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Our Genius for Ugliness Regulations governing the preservation of our important historical buildings are lax. Too often when a building is saved only its fabric is secure. The spirit of the building, the way it strikes the senses, is not secure from the ravages of those who adapt the otherwise untouchable structure to its new purpose. The fabric of a building, its materials, details, ingenious solutions to technical problems presented by the purpose and the site, reward investigation for their own sake. All are indicative of aesthetic decisions, imagination and, frequently, the most refined craft skill. But another intangible ingredient in a great building is far more significant than the pedantries of its construction. I am talking about the silent contemplation of the edifice in its entirety, the experience, perhaps from a small number of crucial vantage points, which might reduce even the strongest of us to tears of pleasure and gratitude for the special impact of so special a place. At Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, for example, the dutiful student might swot up on buttresses, squinches, pendentives, saucer dome and hemi-dome construction, and even on its architects Isidorus of Miletus and Anthemios of Tralles, but nothing so academic quite prepares you for that moment in the balcony when the shape and volume of the walled and parcelled air suddenly come alive and you know without doubt that this is an unforgettable place, somewhere to revere. I have a theory – probably nonsense – which I may get the opportunity to test in a few years: it is that such rare happenings of intense satisfaction touch us so very deeply that they are the only memories not erased by the dementia of old age. More than anything else, access to such revelations is what should be protected in a building at least as much as the fabric, because these experiences are what made the site worth protecting in the first place. Too often with ‘saved’ buildings it is the impact of the structure on the eye and the senses which is undervalued and destroyed. Planners are so guileful. They stick to the letter of preservation but hardly ever to the spirit of it. I discussed a similar subject only three issues ago when considering the tasteless conversion, with its inhuman Midland Railway annexe, of St Pancras station. My apologies for returning so soon to this matter but I was unaware at the time of writing that Liverpool Street station was in fact an even more odious example of the gross betrayal of preservation I was struggling to describe. Although I’ve travelled to and from Liverpool Street scores of times I’d never registered until recently the vileness of its 1991 conversion – the metal and glass hood over the Bishopsgate escalators, for example, destroys the impact of the Italianate brick towers behind which might as well not now be there. The reason for my inattention at Liverpool Street is that like the majority of the station’s passengers I am subconsciously put off from looking upwards or even around myself. Everything about this place conspires against noticing the surroundings. The sickly pong of warm pastry, the grating light and the pressured ambience of shopping convince me, without even a doubting glance, that I am in a banal place unworthy of closer notice. Nothing redeems the architecture of shopping. Many streets and public buildings, especially precincts, have this effect, for no mall was ever a building of distinction. Bluewater will never be listed, and nor will the Trafford Centre. Indeed, so positively anti-aesthetic are such places that, taking their uglinesss for granted, we cease to think with our eyes. No civilisation prior to our own was responsible for such cheap and temporary unsightliness on so widespread a scale. If the future concludes that our people spent too much time hiding indoors, it might be because the outside was so offensively blighted. Sleeplessness being the preserve of those nearer the end than the beginning, I arrived at Liverpool Street early for the 6.02 am electric train to Romford. Without newspapers there was nothing for it but to look around... I remember well the campaign which began early in 1975 to preserve the station, but to my shame had never taken the trouble to register what the fuss was about. Asked then for my post-1850 architectural preferences I may have cited the Shredded Wheat factory in Welwyn, or Agecroft power station, the Daily Express building in Manchester or the Boots factory of Nottingham, but not one of the blackened Victorian buildings which by then had almost all been deliberately let go. Liverpool Street was such a place and suffered for not having a grand frontage. You can’t stand before it in admiration, and arrival by train is no more prepossessing than any other troglodytic adventure. The station only comes alive when, having forced your way through the corporate swaddling of glossy granite, it opens outwards and upwards. The problem is that it’s greater allure is even then far from obvious because developers (British Rail and its numerous subsequent derivatives), doubtless miffed that they couldn’t level the whole shebang, cleverly built their shopping centre anyway, but inside the station. Imagine the rumpus if the Turks built a two-storey row of shops selling kebabs and simit right across the middle of Hagia Sofia. International outcry at their crudity would result in their EU application being placed on indefinite hold. I can’t remember anyone uttering so much as a peep when its equivalent happened at Liverpool Street, where the effect of the whole has been sacrificed for the sake of yet another Thorntons, Marks and Spencer, Ladbrokes, Vodafone and a dozen others. The station was opened in stages over 18 months from February 1874. Costing £2 million, it was designed by the Great Eastern Railway’s chief engineer, Edward Wilson, using bespoke ironwork supplied by the Fairbairn engineering company of Manchester. The new terminus replaced an earlier station, Bishopsgate, which was regarded as unfit for the rapidly expanding commuter and express traffic from Essex and East Anglia. Following the trend for hotel frontages established by Paddington, St Pancras and King’s Cross, the station was anchored by the