Hardwick’s Euston Arch
The circularity of history. When George and Robert Stephenson conceived their plan for what was to be the world’s first long distance passenger railway, they planned to run the line from Euston Square to Birmingham, which did not gain city status until 1889. However, in order to get their bill through Parliament, which they did in May 1833, they had to bow to objections from local land owners and relocate it to Chalk Farm.
George, though, was made of sterner stuff and by 1835 he had overridden objections and received permission to revert to the original plan of building a terminus at Euston Square. It was a fairly simple affair, consisting of a train shed with two, one for departures and the other for arrivals, with tracks in between for carriages. Euston station, which takes its name from the Norfolk family seat of the Dukes of Grafton, Euston Hall, was opened on July 20, 1837 with the line initially only going as far as Boxmoor in Hertfordshire. The first journey all the way to Birmingham was made fourteen months later, on September 17, 1838.
The London and Birmingham Railway Company employed the architect, Philip Hardwick, to design two landmark buildings at the line’s termini. Drawing inspiration from classical Greek architecture, he designed an Ionic portal building for Curzon Street in Birmingham; it is still standing and is likely to be incorporated into the design for the refurbished station in readiness for its role as end point of one leg of the ill-starred HS2 project.
At the Euston end Hardwick designed an entablatured Doric archway or more correctly a propylaeum, as it was intended to stand on its own without supporting any other structure, an impressive landmark that passengers would have to pass on their way to and from the station. It was phenomenally expensive, costing £35,000 to build in 1838, a sum for which Thomas Cubitt, an architect at the time, reckoned could build an entire mainline terminus. It was also massive, standing seventy feet tall and dwarfing the city’s other arches. By comparison Marble Arch is only forty-five feet tall.
Euston’s arch was not universally liked. In the 1850s Augustus Pugin called it a “Brobdignaggian absurdity”, a sentiment echoed by a tourist guide to the Great Exhibition of 1851 which called it “gigantic and very absurd”. Its popularity did not improve as time wore on, George Lynch calling it in 1902 a “sepulchral prison-like portico” and The Advertiser dubbing it in 1939 as “a rather gloomy portal”.
To compound its problems, as the station expanded over time to cope with the increase in passenger numbers and the expansion of services running from the station, the Arch rather got in the way and was completely obscured from the main Euston Road which ran outside the station. Its fate was sealed when plans were made to redesign the station to cope with the electrification of the lines. With an estimate of £190,000 to reposition it, a figure opponents claimed that was plucked out of thin air, compared with £12,000 to demolish it, its dismantling seemed the obvious option.
Despite a vigorous campaign waged between January 1960 and October 1961 by groups including the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Georgian Society, the Victorian Society, the editor of the Architectural Review, several backbench MPs, and two discussions at Cabinet, British Rail was given the go ahead to demolish it.
Demolition work began on November 6, 1961 and what was dubbed at the time as one of the biggest examples of cultural vandalism was soon completed. Hardwick’s Arch would have stood on what is now the southern end of what is now platforms 8 and 9. A stylised representation can be seen on the walls of Euston’s Victoria line station..
What happened to the stones from the arch was a mystery not solved until 1994 when architectural historian, Dan Cruickshank, discovered that some of the decorative outer stones had been used in a garden rockery, and the rest dumped into a canal off the River Lea. They have been fished out and hopes remain that the Euston Arch which technically not an arch will be restored somewhere sometime.
