrance/exit doors and tower roofs. Each of the four main companies operating railways in Britain between 1923 and 1947 explored how they could make modern stations using reinforced concrete with or without brick for walls. The Southern Railway stations at Malden Manor and Tolworth (1938) and Chessington

Tolworth (1938): Thin concrete shells form the walls and awnings.

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North (1939) are distinguished by their curved cantilevered awnings. Apsley (by W. H. Hamlyn, London Midland and Scottish Railway, 1935) has a concrete structure with infilled brick wall and, until it was demolished for a footbridge, a cantilevered ‘butterfly’ canopy on the island platform.

Again by W.H. Hamlyn for the London Midland and Scottish Railway, West Kirby, Hoylake, Manor Road, Meols, Moreton, and Leasowe (all 1938) are constructed with reinforced concrete and display innovative uses of cantilevering for

Illustration of Apsley Station from Snowcem advert, 1946.

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awnings. Working with the London Passenger Transport Board on extensions of the Central line, the Great Western Railway built reinforced concrete platform canopies at West Acton (by Brian Lewis, 1940), Northolt, South Ruislip, Ruislip Gardens, and West Ruislip, (by F. F. C. Curtis, H. E. B. Cavanagh and R. H. Jones, John Kennett and Roy Turner, 1948/61); the London and North Eastern Railway tried another form of reinforced concrete canopy at Loughton (by Stanley Hall and Easton & Robertson, 1940).

In common with nineteenth century platform awning structures, steel and glass canopies have the attribute of being prefabricated away from the final location. This method of providing platform shelter for twentieth century stations in Britain was prototyped by the London Midland and Scottish Railway at Queens Park (by Leslie Martin and Richard Llewelyn-Davies, 1946), and Marsh Lane & Strand Road and Stonebridge Park (both by Martin and LlewelynDavies, 1948), and tended to replace the use of concrete

from the mid-1950s onwards. Crewe, Preston, Cardiff and Folkestone Central show how cantilevered steel beams, laminated timber and sheet glass could be combined to make obstruction-free awnings.

In place of more elaborate provision on less busy platforms, small timber and brick structures with varying degrees of enclosure from the weather offered another solution for passenger shelter. I. K. Brunel placed simplified versions of his ‘roadside’ stations

Concrete canopies at Hampstead Heath.

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Top left: ‘Pagoda’ shelter at Luxulyan, Cornwall. Many pagoda shelters were manufactured by Joseph Ash & Son of Birmingham.

Top right: St Keyne Halt, Cornwall.

Bottom: Wootton Rivers.

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Timber waiting shelters with valance decoration at Top: Chipping Camden (opened 1853); Bottom: Andover Town; Opposite: Grafton and Burbage (opened 1852).

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on the opposite platform to office and passenger accommodation in the main station building, designed to the same high standard of appearance with matching materials; Pangbourne (page 40) illustrates the Brunel shelter.

Less architecturally distinctive but of reasonable quality were the many timber, brick, stone, brick and timber, or stone and timber shelters provided by other railway architects. Some were basic enclosures for fixed seats; some had separate staff or storage spaces. Roofs were semi-elliptical, or pent, pitched and gabled, or hipped; valances adorned the waiting space openings, or projected forward around small awnings.

The Great Western Railway purchased massproduced huts fabricated from corrugated and galvanised sheet metal attached to a metal frame from 1905-7 to supply its programme of small station or halt openings, and for additional enclosed space at stations.

Named ‘pagodas’ for their curved, hipped, roof forms, the huts are part of a family of similar prefabricated buildings both cheap and popular around the beginning of the twentieth century, and came from manufacturers selling chapels (nicknamed ‘tin tabernacles’), community halls, schools, military buildings, and complete station offices – all of which were rigid and durable enough to be moved as necessary.

The ‘Anderson’ air-raid shelter made available from 1938 for domestic use during the Second World War, relied on corrugated metal for its structural properties.

Charming as all of these tiny manifestations of railway architecture may now appear, their occupation in colder weather during periods between trains would not have been comfortable.

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David Mocatta had designed a type of ‘unit station based on a standard plan’ to the London and Brighton Railway of 1839–41. 28 Mocatta used brick and other materials, and the stations were built at their final locations. Modular design – making-up larger objects from a prescribed set of mass-produced components – had interested builders and architects since timber beams were adopted for movable homes and static house frames. Sir Joseph Paxton’s horticultural buildings, and the 1851 Great Exhibition ‘Crystal Palace’ reminded architects that prefabricated buildings could be an economical, efficient, and flexible method of construction. With the early twentieth century modernity came to bear on small, prefabricated shelters for transport settings.

Charles Holden (1875–1960) made a tour of transport systems in northern Europe in 1930 and 1931; one result of his studies was a new type of roadside canopy made with a frame of welded tubular steel, and glass or steel coated with vitreous enamel, for bus stops in London. Radical in the 1930s, this same approach to system building of shelters has continued, with some variations and developments, for almost a century.

While Holden was drafting bus shelters, French architect and designer Jean Prouvé developed small roadside buildings from the mid-1930s, using the novel materials plywood and neoprene (created 1930). Prefabricated standard units and components – walls, doors, windows, furniture, mechanical and electrical equipment – ensured a useful similarity to each building in the series and a ready supply of spare parts for maintenance.

Standardisation was important to designers of early to mid-twentieth century products because it appealed to the concept of functional and undecorated objects and buildings which could be made in multiples.

London Midland and Scottish Railway architect W. H. Hamlyn had been researching mass-production of buildings from around 1942 to meet the need for workers’ canteens during the Second World War. Once the war ended in 1945 Hamlyn’s semi-prefabricated station at South Kenton (1935) became the focus for new work on prefabricated ‘unit’ station buildings. J. L. (later Sir Leslie) Martin and Richard (later Baron) Llewelyn-Davies led the work, using European and North American examples – and the same materials specified by Jean Prouvé – to create compact, enclosed single-storey buildings with open-plan interiors in which all necessary facilities and services were easily accessible. Every part of the ‘unit’ station was made by the Railway using resources released after the Second World War and was tested in the Railway’s own building laboratories. Any part attached to the welded steel frame could be removed and replaced, much like the construction of a motor vehicle. A prototype constructed on an unused platform at Queens Park station, London, in 1945 was followed by a complete station at Marsh Lane & Strand Road in the Bootle area of Liverpool in 1947 and a platform building at Stonebridge Park, London. Smaller shelters without the canopy featured at Watford Junction.

All examples have been demolished. 29 Leslie Martin left British Railways in 1948; the prefabricated stations project ceased.

Opposite: Prefabricated building at West Hampstead. (Previously a prototype constructed at Queen’s Park in 1945).

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‘Mod-X’ Two patterns of prefabricated shelter continued a distinct railway architecture. The first, devised by the London Midland Region as an effective successor to the Martin-Llewelyn-Davies ‘unit station’, had two phases named Mod-X Mark I and Mod-X Mark II. The second, discussed below, was adopted by the Southern Region of British Rail using the CLASP system which had originally been developed for school building in areas where the land was subject to subsidence after mining.

British Railways owned 8,249 stations in 1948.

It published a Modernisation Plan in January 1955 explaining how the national railway system would be improved through electrification and new vehicles.

Electrification of routes around Manchester, Crewe, and Liverpool invited a new architecture for stations which would advertise the modernised services and be suitable for new needs – rebuilt platforms, lower maintenance and smaller, prefabricated, buildings. The design of what would become the Mod-X series of stations was quite different to the work of Martin and LlewelynDavies a decade earlier, but it came from the same Architects’ Department and was a successful continuation of the project to find a suitable and attractive railway building style. Three prototypes of 1958–9 at Burnage, East Didsbury, and Heald Green Right: Mod-X Mark II at Mossley Hill and Handforth.

Also installed at Acton Bridge, Allerton, Chelford, Ditton Junction (with added clerestory over ticket hall), Goostrey (waiting shelter), Hartford, Heald Green (waiting shelter), Heaton Chapel, Holmes Chapel, Mauldeth Road, Runcorn, Sandbach, Sefton Park, Styal, Wilmslow and Winsford.

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(main building) comprise Mod-X Mark I. Assembled from vitreous enamelled steel, glass, timber and melamine laminate-faced plywood, Mod-X Mark I is distinguished by the platform awnings as cantilevered projections of the deep box roof, the whole unit assembled and placed on an open frame before wall panels were added to form the building. Profiled metal sheeting (at Heald Green), which would later be used extensively by British Rail London Midland and Eastern Region architects, and a plain material (at Burnage and East Didsbury) were used as fascia panels for the awnings. Influenced by the building planning of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), Mod-X Mark II shelters were based on an adaptable regular grid plan which determined the position of walls, internal partitions, and the aluminium frame supports. Twenty permutations for positioning doors, windows and solid wall panels are documented, sufficient for most locations and operating necessities. The structures did not have projecting canopies: Any open waiting spaces were provided by omitting perimeter walls to create recesses.

By 1959 the Department of Transport was showing a strong commitment to road building: this would compete with Government funding for rail. In 1960, 7,450 stations remained open; there would be 7,025 in 1961, and 3,235 in 1968. Frederick Curtis, Chief Architect to the British Transport Top: Hadley Wood – waiting shelters (1959) fabricated from welded steel tube.

Bottom: At Sawbridgeworth, paired girders wrap around the sides of a flat awning (1961).

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Commission, member of the Design Panel and chair of its subsidiary the Architects’ Study Group, looked ahead from 1961 to major redevelopment of railway stations to raise funds for the network, and cited the Mod-X stations as examples of British Railways’ ‘architectural triumphs’. 30 Reconstruction of staff and passenger spaces in railway buildings was compelled by the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963; a radical solution was needed for managing outmoded stations, or those considered overlarge for contemporary needs. Demolition of stations, installing standardised small buildings or basic shelters – transferring ticket sales to the trains themselves – was the strategy chosen by railway managers. British Railways, rebranded as British Rail from 1965, operated at an increasing deficit through the decade. Commissioning of multiple similar items would be a common theme for the railways right through to the 1980s: under the influence of the British Railways Design Panel, The Architects’ Study Group operated an index of approved products, starting with Robin Day OBE RDI FCSD (1915–2010) furniture (see page 168) and litter bins by David Mellor CBE RDI (1930–2009).

For platform passenger shelters British Rail continued the precedent set by Charles Holden of using prefabricated tubular steel frames, roofed with a variety of materials and partially enclosed by glass, laminated wood, or metal panels. For some projects, as at Sawbridgeworth, both ‘wet’ construction – brick and mortar walls – and prefabrication – the paired welded steel beams – were combined.

Railway passengers saw many contrasts in platform comforts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through the Open Station and Paytrain schemes British Rail tried to reduce its operating costs by removing workers from many stations, moving the sale of travel tickets to guards

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onto trains. One approach to providing shelter taken by a number of British Rail operating regions, was to demolish all station buildings in favour of small, prefabricated shelters which had originally been designed as bus stop shelters

by David Mellor for engineering and lighting manufacturer Abacus in 1959. Chosen to resist vandalism and arson, these modest structures deployed across Britain from 1967 were unsuited aesthetically to most settings.31 At bus stops where services were at regular intervals, these shelters could be justified; on railway platforms where trains were fewer in number and further apart in the timetable, they were inhospitable places to wait.

Left: British Rail’s Open Station System reflected a strategy to make savings in staff costs.

Opposite: From around 1967, Abacus shelters replaced buildings at many stations.

This is Bruton, 1982.

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The Southern Region attempted to avoid extensive demolition of its estate by choosing another prefabricated building system. Called CLASP (Consortium Local Authority Special Programme), this was based on precast concrete wall panels, glass, vitreous enamelled metal sheets (where concrete not suitable), and neoprene sealed joints.

Southern Region architect Nigel Wikeley hoped that CLASP could replace up to twenty-five stations each year; he recognised that ‘reconstructed stations [may be] only shadows of their former selves’. 32 In a similar way to Mod-X Mark I, the roof unit of CLASP station buildings could be projected forwards on plain painted steel columns to make an awning. The project ran for several years and examples of CLASP stations remain in use in 2024. 33 The system was not used for all replacement passenger shelters in this period, these being built instead mainly from timber and glass with deep roof fascias of horizontal timber boards – designs of a standard which has outlasted many CLASP stations in durability and quality of appearance.

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Above: CLASP stations at Fleet (top) and Wool (bottom).

Opposite: Shelter at East Grinstead with timber board fascias.

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Folowing the use of CLASP, the Southern Region became more ambitious in its design of platform shelters, bringing all the needs of a station’s staff and passengers together in a single glass box structure it called the ‘D70’ or ‘Design for the 70s’. Maze Hill (1971) launched the D70; Liss, Camberley, Elmers End and Chelsfield followed.

For reconstruction of some inner north east London

stations the Eastern Region adopted a similar design to the D70, omitting public toilets and heated waiting areas, because of vandalism, from 1974. 34 The London Midland Region made more elaborate versions at Radlett and Bedford (1978). Budgets continued to be cut; more passenger buildings were removed from platforms.

External suppliers designed waiting shelters in steel

D70 glass box structures at Chelsfield (opposite) and Maze Hill, (above).

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Glasdon made glass-reinforced polyester (GRP) fittings for the interior of the QE2 transatlantic liner launched in 1969. The Glasdon modular kiosk by Keith Ingham (19321995) of Building Design Partnership, prototyped at Preston Bus Station in 1969, has found extensive use for shelters on railway platforms up to the present.

Above: Westhoughton.

Left: Upholland.

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In the 1980s several suppliers designed waiting shelters in steel and acrylic plastic as at Yate and Newquay (above). This is the ‘Clifton’ type by Macemain Engineering.

and acrylic plastic for public transport environments.

Macemain+Amstad (formerly Macemain Engineering) is now a significant supplier of railway buildings; its early platform shelters originated in this period of railway austerity.

Different architectural styles were manifested on railway platforms during the 1980s. The London Midland Region revived the deep roof form of the Mod-X Mark I stations when it provided platform canopies at Milton Keynes and Watford Junction.

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As an alternative to products from catalogues the Network SouthEast sector of British Rail – sectors were created as a precursor to privatisation of the network – worked with designer David Hodge during 1988–9 to create what would be one of the last pieces of national railway architecture. Based on cast metal columns and a pitched or elliptical roof form which hint at the influence of postmodern styling, the structures were prefabricated and could be configured to build a small waiting area or a complete ticket office, staff space and waiting room. The success of the design, its flexibility and robustness, meant

that it was used widely across southern England, East Anglia, Lancashire, and west Wales. A bench seat styled to match the shelter could be added if required.

Compromised safety of passengers and travel fraud were negative effects of the Open Station and Paytrain programmes. British Rail adjusted its programme of station redevelopments to include rebuilding as well as demolition in the late 1980s. One further initiative by British Rail’s own architects would show how prefabrication and traditional construction methods can produce excellent platform buildings.

Network SouthEast prefabricated system: small shelter at Leighton Buzzard; with matching bench at Homerton.

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The V.S.B. 90, a family of passenger spaces and staff rooms giving railway managers and contractors a ‘comprehensive briefing for a specific building type… for small station projects’. 35 A single set of drawings described every component required to make a station of vernacular appearance equipped with modern facilities. The design and assembly of the buildings was sufficiently flexible that a relatively large station with staff and passenger rooms, and accessible routes for all users was possible, whilst the same drawings provided for minimal waiting shelters in the same architectural style.

Drafted by John Fellows at British Rail as a concise

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way of making good, straightforward, staff and passenger spaces, the V.S.B. 90 system represents an effective use of prefabricated units and traditional materials – brick, timber, clay, or slate-style roof tiles. It also detailed how hard (walls, ramps, paved surfaces) and soft (earth and plants) landscaping would be included around the station, and it prescribed boundary walls and timber or metal fences. V.S.B. 90 can be seen as a successful strategy for making railway platform buildings of better standard than any of the CLASP type, and showed how the whole environment of the station area could be improved by considered planning and thorough control of construction.

