MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
DURING the Battle of Britain my railway station at home was obliterated by an aeroplane falling in flames upon the roof. It had been an agreeable little station, shaped like a box and weather-boarded in a soft southern way. It con- tained a waiting-room, enlivened by a poster of Mont St. Michel, a table, three chairs, and, on occasions, even a tiny fire in the grate. All that remained of it, after the flaming thunderbolt had crashed, were two charred beams and the twisted fragments of a bicycle. The war continued. Pearl Harbour came and the battle of Alamein and the fall of Mussolini and Stalingrad and the great sweep from west and east culminating in the capture of Berlin. The Southern Railway meanwhile had erected a little hutch for their ticket-office and a small tent or canopy of sacking and corrugated iron for the protection and comfort of the passengers. The great day came when the railways passed out of the hands of the capitalists and were fused together under the benign protection of the State. We looked forward to the moment when our station would rise again, glorying in all the splendour of Social Democracy. Yet we still, when the wind howls, the snow tumbles softly against a grey sky, or the rain lashes sideways, are obliged to crouch and cower together under our tin canopy. It seems that British Railways (Southern Section) are carefully considering the situation. In another ten years perhaps they will decide to build again. I am not suggesting that I or my neighbours in any way resent. the inconvenience entailed ; we fully realise that we inhabit a County Palatine and must endure with the same stolidity as our forefathers the scars of war. We have become quite fond of our tent and like the noise that the rain makes when it beats upon the corrugated iron. Nor should we for one moment wish to divert to selfish purposes material or labour that could more profitably be devoted to providing nests for the newly married. We - hope and believe that British Railways (Southern Section) are using the time at their disposal to consider very carefully indeed what sort of railway station a Welfare State ought, in a County Palatine, to provide.
* * * * The problem is not one that can be disposed of impulsively or without prolonged thought. It is, in fact, difficult to determine what sort of building one should erect among the orchards to serve as a small wayside station upon the great Dover railroad. It is not only a question of convenience ; it is also a question of taste. Two considerations arise to create a conflict of wills. Ought a country station to be purely functional, or out it to be appropriate to its surroundings ? It can correctly be contended that a railway station is not an agricultural building and that to erect something that would harmonise with the surrounding farms and oast-houses is to utter an architectural lie. Conversely it can well be argued that it would be as inappropriate to dump in the middle of the Kentish meadows a structure of reinforced concrete or even a replica of those pretty tubular stations that cheer the eye at Hanger Lane and Amos Grove. Much as I admire the work carried out by Mr. Charles Holden and others under the inspiration of Mr. Frank Pick, I should regret it if these suburban jewels were to be transported to our unflaunting fields. If the decision rested with me, I should decide to reproduce the original modest little cottage that was destroyed in 1940. Nor should I be deeply wounded by the reproach that it is uncultured to reproduce in 1960 a style of building suited to the economic and social conditions of two hundred years ago. A country station should not aspire to arouse aesthetic surprise ; its sole object should be to provide shelter and soine comfort without attracting attention to itself.
I have been reading this week an admirable essay upon "Railway Architecture" covering the experiments and inventions of a hundred years. It is written by Mr. Christian Barman and published by Art and Technics for the sum of fifteen shillings. Mr. Barman renders it evident that the architects and engineers of the past were equally exposed to this conflict between the appropriate and the functional. Their minds were further confused by a desire to express in terms of stone and iron the triumph of the Industrial Revolution ' over the former territorial aristocracy. The men who built the rail- ways did not share, or wish to share, the esoteric taste of Lord Burlington ; they, the craftsmen-inventors, regarded themselves as the successors rather than the heirs of humanism. They were, as Mr. Barman asserts, "not philosophical students of art, but they knew common sense when they saw it." The misfortune was that they saw it so seldom, since their minds were blurred by a desire to express their triumph in what Mr. Barman calls, not unwisely, "hieratic terms." Nobody could regard as even verging upon common-sense the designs of the two Hardwickes for the London and Birmingham Railway terminus at Euston. The Great Hall, doubtless, is a noble monument; but no man in his senses could have erected a huge Doric portico or propylaea to serve as an encumbrance to a site which, by its very nature, was bound to be subject to traffic-congestion. Mr. Barman is perfectly correct in telling us that we must regard the Euston arch as an Arc de Triomphe. But I trust that British Railways, when they come to rebuild my little station on their Southern Section, will not similarly allow the Glory of Nationalisation to go to their heads. We do not want triumphal arches: all we desire is protection from the wind and rain.
I have often been puzzled by the fact that we, with the vast riches given us by our nineteenth-century monopolies, never built our railway stations on the scale that has since been adopted on the Continent or in the United States. Mr. Barman's essay provides an answer to this problem. The pride expressed by our pioneers in station-building was in comparison a limited form of arrogance. What they wished to convey was the triumph of the new engineering formula over the old humanistic theory. It was in 1845 that John Dobson started on the Central station at Newcastle. There followed, in what Mr. Barman describes as "a spirit of eager rivalry," Padding- ton, Cannon Street, Liverpool Street, Fenchurch Street, York and Manchester Central. The railway executives who commissioned, and the engineer-architects who designed, theseimpressive buildings did not desire, as some of the banks and insurance companies desired, to suggest in terms of building the massiveness of their own capital reserves. Nor. were they influenced by civic, political or national pride. All that the executives wanted was a building suited to their managerial needs ; all that Dobson and his pupils desired was to show with what ingenuity they could turn the old wooden train-sheds into high vaults of iron. The foreigners, when they in their turn started to build railway stations, were actuated by more ambitious motives. They desired to express wealth and power, as in the Pennsylvania Station at New York ; or imperial majesty, as in the ungainly old station at Frankfurt-on-Main ; or the prosperity of their own city, as in Cleveland, Ohio ; or the force of a new
political revelation, as in the many railway stations that Mussolini reconstructed with demonstrable success. It was because the inten- tions of our own pioneers were more restricted that our own stations may seem, in comparison to these foreign palaces, murky and somewhat mean.
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After reading Mr. Barman's book, and examining the excellent prints and photographs therein contained, I have become more, rather than less, anxious regarding my own little , station of the Southern Section. With some apprehension I await the far distant moment when it will be reconstructed. I hope they will not consider building campaniles as at London Bridge, Totnes and Dawlish. I hope we shall not have Italian loggias as at Warwick and Whitby. It would be terrifying to be landed with a Tudor mansion such as Temple Meads at Bristol. I desire neither a cottage orne nor a baroque orangery. Rather than any of these I should prefer to huddle, on a December morning, under my liftle Canopyoaf sackcloth and tin.
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