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The Age of the Shop The transformation of the London Midland train shed at St Pancras into the Eurostar terminal is, by unanimous agreement, a triumph. If a single syllable of discontent was uttered when the station recently re-opened following six years of cosmetic surgery I can’t recall it. When the architectural establishment, including all its supposedly independent critics, is of a single mind in praising its own endeavours, one suspects a smokescreen and scurries off to investigate. Admittedly, the tremendous impact of William Barlow’s great shed is indestructible even by penny-pinching developers. Its monumentality will always offer a lift to spirits pummelled by London. Nevertheless, avoidable errors of visual judgement have been made at St Pancras. Indeed, in my view the public were hoodwinked into believing that the old station had been ‘saved’. In truth, the building which emerged from behind the plastic sheeting is, on the inside at least, a completely different one. The original shed, now only visible from the outside in the newly exposed clean perspectives along its flanks, was a living museum. History, once so powerful a presence here, can now neither be felt nor imagined. For all the improvements made, some of them worthwhile, the interior is no longer a place with an instant atmospheric connection to the past. For all the new liberties offered by side entrances, holes in the floor, glass lifts and other mod-cons – including the one we’ve all so eagerly awaited, i.e. the convenience of sipping bubbly in “the longest champagne bar in the world” whilst freezing to death – access to half the shed is prevented. Freedom to wander is restricted, the Eurostar platforms having been fenced off like the international frontiers they are. St Pancras used to be one of few buildings hereabouts which, with time to kill, one might enter and wander about and perhaps even attempt an inept drawing or two. If ever any building was a work of art to be investigated and loved it was this one: I never visited without pleasure. Nobody in their right mind would draw in such a soulless place now for it is re-incarnated as an Arndale Centre. For one thing, both in day time and at night, the light is horrible, shadowless and monotone. It forcibly confronts us all too painfully with our materially decadent and spendthrift present. You see, I preferred it when it was a Victorian railway station and not a shopping mall; when it smelled like a railway station and not a shopping mall; and I much preferred the dingy glow and recesses of the station to the electrical firestorm of the shopping mall which eliminates shape and recess. If architecture is the sculpting of space, this is now one massive, anaesthetic void. Part of the problem with its even light is created by the unfortunate reflective colour chosen for the original “Butterley Company, Derbyshire” iron superstructure. What was previously charcoal is now sky blue. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a flash of sky blue; indeed, it was fit for the Gods when gracing the heroic torso of Colin Bell, but it couldn’t be less appropriate colouring the ribs of a train shed. What is so sad is that the past has been scoured out and painted over in order to supply the desired ambience for shifting coffees with silly names at a price even Rachman would have been embarrassed to charge. Barlow’s shed, which was always more aesthetically satisfying to those numbed by minimalism than George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic pile banged on the front, was the greatest of soaring monuments from the first forty years of the railway age, arguably the greatest period of British architectural innovation: the whole world copied it. New materials and daring engineering innovations, fuelled by that Victorian can-do confidence and self-belief, were used to span unprecedentedly wide areas. From the blueprints of Paxton’s Great Stove greenhouse at Chatsworth (1840) and Decimus Burton’s magnificent bird-cage Palm House at Kew Gardens (1848) to the full-blown windy bloomers of the Crystal Palaces for Hyde Park (1851) and the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition at Old Trafford (1857), engineers went mad with ambition for their bent beams. Presented with new challenges, railway architects, many of whom had already assisted on some of the buildings mentioned above, ran fast with the new possibilities; first John Dobson at Newcastle (1850) and Brunel at Paddington (1855), then Barlow at St Pancras (1868) and Thomas Prosser at York (1876). For 20 years the northern perimeter of London’s West End was a building site as large termini fired lines towards all points north and west. Thanks to steel and glass, railway stations were the first buildings for 600 years to compete in size and height, and spirit, with the cathedrals and minster churches to whose interiors they’ve so frequently been compared. Even the vocabulary of religious architecture applies – we refer to the nave of Paddington, the transepts of Liverpool Street and the undercroft at St Pancras. Stations were secular architecture born of a near-religious fervour for engineering novelty. And St Pancras topped the lot: five platforms and a generous set-down area for hackneys and horse-drawn carriages, all covered by one span, made it easily the largest unbroken covered space in the world. It is hard to imagine all those careworn little engineers wearing stovepipe hats in the collodion photographs agonising over the ‘visual impact’ their work might have. With tricky maths to solve in order to get it to stay up and fierce company chairmen to satisfy, how their creations struck the eye was the last thing on their mind. Solving the equations within budget was all that mattered, the rest would have to look after itself. And it did, superbly. Their belief is our eyes’ reward. The station worked as intended right up to the recent rebuilding: the hotel had closed in 1935 and was fitfully used as offices. When the station first reopened in November it looked better for being empty of the clutter which quickly followed. Furniture was at a minimum so lines were clean and the view of the back wall – two austere arcades echoing those on the scenae frons of an ancient theatre – was unimpeded now the old café, lavatories and newsagents had been bulldozed. Now we could see the rear wall it became apparent what a crime had been committed when concealing it in the first place. Not realising for a minute their good