Opposite: V.S.B. 90 station at Moulsecoomb. Above: Drawing from the V.S.B. 90 building system showing how traditional on-site construction was combined with components made off-site.

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After British Rail Solutions for providing platform shelter and enclosed spaces for selling tickets and kiosks have remained a concern of railway architects. V.S.B. 90 was the last product managed by British Rail’s own design team.

Railtrack, the privatised owner of Britain’s railway infrastructure and most stations in the period 1994–2002, categorised its stations into five groups – A, B, C, D, E, and F – corresponding to the size of station and capacity for traffic, from a national hub (category A) to a small unstaffed station (category F). The network comprises mainly category D, E, and F stations.

Maintenance of category F stations is expensive because of their – often remote – locations, and their limited revenue-earning potential due to lower passenger numbers, but they still need passenger shelters, automatic tickets sales equipment, communications devices for passenger safety and information, and seating. Solutions for shelter at category F stations have, once again, rely on prefabricated structures and modular design which enables a standardised system of parts to be built up in a variety of ways with consistent use of materials and equipment. Assembly is quicker and easier; replacement of defective or damaged parts can be achieved from a stock of uniform components.

Railtrack architects’ first work in this area started in 1996. A cantilevered arrangement, sharing features with the London Midland and Scottish unit station of 1945–6 (see page 74), formed the basis of the ‘Small Stations’ concept. The metal structure acted as armature onto which enclosing panels, lighting and information

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equipment could be attached. Further awnings could be connected to the main frame to protect ticket machines.

A more elaborate version of the ‘Small Stations’ project proposed shaped metal awnings containing the lighting supported by distinctive metal columns, and with small kiosks for staff and passenger uses. This project was not realised, necessitating a continued search for better quality passengers and staff platform shelters. Working with Macemain Engineering – now Macemain + Amstad – Railtrack launched the ‘Modern Facilities at Stations’ (MFAS) initiative to locate prefabricated platform buildings at more than 35 stations during 1996–2005. Tubular metal verticals meet semi-elliptical metal roofs. A second pattern uses shaped hollow roof units with projecting awnings. Douglas Lawson at IDP Architects was involved in the design work. Glazed sections are secured with metal frames; perforated metal panels are ?rivetted. Lighting equipment and rainwater management is contained inside the structure.

The results have weathered well, not least because of their use of glass and stainless steel and the precision with which their parts are made to resist the railway context, and because the design of the building system allows for extension and alternation as service needs change. The visual appearance of these platform pavilions is another important factor in their success: like the London and North Western Railway timber buildings and the Great Western Railway corrugated iron ‘pagoda’ sheds, the MFAS buildings look good in different environments and present a uniform and contemporary identity.

Top: The Railtrack ‘Small Stations’ concept [Canning Wharf]. Design of this system can be compared to similar work by London Underground consultant architects for the Jubilee Line Extension Project of 1999.

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Top: Modular Automated Waiting Enclosure at Gloucester.

This model features fully sealed modular units with automated doors, comfort heating and cooling, and LED Lighting. It can be built to include passenger waiting areas, accessible toilets and washrooms, ticket offices, staff facilities, and stores.

Above left: Paragon AV9 Shelter at Gerrards Cross Station. The Paragon Shelter was designed in the early 1990s and has been developed to provide a range of flexible modular structures to

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encompass a diverse spectrum of applications including: Waiting Shelters, Waiting Enclosures, Covered Walkways, Canopies etc.

The Paragon Shelter is characterised by a distinctive hollow cast aluminium “wishbone” which connects the shelter column to the wedge-shaped eaves and carries services such as drainage, electrics and/or fibre optics.

Above right: Pioneer Open Fronted Shelter at Rufford, designed 2017–18.

Above: Blairhill ticket office with external canopy, encompassing ticket office window and counter, passenger waiting room, staff mess with kitchenette and staff toilet and washroom.

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Network Rail Modular Station Concept (– 2006, 2008–) Wanting to enhance station developments by designing its own modular station buildings to supply the railway system for another half century, Network Rail prepared a family of buildings for use at C, D, E, and F stations, ranging in scale from the largest – a complete enclosed block with ticket sales, retail unit, and lavatories – to the smallest – a passenger waiting shelter with enclosed and open areas. All permutations of structures in this group were based on a square plan of six metres in each dimension, multiplied for the required total plan area. Each building would feature a distinctive deep and overhanging roof, modelled as a canopy of one or more bays for the open shelters. As the awning with patterned valance was a distinguishing feature of nineteenth century railway stations, so the canopy in this design would be the central element, extended and adapted to cover the platform, the roadside, ticket sales machines, and retail kiosks. In contrast to most previous forms of British platform awning, the modular type would be almost entirely metal in structure and the sheet materials concealing the structure. A limited number of wall surface treatments – coated metal or stainless steel, brick or tile, wood, stone – would provide solid panels in addition to the glazed areas. From the design proposals of 2006 stations were built at Corby (2008), Greenhithe (2008), Mitcham Eastfields (2008), East Grinstead (2012), Berkswell, Uckfield (2010), and Hassocks (2013).

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Top: The Modular Station Concept included different exterior materials to suit the local context.

Above: A typical street-facing view of the Modular Station with walls of glass and solid cladding below a canopy roof.

Opposite: Network Rail Modular Station at Corby, opened April 2009. The architecture is made distinctive by the projecting roof above high walls of glass and metal panels.

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If travel purchasing by Internet continues to increase, ticket offices may not be needed at every staffed station.

Changes in how customers are met by staff have already been seen in the banking industry, where the counters with glass screens behind which sits a teller have reduced in length or disappeared altogether in favour of freestanding desks and workers with mobile devices alongside the automated money handling machines. Evidence of similar shifts in the railway environment can in fact be traced back to the selling of tickets by guards on trains in the early twentieth century, where lightly used branch lines did not warrant a human presence at each station.

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On trains today and at bigger stations guards, customer experience staff, and revenue protection officers carry digital equipment capable of producing most ticket types on demand.

Future passenger shelters will be prefabricated by suppliers, working independently and with the rail infrastructure owners. New stations will often – because of the cost of everything else needed to build, power, and hire trains for services – be equipped with basic shelters, made as free-standing awnings or small enclosed spaces.

A timber railway passenger shelter has been developed by Benjamin Stedman Design for the Natural Shelter range.

Opposite page, left: Macemain+Amstad ticket machine shelter at High Brooms, 2024.

Opposite page, right: Natural Shelters are digitally manufactured from acetylated pine timber and aluminium with glass. Modular design allows for diverse permutations and sizes.

Equipment and furniture is integrated within the vandal-resistant enclosure. The patterned valance can be specified by the train operator as a heritage feature.

Right: Free-standing ‘totem’ information kiosk, Liverpool Street.

Far right: Mobile desk and pole-mounted sign unit.

The structures are prefabricated using programmed machines to engineer a chemically-modified timber product named Accoya®. Each set of shelter parts features options for bench and perch seating, lighting and other equipment, a range of panel colours and glass screens, and a machine-routed valance trim fitted to the platformfacing side of the shelter. 38 Passengers still need information. Train departure displays based on LED or LCD technology – either as dot matrix characters or multi-colour screens – fixed to be seen over passengers’ heads compete with animated advertising panels. Additional screens have in recent

years appeared at stations as part of mobile units named kiosks, or ‘totems’ because of their their vertical form. As chalk handwriting on slate boards or pasted paper notices once communicated train information, contemporary rechargeable totems can display complex real time data in accessible ways using visual and outputs, video of British Sign Language interpreters, and cross-network updates.

A person-to-person passenger service continues to be available from static and mobile desks provided with polemounted signs to indicate their position.

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Above, right and following two pages: Network Rail has worked with architects and designers to create a system of prefabricated building components which can be used to produce small to medium-size stations. The system, which was the subject of an international design competition, is called HUB. Unlike the other modular buildings we have seen, from standard timber units and corrugated iron sheds to recent innovative engineered solutions in metal and timber, HUB offers a total station environment designed to be built up from compatible features so that a consistent and complete station can be provided in different locations and to suit varied constraints. The ethos informing HUB

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is to connect communities (the station can provide accessible community spaces and uses); minimise environmental impact (HUB uses sustainable or recyclable materials, low-carbon manufacturing and construction methods, and incorporates green space promoting biodiversity); and improve the passenger experience (shelter, information, and ticket sales pods are standard, whilst shops can be added).

The architectural design of HUB combines traditional railway platform features – a canopy, a clocktower, seating – with thoughtfully landscaped surroundings so that the stations have a civic presence and are easy and pleasant places to use.

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Chapter Three Slow and fast food on the platform

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Slow and fast food on the platform: buffets, shops, and vending machines Provision of refreshment and retail on station platforms is as old as the railways. Mobile traders, trolleys, kiosks, bookstalls, newsagents, cafés, buffets, and vending machines are all solutions for selling drinks, food, and goods on railway platforms. Railway catering, associated with locations as spectacular as the Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras Station, London and the now-mythical experience of a stale, processed ‘British Rail sandwich’, is a history still to be fully studied.

Between these extremes were hundreds of small places on platforms at which to buy food and drink during a rail journey. John Betjeman recalled seeing ‘AFTERNOON TEAS A SPECIALITY’ in glazed letters on Edwardian station café windows. 43 Refreshment room staff attended railway company training schools equipped with a fullsize demonstration buffets and bars, and functioning equipment for practical instruction.

By 1939, 767 ‘refreshment, dining and tea rooms’ were available to travellers.44 That same year Great Western Railway sold 18,000 cups of tea and 1670 meals per day.

Bigger stations operated buffets in buildings and kiosks, often licensed to sell alcohol too. Special free tickets were issued to visitors who wished to dine at the station without travelling on the railway.

A typical station tearoom, the focus of key scenes in films like ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945), presented to the customer stacks of ceramic cups and crockery on bar counters, heaps of stainless steel or nickel-plated cutlery marked with the railway company monogram, bowls of white sugar with occasional clusters tinged tea or coffee brown, and bread and pastry products. Slabs of chocolate, boxes of chocolates, colourful confectionery, and wrapped segments of cake promised pocket-sized consumables to

Above: At Melton Constable, about 1910, Mrs Field and Miss Morgan operate the station’s Tea Room.

Opposite: Selling food to train travellers at Bobadilla railway station, Spain, early twentieth century.

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Interior of a modern station buffet, London and North Eastern Railway, 1946. The streamlined design of the bar and behind-counter wall reflect trends in novel materials including chromed metal and the opaque tinted glass called Vitrolite.

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take away. Many railway buffets were licensed to serve alcohol when public houses were closed.

As is still the practice in some nations, vendors of food and drink worked along trains waiting in platforms. In 1938 the London and North Eastern Railway employed ‘fruit girls’ – a similar role to the cinema ‘usherette’ – wearing a tray loaded with snack foods for sale to passengers. Mobile

trolleys could support food and the heavy appliances needed to heat water for drinks which would be consumed from equally heavy ceramic cups. The Southern Railway commissioned tea trolleys in 1946, styled in the streamlined forms of the 1930s and embellished with chromium trims and acrylic glass cake display cases. Eventually, again following airline practice, the trolleys moved onto trains.

Passengers who did not use the catering spaces at stations were not a neglected sales opportunity: railway company vendors attended main line trains. Following the pre-war ‘fruit girls’ after 1945 mobile sales personnel returned, selling fruit, sandwiches, drinks, sweets and cigarettes to travellers. At busy stations miniature buffets on wheels also catered to passengers and visitors.

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Waiting for a train, passengers are a captive audience for impulse buying opportunities and for advertising.

The journey passes more quickly with a distraction. Now, music and movies are in most mobile devices, but until quite recently railway travellers had to bring or buy printed materials for their entertainment. Two William Henry Smiths, father and son, opened newsagent kiosks on

railway stations from 1848. Louis Hachette started a similar trading enterprise on French railways in 1852. Railway bookstalls became local shops selling worlds news and goods from far away. Newspapers sent by overnight trains made stations the first places that national and world news was communicated to communities outside cities. W. H. Smith & Son worked to raise the quality of reading material

A typical small station bookstall selling paperback books, magazines, newspapers, cigarettes and travel items.

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available for sale, and for a time also rented books to passengers for the duration of their waiting time. Progress in lithographic printing added monochrome and pictorial magazines to the kiosk stock. Paperback book sales burgeoned at station bookstalls: Penguin and Pan brought fiction, science fiction, murder mystery, poetry, and classical literature to people on the move. Confectionery

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for consumption or gifts was an obvious addition. Standard types of kiosk identified the premises of W.H.Smith & Son, one rectangular, and another based on a half octagon.

Retailer John Menzies maintained newsagent’s kiosks at stations across Scotland. Finlay & Co. sold tobacco products; the Interflora brand was an early manifestation of purchasing items to be delivered to a remote address.

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British Railways’ commissioning of new buildings for its 1955 Modernisation Plan gave architects the possibility of re-imagining the station buffet. The trend from counter service towards self-service in the early 1960s prompted changes to buffets, and a swing back to more intimate and fashionable dining and drinking venues later in the same

decade was reflected in several good projects by younger designers aware of city cafés and nightclubs. Even so, station buffets – with exceptions where redevelopment took place – offered the possibility of encountering a Victorian or Edwardian interior well into the twentieth century.

Above: Refreshment room at Colchester, 1962. Tinted glass and paint have been superseded by laminate plastics and exotic woods.

Opposite: Sevenoaks, 1978. A typical railway buffet counter was much like any town or suburban cafe. The principal equipment is the water heater/dispenser. Packaged food is supplemented by boxed confectionery and cigarettes.

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Resulting from airline competition for national traffic British Rail formalised the Inter-City network of express train services. To extend the passenger experience, the marketing and design of over 200 station catering spaces (then a subsidiary of British Transport Hotels) were transformed with the red and yellow Catering Services devised by Design Research Unit in 1968, and equipped

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with specially commissioned industrial design: beakers, cutlery, and trays in smoked and coloured polypropylene designed by Martyn Rowlands Associates in 1967 for train meals and stations. 45 Rail catering and retail was rebranded Travellers Fare, in 1973 and later Travellers-Fare. The choice of red and yellow for Travellers Fare was informed by catering

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industry ideas in North America and Britain about colours implying positive moods and freshness (green would not be chosen because of its associations with older railway buildings), and also to be eye-catching and attractive in busy station settings. Consultant architects and British Rail’s own design teams produced contemporary styling

for platform dining and drinking spaces. To embed the modern cafeterias into older contexts and at the same time attract business, Travellers Fare named its outlets after landmarks or cultural references local to the stations, choosing titles such as Belgrave, Brayford, Bridge, The Centre, Charnwood, Dome, Drum, East End, Europa, Globe,

The Drum bar and buffet opened at Waterloo early in 1972, with an interior by architects Hulme Chadwick & Partners. The design incorporates ideas suitable for transport environments but influenced by the higher-quality examples of restaurants in London and Europe’s prestigious shopping areas. By focusing the lighting on individual tables, and introducing plastics and polished metal surfaces, the relatively small space was made to feel more intimate and special. This space was occupied by the Casey Jones burger bar 1980–94 (see image on page 127).

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Golden Frame, Jazz, Lodge, Lord Byron, Out of Town, Paddock, Peaks, Saddle Room, Shires, Stirrup Cup, Taurus, Toreador and Weald. 46 Plastics, glass, polished metal, and bright lighting gave a uniformity to the brand. Drinks were served in pale green vitrified stoneware cups made by Dudson Brothers

in Hanley, and meals consumed from Dudson Brothers plates using the Thrift cutlery range designed by David Mellor and manufactured in Sheffield from 1965 for public organisations such as the National Health Service and the Prison Service.

