Euston - an appreciation

Is this London’s least loved building? To the traveller, Euston Station seems almost designed for that dubious accolade. Provincials from the Midlands and the North-West are debouched into a dismal concrete sepulchre, slab-ceilinged and oppressive, which despite being at surface level contrives to feel about a mile underground. Londoners either arrive by bus, across the forecourt’s shanty-town of encrusted picnic-tables and relentlessly tawdry public art, or else ascend from the Northern Line into a drearily cavernous ticket hall, its chaos of ad-hoc signage, commercial kiosks and huddled humanity reminiscent of a funfair in an aircraft hangar.


How did we end up with this mess? Euston belongs, along with Coventry Cathedral and the Globe Theatre, to that peculiar class of buildings loved or hated at least as much for what they used to be as for what they are now. Veteran travellers on what was once the London and North Western Railway remember a very different station, which lingers among their descendants as a folk-memory: the vast Doric propylaeum (the so-called ‘Euston Arch’) bestriding Drummond Street like the gateway to some industrial-era Acropolis, and behind it the scrolly Italianate pomp of the Great Hall and the airy delicacy of the iron and glass train shed. The original station complex of 1837-49, designed by the father-and-son architects Philip and Philip Charles Hardwick, was one of the late masterpieces of English neoclassicism, and the first great architectural glory of the railway age. Its destruction in 1961 prompted a tremendous reassessment of the 19th-century’s artistic heritage, for which we can thank the continued existence of the neighbouring (and even more spectacular) St Pancras. The replacement station is still somehow felt – in what has feelingly been called ‘the Euston Murder’ – to have blood on its hands.


But modern Euston is what it is; and it’s hardly fair to expect it to possess the special qualities of early Victorian architecture, still less to regard the station itself as guilty of some sort of oedipal crime. Prejudice against the architecture of the post-war era, combined with what we might call the aesthetics of resentment, conspire to blind us to the distinctive characteristics – even virtues – of the present-day complex.

For the Euston we see today is a complex – not the single monolithic unity we tend to imagine, but a sequence of buildings added to and altered over time, displaying the varied, often conflicting stylistic codes of several periods. Coming from the Euston Road, we first encounter some little-regarded relics of the old station: two neat classical cubes of Portland stone clinging to the unloved scrap of municipal greenery known as Euston Square Gardens. These accomplished little buildings of 1870 are the work of one JB Stansby, engineer to the LNWR (try getting a 21st-century transport engineer to run up a couple of Albertiesque pavilions on his afternoon off), and once marked the entrance to a grand processional route stretching from the main road a hundred yards north-west to the Arch itself. Between them is a stone obelisk with a group of sad soldiers in bronze at its foot: the railway company’s monument to its Great War dead.

Behind this touching group of forlorn survivors are the best of the modern buildings: a speculative office development of1978 by Richard Seifert and Partners, the most prolific and rapacious of London’s post-war commercial practices, remembered for such sensitive additions to the city’s skyline as the Natwest Tower and Centre Point. They have the trademark Seifert swagger. Across the front of the site stretches a long, sleek office slab clad in polished black granite and smoked glass, its structural grid expressed externally as an array of crisply-projecting shelves and fins. Around it stand three squat towers, curtain-walled the same dark materials as the slab; but here the granite and glass coalesce to form a perfectly smooth all-over sheath, a glistening storm-grey mirror for the surrounding sky. Here is that sinister glamour one sees in the best commercial architecture of the 1970s, when modernism abandoned its pretensions to brutal truthfulness and learned to live on the slick surface of things. This glossy insubstantiality is played up in the fenestration: the pattern of close-set windows wraps seamlessly around all four corners, so that the angles themselves are transparent rather than solid, and the bulky towers seem at the point of evaporating into the grey London air.


