Denham, Buckinghamshire

Corrugated iron to the fore

Regular visitors to this blog will know all about my enthusiasm for corrugated iron as a building material. Barns and, especially, churches, made of the material have caught my eye in the past. So it will come as no surprise that I’m also keen on corrugated iron railway architecture. These are amongst the humblest examples of their kind, but are not without a certain flair. They’re called pagoda shelters, and were a form of building introduced by the Great Western Railway in about 1904 as a way of providing cheap platform waiting space at small stations and halts.

These particular examples are at the station at Denham Golf Club, which came along a couple of years after the club itself was founded in 1910. I found out about them from Peter Ashley, photographer and chronicler par excellence of Unmitigated England, who supplied the photograph in which the wrinkly surface of the metal stands out like magnified corduroy in the sun. They have been repainted since this picture was taken, but are otherwise the same.

He and I both like the way in which corrugated iron’s propensity to yield to a gentle curve has been put to use in the galvanized roofs of these little buildings, giving them their pagoda-inspired outline. This care with a humble building comes from another age, an age in which, as Peter has said, ‘it is not difficult to imagine plus-foured golfers arriving here and lighting up their Player’s cigarettes in the dim recesses of the iron shelters’. The Players (though not, perhaps, the players) may be gone, but these unassuming shelters have survived from another age.