Travellers-Fare produced Trax buffets from 1983. Station

Left: Poster for The Great Express restaurant. Right: Design of The Great Express restaurant and lounge bar at Waterloo was as stylish as food outlets like Mr Feed’em in fashionable city shopping areas and was ‘intended to resemble the interior of a Wurlitzer juke box’.47

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buffets experienced internal competition from on-train catering – food and drink trolleys – which made an agile and economical solution to the outdated fixed carriage buffet.

This shift was accelerated when British Rail developed its express Inter-City/InterCity train services from the late 1970s. Even with the more luxurious French station-inspired

interiors such as the Europa Bistro at Liverpool Street, passengers’ interest in sit-down dining decreased as they came to accept pre-packaged food, microwave cooking, and disposable plastic cups and cutlery. Observing that food choices were changing as fast-food outlets proliferated in Britain from the early 1970s, Travellers-Fare created the

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Top: A portable refreshment trolley at Waterloo, 1979 and disposable cup.

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Bottom: Edinburgh Waverley Quicksnack kiosk.

Casey Jones brand in 1980 as a version of better-known hamburger retailers of North American origin. Platform refreshment spaces became brighter, dominated by offwhite, yellow, bright green and bright red plastic surfaces.

Beyond the fourteen Casey Jones operations, generic titles including Quicksnack and Station Tavern replaced the local names which had applied by British Rail Catering in the 1960s. A further development in station catering spaces came with the food court, an arrangement adopted from airport design, where several kiosks are grouped together offering different meal types. Novel when opened in 1986, Le Croissant Shop began a series of similar offers based around baguettes, pastries, muffins and pasties: all foods made to be consumed on the move.

British Rail established a Property Board during the 1980s to formalise management of its building assets and station spaces and exploit the commercial and social value of the railway estate. British Rail took the examples of airports and shopping malls to add shopping opportunities at stations. Change was most obvious at major termini, where under-used rooms became shops and whole developments were added as part of larger property deals. At other stations refurbishment of public areas made room for bigger shops and new refreshment areas. Brands associated with the early expansion of retail at stations include Tie Rack, Sock Shop, Journeys Friend, Heel Bar, Millie’s Cookies, Photo Me, Whistle Stop, Our Price and iterations of baguette, sandwich and pasty vendors.

In comprehensive schemes for new stations, railway architects arrange the kiosks and group the machines for convenience and tidiness, however any planned design is vulnerable to the addition or replacement of the original equipment. The fast evolution and economic volatility of

retail activities has meant that some innovative design schemes of the 1980s have themselves become heritage structures or been lost to newer installations. Separate kiosks and cabins are the preferred solution for late twentieth century platform retailing because they can be moved or removed as required. In summer for example, substantial space is rented to sellers of sweets and pastries displayed in moveable glass cabinets; in autumn or winter, charities bring ‘pop-up’ vintage fashion stalls.

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Food retailing at stations is now much improved by refrigerated displays and deliveries from off-site kitchens. A visitor to many small railway platforms will encounter diverse coffee outlets linked to national brands and small businesses, working from sophisticated branded kiosks, redundant station rooms, and small timber sheds. More traditional cafés have been revived at some locations.

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For operating and financial reasons railway companies preferred to rebuild or add to stations rather than replace them completely. A consequence of this approach was that platform areas accumulated a mix of shelters, kiosks for

Mechanical vending machines in cast iron.

books, magazines, newspapers, and confectionery, and self-service vending machines selling food (hot and cold), drinks (in tins, bottles, and disposable cups), cigarettes, and platform tickets.

Companies marketed automatic services to whatever venues wished to save on workers’ wages or attract additional business by placing purchasing opportunities in the paths of visitors and travellers. The design of vending equipment was not co-ordinated with the station environment but did demonstrate the ingenuity of cast iron manufacturing in the way architectural forms – columns, pediments, scrolls, acroteria, and artistic scripts cold be compressed into the narrow vertical space of a machine. Typical services were selling cheap chocolate bars or chewing gum, telling a passenger’s weight, or the opportunity to stamp messages onto metal strips as souvenirs. Machines might be of different shapes and dimensions arranged in odd groups, or enclosed in ungainly housings where they were located beyond fixed shelters.

Technical developments in the coin receiving and service dispensing mechanisms, and technology for shaping metal forms devised in the motor vehicle and aviation industries, led to cast metal vending machines being superseded by plain rectangular metal casings, screen-printed with the product branding, and with or without windows to show the contents available for purchase. The best of these assemblies was planned in every detail; less good were the examples built without thought for their surroundings and painted in bright, eye-catching colours. Electronics have transformed platform vending machines again; now multiple items can be displayed in illuminated and temperature-controlled cabinets behind glass panels.

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Vending machine, 1974.

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Ticket sales units are now an essential feature of platform spaces for use when the ticket office is closed or not required.

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Chapter Four Scene

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We have discussed the platforms and pavilions that characterise railway stations.

Now we step back from the buildings to consider the environment of the platform: the signs, lighting, seating, and designed boundary features, which provide information, comfort, safety, and security. Unusual features of station platforms are noted, including drinking fountains, and the dogs which formerly collected money for charities. We look at the memorials, art, and design made for and about platform areas, and the station gardens which have made many platforms special places.

Station name and information signs show the trends in lettering for public spaces over the last century and a half, some examples adopting characters used in letterpress printing for some hundreds of years. Techniques for forming words from metal, vitreous enamelled steel, cast metal, and screen printing have been used to fashion these essential textual communications. Platform lighting is a three-dimensional catalogue of engineering and

electrical/electronic invention, from the plumbing and exuberant metalwork of oil and gas lamps to the smoothed technology-concealing contours of concrete, glass, metal, and plastic posts and luminaires. Railway companies used their own foundries and other manufacturers to fabricate bench seats from cast-iron and timber. Like the awning support brackets over passengers’ heads, metal seats beneath their resting forms incorporate company monograms, or naturalistic decorations conveying the ingenuity of metalworkers and carpenters. Definition of designed platform boundaries – most obviously with fences and railings of various types – has also utilised the skills of craftspeople.

Station platforms are private spaces in public use; they are an occasion to display cultural expressions – tributes and memorials for significant people and groups, artistic representations of local communities and historic contexts, horticultural expertise as a once-important and widespread pastime – to a considerable audience.

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Metal letters fixed to a timber board were a flexible and popular system among railway companies. The Great Western Railway used this approach extensively, and adopted an alternative solution of casting the entire sign in metal, the name highlighted afterwards in paint (white on black).

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Signs at Stations Signs at railway stations have two purposes. For passengers on trains, nameboards of different sizes and formats display the station name to communicate the location. For passengers at stations – and visitors to the station – signs on platforms give directions to the available facilities and identify the facilities. Early railway platforms were not so well provided with typographical communications: passengers were expected to navigate the simple provisions or be directed by the teams of workers. The expense of providing signs, and perhaps the assumption that it would be obvious that an object as large as a railway station could be readily located, meant

that some platforms were identified by a single name sign painted onto on suitable building or a large board.

Quickly routes lengthened; travellers covered greater distances to unfamiliar areas. Platforms needed name signs for arriving passengers. Most railway companies provided ‘running-in’ nameboards at significant stations and at junctions where passengers would need early notice of their need to change trains. Very early station developments had a limited number of nameboards, often hand painted by signwriters. The Great Western Railway, and its successor the Western Region of British Railways, used large nameboards to which were fixed

Above: Hand-painted sign at Highbridge, 1890s.

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individual letters cut from timber or cast in metal. Entire cast iron nameboards were available as durable but expensive alternatives. Metal sheets with a vitreous enamel coating, a manufacturing technique exploited for commercial advertising, suited the manufacture of station nameboards and smaller direction and information signs: these were also used. The art of the enameller proceeded from signwriters’ skills, endowing nameboards with bold serifed or grotesque (sans serif) alphabets. Plainer works presented only the characters in light or dark hues – chocolate or ultramarine blue with cream or white as a

contrast. More ambitious efforts added three – dimension shadow effects in one or more shades. Choice of colours was deterined by the availability of enamels and their resistance to sunlight and dirt.

Between the large boards, the station name appeared as a section or ‘tablet’ of the glass lanterns of oil and gas lamps, rendered in etched or pressed opal glass, vitreous enamel, or on printed paper labels.

After amalgamation of railway operators in 1923, the Great Western Railway maintained its existing signs and made new signs to similar patterns. We have already

Left: Station name painted directly onto timber building at Marston Gate, opened 1860.

Right: Ornate cast metal letters made by Macfarlane’s of Glasgow. These imparted sophistication and rusticity to stations on the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway and the Weston, Clevedon and Portishead Railway.

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Vitreous enamel on steel nameboard for the Great Western Railway at Culmstock. The station name is also shown on the tablet present in the lamp housing.

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seen how railway companies used reinforced concrete to manufacture building items; the same technology found use in nameboard production. For Southern Railway stations the Exmouth Junction manufacturing facility made reinforced concrete nameboards comprised the station name in raised letters on a panel, or displayed on backlit glass or enamelled steel, between two posts.

On the solid nameboards contrasting paint colours, dark on light and later white on green, made the name prominent. 48 Certain other operators adopted reinforced

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concrete for nameboards, adapting the patterns of metal and timber types.

For the Midland and Great Northern Railway engineer William Marriott designed reinforced concrete nameboards so finely detailed that they resemble timber products. His specifications for reinforcement were protected by patents; his choice of cement mixes emulated white paint. Individual letters cast in durable colours – red, black or white – were secured to the main board by a layer of cement in a contrasting hue to create

the background. Made from 1916, examples were also provided for other rail companies.

Alphabets and symbols created by Edward Johnston for London Transport (the London Passenger Transport Board) from 1916 came to influence other railway operator corporate brands. Through connections between Sir John Elliot and London Transport, the Southern Railway fitted many of its stations with vitreous enamel on steel ‘target’ nameplates – a derivation of the London Transport bar and circle symbol – displayed on lamp standards so that they

were legible both day and night. Unlike the original device designed by Edward Johnston for use in London, Southern Railway targets varied in length of bar according to the station name. Subsidiary information would be added to the ring, a practice avoided by London Transport as it was considered to weaken the visual impact of the symbol.

An alternative version of the bar with circle motif formed the basis of cast metal alloy nameplates introduced by the London Midland and Scottish Railway 1934–38, and known as ‘Hawkseyes’ after their Birmingham-based

The vitreous enamel on steel London and North Eastern Railway name sign, shown here on an experimental reinforced concrete nameboard support, is dark blue with white letters from the Gill Sans alphabet, introduced by the operator from around 1933 as part of a unifying brand.

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manufacturer G. C. Hawkes. The recent innovation of reflective glass beads for road signs, and the black on yellow colour scheme of road signs chosen for best visibility in all weather conditions, was adopted for the nameplates.

Passengers waiting for trains at all but the smallest stations will need to find ticket sales, information, refreshments and toilets. Railways also previously offered parcel-carrying services with their own spaces. Operation of the railway requires rooms for staff and equipment, some to be visited by the public, and some to which access is prohibited. Signs suspended from platform awnings or fixed to walls direct passengers; signs attached to doors label the function of the spaces. In common with station nameboards, direction signs and doorplates were commonly made from metal letters on timber boards or cast entirely in metal by the railway company or an external supplier. Painting schemes matched the nameboards. The creativity of the foundry or signwriter resulted in complex displays of substantial scale, often endowed with one or more manicules (hands with a pointing finger), and decorative borders to the frames by which the signs were mounted.

Right: Passengers boarding a train at Crewe, about 1908.

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A selection of station nameboards shown at the same scale to indicate variations in size.

Swainsthorpe and Rayne are midnineteenth century; Birdbrook is mid-twentieth century; Audley End represents a style of sign used by British Rail from the late 1960s.

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Totems Brought into state ownership with London Transport in 1948, British Railways wanted a single brand symbol which was equal to the bullseye or bar and circle roundel which identified London’s buses, Underground trains, trams, and trolleybuses. British Railways’ corporate styling from 1948 was developed by A. J. White.

White produced a ‘totem’ device resembling a compressed version of the bar and circle, its one main and two subsidiary panels rounded in the streamlined moderne idiom. Having been associated with the London and North Eastern Railway, White promoted the Gill Sans alphabet for British Railways’ use. The ‘totem’ was a central feature of the nationalised rail network corporate identity, as printed logotypes and threedimensional signs rendered in different colours according to the region or operating area.

Its general form is still associated with railways and has been appropriated by many transport and train toy-related businesses.

Although White’s ‘totem’ station nameplates are now very desirable items amongst collectors of such materials, the motif was not as elegant and simple as the roundel.

Other signs made for the British Railways’ 1948 regional identity scheme exploited a design of frameless panel, where the edges of a metal sheet were pressed back at right angles to make a more rigid unit. Large nameboards and small door signs all used this format, enamelled in the regional colour with white or cream Gill Sans letters. An early move away from the totem signs was evident with the production of Mod-X buildings by the London Midland Region of British Railways during 1958–61. To maintain full

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prefabrication of all parts in the building systems, location names were displayed on frieze panels above passengers’ heads – much like the practice at subterranean London Underground stations. The names were either in white letters on a dark background, or dark letters on white or frosted glass.

After Gill Sans Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert had designed a set of characters and numerals for the British government’s Ministry of Transport motorway signs. In use on roads from 1958, the ‘Transport’ letterform was modified for railway use and appeared for a time on some platform name ‘totem’ and direction signs, the lettering usually in black on white, or in white on green for station totem name plates. 50 This was a compromise move arising from the Ministry’s responsibility for road and rail, but it did prompt a review of visual communications on the railway network.

British Rail’s corporate identity, created by Design Research Unit with Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert working with George Williams of the British Railways

Design Panel, is attributed to Dr Richard (later Lord) Beeching. Learning from the transformation of airline brands such as BOAC and BEA, Beeching saw restyling of the railway system as an important part of the modernisation programme at a time when passengers had increasingly high expectations of design in travel contexts.

Planning for the corporate identity started in 1963; it was launched with an exhibition – and the new British Rail double arrow symbol –in London in 1965. Documented in extensive manuals, every public aspect of British Rail was changed by branding, vehicle liveries, signs, paint hues, the uniforms of workers, and printed publicity.

Central to the Design Research Unit project was

Above: BR ‘plank’ nameboards, doorplates and direction signs.

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the visual unification of the rail network. This could only ever be piecemeal because of the extent and age of the infrastructure, however the use of a consistent alphabet for signs, simplified colour schemes, and the control of all aspects of station design by British Rail architects achieved a renewed and consistently high standard of buildings and interiors. Station signs in the 1965 corporate identity scheme were lettered with Kinneir Calvert’s bespoke Rail Alphabet, displayed most commonly as black lettering on a white rectangular panel or ‘plank’, and replacing older signs to give ‘a theme of unity throughout the system…create a feeling of confidence and reassurance as well as imposing control’. 51 In contrast to the metal and enamel signs used by railway companies for over a century, the British Rail corporate identity examples were to be ‘adequate in design and construction without being extravagantly expensive’. 52

Network Rail Wayfinding Design Guidance manual.

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Single large panels formed the platform station name signs, mounted on slender square metal posts without decoration, at regular spacing along platforms positioned to be visible above travellers’ heads. Although dimensions were standardised, only the length of the panel being adjusted for a particularly long name, smaller rectangular names signs were sometimes installed at stations, fixed to lighting standards like the totems or lamp tablets they had superseded. Smaller planks could be arranged on their own or in groups for directional and information purposes.