Beyond these, across the cratered moonscape of the forecourt (complete with rocket-like ventilator shafts), lies the station proper, the new concourse and platforms that replaced the Hardwick complex between 1962 and 1968. The architect was RL Moorcroft of British Railways’ Midland Region; his work, although it doesn’t compare well with that of his distant predecessor Stansby, still repays inspection. Even the rather dull forecourt facade – a series of long horizontal planes clad in white mosaic tile, tied together by slim black vertical shafts – is well composed and in its unfussy way even elegant; and the main interior, if we mentally subtract the unplanned accretions of the last forty years, is a lofty, clean-lined, generously-proportioned space, a measured rejection of the smoke-and-upholstery world of Victorian rail travel. The one hint of extravagance is underfoot, in the lavish floor of deep green marble. Overhead, the massive ribbed concrete vault gestures towards the sublime (and also towards the famous deep-coffered ceiling over the 1849 Great Hall), whilst a strange honeycomb canopy gives the ticket office a surreal touch of the Alhambra.


Euston is no masterpiece. But neither is it the blank inhuman architecture-without-qualities that stereotyped perception represents. If the current £1 billion deal between Network Rail the mega-developer British Land goes ahead, the whole of the 20th-century complex will shortly go the way of its predecessor, to be replaced with a huge new terminus-cum-hotel-cum-retail arcade in the swooshy shopping-mall style currently in vogue – possibly even incorporating a modern replica of the demolished Arch. This time, half a century on, few will mourn; but it pays to get the measure of what you have before you throw it away. Heritage sentiment is catching up with modern architecture: Centre Point is now grade II listed, as are the Barbican, the Trellick Tower and numerous other icon/carbuncles of the era. And if the ‘sustainability agenda’ ever becomes more than a rhetorical fig-leaf, we’ll have to look again at our age-old practice of tearing buildings down as soon as we can make more money from new ones. How will the future look at the things we now unthinkingly destroy?

Across the Avon Gorge

No English city comes to an end more abruptly than does Bristol at Clifton Down. One moment we are walking among handsome Georgian streets with names like Caledonia Place, West Mall, Royal York Crescent, the Paragon; the next, we stand on the brink of a chasm, where the land flings itself down a near-vertical limestone escarpment to the sluggish tidal waters of the Avon three hundred feet below, rising again just as steeply on the far bank into a virgin country of beech-woods and fields and open downland. The effect is, as ever, deceptive: look closely and some of those emerald Somerset pastures are really golf courses, while among the trees lurk clusters of urbs-in-rure executive villas. But as an ideal image of the coming-together of town and country, freed by fortunate topography and tolerably good planning from the usual sprawling horrors of exurbia, we have nothing to match it.



At the narrowest point of the gorge, this easy harmony between man and nature is transfigured by one titanic act of engineering into a thrilling, breathless tension. On the city side, a high diagonally-stratified bluff breaks free from the escarpment; upon it stands a colossal tower of rough blue-grey Pennant stone, ninety feet high and thirty broad, the huge apertures scooped from its craggy flanks opening like portals into the beyond. Two hundred yards away on the Somerset side is a second tower, perched on an artificial outcrop of blood-red sandstone. Between them run the great chains: anchored in bedrock two hundred feet back on each side, they rise to pass through square openings beneath the parapet of each tower before looping down and up across the ravine like iron lianas in a vast hanging curve of tremendous, perilous beauty. Suspended from them on a hundred and fifty slender harpstring rods is the roadway, a shallow deck of planks and girders overlaid with tarmac; it is so narrow that traffic must go in single file, the cars seeming to pick their way nervously across like tightrope walkers uncertain of their safety net.

The mastermind of all this high-wire artistry was, of course, Isambard Kingdom Brunel; and this, perhaps his best-known surviving structure, is the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge. The bridge was both Brunel's debut and his epitaph. When he won the competition in 1830 he was a young man of 24, the son of a leading engineer but with no major independent projects to his name. He had submitted several alternative schemes, of which his favoured option was for a much longer bridge without towers, hanging below the level of the hill-tops and accessed via a pair of access tunnels cut through the cliffs. This proposal, with a span of nearly 1000 feet, was dismissed as a physical impossibility - although the design that was eventually accepted still required a 700-foot span, far longer than any then in existence.
Brunel never saw his bridge completed, or even properly begun. By the time he died in 1859, work had been abandoned for more than a decade due to lack of funds, with only the two half-finished towers eyeing one another up like stone vultures from either side of the unspanned gorge. The chains and deck were finally installed as a memorial to Brunel in 1864, under the joint supervision of John Hawkshaw and William Henry Barlow. Economies were still required: the chains, for instance, are second-hand, having been brought from Brunel's lately-demolished Hungerford Bridge across the Thames at Charing Cross.

