Poster for the exhibition at Stockwell Station
One of my architectural heroes, Charles Holden - the architect famed for designing many of the iconic '20s and '30s Tube stations - is being celebrated at a free exhibition now showing at the V&A Museum. When using the Tube on a daily basis it is easy to forget its history, and the energy and vision it took to build them. The latest exhibition at the Architecture Gallery will hopefully act as a reminder, whilst revealing the lasting influence of Charles Holden’s work for London Transport.
Charles Holden
Charles Holden's first commission for the Underground this 1924 entrance to Westminster Station. Unfortunately it was demolished in 1999 when the station was rebuilt
This exhibition examines the designs carried out by Charles Holden and his architectural practice, Adams Holden and Pearson, for London Transport, undoubtedly his greatest and most successful patron. The full range of his work, from stations on the Northern line extension and refurbishment of Piccadilly Circus station through to his creation of a new London Underground headquarters at 55 Broadway and his iconic modernist station designs produced for the Piccadilly line extensions is on show. Holden's relationship with London Transport's chief executive, Frank Pick is also investigated as their collaboration and integrated approach to design and architecture was instrumental in shaping London Transport's corporate brand.
Holden's sketch for Highgate Station entrance - later re-named Archway RIBA Drawings Collection
Holden masterminded the design of 20 or so tube stations – those elegant red brick affairs best seen on the northern stretch of the Piccadilly Line. These in particular show off Holden’s principles of ‘total design’. Interiors, light fittings, clocks and tiles – everything in his buildings was crafted to work together harmoniously. Holden deserves to be better known. A contemporary of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he too produced buildings of great originality, and, unlike his Scottish counterpart, enjoyed a much longer professional career. Stylistically his buildings are difficult to categorise. But large or small, his buildings stand proud, distinguishable from their neighbours by a strong feeling of mass and line.
South Wimbledon Station
As the Guardian Newspaper's Architectural correspondent (and former London Transport management trainee) Jonathan Glancey observed;
“The first of Charles Holden's tube stations for Frank Pick was Sudbury Town, on the Piccadilly line, opened in 1931. There had been nothing like this distinctly modern yet well-crafted building in Britain before. With typical modesty, Holden, a retiring, teetotal, vegetarian Quaker draper's son from Bolton, Lancashire, chose to describe his first modern masterpiece as "a brick box with a concrete lid. Possibly, just possibly, Holden meant something more.
I can't help thinking that this truly great and still under-rated English architect was thinking of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), who had instigated a revolution in British architecture in the reign of James I when he designed the country's first truly classical buildings. When his client Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, asked Jones to add a chapel "as cheap as a barn" to his smart residential development built around the new Covent Garden piazza, the architect replied "then you shall have the handsomest barn in England". Sudbury Town station is surely transport design's equivalent of St Paul's, Covent Garden.”
Sudbury Town station
Holden is best known for his work for London Underground in the 1920s and 1930s, when his office – Adams, Holden and Pearson – designed a series of underground stations of startling originality, like this at Rayners Lane. These play with basic geometry and volumes, and gain effect from the contrast of forms and materials, not decorative excess. In fact, this drawing of the new Rayners Lane station resembles the architecture itself: both are pared down. People, with their precise shadows, animate the building, not sculpture. Perhaps this architectural purity was regarded as excessive: it has been noted that the main hall of the station should have the addition of windows on either side.
Sketch for Rayners Lane Station
Cockfosters Station
The Directors of London Underground in the 20s and 30s saw good design as good for business. By the example it set under Frank Pick the Underground was gradually able to change the public’s attitude to railway stations which had been seen as shabby and inhospitable places. Sir Nicholas Pevsner wrote that Pick saw in every detail a “visual propaganda” and he used this not only to improve the Underground but the environment as a whole. Charles Holden brought the Underground station to the forefront of modern architecture: This achievement is unequalled by any other transport company before or since.
Ticket Hall with Passimeter
Escalators with bronze uplighters
55, Broadway - London Underground's iconic HQ built in 1929 in the "airspace" above St. James's Park Station
He was not universally admired and his huge complex for London University in Bloomsbury was considered cold by some critics. So much so that George Orwell modelled his Ministry of Truth, in his novel 1984, on Holden's 19 storey Senate House – Orwell's wife worked in the building for the censorship department of the Ministry of Information during WW11. There is a parallel for this as Ian Fleming objected so much to the modernist house the Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger designed down the road from his house in Willow Road Hampstead that he gave his name to his first Bond villain. In the event Holden’s huge scheme for London University which would have involved buildings set around 17 courtyards was scaled back due to the onset of war.
Senate House. London University
This area around where the exhibition is being hosted at the Victoria and Albert Museum was dubbed by the Victorian press as Albertropolis' a name coined in the 1850s and resurrected in recent years for the 87-acre site south of Hyde Park, purchased by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 with profits from the Great Exhibition. Exhibition Road - whose route the 440 yard subway from South Kensington Underground station follows - forms the spine of “Albertropolis”. The nickname satirised the vision of Prince Albert, the Commission's President, of the area as a centre for education, science and art - an ambition largely realised within a few decades of the Prince's death.
See; The Great Circle Line Journey
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/01/great-circle-line-journey.html
The Royal Institute of British Artists (RIBA) and the V&A, with help from London Transport Museum, have pulled together this exhibition from original drawings, photographs, posters, film, journals and models from their extensive collections to tell the story behind Holden's modernist stations, many of which still serve Londoners today. It is well worth catching to understand this prolific and underrated architect who nonetheless has been hugely influential and whose designs have stood the test of time.
'Underground Journeys: Charles Holden's designs for London Transport' runs at the V&A+RIBA Architecture Gallery, V&A in South Kensington until February 13, 2011.
Website;
http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/index.html
See also;
Give my regards to 55, Broadway
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/give-my-regards-to-55-broadway.html
Great British Design Quest
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-british-design-quest.html
Mapping the World
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/11/mapping-world.html
A night at the Museum
http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/01/night-at-museum.html
The Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington
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