Here, the lettering was black and any directional arrow blue. Spacing of each letter conformed to a system devised

by Kinneir Calvert and Design Research Unit. Pictograms, symbols representing facilities and services which could be recognised without reading the adjacent word, had become popular through use at several international events and ait airports in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Pictograms were added to the plank signs, increasing their visual complexity but making them more accessible to travellers. British Rail shared Rail Alphabet with the Danish State Railways (DSB); Kinneir Calvert designed versions for the British Airports Authority and the National Health Service. Similar typography featured at some stations in Ireland. As British Rail rationalised its station services from the late 1960s, platform buildings were closed, and the signs removed along with the facilities they had advertised.

The rectangular name sign introduced by British Rail from 1965 has remained the format for these items up to the present, with variations only in colours and added graphics related to different British Rail pre-privatisation sectors, and train operating companies.

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Sign Family 6.3 Directional

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Platforms 1 to 5 Merseyrail via lift Toilets Lost property

Car park 300 m St George’s Hall 165 m Albert Docks

Two direction configuration examples

Underground Way out 3 Joiner Street

Information Buses Tooley Street R S H Taxis London Bridge City Pier

A

B

Tickets Buses Way out

C Shard Piazza

London Bridge Street 4

Three direction configuration examples Directional – Four line (combined horizontally)

Stations are complex places which need wayfinding to make the passenger journey from arrival to departure, and between ticket sales, refreshments, shop units, and toilets, simple. Signs giving directions, information, identification of places and facilities, warnings, and safety information combine words and symbols for the best accessibility. Design of signs must ensure that they are easy to see amongst advertising and retail displays.

Network Rail, studying global transport examples and British Rail’s own work in corporate identity, has created a family of signs for use at stations. To ensure the signs are most effective, station environments should be cleared of older visual ‘clutter’.

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Passenger routes are modelled to confirm the best placing of signs. The type of information required at different points along the passenger journey is planned. The size and type of sign, lettering, and symbols is confirmed by testing and according to a Wayfinding Design Manual.

Signs have a hierarchy of elements or features. The lettering is the railway’s own typeface called Rail Alphabet 2. The brand mark is the double arrow or Rail Symbol 2. Arrows are drawn to standard dimensions and alignment angles. A library of pictograms provides for most of the symbols likely to be needed in transport contexts.

Information Structure 4.3 Information Hierarchy 1. Essential journey information — Train travel — Way out

2. Onward journey information — Transport Interchange — Journey inside station

3. Amenities & facilities — Toilet and shower facilities — Main station facilities — Other amenities

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A clear and consistent hierarchy of information is essential to wayfinding.

This hierarchy defines how information is presented consistently across all channels of information. Designing an information hierarchy requires thinking from the passenger’s point of view about their primary, secondary and tertiary needs, and then using graphic means to emphasise importance.

As passengers read a list of destinations in signage from the top down, the hierarchy of information for passengers should start with the station user’s most essential needs at the top, working down to their least critical requirements. The high importance of safety, directional and mandatory signage should be reflected visually in the information design.

Essential rail travel, tickets and Way out information should be listed at the top, followed by onward journey information, internal station circulation, amenities and facilities, working down to less essential commercial services at the bottom.

4. Commercial establishments — Restaurants, cafés, shops, hotels

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Colour schemes Timber and metal parts of station structures require painting to protect them from the effects of weather and use, and to resist pollution (including smoke and steam from locomotives), and the and metal dust from train braking equipment. Railway companies use painting schemes to impart a visual uniformity to groups of stations, lines, and networks. Early paints mixed from burnt sienna (iron oxide-bearing clay) ranged in shade from cream to stone, buff, and chocolate brown, modified by the addition of carbon black. Extracts of metals and earths added to paint mixtures produced green hues. Lead and chrome additions brightened the whites and yellows, gave variation to greens, and made other colours more stable. Creams and bronze greens became popular shades for building elements in the 1820s, so they were natural choices for railway buildings: several railway companies across Britain preferred green and cream for stations. Darker colours give solidity to objects, and lighter shades reduce the visual impact of overhead structures. It was common practice for windows and doors to be either darkened by graining effects to simulate wood, or highlighted against the brick, stone, or timber walls with a suitably contrasting colour.

Developments in Paint Microscopy Examination reveal that the colours varied little from the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century. Paint analysis at Wingfield station – where surface treatments date back to its opening in 1840 – reveals that the selection in interior colours extended beyond generally understood corporate painting practices, moving from cream and buff with light grey ceilings, succeeded in the late nineteenth century by pink, blue, and green. (Similar hues are recorded for Great Western Railway interiors of

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the period.) In the twentieth century, cream walls and redbrown woodwork at Wingfield were replaced around 1940 by cream with dark green woodwork.

Before industrialised paint manufacture, colours for buildings were mixed to match samples from previous batches: the resulting hue was subject to the judgement of the person mixing the ingredients, the purity of the ingredients, and the paint recipe. Records of railway structure painting schemes feature names for which there may be no precise definition. Companies’ records illustrate the general choice of colours. Midland Railway station exteriors were chocolate and cream, with maroon doors and cream window frames. From 1899 the Great Northern Railway painted buildings in a sequence from ground to awnings, in dark or chocolate brown and light brown or light stone; doors and window frames were ‘combed’ to represent dark oak, and window sashes painted light green. In Scotland the Caledonian Railway used cinnamon, burnt umber, and cream, and white painted window frames. The London and South Western Railway chose pinkish buff for exterior walls, with frames, timber building corners, doors, and columns in a darker brown.

Awning valances were striped vertically like their textile originals, in dark brown/buff and buff. Orange, brown, and pink appeared on the interior walls of these buildings.

A consistent appearance of locomotives and buildings created a strong visual identity for the Great Western Railway. It used shades of stone colour, simply named No.1, No.2 and No. 3, with black and white for station buildings from London to west Wales and the Midlands.

Changes were few, but variations arising from hand mixing of colours widespread, so that the light stone might be interpreted as ‘buff’ and the dark stone as ‘cinnamon’.

There was only limited standardisation of British colours before the beginning of the twentieth century, and no specification for a universal range until 1930 when the first British Standard (BS) 381 shades were published.

The London and North Eastern Railway planned in 1936 to repaint stations along some lines in the same colours, and to introduce brighter shades at some stations. London Midland and Scottish Railway colours were to be limited to six from 1936/7: deep cream or Portland stone, with middle brown or middle Brunswick green or Venetian red, and golden brown on its own or with other colours.11 Colour paint was reserved for certain uses during the Second World War, and only released for widespread

public sale from 1954. The Archrome (Munsell) range devised by the Development Group of the Ministry of Education introduced bright colours for schools and other non-domestic uses in 1953, as an alternative to the sombre shades of the BS 381 range. Archrome and BS 381 colours were subsequently adjusted to extend the availability of Archrome shades. Shades of green, cream, brown and red were used throughout the first half of the twentieth century. British Railways still relied on visual colour matching in the early 1960s.49 Perhaps surprisingly, black was not a common colour for railway buildings until around 1960 when the composition of suitable paints was achieved. The British

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Railways’ Architects’ Study Group 1961 Code of Practice did not specify colours but stated ‘selected paint colours should harmonize with the colours of unpainted surfaces [and] the station surroundings which might be urban, industrial or rural… colours should be chosen to bring out the colours used on station name and direction signs [and] to increase the effectiveness of the lighting. There should be a limited standard range of colours, at any rate standard within each region, from which colours can be selected to suit the characteristics of each station.’

British Railways’ Eastern and Southern Regions started to move away from a uniform colour scheme of green and cream in 1963. Routes would now have different painting patterns, one of which was blue and grey.

Through the 1970s, where buildings were retained on platforms, repainting schemes featured limited combinations, with cream, brown, black, and white as one set, and green, grey, black, and white as another. Dark green, blue, yellow, and dark or bright red might be applied to highlight details.

British Rail pre-privatisation sector station colours are particularly memorable for the ScotRail and Network SouthEast red applied to buildings, structures, lighting standards, equipment, and furniture. In fact, Network

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SouthEast devised three colour schemes based on bright red, dark green, or dark blue to emphasise the architectural design and details of different stations. To these colours would be added, respectively, magnolia, white, or very pale cream for window frames and awning valances, with a shade from the red, green, or blue colours used in contrast for mouldings, columns, and door frames.

Available records suggest that InterCity did not specify station painting schemes, choosing instead to advise choosing colours sympathetic to the station. From 1988 a palette of red, black, light and dark grey, and silver was available for stations; the addition of further greys and an ivory or pale cream extended the range in 1991.

Regional Railways, operating stations in varied rural and urban settings, allowed more diversity in colour choices, indicating base colours of grey, cream, brown, soft blue, soft green, white, or black for walls, to which could be added dark green, dark blue, or deep red for doors and columns, and cream, bright blue, warm red, deep yellow, or bright green for highlights.

Post-privatisation infrastructure company Railtrack chose a shade of purple as part of its colour scheme for the stations it owned or managed. Network Rail does not have a fixed range of colours for stations.

Great Western Railway

London and North Eastern Railway (1937)

London Midland and Scottish Railway (1936)

London Midland and Scottish Railway Town/brick (1948)

London Midland and Scottish Railway Country/stone (1948)

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British Railways - Southern (1949)

British Railways - Eastern (1953)

British Railways - Midland (1954)

British Railways - North East

British Railways - North East (Oriental Blue)

British Railways - Western

British Railways (1980s)

British Railways (1980s)

Network SouthEast (Red)

Network SouthEast (Green)

Network SouthEast (Blue)

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Lighting Before the now common use of closedcircuit television and remote video monitoring, platform safety and security at night depended on lamps fuelled by oil or gas. Oil lamps are portable units containing their fuel (usually a distillation of petroleum called paraffin or kerosene), requiring the daily cleaning and adjustment which occupied much of a railway station worker’s time. Oil lighting, besides being the first type of viable artificial illumination on railway networks, remained the source of light for thousands of railway signals until the 1980s, and still features at heritage railways where a sweet, sticky aroma is a clue to their presence. Station oil lamps, like their counterparts in other public and domestic spaces, could be used with or without additional enclosures. At stations, they were typically placed in glass boxes fixed to station buildings or posts.

For the most basic station platforms one or two glass and metal enclosures fixed to metal or timber posts was considered sufficient lighting; in some cases there was no permanent installation at all, the portable oil lamps being distributed from the most suitable train.

Gas produced from the heating of coal – also called ‘town gas’ – brought a more Ventilators on Midland Railway lamps combined finials with decorated fringes much like miniature valances.

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One of the art deco forms of concrete railway platform lighting standards manufactured by the Southern Railway (two versions),

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reliable, lower maintenance lighting source to streets, homes, and railway platforms. Extremely toxic, and with a similar basis in flammable hydrocarbons to lamp oil, gas flowed through pipes to fixed lamp standards. Gas lanterns required the burning element to be enclosed in glass and metal cases of square or hexagonal form, often shaped with a taper from base to top and usually mounted on the metal scrolls of a ‘frog’, or suspended from a curved extension of the post called a ‘swan neck’ with or without a surrounding cage. Above the glass, pyramidal,

conical or concave ‘tent’ covers included a chimney decorated with tiers having serrated edges or smooth folded rims, and conical, domed, or turned finials. From iron-founders, many of which were located in Scotland, railway companies purchased ready-made cast iron lamp posts (standards) of round or hexagonal section, and with surfaces undecorated or having straight or spiralling flutes.

At the top of the posts, shaped metal pieces supported the lantern.

Bridging the transition from gas to electricity as

The Great Western Railway designed a lighting standard without a bracket, preferring instead to turn the standard over by 45 degrees near the top, and then again by 45 degrees to provide a horizontal section to which the lamp was attached. The simplicity of this pattern was most evident in the two-arm standards installed on island platforms.

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a lighting source is the shadowless lamp developed

by William Sugg & Company. Shadowless lamps were suspended rather than mounted at the top of standards, which combined with their vitreous enamelled metal shades and rounded glass enclosures produced illumination unobstructed by any frame. This type of lamp, containing electrical equipment, is popular with ‘heritage’ settings and features at Downham Market, restored in 2017 to reflect the branding of former British Rail sector Network SouthEast.

Electricity began to be tested for railway lighting from around 1880. It started to replace gas and oil as the luminant from the 1920s if or when stations were modernised. Lighting standards were an obvious application for reinforced concrete.

Each of the main railway operators designed versions for single and double platform uses. In keeping with its extensive electrification of suburban routes south, south east, and south west of London, the Southern Railway Exmouth Junction works designed a platform

Above left: London Midland and Scottish Railway two-branch lamp standard at Hellifield, Above right: Concrete lighting columns at Whitby Town, designed and made by the London and North Eastern Railway.

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lamp standard in two successive patterns. The first, an elaborate post of hexagonal section with urn decoration at the top. Near the top of the standard, a shade of opal (white) glass in a metal frame was suspended from each quadrant-shaped bracket. A subsequent pattern of platform lamp standard reflected moderne styling: the

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post section was now almost square, the quadrant bracket of more equal proportions, the urn finial omitted, and the shade made from shaped opal glass without a frame.

Many of these standards continued in use for over fifty years. Similarly, the Great Western, London Midland and Scottish, and London North Eastern railway companies

combined concrete and glass to make single and twin-armed standards of various configurations based on six- or eight-sided forms and sections.

British Rail developed a design of lighting standard using fluorescent tubes with the distinctive appearance of a horizontal lamp housing mounted at the top of a shaped concrete or cylindrical steel post. With minor variations in the form of lamp housing and post profile, these were used across the rail network from around 1955, the station name commonly being printed on the long sides of the translucent white lamp enclosures. Under awnings, similar lamps would be suspended from the structure or fixed to a suitable surface. Where British Rail architects retained control over an entire station, lighting equipment could be specified from product ranges accredited by the Design Council, or featured in architectural magazines. Contractors developing stations were free to choose items based on cost and efficiency.

Availability of effective light-emittting diode equipment has brought invention to station illumination. Handrails on footbridges can now contain lighting within the rails to brighten footways for passenger safety and environmental benefits. Lamps on standards are more efficient. Lighting systems can be controlled remotely using the Internet.

Opposite and above: British Rail fluorescent lamps in metal and plastic enclosures with the station name displayed on sides replaced older types of lamp standard and enclosure-shade-reflector.

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Seating

Caledonian Railway Company initials incorporated into cast-iron bench ends.

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Waiting for a train, especially on platforms where services may be infrequent or irregular, seating with or without shelter is an essential basic comfort. Limited space in station buildings, closed station rooms, or good weather, all suggest the need for somewhere to sit. Platform furniture made before the widespread use of concrete and folded metal sheet took two forms: cast iron supports for hardwood seat and back supports, and all-timber benches. However well made and treated with preservatives, timber rotted faster than iron oxidised, so iron was the preferred material for seat parts touching the ground.

On page 61 we saw how railway operators were major consumers of metal objects for many aspects of the platform environment. We have also seen how the fabricators of metal fittings and fixtures for railway stations demonstrated almost unlimited invention in their appropriation of architectural ornament for awning columns and brackets, nameboards and other signs, and lamp standards. This creativity – an artistic licence which entertained visitors to the 1851 ‘Great Exhibition’, and by the early twentieth century offended design critics because of its free use without functional purpose – found a

particularly florid expression in the fashioning of components for seating in public parks, promenades, open spaces, and on railway platforms. Some railway companies combined stylised monograms of their initials: for example C.R. for Caledonian Railway, L.T.S.R. for London, Tilbury and Southend Railway.

Over time the monograms were modernised to reflect wider tastes in typography and industrial design, with the ‘GWR’ roundel being a notable product of pre-1939 branding.

Continuing the emulation of naturalistic

Top row: Furness Railway squirrel and grapes motif; South Eastern Railway with SER in metal letters attached to frame at each end.

Bottom row: Nature imitated in cast iron by the Great Western Railway; Modernist brand logotype for the Great Western Railway on bench seat support, 1934.

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Opposite: Serpent seat at Benton, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Above: Polished hardwood bench seat for the Great Western Railway. The metal parts were cast alongside locomotive components.

