York

Curves and arches

In the next couple of posts I’m looking back to my summer visit to York, with its magnificent railway station.

I’m an admirer of the great train sheds of large Victorian stations. Their scale, and the elegant engineering that makes this possible, still inspire awe a century and a half or more after they were built. But there’s something especially admirable about York station – it’s built over a line that curves. Some 795 feet in length, the platforms are spanned by ribs that take the form of five-centred arches, coming to rest on stout Corinthian columns. These ribs are pierced with quatrefoils and circles, which gives them a lightness (both visual and in terms of weight), allowing the sun to shine through where the roof above is glazed. As the platform and the roof describe their gentle curves, there’s a pleasing visual counterpoint on a scale that’s unmatched in any other English station, with the exception of Newcastle. It’s a magnificent sweep, hardly noticed by most passengers as they alight from their train – minding the gap between the train and the platform edge, of course – and hurry to the exit and whatever has brought them to York in the first place.

It’s a stunning structure, and there are visual pleasures to be had from the details too. Not every one of the arches has its own Corinthian column – only every third arch is immediately above a column. The intermediate arches are held up by lateral girders supported on elliptical brackets. Parts of this supporting metalwork are pierced in the same way as the arches, and there are displays of railway symbolism and heraldry in the spandrels. The coat of arms of the North Eastern Railway Company, which built the station, are prominent, and are picked out in bright colours.

To railway historians this is York’s ‘new’ station, having been completed in 1877 to designs by Thomas Prosser. It was built to replace the ‘old’ station of 1841, which had been built inside the city walls. This station was not only too small for the increasing railway traffic, but was also inconvenient, because trains had to reverse to get in or out through the arch that had been cut into the city walls to allow access. The new station has served its purpose well, both for the NER and for the other companies whose trains have used it since.