fortune, the building’s custodians have already tested the possibility of obscuring it again. Planners never learn. This is the principle reason why England is now comfortably the ugliest country of Europe. Shortsighted and easily avoidable architectural mistakes now happen with such frequency one suspects philistine jobsworths of taking a perverse revenge on vistas otherwise so upliftingly simple. Smithfield Market was restored then scandalously disfigured in such a way ten years ago and we will only realise the offensiveness of the entrance and shops inflicted on the facade of Cubitt’s double-barrel at Kings Cross when their promised removal takes place in a couple of years. The same should be said for the municipal barbarity of the metal footbridge dropped straight across the middle of York railway station blocking the lines of the most wonderful arc in all of British architecture. As an extreme aesthetic offence, this runs Norman Foster’s British Museum roof close. Make no mistake this is as great an enormity as if someone had built a dockside gantry across the nave of Durham Cathedral before daubing it thickly with shitbrown gloss. The appearance of our great buildings is precious to all who pass them and patiently look up. Those who underestimate these potentially elevating moments in our everyday lives condemn us to live surrounded by a dispiriting vision of needless degradation. Like all new buildings, when it opened, and when it was reviewed by the architecture critics, the new St Pancras wasn’t finished. In fact, scaffolding will remain on the hotel for three years more. (This is not, by the way, a modern problem: Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel opened five years after the railway station in 1873.) Allowing the press inside before the building was complete was a clever trick on the architects’ part, for critics saw it in what will have been its only instance of architectural purity. But within a month all the best prospects had been interfered with by intrusive information boxes and overhanging signs. The back curtain wall so impressive in November had by December been hideously draped with massive advertisements which by mid-January had been removed – permanently it is to be hoped. Much praise has been aimed at the opening of the cavernous undercroft by scooping out the floor of the main hall. The crypt feels underground but is actually close to street level. Originally, tracks had to be built high on a platform so that trains could be hauled out by Stephenson’s locomotives. Two hundred yards up the road at Euston such was the incline out of the station that in its first years of use trains were dragged from the platforms by pulleys and only at the brow of the slope coupled to an engine. St Pancras was high enough to build the tracks over a cellar. As we now know (thanks to Simon Bradley’s recently published history of the station, Profile Books, £14.99) the hundreds of iron columns supporting the floor were spaced specifically to accommodate barrels of Bass beer from Burton-on Trent. To have this area opened up has the advantage of adding to the building’s already impressive height. Inevitably, however, his room has been used to recreate every High Street in the country, with no fewer than 44 of your favourite franchises. The most prominent eyesore of the new station lies at the end of Barlow’s shed where the Midland Railway and so-called BedPan trains have their new terminus. An extension to the shed had to be constructed because St Pancras was a uniquely unsuitable and inflexible place for long Eurostar trains, all of which operate at twice the length of Barlow’s shed. The new Midland station is a flattish awning of overlapping scales held up on thin columns. It looks as though it’s been built to last months. Here we have the 21st century solution to covering platforms bolted on to the 19th century’s answer to the same problem. Today’s architects also left the art to look after itself. It did, and stayed at home. This Stonehenge annexe to the Parthenon is Beauty and the Beast. One can’t imagine in the entire history of architecture a more grisly mésalliance than this shabby eyesore. The new station abuts the old at the height where the marvellous filigree fanlight stops. This completely ruins the view of the far arch from the station entrance, the bottom half of which is now denied natural light or, at night, an even more suggestive natural darkness. The inevitable ‘Public Art’ has been deposited in the station. That commemorating our greatest poet of nostalgia, Sir John Betjeman, is an affectionate, recognisable and modest account of a fellow whose campaigning helped save the building when it was under threat from British Rail penpushers. It seems inconceivable now that this triumph of Victorianism was within months of demolition in order that vandals might convert the site into Birmingham New Street. Anyway, Sir John should be in a corner or adjacent to an entrance where his charming, surprised look upwards would make more sense. Abandoned in the middle of the concourse the sculpture looks as though someone left it there by mistake. It is, however, very popular with the bomb-proof-knickers brigade from Adlestrop who pose beside it for photographs. The large bronze called The Meeting (opposite) at the buffer end of the old station is a most regrettable error of judgement. Paul Day, its author, is a good young sculptor who has featured many times in The Jackdaw but I fear he will live to regret this clanger, whose scale would dwarf both Michelangelo’s David and the Farnese Hercules. Virtually everything is wrong with it. It is the wrong size, the wrong colour, the wrong subject and it’s in the wrong place. Worst of all, it is Jack Vettriano in three dimensions. It is yet another example of a sculpture conceived small then grossly over-enlarged. Day’s facility for modelling figures evaporates at this dimension. Indeed, almost anybody’s finesse would disappear, for this is not a gargantuan Damien Hirst where you expect the size and idea to be everything and the form nothing. On the contrary, form is crucial here, yet it fails to seduce. There is no mystery. Surfaces are bland, features comic-like. Only installed three months ago, it already looks dated. As with so much public art the space was better left to look after itself. In the end, St Pancras was not ‘saved’. It was used as the foundation for something else not nearly as rich and quietly glorious as the original. David Lee | |||||
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