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decoration which subsequently so disturbed advocates of pure, functional form, iron founders and railway companies assembled bench seats with rich images of flora and fauna. The squirrel and grapes pattern of bench ends used by the Furness Railway has been much admired by railway historians and collectors of transport antiques; the serpents supporting timber slats with their looped bodies

were a distinctive platform feature on the North Eastern Railway system; Yarmouth South Town seats conveyed the proximity of fishing waters through the motifs on bench ends. The Great Western Railway equipped some stations with benches made to resemble tree branches. Lighter seats comprised curved metal bars to carry the seat slats, fitted to timber skids for support and ease of movement.

Liverpool Street ladies waiting room 1957, furnished with Robin Day upholstered seats.

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From the early 1930s until the Second World War, railway companies preferred to make new platform furniture from varnished timber, using robust pieces for legs, arms, and frames, and shaped slats for seats and backrests. The products of the four operators of this period are all quite similar.

Platform seating was little changed until the late 1950s when British Railways’ Design Panel commissioned Robin Day to reimagine station furniture. This move introduced the manufacturer Hille to British Railways; Hille would supply seats to stations through to the 1980s.

As we have seen on page 80 in the context of platform

shelters, welded tubular steel frames had the strength and simplicity desired by designer of modern objects from the 1920s onwards, inspired by European products and British versions. Robin Day’s seats for British Railways could be upholstered for interior use or bring together steel frames and treated hardwood where resistance to tougher conditions was needed.

Industrial development in the moulding of polypropylene plastic were suited to making ‘bucket’ seats in place of benches. By the early 1970s station waiting areas could include arrays of brightly coloured individual seats mounted together on steel bar supports. Plastics

Carousel moulded plastic seating at Dundee, 1985.

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with or without glass-reinforcement can take any form, making them ideal for furniture designers and makers exploring novel shapes and colours.

Across the railway network in the last two decades of the twentieth century passengers would encounter a

Macemain 011 bench seats in Network SouthEast red.

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mix of seats from previous decades, and new products from external manufacturers. British Rail’s ScotRail sector (1983–97) introduced west coast American styling to its platform concourses with the Carousel seat unit. Designed

by Elsie Krummeck Crawford for Sintoform in 1969,

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Carousel is a six- or eight-seat moulded glass-reinforced plastic seat module made for transport buildings, shopping malls, leisure complexes, and public spaces. 53 Part of a range called ‘Architectural fiberglass’, Carousel has at its centre an opening in which to place plants. ScotRail chose orange Carousel units for its stations, in the largest eightseat model. Network SouthEast, which was managed by

Trax seating system at Liverpool Street.

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Chris Green after ScotRail with the same lead architect Ronnie McIntyre, populated its stations with Carousel units and hundreds of welded and perforated metal 011 bench seats made by Macemain Engineering, painted bright red.

English stations associated with the first Waterloo–Paris Eurostar route (opened 1994) seated passengers on the polished and cast metal variety of the Trax modular system

design by Rodney Kinsman RDI (1943–). Macemain + Amstad products such as the Populus and Paragon steel benches, and Prima timber and steel seats, can be seen on the platforms of different train operating companies.

Network Rail managed stations now provide extensive seating for passengers, with the installation of the Nova C bench seating designed by Johan Berhin in 2013 and sold by Green Furniture Concept, Sweden. Based on what appears to be a simple moulded timber seat slat mounted transversely on a metal frame, the number of slats which can be used is limitless. Benches can be formed in a circle or ‘donut’, or flow around kiosks and other structures. The slats can be one colour, or many colours. Mobile device chargers can be integrated with the tables which are part of the Nova C scheme. The height of the frame and slats can be adjusted for accessible seating.

Left: Nova C seating designed by Johan Berhin.

Above: Seat as social focus: the ‘chat bench’ at Salisbury, 2024.

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Designed boundaries An alternative to the hedge formed of vegetation, the fence is an artificial boundary which can be created without waiting for plants to grow. In the railway context it is used to keep animals and non-paying people off railway land, and to separate passengers from the more hazardous parts of train operating areas.

Local materials – stone, brick, timber, or vegetation – were the first and often most long-lasting solutions.

Old pieces of track rail were easy to obtain and re-use as support posts. Railway companies adopted standard patterns of timber fence, or purchased ready-made items.

The several creosoted or painted timber pale and railing types were designed to be cheap and easy to replace; more indestructible types could be obtained fabricated in pressed and cast metal, or concrete and steel, with wire or

tube barriers built up from components.

Different railway companies used various patterns of fence; a study of early types is found in Alison and Peter Smithson’s The Euston Arch. 54 These include turf banks (Cornwall), dry and mortar-joined stone (Yorkshire and Scotland), horizontal metal wire between posts, horizontal timber, open timber pale, stone flag (Lancashire), horizontal metal rods between cast iron posts (Great Eastern Railway). Fences preferred by the Great Western Railway featured spearheads to the vertical elements and two forms of cast metal post. Alongside innovation in lamp standard and nameboard manufacture, railways produced concrete fence posts, pales, and solid panels. Current boundary solutions include palisades, chainlink, wire mesh and unclimbable or anti-climb designs of several types.

Opposite: Hutton Cranswick, 1976. One of the most distinctive examples of fencing is the inclined wood pales used by the former Midland Railway. This design has a close relation with the more natural boundary it emulates, being very similar to the ‘Midland Bullock’ style of hedge-making.

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Midland Railway inclined timber palings, nineteenth century

Painted timber palings, nineteenth century

Midland Railway horizontal timber rails, nineteenth century

Midland and Great Northern Railway timber pailings, mid-nineteenth century

Great Western Railway iron unclimbable fence, late nineteenth century

Great Eastern Railway wrought iron railings, late nineteenth century

Southern Railway precast concrete, about 1924

Steel bow top railings, late twentieth century

London and North Eastern Railway chain link, 1940

Kee Klamp, 1990

Designed boundaries separating railway property from surrounding land take many forms. Timber, cast iron, concrete, and steel have been cut, sawn, cast, pressed, and milled to make fences which deter people and animals from climbing, and are attractive to see in the station setting.

London and South Western Railway iron railings mid-nineteenth century with later additions

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Drinking fountains An important feature of Victorian railway platforms and municipal parks is the public amenity of the drinking fountain, a product of philanthropic individuals and associations, and enterprising foundries.

In the nineteenth century the fountains were carved from stone or cast in metal, provided with cups attached by chains, and commonly set into station building platform walls. The Midland Railway installed ornamented cast iron water outlets at its stations; some are now preserved by museums and heritage railways.

Coming forward a century, Network Rail has tackled the unsustainable volume of plastic water bottles purchased by travellers by providing free drinking fountains at its managed stations so that refillable bottles can be replenished.

An inevitable consequence of the drinking fountain is the need for toilet facilities on platforms. Stations presented conflicting responses to this inevitability: ‘ladies’ waiting rooms’ might be entirely absent or present with included water closets. ‘Gentlemens’’ lavatories might be inside the platform building or built as an external lean-to structure. Once again, the Glasgow iron founders made products for this inevitability, selling complete prefabricated urinal enclosures for public spaces and railway stations. The iron ‘pissoirs’ were canvases for extensive decoration in classical patterns, across the expanses of solid panel and the pierced ventilation sections.

Cast-iron drinking fountain at Dunfermline.

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Collector dogs A strategy for exploiting appealing dogs to raise money for charitable activities, was to teach the animals to attract attention and invite donations to hospitals, orphanages, and other benevolent enterprises. When more stations were staffed, trained dogs wandered around platforms and station concourses, rode on trains and even railway boat services wearing money boxes, carrying coin receptacles in their mouths, or pulling small vehicles with coin containers, collecting for railway-related charities. By 1880 railway companies or their employees used collecting dogs to raise funds for the care of children orphaned from railway families, and for retired railway workers.55 Fondness for the animals meant they became personalities and were remembered after their working lives had ceased, so that we know of Swindon’s ‘Bruce’, Dalston’s ‘Grace’, Waterloo’s ‘London Jack’, ‘London Jack II’, ‘London Jack III’, ‘London Jack IV’, and ‘London Jack V’, Bournemouth’s ‘Nell’, Exeter Central’s ‘Sandy’, and Paddington’s ‘Tim’. In the 1930s Labrador ‘Hector’ worked at Lossiemouth, Scotland; ‘Sally’ could be found at Battlesbridge, Essex. ‘Station Jim’ collected donations for the Great Western Railway Widows and Orphans Fund during 1894-96; the dog is preserved in a glass case at Slough Station, Berkshire. ‘Laddie’, an Airedale terrier, walked around Waterloo 1948–56, inviting contributions to the Southern Railway Servants Orphanage.

Another dog accompanied by a human, was collecting at Victoria in the early 1970s. Like ‘Station Jim’, ‘Laddie’ was displayed after death in a glass case, continuing to attract charity money at Wimbledon, Surrey, until 1990.56

Top: Hector collecting dog, Lossiemouth 1936.

Bottom: Sally at Battlesbridge, Essex, 1936–38.

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Portrait of collector dog ‘Tim’

by L. Magill, 1900. Tim worked at Paddington Station for ten years, 1892–1902, raising £800 (£82,000 in 2024) for the Great Western Railway Widows and Orphans Fund.

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Art After centuries of slow-changing environments, the railway platform was a new place to see concentrated microcosms of society on the move in a modern and unprecedented context, and to engage with flows of humanity and industry.

Contemplating the world with the benefit of a raised position or watching what could be a desolate expanse of space or an assembly of people with nothing in common but travel, has fascinated commercial organisations and artists from the beginning of railway operation.

Through their mix of branding and images, poster displays on platforms gave polychrome character to the railway scene, a changing art gallery of products and places with a guaranteed audience. The imaginative figurative and abstractive illustrations, hand drawn or using industryleading lettering, have made printed posters pieces of art particular to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cherished by museums and collectors.

The platform is a place for emotions and dreams too: the impressionist painters especially found the amosphere of the station with its contrasts of light and dark, noise and silence, rapidity and stasis, banality and confusion, crowds and abandonment, a suitable setting for evocations of human perceptions and feelings. Painters and illustrators including John Cooke Bourne, George Measom, George Elgar Hicks, Lefevre James Cranstone, Frank Holl, Fernand Léger, Camille Pissaro, Jean Jacques Tissot, J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Giorgio de Chirico, Alethea Garstin, Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Gustave Courbet, William Powell Frith, Spencer Gore, Algernon Talmage, Stanhope Alexander Forbes and Anna Airy have represented aspects of the new spaces and experiences manifested by the railways. In recent decades artists continue to engage with platform contexts, contemplating people, environments,

and the trains. Terence Cuneo, David Shepherd, Don Breckon, Jock McFadyen and Doreen Fletcher have made station platform related work; the Guild of Railway Artists represents many more.

Since photography first challenged painting, exponents of the new practice looked to the railway for its scale, speed, diversity of people, and its vistas of engineering and topographies. Among several notable documentary photographers we can think of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Film makers too have identified the potential for railway platforms to be settings for events in human life, negative and positive. Governments and regimes in both the West and the East have claimed the railway station for expressions of politics and power, through touring leaders and static displays of propaganda. War and colonialism have been recorded in American and Italian ‘western’ movies; Nazi documentation of genocide provided evidence with which to identify perpetrators. Tragedy has been treated on a smaller scale in ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945, based on a 1936 play by Noël Coward), ‘Oh Mr Porter!’ (1937), ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ (1948); ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ (1953), ‘Wings Of Desire’ (1987). Emile Zola’s ‘La Bête Humaine’ 1890, filmed by Jean Renoir in 1938, and again by Fritz Lang (director of Metropolis) in 1954, collides all the sensations of departure observed from the railway platform. These are seen too in ‘Terminus’ (1961) where suburban commuters and long-distance travellers mix at Waterloo. ‘The Railway Children’ (1970) used an early preserved line for much of its story.

In literature, writers represent the railway platform as a place for significant events. ‘Adlestrop’, the poem

by Edward Thomas portraying the perpetual stillness of

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Above: Spencer Frederick Gore, Letchworth Station, Hertfordshire, 1912. Opposite: Bertram (Bert) Curry, York Station, 1913.

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a wayside railway station in 1914, is now associated with the total contrast of the First World War in which Thomas died. The stopping place itself is long closed, but it has come to summarise something of a country platform in summertime. ‘The Send Off’ by Wilfred Owen narrates the night-time departure of soldiers to the same war. John Betjeman mixed architectural history and nostalgia in his

Marjorie Sherlock, Liverpool Street Station, London 1920s.

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prose and poetic odes to stations. Grace Nichols’ poem below well articulates how the rhythms of train travel and passing landscapes set thoughts in motion too.

Outward from Hull The gulls of Hull the train pulling out – a metallic snake along the estuary leaving behind the forceful ghost of Wilberforce the confluence of the Hull and the Humber.

Brough, Selby, Doncaster.

How many times have I sat this way England, gazing out at the leafless names of trees; at cathedrals I still haven’t seen – Our inter-city boa Pushing through the deepening night – the wet black roots of the country.

Suddenly, for some unearthly reason, it falters, then stops – an inexplicable paralysis of rhythm – the brooch of a small town gleaming in the distance – the eels and eels of branching tracks.

O England – hedge-bound as Larkin omnivorous as Shakespeare.

From artworks of stations, we turn to artworks at stations. Art in public spaces was once polarised between public sculptures – many of which are now contested – and ad hoc graffiti, with little in between.

Railway companies have placed memorials to their employees killed in wars at several stations: the soldier at Paddington represents a figurative approach, and the

plaque at Waterloo a list of names. Bronze is the traditional material used for these memorials, being both durable – it does not rust and looks better as it ages – and is able to carry more detail than other metals. More recent memorials remember civilians involved in particular historical groups and events, including members of the ‘Kindertransport’ and ‘Windrush generation’.

Unknown soldier war memorial at Paddington.

The National Windrush Monument at Waterloo.

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After significant civil unrest in communities in the early 1980s, government and service organisations started to bring artwork into public spaces in a project to engender a sense of belonging and ownership. It was hoped that this would engage people of the locality, deter vandalism, and

brighten what had been neglected and unsafe parts of the railway system. A notable project is the British RailLambeth Council environmental partnership through which several stations received redecoration and restoration, and Brixton station gained a mural and figure sculptures by

Joy Battick meets her bronze counterpart at Brixton, 1986. Joy II was installed facing this figure across the railway tracks in 2023.

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Kevin Atherton of three Brixton citizens.

British Rail continued its patronage of the arts in diverse media and at many scales. Murals were painted at Southampton, Surbiton, and Vauxhall, abstract sculpture was installed at Wakefield Westgate and

Reading, and figurative sculpture at Stoke Mandeville and Templecombe.57 In the twenty-first century, signwriter and artist Lionel Stanhope has painted murals under railway bridges at several stations.

Sculpture installations by by Sioban Coppinger.

Left: The Gardener and the Truant Lion (1986), commissioned by British Rail for the Chelsea Flower Show, is displayed at Stoke Mandeville Station.

Above: At Templecombe ‘Tempus Fugit’ (1990) is a sundial made

by Sioban Coppinger in collaboration with Fiona and Alec Peever.

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Above: Children from Parkside Junior School in Smethwick had provided a mural for Smethwick Rolfe Street Station as part of a pioneering British Rail project to bring art into public spaces. Students from Sandwell College made a replacement artwork for the station in 2017.

Opposite: Lionel Stanhope murals can be seen at railway stations across London. The form and colours of the design, inspired by the British Railways totem are developed with the local community and Network Rail.

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Opposite: Sarah Sze, Metronome, The Waiting Room, London, 2023.

