Down Street, London

On the tracks of old railways (1): Identity

Go on. You know what this is, or what it was, don’t you? If you’ve lived in London, or been to London, and you’re not rich enough to ride around all the time in taxis, you’ll recognise the style straight away. Oxblood-coloured tiles, semicircular windows a bit like the Diocletian windows used in Roman and Palladian architecture, classical details like the dentil course at the top, the occasional Art Nouveau curlicue. But especially those oxblood tiles. It’s an underground station, of course, or, in this case, Down Street Station having closed in 1932, a former underground station. It was never heavily used, being close to other stations on the network and in a well-to-do area in which relatively few people took the tube; those who wanted a train could easily get one at nearby Hyde Park Corner or Dover Street (now Green Park).

That we know immediately what this building is or was is down to Leslie Green, architect to the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, who was tasked in 1903 with designing new stations on lines then opening that later became parts of the Piccadilly, Bakerloo, and Northern lines on the modern tube network. Green designed all these stations, about 50 of them, between 1903 and his death in 1908 at the tragically early age of 33.

He chose the shiny tiles for these facades because he knew they would be easy to keep clean and their uniform colour would be easy to identify. That would help travellers searching for a station, and so greatly increased the usefulness of the underground network. I remember my mother telling me about making her first trip to London from rural Lincolnshire in the 1940s. She was frightened of getting lost in the capital’s maze of streets. ‘You need never get lost in London,’ said the friends she was going to see. ‘Just find a station and take the tube to where you want to go.’ And so she could orient herself and find her destination, wherever it was, from Oxford Circus to Kentish Town.

With these innovative and enduring station designs, Leslie Green also started another ball rolling. He gave London’s underground network something akin to a three-dimensional corporate identity. That wasn’t a familiar concept in 1903, but it soon would be. He was a pioneer, then, in more ways than one. It’s pointless to speculate, but one can’t help wondering what else he could have achieved if he’d lived longer.

Maida Vale, London

Happy birthday

London's Maida Vale underground station celebrates its one hundredth birthday today, Saturday 6 June 2015. It's one of the many stations designed in the style developed by Leslie Green, the Underground's short-lived architect of the first years of the 20th century. The trademark manner that Green developed became a kind of three-dimensional corporate identity for the capital's underground railway. It's not just the familiar oxblood tiles, but so many of the other details – segmental arches, ornate glazing bars, signs made up of big tiles containing one or sometimes two individual letters each, the flat roof designed to accommodate development above if desired – that make these station instantly recognisable. And of course the Underground roundel. Maida Vale has a particularly decorative glittering mosaic version of this inside the station, which I've posted about before.

This station's other claim to fame is that when it opened it was staffed entirely by women – apparently it was the first tube station to have an all-female staff. This was no doubt a result of the way in which World War I was draining potential male staff members away at a rapid rate, bringing many women into waged employment for the first time. Thoughts of the war provoke mixed feelings, then, but the architecture and its survival are something, at least, to be thankful for.

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Ian Visits has more about the station here.

Gloucester Road, London

A note from underground

On the 150th anniversary of the London Underground, a brief tribute to one of its architects.

In 1903 Leslie Green was appointed architect to the Underground Electric Railway Company of London. His job was to design stations for the Bakerloo, Piccadilly, and Northern lines, to make these stations work within the demanding engineering requirements that resulted from building a complex railway network beneath a great city, and to devise a distinctive but consistent style that would make them recognisable. Over the next five years he designed more than 50 stations, creating a visual style, with the now-familiar ox-blood coloured tiles, that became synonymous with the Underground. My photograph shows the sun catching some of the gold lettering on the tiles of Gloucester Road station. Green's design style, with Arts and Crafts arches, semi-circular windows, and the ubiquitous tiles, was a success – in developing it, Green could be called one of the fathers of the idea of the corporate identity, and its importance is acknowledged by the fact that many of his stations are now listed. Sadly, Green did not go on to yet more successful architectural projects. He died in 1908, still in his thirties.

Leicester Square Station, London

On the winter-time walk along Cranbourn Street that inspired the previous post I also saw this charming reminder of the summer game. Part of the tiling above Leicester Square underground station, it marks the site of the one-time offices of Wisden, the people who produce the yearly almanac that is the cricketer’s Bible. The ox-blood tiles that cover so many of London’s tube stations deserve a post, or two, or their own. They’re the brain-children of Leslie Green, the young architect of around 40 turn-of-the-century stations with tile-clad facades that gave the underground a house style or corporate identity long before these terms were familiar. Leicester Square station opened in 1906 and its resilient tiles have worn well. Thankfully, the Wisden tiles also promise to outwear the recent signage beneath them.