Clifton was by no means the first suspension bridge (rope-bridges of this type go back to antiquity, and a version using iron chains was pioneered in North America at the beginning of the 1800s), and by the time of its belated completion it had long since been surpassed in terms of length and load-bearing capacity. What Brunel did was to give the form its first definitive artistic expression. Recent discoveries in Egypt offered the early 19th century a new idiom in which to express the sense of awesome power and majesty that the engineering marvels of the day inspired. The form of the towers, with their battered (that is, inward-sloping) walls and cavetto (quadrant-shaped) cornices, deliberately recalls the massive pylon gateways at such temples as Philae, Luxor and Edfu, and was calculated to draw forth from the myth-kitty the same images of hieratic power and enduringness that Shelley had recently employed, albeit to more ironic ends, in 'Ozymandias'.

But it is less the style, which soon fell from fashion, than the sculptural quality of the towers that has proved so iconic: their hunched, Atlas-like aspect, as if they stood with legs apart and knees bent to bear the weight of the unimaginable; the elemental simplicity of their outlines, and of the great geometric openings - rectangular, segmental, parabaloid - cut clean through their solid masonry, suggesting both oneness with and transcendence of the fissured limestone landscape they bestride. In fact, the rough-hewn sublimity that is the structure's defining characteristic results as much from what Hawkshaw and Barlow left out as what Brunel put in. The latter had envisaged a full programme of neo-Eygptian embellishments, including paired sphinxes atop the towers and sheet-metal cladding emblazoned with sun-disks and faux hieroglyphics, all of which would soon have made the bridge into a mere charming period piece. In its final, unfinished form it is a timeless thing: a speaking emblem of the dynamics of human potency, of the visionary intellect imperiously commanding, yet visibly reliant upon, raw collective strength.




The very conception of what, in aesthetic terms, a bridge involves has changed utterly since Brunel's day. Despite its technical brilliance, his great work belongs in many ways to an immemorial tradition of bridge-building that relies for its visual effect on mass and masonry and manifest, overwhelming power. The Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an obvious descendant of Clifton completed in 1883, was among the last to be built according to this Cyclopean paradigm. Through the 20th century, advances in steel and reinforced concrete construction refined the suspension bridge down to an airy, effortless minimum, flung across ever more tremendous distances with the insouciant grace of a harpist's arpeggio. Compared with the tiptoe poise of, say, the 1937 Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco, Clifton appears positively archaic in its display of ancient archetypes and brute musculature. In this, it perfectly typifies the century of its construction. A child of Romanticism as well as an empirical genius, Brunel sought throughout his life to make structural rationality congruent with historical resonance and poetic grandeur: a notoriously difficult marriage, but here at least a triumphantly successful one.

Elephants in commuterland

Today began, grimly, in Frimley, Surrey - a sorry little place, once a village, now a strip mall with attached business parks, its centre eviscerated in the usual way for ease of motorised access, its principal urban space a mini-roundabout, and everywhere the clutter and litter and all-pervading crappiness that the M25 hinterland does best. Let us never forget that full and happy lives are, no doubt, lived in Frimley, that it is the daily scene of kindness and courage and love and hope. But on any other analysis, it's an authentic hell-hole whose very existence seems to undermine the prospect of there being any good in this world, anywhere, ever.

And yet.... even here there exist possibilities of redemption. Walk down the despoiled high street with its token surviving old building, turn right at the grinding intersection of the A327 and the B3411, and in a hundred yards behold a scene of sheer gratuitous delight. An ancient, twisted oak tree stands at the centre of a mossy green, around which are clustered the eight blocks of the Apex Drive estate: broad-shouldered in pale grey brick, all overhangs and shadows and strange tubular protrusions, each black-framed window an upside-down semicircle, the shape of an eyelid. They gather round the tree like a herd of elephants seeking shade, and to be amongst them is to be sheltered and sustained by large, solid, friendly presences, by dignity and even an odd sort of ugly beauty, in the midst of what is otherwise a howling savannah of dreck. Someone (specifically the architect Lawrence Abbott and the Apex housing association, who built the estate in 1966-9) has thought and cared about this corner of the world, has worked to make it a fit dwelling-place for human beings. In an environment like Frimley that counts for a lot.