“For her long-awaited project with Artangel, New York-based artist Sarah Sze transformed a large Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye Station that has lain empty for almost 50 years. An atmospheric construction of cascading lines emerges from the centre of the vaulted waiting room to create a mesmerising model of a fragile world. A multitude of flickering videos illuminate the structure and swirl around the space, conveying the velocity and volatility of living in the age of the smartphone.”

The work was displayed at Peckham Rye Station 19 May 2023 – 17 September 2023.

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Station gardens

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Station gardens Cultivated areas of station platforms are an important but overlooked feature of the railway environment, as long established as the railways they adorn. Decorative and productive, the station garden occupies the margins of the platform, softening industry into landscape, mixing town or suburb with impressions of rurality. Now abandoned in many locations but never completely forgotten, station gardens are miniature nature reserves, sites of reflection and peace, venues for community activity and art. Humans have brought order to nature in domestic and public areas for ornament and enjoyment for several millennia. Gardens can be sacred spaces, secluded for private meetings, made for display, prestige, or memory, used to grow food, and for pleasure through stimulation of the senses and entertainment. In Britain, growing space associated with rural dwellings was established in the mid-fourteenth century; five hundred years later allotments and cottage gardens were recognised as an important resource for feeding communities. Pleasure gardens developed in eighteenth century Britain and have a much older history in Asia. Advocates of picturesque architecture and landscapes admired the cottage garden as a complement to the rusticity of their buildings. Urban developments incorporated gardens as an amenity for residents, for visual relief amongst the buildings, and as an indicator of social status. The ordered plant beds of suburban villas became an icon of suburban escape promoted to commuters by the London Underground. Municipal parks and gardens, garden suburbs and garden towns, extended the appreciation of, and access to, green space.

Many towns had nurseries to supply plants in seed, bulb, or root(stock) for growing; the free exchange of plant ‘cuttings’ encouraged gardening as a rewarding pastime.

Emergence of ‘florist’s societies’ and subsequently of gardening clubs, stimulated enthusiasm for flowers and shrubs, culminating in competitions for the best blooms.

Gardener-writers like Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) and C. H. Middleton (1886–1945) promoted the potential of small gardens through their mass-produced publications and, for Middleton, radio broadcasts. Readily seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as

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illustrations by Helen Allingham (1848–1926) and other artists, adapted for commercial and vernacular decoration, and printed on packaging of luxury foods including chocolates and biscuits, the idealised small domestic garden – detached from the reality of labour intensive food production – signified a place of repose, colour, and fragrance and a nostalgic image of pre-industrial, preurban homes.58 Station gardens served several purposes. In common with domestic styles of station building and the decoration of platform canopy valances, the station garden also reflected picturesque ideals of detail and intricacy in how

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flowering plants – each bloom a small jewel, cheap to obtain – were arranged and mixed. Railway companies noticed that their industrial infrastructure could be better assimilated into the landscape if the provision of trees and shrubs around buildings formed part of the design to ease the transition between the transport system and the human scale of the city, town, or village. Patches of nature, colour, and fragrance make the station environment more pleasant, acting as a positive advertisement for the railway operating company. The labour of railway staff, a resource available between the duties of managing trains and travellers, could be matched to the inclination of some

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workers to exploit the station grounds for cultivation of plants collected from the wild, exchanged as seeds or cuttings, and bought from their wages. Areas of planting on platforms – in common with the gardens of cottage dwellings – reflected folk practices through which people with limited means could emulate the design and planting patterns of higher status gardens, show control over nature, and enjoy the admiration of observers. One correspondent, observing that many country railway stations would close as the railway was modernised after 1945, saw the station garden offering ‘unfettered opportunity in the taste for horticulture of the stationmaster and the porter handyman’.60 Separated from the agricultural effort of vegetable and fruit farming, garden work brought satisfaction to the grower and pleasure to the viewer.

Gardens have their own ever-changing appearance, not synchronised to human or machine time. A gaze over areas of platform horticulture would reveal names older than their Linnaean, Latin, classifications: Bleeding Heart, Blue-Eyed Mary, Bird’s Eye, Candytuft, Custard and Cream, Day’s Eye, Foxglove, Gillyflower, Gold Dust, Grim the Collier, Hundreds and Thousands, Lady’s Delight, Michaelmas Daisy, Pinks, Ploughman’s Mignonette, Snapdragon, Snow-on-the-Mountain, Solomon’s Seal, Tenby Daffodil, Wallflower, Zinnia.

The railway companies running railway services between 1923 and 1948 all operated competitions for ‘Best Kept Stations’ and ‘Station Gardens’. The London and North Eastern Railway Magazine gives examples of station garden practice just before and after the Second World War.61 Small beds of plants bounded by flints, whitewashed stones, coals, or bricks represented more modest

cultivation endeavours; bands of flowers and shrubs along platforms and approaches to station buildings are of intermediate scale; where land was available extensive grounds of grass lawn punctuated by groups of plants in areas of soil, and by bushes and hedges, entertained travellers. Different approaches to planting informed the choice of plants and their settings. Victorian horticultural customs, in both private and municipal gardens, promoted placing plants together by height and colour, to create contrasts or similarities in hue and texture. The writergardener William Robinson argued for selecting plants by their appearance but allowing them to grow more freely, naturalistically. Gertrude Jekyll combined Robinson’s ideas

Above: Several railway companies rewarded employees who cultivated station gardens.

Opposite: Ornamental rockery, pool, lawn and flower beds at Bruton, 1962.

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with a system of planning gardens by plant colours. Station gardens did not frequently offer sufficient space for Robinson’s approach, but it has become relevant and useful in the more recent ‘re-wilding’ of railway lands.

In the ‘picturesque’ style of landscape design alpine features made from groups of stone gathered from elsewhere, with or without plants and water, were popular emulations of Switzerland. The ‘rockeries’ of station gardens were reduced versions of alpine features, sometimes made more obvious by whitewashing the stones.

Another custom was to arrange the stones as a large rendering of the station name, highlighting the work with whitewash or planting, or both. Eyecatching – and prize-winning – station gardens included a map of Scotland entirely in flowers, a functioning clock with a dial of flowers, a model bungalow lit inside at night, fountains, a miniature Loch Leven with ruined castle. These last two examples mirror the passion for model villages in early twentieth century Britain and Europe. Hundreds of stations gardens of all sizes attracted Special, First, Second, Third Class and Commendation prizes, the cash part of the award being shared amongst the station staff, and the certificates

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Above: A postcard celebrates the floral displays at Stirling.

Opposite top: Taplow, 1981.

Opposite bottom: Yeovil Junction, 2024.

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displayed in public rooms. Special excursion trains carried gardening enthusiasts on itineraries featuring the best stations. With war, floral schemes were replaced by vegetables.

British Railways continued to encourage the creation and maintenance of gardens on platforms, of any scale from hanging flower baskets and window boxes to plants on roofs and extensive strips of ground. Horticultural shows at prestigious city venues honoured cut flowers, pot plants, vegetables, railway childrens’ gardening crafts, and household activities such as cake baking and jam making.

Clipped plant boundaries around station gardens may seem trivial details, but they remind us that some of the earliest trained rows of dense shrubs – we are thinking of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and dwellings through two millennia – were used to create private spaces for the protection of people from sun or wind, for spiritual places, and for discrete meetings. The enclosed garden or hortus conclusus, is an ancient symbol of privacy and purity. Discovering that ordered lines of plants could be used to form patterns, the gardeners of palaces and houses clipped box, holly, myrtle, yew, and other shrubs and trees to fashion mazes, parterres, and knot gardens to entertain, and to display wealth and culture. When cities expanded into suburbs, the assertion of status and the definition of ownership could be achieved easily and economically by the cultivation of hedges around the areas of land provided for ‘front’ and ‘back’ gardens: contained utopias looking back modestly to renaissance estates and ancient examples of palace grounds. Hedges may flower and may give scent; they will vary from darkest spikiest green to gentle oval leaves and catkins, from white-green flowers to blackest berries. Visually, they signal the change

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from unordered space to curated landscape. Hedges are not all knee- or waist-high; the dense growth of hedge shrubs suggested to Roman gardeners that taller plants could be shaped into un-natural forms. Making discs, spheres, cubes, and pyramids from trees brings vertical emphasis and unexpected scale to otherwise horizontal formal landscapes. Beyond this architectural horticulture the shaping of hedge pants into animals and symbols demonstrates the flair of the gardener and occupies the eye whilst waiting for a train.

After railway rationalisation through the 1960s and 1970s, which abandoned station areas to plants like Rosebay Willowherb and the Poppy, British Rail’s Environment Panel, a group related to the architecture and design team with a focus on conservation and

sustainability, addressed improvement of station areas by working with the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI) and the Beautiful Britain Campaign. Several stations had land cleared for horticultural projects; some WI groups continue this work today. With the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Network Rail has published the Biodiversity Action Plan, intended to create and maintain on railway land, habits and ecosystems for plants and animals.

Train operators partner community-managed garden volunteer ‘Friend of Station’ groups which have replaced the labour once provided by railway staff, making awardwinning displays ‘Best Kept Station’, ‘Station in Bloom’, and Royal Horticultural Society-sponsored planting through ‘re-wilding’ and cultivation of extensive beds and ‘pocket’ gardens.

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Chapter Five Railway heritage and conservation

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Redundant station buildings have for many years provided convenient shelter for other purposes. Portable timber structures were removed and reused as animal houses or sports pavilions. Brick or stone buildings became youth clubs, workshops, building supplies stores, offices, schools, museums, public houses, cafés, and private dwellings. Since the 1960s the need to care for significant railway structures has been part of the culture of understanding and appreciating the importance of railways in Britain. Significance does not have to mean large, or grand, or associated with famous people.

Significance is about how the railway and its assets – the platform, the buildings, the trains – have contributed to people and are a part of the landscape both locally and nationally.

During the period when Sir Peter Parker was Chairman of British Rail (1976–83) it was realised that conservation was valuable for heritage and business.

Chief Architect and Director of Environment Bernard Kaukas took responsibility for the conservation of British Rail’s environment, restoring, repairing, and repurposing stations. Next to commercially-focused projects, from 1982 station re-openings and maintenance of station buildings could benefit from British Rail’s awareness of corporate social responsibility – the need to contribute to, and partner with, communities around the railway.

This activity was a solution for addressing criticism of earlier demolition programmes. Conferences brought together transport officials, enterprise, and architectural specialists to debate how best to conserve the substantial Opposite: Between 1984 and 2023 Lady Foley’s Tearoom served refreshments to travellers and visitors in a redundant first class waiting room at Great Malvern station.

operational and non-operational railway estate. The Railway Heritage Trust, formed by British Rail and the Department of Transport in 1985, works independently to administer grants for preservation of significant railway assets.

Network Rail has published guidelines for conservation and re-use of its heritage assets and makes awards for conservation projects. Community Rail Partnerships link Network Rail with local social and business organisations. Stations are adopted by ‘Friends’ groups. Volunteers care for station spaces where once railway workers were occupied with the business of passenger care and the passenger environment.

The National Railway Heritage Awards encourages conservation and reuse projects, benefitting the stations themselves and their communities. Platforms, buildings, gardens, signs, furniture, and artworks all enhance the work on railway spaces.

Recent successes include the former Folkestone Harbour station, where a linear park of walkways and plants has replaced the railway tracks through the restored station platforms and awnings.

Okehampton station is still part of the rail network.

It has been transformed to resemble its appearance in the 1950s: painted the appropriate colour scheme of green and cream. Surplus station spaces at Okehampton accommodate a buffet, Dartmoor National Park information centre, and Dartmoor Railway Association shop and museum.

At Leamington Spa the refreshment room interior – an example of skilled craft work in wood panelling – is now repaired and renewed. Platform awnings, kiosks, wall and floor materials, footbridges, and redundant waiting areas

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have become food, gift, pharmacy, and clothes shops, bakeries, coffee bars, potteries, craft centres, bakeries, hiking centres, holiday cottages, market halls, museums, and community meeting spaces.

Kents Bank station includes a library stocked to cover the social history of railways.

At Henley-in-Arden a micro-brewery and bar have

revived the station as a meeting space.

All of these projects give life to platform areas and add to the railway network’s historic environment. Away from Network Rail, private railway organisations founded by volunteers have revived, restored, and developed infrastructure previously closed by British Rail.

Opposite: Commerce and safety were once evidenced on platforms by many pieces of equipment. Some of these items were designed by specially for their purpose, as we see with the weighing scales at Aberlour, Morayshire (closed to passengers 1965). Other objects, often rudimentary or adapted, served numerous functions. The red galvanised metal buckets contained water or sand for extinguishing of fires; the blue box on wheels transported water.

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Throughout this book we have studied many aspects of the distinctive environment of railway station platforms, and the buildings, other structures, furniture, and spaces placed on or near the platforms. But there is always another detail to notice, and too many details to neatly wrap into chapters. In the second half of the twentieth

century photographer Graham Smith aimed to do much the same as this book, to survey stations as places populated with people, architecture, design, and equipment. On this and following pages are selected images of four platform settings, revealing curious features, extraordinary objects, and everyday items once essential to railway operation.

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Opposite: In a small settlement, the railway station catering offered a useful meeting place for local people and travellers.

Drinkers and diners did not always want to be watched whilst enjoying their leisure. This etched glass window in the Station Hotel at Wroxall, Isle of wight (closed 1966) gave privacy and announced the facility to passengers.

Above: Before the availability of illuminated or digital screen advertising, other strategies for attracting customers were needed. This elaborate glazed cabinet on a plinth contained a model of a boat used on the ferry service between England and the Isle of Man.

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The apparently complexity of digital train announcement systems is the successor to a much simper system, the main difference being that before networked display units the railway workers on platforms required a good knowledge of the timetable. At Faversham we see an array of ‘fingerboards’ of different ages and with different lettering styles, once common items at stations. Each board shows a train destination with, but not always, intermediate stopping points. The relevant fingerboard is then displayed near the platform entrance to communicate essential information to passengers, and changed for different trains.

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225

Endnotes 1.

Christian Barman, Next Station: A Railway Plans for the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947), p. 63.

2.

Croughton, Kidner, and Young (1982) list several hundred private railway stopping places. For factory stations we can note Rowntree Halt for the York chocolate works, and Acrow Halt for an engineering company. For hospitals and asylums see Hellingly, Silloth, and Whittingham. For cemeteries see the London Necropolis Railway. For holiday camps see Penychain. Shrine stations include Slipper Chapel Halt. For railway workers see the Staff Halt at Wimbledon. For private stations see Avon Lodge, Black Dog Halt, Coed y Bleiddiau, Crofton, Dovenby Lodge, Dunrobin, Watchingwell, and Westmoor Flag.

3.

Henry James, English Hours [first published 1905] (London: Mercury Books, 1963), p. 24.

4.

See for example the work of John Betjeman, Gordon Biddle, Marcus Binney, David Lloyd and Donald Insall.

5.

See https://www.networkrail.co.uk/industry-andcommercial/supply-chain/existing-suppliers/buildings-andarchitecture-design-guidance/, (accessed 23/01/2024).

6.

Network Rail is publishing a new technical and design document called ‘Platforms’ and adopting standard platform systems.

7.

See https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/listentry/1322808 (accessed 15/11/2023).

8.

One artificial stone slab product used for railway platforms is known as ‘Groby Patent Stone’, because it was manufactured by the Patent Victoria Stone Co. using Syenite (a form of the mineral granite) quarried in Groby, Leicestershire. After grinding the Syenite was mixed with cement and water, cast in moulds, and treated with chemicals to make it waterproof.

9.

R. S. Fitzgerald, Liverpool Road Station, Manchester: An historical and architectural survey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 59.

10. Hawkins and Reeve (1987), p. 2.

11.

William Hamilton Shortt (1881–-1971), civil engineer and horologist.