Great Eastern Hotel which opened in 1884. Designed by Charles Barry (grandson of the Houses of Parliament’s architect) it was in the lumpen-Gothic idiom which had by then established itself as the public face of railway termini. Wilson was lucky. His was the last of the mainline stations to be built in that arc around the northern perimeter of central London which sprayed lines into England like so many spokes from a hub. In the previous 20 years I K Brunel and W H Barlow, both more adventurous than Wilson, had supplied blueprints for him at Paddington and St Pancras. He opted for the multi-span, nave, aisle and transept, ‘cathedral’ plan first adopted by Brunel, adding Decorated Gothic detailing to the spare minimalism preferred by the GWR’s engineer. Wilson’s was a unique combination of up-to-the-minute metal engineering with the arty flourishes formerly reserved only for the hotels. Brunel and Barlow, both form-and-function men, would have raised their eyebrows at Wilson’s effete (and expensive) superfluities. But all minimalism and no play make Jack a dull boy and Liverpool Street’s double-columns with their Egyptian-style lotus capitals are marvellous. The station was extended eastwards in 1894 adding extra platforms. (In terms of passenger numbers per hour, Liverpool Street has, surprisingly, always been the busiest of London’s main stations – 219,000 a day by the 1970s.) It was left in this more or less original condition, gradually deteriorating and accumulating thick soot, until in 1974 British Rail announced plans to demolish Liverpool Street, Broad Street and the Great Eastern Hotel in order to build what it called ‘The City of the Future’: cartoon northerners like the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who had been brought up in satanic dumps like Huddersfield, were suckers for such modernistic drivel. BR’s jerrybuilt metropolis was to comprise 1.25 million square feet of offices, a shopping centre with fackin ’orrible (then à la mode) diamond pod skylights and a 450-bedroom hotel, all sat over and suffocating a new subterranean station. Surrounding roads would have needed re-routing. Spread over 25 acres it would have been the largest building site ever in Britain. You’ll have to take my word about this: I have seen the plans and the models, which are all preserved in a wonderful old library called the Bishopsgate Institute, and had British Rail been given the green signal this lot would by now have gone the way of so many contemporary ‘visions of the future’ and met Mr Murphy’s metal ball. There are two major extant examples of British Rail’s efforts to make money from property development; Euston (completed in 1968) and Birmingham New Street (1972). At the time both were considered ‘modern’, ‘bright’, ‘efficient’ and ‘clean’, words which recur like talismans throughout BR’s submission to the Public Enquiry over Liverpool Street. Concerning Euston, British Rail said that they needed to pull it down because “modernity and efficiency not antiquity and chaos” were the new order. Both complexes are now synonyms for eyesores. Neither has any mitigating feature whatsoever and both blunt, characterless buildings are currently the subject of redevelopment plans precisely because they are unpleasant underground dungeons for which not even the habitually servile architectural press has a good word. Indeed, it is hard to think of the demolition of any London building which is as much regretted as the wrecking in 1962 of Philip Hardwick’s doric Euston Arch which was built as the propylaeum to George Stephenson’s original 1837 station. The campaign against BR’s plans for Liverpool Street was organised by two remarkable, diligent men, Alan Stones and John Chesshyre – having read through their work I am in awe of their energy and achievement. Both gave their all to the cause which eventually succeeded after five years against overwhelming odds. They won because British Rail’s plans were exposed for what they really were – naked commercial development masquerading as an improvement for passengers. By 1975 British Rail was losing £54 million a year. As usual there was no promise from the Government of additional public subsidy to anywhere near the amount required to run properly a national railway. The nationalised company was forced, therefore, into exploiting its thick portfolio of land and property. Instead of coming clean, they tried to pretend that Liverpool Street had to be demolished because platforms needed reconfiguring and the lines relaid ten degrees off present track in order to reach the required passenger throughput per hour. By fundraising, campaign organisers were able to enlist professional consultants and eminent legal representation to demolish one by one BR’s charges. Also, and crucially, within six months of starting they had achieved Grade 1 listing status for Liverpool Street and its supporting buildings, which was good for both morale and momentum. The campaign figurehead, as usual in this period, was John Betjeman. An old hand at campaigning to preserve the most evocative of the past, he had been successful with St Pancras but had tasted failure at Euston. He it was who set the tone for the aesthetic defence of “London’s most picturesque terminus” as a building which “epitomised the Victorian growth of the city”. It had its own beauty, he wrote, and was quite unlike any of the other stations in its combination of greenhouse and cathedral elements. Equally repugnant to him was the growing belief in the City that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of Mammon. He summed up his opposition: “Progress is not building unlimited ‘Centrepoints’ but using our heads in an intelligent way”. So where is it now, “the surprise and spectacular sensation” of the view along the Liverpool Street nave? Nowhere to be seen. We got the shopping centre and offices anyway. Money talked louder. We might start the redress by demanding removal of the two layers of shops, that disgusting parody of an iconostasis, which doubles as a ticket barrier, and also the removal of the ‘Departures’ board to a place less obstructive and intrusive. Only then will the spirit of Stones’s and Chesshyre’s victory have been at least partially won back. David Lee | |||||
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