26 October 2020 · The Beauty of Transport

Presenter: Daniel Wright

For our virtual meeting in October we welcomed Daniel Wright, whose talk was entitled “The Beauty of Transport”. By profession Daniel is a transport planner, and he works closely with Community Rail Partnerships. He has a lifetime interest in the architecture and design of railway stations, and has for some time run a blog about them, and other aspects of travel, which has the same name as his talk.

If there is such a subject as railway architecture, said Daniel, it is definitely under-studied. He then took us on a marvellous tour of stations through the years, in the UK and overseas. It is fortunate that the world’s first inter-city station, Manchester Liverpool Road, and the first long-distance inter-city station, Birmingham Curzon Street, both have significant structures standing, even though long since closed to passengers.

It was interesting to reflect on whether these looked like what we think of as railway stations, seeing as there had not been any before they were built! The same could be said for Croydon Aerodrome, which was similarly a building without precedent. We next saw a succession of stations, tracing the styles fashionable in turn; gothic, Tudor, Jacobean, Cottage Orne, classical, French, Italianate and so on. We have stations extant today in all these, and others. Daniel turned to Europe and the USA for examples of such as Art Nouveau, Beaux Arts and Mission Revival, which did not really catch on here.

This excellent and intriguing talk concluded with a look at current British practice, which compares favourably with other countries. We looked at the new Reading, of course, Blackfriars, Glasgow Queen Street, and the western concourse at Kings Cross among others. With their use of modern materials to reduce weight where appropriate, or make for better shelter, cleaning, and passenger movement, the UK is doing pretty well. A number of other countries are producing elaborate and expensive stations; but we know that HS2 will present significant challenges.

Report by: Jim Tucker