12. William Marriott (1857–1943), engineer.

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13. For London and North Western Railway standard timber station buildings see Anderson and Fox (1981) who note a first version early 1860s (Fig. 6, Plates 72 and 74, no page number), a second pattern around 1876 (A and F, Plates 76, 77), and a third type from around 1880 (A and F, Plates 84–6).

The London and North Western Railway prefabricated at least one pattern of timber station building at its own Crewe works.

14. Woody Bay station has been reopened by the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway Trust.

15. Shackerstone station has been reopened by the Battlefield Line Railway.

16. See for example Basingstoke, plate 5a opposite p. 58 in Tavender (1970).

17. Vernacular architecture is a term for structures made for modest, everyday uses and built by craftspeople ‘according to local traditions’, rather than being designed by architects or other professionals. See R. W. Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).

18. See J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1833).

19. Marcus Binney and David Pearce (1979, p. 75) assert that Ealing [Broadway] and Maidenhead represented ‘the earliest manifestations of decorative valancing’. The Ealing station is illustrated in Peter Hounsell’s Ealing and Hanwell Past (London: Historical Publications), front cover and p. 53.

20. For similar shallow and wide valance patterns see the first station at Petworth (1858, valance in place by 1889); Barcombe Mills (1858); and the William Tite stations in Dorset and Devon.

21. Some accounts have applied the term ‘dagger board’ to canopy valances. ‘Dagger board’ is a name more properly used for removable keels on certain types of small marine vessel, and rarely occurs in histories of railway architecture.

It has also been suggested in heritage contexts that the shaping of valance boards was intended to manage rainwater falling onto the roofs of awnings. This argument is not supported by the evidence of awnings without valances,

or with plain valances, or with valances fitted beneath rainwater gutters.

22. Wikeley and Middleton, p. 73. The authors give the numbers of different patterns by railway company as: London and South Western Railway: seventy; London Brighton and South coast Railway: ninety-five; South Eastern Railway: ninetyeight; London Chatham and dover Railway. Tom Reynolds, in ‘Off the Rails’, New Scientist, Vol. 73. No. 1036 (1977), p. 224, gives the figure of two hundred, presumably repeating a misprint in another publication.

23. For example, the profiles of valance treatments at Clapham Junction, Salisbury, Yeovil Junction, and Bude are to the same basic pattern but with variation in the dimensions each element.

24. Listed on the National Heritage List for England for its special architectural or historic interest at Grade II. 25. See The Architect and Building News, Vol. 200. No. 4331 (1951), pp. 720-5.

26. See: http://railwayheritagetrust.co.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2019/04/1754-150_Examination-of-the-use-of-FRP_ final.pdf, accessed 26/01/2024.

27. See: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/listentry/1099945 and https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/ the-list/list-entry/1356499, accessed 26/01/2024.

28. Linda Clarke, John Ives, Stuart Rankin, and Paul Simons, Aspects of Railway Architecture (Bristol: Bristol Marketing Board, 1985), p. 38.

29. British Rail relocated the Queens Park building to West Hampstead Midland; it was conserved by British Rail Architects in the early 1980s and removed around 2008 for the construction of a footbridge.

30. Anon., ‘Architecture in Transport’, The Railway Magazine, vol.

107. No. 720 (1961), pp. 282–3.

31. See Modern Railways, Vol. XXIII. No. 224 (1967), p. 276.

32. Wikeley, 1967, p. 646.

33. CLASP station buildings include Ashtead (1969), Aylesham (1968), Belmont (1968), Belvedere (1968), Berrylands (1969), Brockley (1972), Catford (1970), Charlton (1968), Crayford (1968), Dartford (after 1972), East Grinstead (1972), Fleet (1966

prototype), Forest Hill (after 1972), Hampton Wick (1969), Hassocks (1973), Kidbrooke (1972), Longfield (1972), Lower Sydenham (1972), Meopham (after 1972), New Eltham CHECK (1968), Poole (1970), Rainham Kent (1972), Slade Green (about 1968), Strood (1973), Sunbury (1965 prototype), Sunningdale (1972), Virginia Water (1973), West Byfleet (after 1972), West Norwood (????), Wokingham (1973), Weymouth Quay, Wool (1970). Six railway ‘panel’ signal boxes – buildings containing centralised signalling systems controlled from large track diagrams displayed on panels fitted with indicators and switches – were built using the CLASP prefabrication system, at Basingstoke, Dartford, Eastleigh, Guildford, Portsmouth, and Surbiton. See: Signalling Study Group, The Signal Box: A Pictorial History and Guide to Designs (Shepperton: Oxford Publishing Company, 1986), p. 230.

34. See for example Cheshunt, Rye House, Stoke Newington, and Wood Street.

35. British Rail, ‘V.S.B. 90 System’ standard specification document, 1989.

36. See https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2021/06/NR_GN_CIV_100_02_Station-Design.pdf.

37. Network Rail Modular Station Concept Development-Draft Report-31.10.2006, p. 14.

38. See http://www.naturalshelter.com/rail-bus-shelterwooden-accoya-natural-shelter-train-passengers/.

39. C. Hassall Paint Analysis, Wingfield Station [Report no. C561], August 2020.

40. Colour range BS381:1944.

41. British Transport Commission (1961), pp. 14–15.

42. Information about painting schemes has been gathered from: Haresnape (1989), Historical Model Railway Society publications (https://hmrs.org.uk/), Geddes & Ballass (1995), Station Colours Info (https://www.stationcolours.info/), Michael Papps, and British railway records.

43. John Betjeman, ‘London Railway Stations’ in First and Last Loves [first published 1952] (London: John Murray, 1969), p.

76.

44. British Railways Press Office, British Railways in peace and war (London: British Railways Press Office, 1944), p. 63.

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45. British Rail cutlery designed by Martyn Rowlands Associates was manufactured in London by Cosmocord, an early producer of plastics products for record playing equipment.

Similar disposable cutlery by the same designers was used by British European Airways, and for children’s eating utensils sold by the Boots company. The disposability of the plastic cutlery makes these items very rare; they are part of the Victoria and Albert Museum collections (fork: accession number 096827, spoon: accession number 096828).

46. See L. N. S. Wooler, ‘What’s in a Name’, Railway Magazine, Vol. 127. No. 968 (1981), pp. 577–9.

47. Designers Frances and Michael Edwards to David Lawrence, 2018.

48. Hawkins and Reeve (1987), p. 49.

49. Official names for British Railways’ regional colours are: Southern Region – green, Western Region – chocolate, Eastern Region – blue, North-Eastern Region – tangerine, London Midland Region – red, Scottish Region – pale blue. For signs, all regions had white Gill Sans letters on the coloured ground, except for the Western Region where the letters were cream. Variations on the standard ‘totem’ include white Grotesque letters on black for the Western Region station at Bourne End, Devonport, Hayes & Harlington, and Langley (Bucks), and solid green symbols for the Southern Region.

50. Signs at Coventry and Stafford stations (both rebuilt 1962) were rendered in Transport Medium black lettering on a white background. The stations which featured Transport Medium lettering on totems (all Southern Region) are Balcombe, Banstead, Barnehurst, Belmont, Chislehurst, Christchurch, Clapham, Cobham & Stoke d’Abernon, Durrington-on-Sea, Earley, Eltham Park, Esher, Fratton, Hackbridge, Hampton, Leatherhead, Lewisham, London Road (Guildford), Maze Hill, Mortlake, New Milton, Oxshott, Oxted, Petts Wood, Queenborough, St. Denys, Seaford, Shoreham, Smitham, Staplehurst, Streatham, Tadworth, Upper Warlingham, Warnham, Winnersh Halt, Woldingham, and Woodside.

51. British Rail Corporate Identity Manual, sheet 3/01/1, April 1965.

52. British Rail Corporate Identity Manual, sheet 3/01/1, Aug 1971.

228

53. Elsie Krummeck Crawford (1919–99) worked with Victor Gruen (1903–80) on the design of many important North American large retail stores and shopping malls.

54. Alison and Peter Smithson, The Euston Arch (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), no page number.

55. Bondeson (2011), p. 108.

56. ‘Laddie’ succeeded ‘Wimbledon Nell’ (died 1913) as static collector dog at Wimbledon. The dog in its display case is now in the collection of the Science Museum Group at York, object number 1990-7629.

57. Surbiton murals by Sue Ridge and Graeme Wilson; Southampton murals by Sue Ridge; Vauxhall mural by William Pye, 1984; Wakefield Westgate ‘A Light Wave’ sculpture by Charles Quick, 1988; Reading ‘Glass Column’ by Alexander Beleschenko; Stoke Mandeville ‘The Truant Lion’ by Sioban Coppinger, 1986; Templecombe ‘Tempus Fugit’ by Sioban Coppinger and Fiona and Alec Peever, 1990.

58. Artists noted for their depiction of cultivated gardens include Anna Lea Merritt (1844–1930), Alfred Parsons (1847–1920), George Samuel Ellgood (1853–1943), and Beatrice Parsons (1870–1955).

59. Roger Lloyd, The Fascination of Railways (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), p. 158.

60. The North Eastern Railway, a predecessor to the LNER, gave prizes to sixty best-kept stations each year.

61. London and North Eastern Railway Magazine, Vol. 28. No. 10, various pages.

Acknowledgements AHG Books: James Gordon; Katie Amos; Clive Baker (http://www.clive-baker.co.uk/); Martin Bamford; Bishop’s Castle Railway Society: Lin Dalton; Simon Bradley; Caledonian Railway Association (https://www.crassoc.org.uk/web/index. php): John Paton, Jim Summers; Lucy Chadwick; Oliver Chisholm; Chisholm Larsson Gallery (https://www.chisholmposter.com/): Jason Pellecchia; Sioban Coppinger; The Cottage Garden Society (https://www.thecgs.org.uk/): Margaret Mason; Culham Ticket Office (www.culhamticketoffice.co.uk): Colin and Daniel Taylor; Carole Cuneo; davephotopics; Rob Davidson; Disused Stations: Closed Railway Stations in the UK (http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/): Nick Catford; Andy Dixon; Tim Dunn; Frances and Michael Edwards; Julia Findlater; Doreen Fletcher; Chris France; Friends of the Flitch Way and Associated Woodlands (https://www.friends-of-the-flitch-way.org.uk/): Stan Davies, Sandra Reynolds; Garden Museum (https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/); Carol Grant; Great Western Society Bristol Group (http://www.gwsbristol. org/gws.html); Great Western Trust (https://didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk/article.php/408/great-western-trust-museumarchive): Laurence Waters, Hon Photo Archivist; Chris Green; GW Railwayana Specialist Auctions (https://www.gwra. co.uk/): Simon Turner; Mark Hadley; Hinckley Antiques: Neil Bawdon; Historical Model Railway Society (https://hmrs. org.uk/): Peter Swift (Archivist), Ian Cross (Assistant Librarian), Tom Pullen (Librarian); Richard Horne; Ian Hurst; Robert Jachacz; Brian Jeyes; Roger Joanes; Anthony Lam; Leila Lawrence; Lens of Sutton Association (http://lensofsutton.co.uk/): Peter Fidczuk; Macemain + Amstad: Karen Martin, Colin Godfrey, Andrew Manning; Colin G. Maggs; M&GN Circle: John Hobden, Adrian Whittaker; Mangapps Railway Museum: John Jolly, James Jolly, Whiskers, Robin French; Midland and Great Northern (M&GN) Joint Railway Society shop (https://www.mandgn.org/weyborne-bookshop): Nigel Scarlett; Martyn Mugridge; Network Rail: Frank Anatole, Martin Ball, Anthony Dewar; Mark Fletcher, Igor Matcas, Bledar Shebegu, Ergest Shebeku, Gopika Smitha; Grace Nichols; North Eastern Railway Association (https://ner.org.uk/): Claire Williamson; Michael Papps; Michael Patterson; Tim Proudman; Kevin Robertson; Rother Valley Railway (https://www.rvr.org.uk/); RSPCA Kings Lynn Book & Music Shop; Andy Rysztogi; Mark Saunders; The Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust (https://www.sdrt.org/): Rod Ormston, Martin Rice; Cathy and Richard Spurgin; Benjamin Stedman Design: Yorick Benjamin, Jonathan Stedman; Michael Stewart; William Sugg History Website (https://williamsugghistory.co.uk/); Jim Summers; Robert Thornton; Tracks through Grantham (www.tracksthroughgrantham.uk): Mel Smith; Transport Treasury (https://transporttreasury.co.uk/): Robin Fell, Rebekah Whitmore; Robert Thornton; UK Sucrologists’ Club (http://www.uksucrologistsclub.org.uk/main/index. html): Mary Grinsted; Alan N. Walker; Martin Warburton; Waterford County Museum (https://www.waterfordmuseum. ie/exhibit/web): William Fraher, Curator; Steve Welsted; Michael Wheway; Paul White; James Whiting; Stephen Williams; Roger Winnen; Yeovil Railway Centre Shop, Yeovil Junction (http://www.yeovilrailway.freeservers.com/shop.html); Alan Young.

229

Image Credits Patrick Baty: 153; Benjamin Stedman Design: 102 (Natural Shelter); Bishop’s Castle Railway Society: 53; British Railways Board: 15, 78, 79, 84 (Fleet), 86, 92, 97, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126 (right), 127, 128, 147, 153, 168, 169, 186, 210; Caledonian Railway Association, J. F. McEwan: 19 (left); Caledonian Railway Association, John Paton: 47; Chisholm Larsson Gallery: 126 (left); Tim Clarke: 146 (Merstone); Sioban Coppinger: 187; Guy Eaglesfield: 185; Garden Museum, London: 52; Great Western Railwayana Auctions Ltd: 145 (Hartlebury, Knottingly, Portsoy, Powerstock), 165 (top row), 195; Great Western Trust: 10, 23 (above), 28, 42, 71 (bottom), 138, 141, 160, 167, 198, 199; Image available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 via Science Museum Group Images: 180; Brian Jeyes: 18, 140 (left), 164, 178; Roger Joanes: 25, 31 (bottom), 46, 162; David Lawrence: inside front cover, 4, 5, 26, 43, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 84 (Wool), 90 (Homerton), 102 (High Brooms), 103, 130, 133, 136, 149, 155, 156, 157, 165 (bottom row), 172, 173, 176, 177, 192, inside back cover; David Lawrence collection: 20 (bottom left; above), 21, 22, 23 (left), 24, 31 (top left), 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50, 54, 60, 62, 63, 64 (left), 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 (top left; top right), 72, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 129, 131, 132, 139, 143, 145, 161, 163, 166, 170, 174, 179, 194, 196, 200, 201, 202, 23, 204, 205, 206, 207; Lens of Sutton Association: 19 (right), 27, 64 (above); Macemain + Amstad Limited: 98, 99, 171; Martyn Mugridge: 20 (top left); © National Railway Museum / Science & Society Picture Library – All rights reserved: 144, 182, 183, 184; Network Rail: 104, 105, 106, 107, 148, 150, 151; Network Rail Media Centre: 188, 189, 212; Network SouthEast: 74, 90 (Leighton Buzzard), 91, 93; Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust: 142, 158, 159, 197; Sybil Kirk Collection courtesy M&GN Circle: 113; Sarah Sze, Metronome, The Waiting Room, London, 2023. Photograph: Thierry Bal. Commissioned and produced by Artangel, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum & OGR, Torino with the support of Victoria Miro. Generously supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies: 190; User.who.is.anonymous via Wikimedia Commons: 35; Waterford County Museum: 140 (right); Roger Winnen: 30, 31 (top right); Alan Young: 146 (Corrour); 113, 114, 115, 116 Graham Smith.

