The concrete
cathedrals
Cockfosters stationS,
It’s a great shame that
architect Charles Holden (1875-1960) never designed a church or cathedral. The
Modernist architect would have made a very good job of it. He’s now most famous
for his London Underground stations which formed a key part of the network’s
corporate identity in the 1920s to 1940s.
Modernism is a surprisingly
good fit with church architecture. While the Church of England built its last
great Gothic cathedral as late as 1978 (admittedly it had been under
construction for 74 years) in Liverpool¹, it also opened a spectacular
Modernist cathedral in Coventry, in 1962. A replacement for the war-damaged
original, the cathedral was initially controversial in discarding conventional
cathedral construction. In form, it is radically Modernist, but in character,
it is utterly peaceful and calming. It is a building to win over those
sceptical of the appeal of Modernism.
Cathedrals and churches don’t,
on the face of it, have a lot to do with transport, except for the fact that
large railway termini were/are often referred to as the cathedrals of the
Industrial Age. When you take a look at the soaring train shed of London’s St
Pancras station, or pictures of the lost Penn Station in New York, USA, you get
the point. But it’s train sheds (shelters that overspan tracks at a railway
station) that bring us back to Charles Holden, and the first of this week’s
transport beauties, his station at Cockfosters on London Underground’s
Piccadilly Line.
Holden had worked for London
Underground managing director / London Transport chief executive Frank Pick
since the 1920s, remodelling existing stations and building new ones as the
Underground expanded. Holden’s Art Deco/Modernist station designs (the argument
over which they were isn’t worth getting into for now) formed part of Pick’s
vision of an Underground corporate identity built on excellence in design. It
extended beyond stations to maps, trains and publicity. Together, Pick, Holden
and other talented designers built a corporate identity which essentially still
defines the Underground (not to mention overshadowing the earlier attempts of
Leslie Green to do the same thing).
Holden’s modernist stations
have been characterised as “brick boxes with lids”, and the design arguably
reached its zenith as a collection on the Piccadilly Line’s northern extension
from Finsbury Park. Some of the brick boxes were square (like Oakwood) while
some were cylindrical (like Arnos Grove) or even octagonal (Bounds Green). The
bright and airy ticket halls with their huge glazed panels and lofty ceilings
spoke of efficiency, modernity, and welcome. When it came to the terminus at
Cockfosters, however, Holden broke away from his brick box model.
Cockfosters station opened in
1933. As a terminus on a surface site, the station was granted a grand train
shed design of the classic railway variety. With only three tracks and four
platforms, it just happened to be a classic train shed solution on a somewhat
smaller scale than many. Though the concept harks back to the great Victorian
railway termini, the design of Cockfosters is defiantly Modernist. Instead of a
steel roof on brick or iron pillars, Cockfosters is a symphony in pale
concrete. The most extraordinary thing is that this small scale cathedral of
the Underground railway feels just like, well, a Modernist concrete cathedral.
The central section of the Transept is a double height nave with
clerestory windows at the top, flanked by two single storey aisles – just like
a church. The pillars of a conventional church are replaced by angular portal
frames (structures which combine pillars and rafters into a single unit)
repeating in pairs all the way down the train shed. The ‘aisles’ at the outer edge
of the train shed are open at the sides, with the portal frame legs breaking up
the space, cloister-like. If only Holden had built an actual cathedral; it
really would have been quite something.
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