230

Index Abacus shelter

80

Kinneir, Jock

Abbey Mills pumping station

61

Kinsman, Rodney

173

Accoya © timber

103

Krummeck Crawford, Elsie

170

Allingham, Helen

196

Lawson, Douglas

96

Anderson air-raid shelter

72

Lewis, Brian

68

Livock, John

48

Architects, designers, engineers: Austin, Hubert

63

Llewelyn-Davies, Richard

Bell, William

63

Loudon, John Claudius

Benjamin Stedman Design

102

Macemain + Amstad

Berhin, Johan

173

Marriott, William

Brunel, I. K. Building Design Partnership

41, 44, 69 88

69, 75, 78 49 89, 96, 98, 99, 102, 170, 171, 172, 173

Martin, Leslie McIntyre, Ronnie

Calvert, Margaret

147, 148

Cavanagh, H. E. B.

68

Mocatta, David

124

Chadwick, Hulme

147, 148

Mellor, David

29, 142 69, 75, 78 172 80, 126 75

Nash, John

50

68, 79

Paley, Edward

66

80, 168, 169

Paxton, Joseph

62, 63

122

Porden, William

49

Driver, C. H.

61, 63

Prouvé, Jean

75

Elmslie, E. W.

62

Rowlands, Martyn

122

Emett, Rowland

66

Ruskin, John

61

Fellows, John

92

Shortt, W. H.

29

88

Smithson, Alison and Peter

175

Stanley Hall and Easton & Robertson

68

Curtis, F. F. C. Day, Robin Design Research Unit

Glasdon Hamlyn, W. H. Hille

68, 75 169

Thompson, Francis

48

Hodge, David

90, 91

Tite, William

48, 50

Holden, Charles

75, 80

Turner, Roy

68

IDP Architects

96

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène

61

Ingham, Keith

88

White, A. J.

146

Johnston, Edward

143

Wikeley, Nigel

84

Jones, R. H.

68

Williams, George

147

Kaukas, Bernard

211

Wyatt, Jeffry

49

Kennett, John

68

Archrome colour range

153

231

Art at stations

185–91

Ash, Joseph, & Son Atherton, Kevin Awnings as shelter

147, 148

Drinking fountains at stations

187

Dunn, Tim

9

Edmondson, Thomas

6

42–45, 47–51, 53, 55–9, 62, 67, 68, 69

178

Battersea Park Pleasure Gardens

66

Endsleigh Cottage, Devon

49

Battick, Joy

186

English Hours (1905)

13

Best Kept Station competitions

199, 200

Exmouth Junction concrete works

Betjeman, John

113, 184

Fencing at stations

Bookstalls

13, 113, 117, 119

Brighton Royal Pavilion

29, 34, 142, 161 174–7

Films:

50

‘Brief Encounter’ (1945)

Brighton Royal Stables

49

‘Help!’ (1965)

13

British Airports Authority

148

‘La Bête Humaine’ (1938; 1954)

181

British Rail Environment Panel

205

‘My Brother’s Keeper’ (1948)

181

British Rail Property Board

129

‘Oh Mr Porter!’ (1937)

181

80

‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)

13

‘Terminus’ (1961)

181

British Railways Architects’ Study Group British Railways Design Panel

80, 169

13, 113, 181

British Railways Modernisation Plan

120

‘The Railway Children’ (1970)

British Standards Institution

34

‘The Station Agent’ (2003)

British Transport Hotels

122

‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ (1953)

181

BS381 colour range

153

‘Wings Of Desire’ (1987)

181

Buffets at stations

113–5, 120–7

Finlay & Co.

118

Casey Jones

124, 127, 129

Friends of Templecombe Station

205

Cast iron

60, 61, 62, 90, 131, 160, 164, 165, 178

Catering activities on platforms Collector dogs at stations Construction materials and methods

113, 116, 120, 121, 122, 130 179–80 20, 23, 24, 29–35

‘Fruit girls’ Gardens at stations

113, 181 13

116 194–205

Gore, Spencer Frederick

182

Great Exhibition 1851

52

Coppinger, Sioban

187

Great Western Widows and Orphans Fund

180

Corrugated iron

71, 72

Green Furniture Concept

173

Cottage orné

48, 49

Guild of Railway Artists

181

Curry, Bertram

183

Hachette, Louis

117

Deller, Jeremy Department for Transport Design Council

232

Design Research Unit

71

13

Hawkes, G. C.

144

34, 79

James, Henry

13

163

Jekyll, Gertrude

195, 200

Jubilee Line Extension Project

97

Preston Bus Station

88

Lace-making

52

Rail Alphabet

148

186

Rail Alphabet 2

150

Rail Safety and Standards Board

34

Lambeth Council Lighting and lamps on platforms

158–63

Melton Constable concrete works

29

Railtrack

96, 97

Menzies, John

118

Railway heritage and conservation

210–11

Middleton, C. H.

195

Railway Heritage Trust

National Health Service

148

Railways:

211

National Railway Heritage Awards

211

British Railways

National Windrush Memorial

185

British Rail

34, 122, 124, 127, 147, 154, 161, 163, 170, 186, 186, 211

102, 103

Caledonian

152, 164

11, 14, 34, 66, 150, 170, 173, 178, 205, 211, 212

Danish State

148

Natural Shelter Network Rail Newsagents at stations

117, 118

Newton Heath concrete works Nichols, Grace Open Station system

34, 78, 137, 139, 146, 153, 154, 156, 157, 203

Far Tottering and Oystercreek

29

Furness

184

66 63, 165, 168

Garnkirk and Glasgow

19

80, 90

Great Central

47

Owen, Wilfred

184

Great Eastern

53, 63, 175, 176

‘Pagoda’ shelters

71, 72

Great Northern

152

Paint colours at stations

152–7

Great Western

23, 29, 40, 41, 53, 68, 72, 96, 113, 138, 139, 152

Parker, Peter

211

Paytrain Pictograms Picturesque style

90

Highland

63

148, 151

InterCity

154

48, 49, 50, 53

Leicester and Swannington

19

13

Liverpool and Manchester

48

4–6, 36–7, 76–7, 82–3, 94–5, 108–9, 131, 206–7

London and North Eastern

29, 114, 116, 146, 153

Platform 9¾ Platform tickets

155, 160, 162, 165, 167, 168, 175, 176, 179, 199

Platforms: positions and alignments Platforms: surface treatments

26, 42, 43, 45 20, 34

Poems: ‘Adlestrop’ (1914)

181, 184

155, 161, 162, 177 London and North Western

45, 96,

London and South Western

53, 152, 177

London Midland and Scottish

29, 68, 69, 75, 96, 143,

‘Outward from Hull’ (CHECK DATE)

184

‘The Send Off’ (1918)

184

London Passenger Transport Board

13

London Transport

143, 146

London Underground

97, 146

Potter, Harry Prefabrication

60, 74, 75, 76, 80, 84, 87, 96, 97, 98

153, 155, 161, 162 68

233

Railways (continued):

‘Modern Station concept’

London, Tilbury and Southend

165

Midland

62, 63, 152, 175, 176

Midland and Great Northern Mid-Suffolk Light Network SouthEast

‘Small Stations concept’

100 78–80, 146 96, 97

142, 176

‘V. S. B. 90’

92, 93, 96

140

Station gardens

194–205

Station in art

181–4

90, 154, 157, 161, 172

North Eastern

168

Station nameboards

138–51

Railtrack

154

Stations on film

13, 181

Regional

153, 154

ScotRail

170, 172

Acklington

45, 165

Acton Bridge

78

29, 31, 32, 67, 116, 142, 143, 159, 161, 177, 179

Acton Central

55

South Eastern Southern

Stations: 46

Stockton and Darlington

19

Aldermaston

44

Weston, Clevedon and Portishead

140

Allerton

78

Reinforced concrete

67, 68, 69, 142, 161–2

Retail activities on platforms Ridge-and-furrow glazing

Andover Town

72

113–9, 129, 130

Apsley

68

62, 63, 64

Ardlui

34

Arrochar & Tarbet

34

‘Roadside’ stations

41, 69

Robinson, William

199, 200

Royal Horticultural Society

205

Seating on platforms Shelter buildings

164–73

‘HUB station’ ‘Modern Facilities at Stations’

46

Battersea Park

56

Battlesbridge

179

13, 117, 118, 119

Bedford Midland Road

51, 55

63, 87

179

Belford

187, 189

Benton

166

152–7

Berkswell

100

Station building systems ‘D70’

46

184

Southern Railway Servants Orphanage

CLASP

Audley End

63, 64

138–51

Smith, W. H., & Son

Station building colour schemes

Askham Barcombe Mills

Signs at stations

Stanhope, Lionel

Ashchurch

71–81, 84, 85, 89–91, 96–107

Sherlock, Marjorie

234

‘Mod-X’

45

Birmingham New Street

33

78, 84

Blair Hill

99

87

Bobadilla

112

Bournemouth

179

Bournemouth West

56

104–7 96

Stations (continued):

Dalston

179

Bridge of Orchy

34

Defiance Halt

24

Brixton

186

Denham Golf Club Halt

24

Bruce Grove

64

Dilton Marsh Halt

31

Bruton

Dingwall

63

Bucknell

45

Ditton Junction

78

Burnage

78

Downham Market

161

Bush Hill Park

57

Dumfries

63

Camberley

87

Dundee

169

Camden Road

56

Dunfermline

178

Cardiff

69

Ealing

50

Carstairs

57

East Didsbury

78

Castle Cary

138

East Grinstead

85, 100

Cemetery Halt

24

East Ham

Chabris

81, 198

55

24

Ebley Crossing Halt

24

Charlbury

41, 44

Edinburgh Waverley

128

Chathill

46

Elmers End

87

Chelford

78

Entlebuch

24

Chelsfield

86

Euston

26

Chessington North

67

Exeter Central

179

Chesterton Lane Halt

22

Faringdon

46

Chippenham

44

Fenchurch Street

59

Chipping Camden

72

Finsbury Park

143

Colchester

120

Flag Station

24

Cold Harbour Halt

24

Flaxton

20

Cole

201

Fleet

84

Corby

100, 101

Corofin

21

Folkestone Central

69, 163

Corrour

146

Folkestone Harbour

211

Crewe

69, 144

Fulwell

56

Culham

44, 51, 55

Fleur-de-Lis Halt

24

Furness Abbey

46

Culmstock

141

Gainsborough Lea Road

56

Dagenham Dock

57

Garelochhead

34

235

Stations (continued):

Hutton Cranswick

174

98

Ipswich

63

Giggleswick

25

Iron Acton

56

Gloucester

98

Isfield

51

Golspie

46

Kents Bank

Goonhavern Halt

24

Kettering

62, 63

Grafton and Burbage

73

Kidlington

44, 53

Grantham

57

Kineton

56

Gerrards Cross

Great Malvern

55, 62, 210

Kings Nympton

46

Great Ormesby

57

Ladywell

57

Greenhithe

100

Lahinch

54

Gwernydomen Halt

18

Lanark

47

Hadley Wood

79

Leamington Spa

211

Ham Street

45

Leasowe

68

Hampstead Heath

69

Letchworth

182

Hampton

46

Lidlington

20

Handforth

78

Lingfield

57

Hartford

78

Liss

87

Hassocks

100

Liverpool Street

Hathersage

45

Llwyngwril

Heald Green

78

Loftus

46

Heaton Chapel

78

Lossiemouth

179

Heighington

19

Loughton

68

Helensburgh Upper

34

Luffenham

46

Hellifield Henley-in-Arden High Brooms

65, 161

Luxulyan

212

Magdalen Road

57, 103

58–9, 168, 184 46

71 204

Malden Manor

67

139

Manchester Liverpool Road

26

Holmes Chapel

78

Manor Road

68

Horden

35

Marsh Lane & Strand Road

75

Highbridge

Horderley

236

212

Marston Gate

140

Horham

53, 56 57

Marton

55

Hoylake

68

Matlock Bridge

63

Stations (continued):

Robertsbridge

55

Mauldeth Road

78

Roy Bridge

34

Maze Hill

87

Roydon

55

Meldon Quarry Halt

31

Rufford

98

Melton Constable

113

Ruislip Gardens

68

Meols

68

Runcorn

78

Merstham

60

Salisbury

173

Merstone

47

Sandbach

78

Micheldever

48

Sawbridgeworth

Middleton Towers

57

Saxilby

Milton Keynes

89

Sefton Park

78

Mitcham Eastfields

100

Sevenoaks

120

Moreton

68

Shackerstone

46

Mortimer

44

Shaugh Bridge Halt

24

Mossley Hill

78

Shillingstone

197

Moulsecoomb

92

Shoscombe and Single Hill Halt

142

Mount Hawke Halt

24

Shrivenham

42, 44

Nantgaredig

46

Silvertown

56

Newquay

89

Slough

179

Northolt

68

Smethwick Rolfe Street

188

Okehampton

79, 80 46

211, 212

Snaresbrook

57

24

South Acton

57

Paddington

179, 185

South Kenton

75

Pangbourne

40, 44, 72

South Milford

20

Peckham Rye

191–2

South Ruislip

68

Penge East

55

Southampton

187

Penrhyndeudraeth

167

St Keyne Halt

71

Polsloe Bridge Halt

30

Stanner

56

Powerstock

46

Stirling

202

Preston

69

Stoke Mandeville

187

74, 75

Old Ynysybwl Halt

Queens Park

Stonebridge Park

75

Quorn & Woodhouse

47

Strathpeffer

63

Radlett

87

Styal

78

237

Stations (continued): Surbiton Swindon Taplow

88

Weymouth Quay

57

179

Whitby Town

161

54, 56, 203

Whittingham

47

Teigl Halt

24

Wickham Bishops

27

Templecombe

187

Wilmslow

78

Thornhill

55

Wimbledon

179

Thrapston Bridge Street

56

Wimbledon Park

57

Tolworth

67

Wingfield

152

Topsham

55

Winsford

78

Townhead

19

Woburn Sands

45

Trewerry & Trerice Halt

28

Wolverhampton Low Level

26

Trouble House Halt

23

Woody Bay

46

Tulloch

34

Wool

84

Tynemouth

63

Wootton Rivers

71

Uckfield

100

Yarmouth Beach

57

Ulverston

63, 64

Yarmouth South Town

168

Upholland

88

Yate

89

Vauxhall

187

Yeovil Junction

203

Wainhill Crossing Halt

24

York

183

Wakefield Westgate

187

Sugg, William, & Co.

Wareham

170

Sze, Sarah

Watchingwell Halt

24

The Great Express

126

Watergate Halt

31

Thomas, Edward

181

Waterloo

238

Westhoughton 187

124, 126, 128, 179, 185

Totem information kiosk

161 190–1

103

Watford Junction

89

Totem signs

146, 147

Watlington

46

Travellers Fare

122, 124, 125

Welford and Kilworth

18

Travellers-Fare

122, 123, 127

West Acton

68

Turkey

54

West Hampstead

74

Uniforms, railway worker

10

West Kirby

68

Valances

West Ruislip

68

Valances: lace as source of patterns

Westbourne Park

56

Vending machines

48–59 52 131, 132, 133

Verandah

48

Vitrolite

114

Walter Macfarlane & Co.

140

War memorials at stations

185

Wayfinding

150

Window box

52

York concrete works

29

239

240

The railway platform is both beginning and ending, familiar and strange. At first the platform may seem a banal necessity, rarely noticed except when we are waiting or delayed. Design of the station environment gives a sense of place and character, intangible qualities created from surface textures, architecture, form, style, materials, details, colours, signs, information, facilities, lighting, furnishings, and equipment, and the landscape of the station itself in its local context. Study of the platform as the central focus of the station is a record of innovation in design for people and transport and looks to the future as railways remain central to work and leisure. To better understand these essential railway structures and look to the future of railway passenger places, this book studies the railway platform and its associated buildings, colour schemes, signs, furniture and equipment, lighting, and environment including station gardens. The platform is every passenger’s place in the two-hundred-year narrative of the railway industry.

David Lawrence

£29.95

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture

Platforms and Pavilions: the railway station in design and culture