Section 1: Piccadilly Line Hounslow West to Hounslow East

Hounslow West, the end of this arm of the Piccadilly Line until 1975, at last gives us something worthy of comment. To look at it you’d immediately say it was the work of Charles Holden. Charles Holden was a distinguished architect, who had designed cemeteries for the war dead of the First World War. He first came to know Frank Pick, general manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, through the Design and Industries Association. Although he’d never been involved with railway architecture prior to this, in 1923 Pick commissioned Holden to produce a new entrance for Westminster Station, and thus began an association which would last, on and off, for more than 20 years. As well as a large number of stations for the Northern and Piccadilly Line extensions, Pick engaged Holden to design the headquarters of the UERL at 55 Broadway, above St. James’ Park Station. This building resembles nothing quite so much as a modern ziggurat, a huge stepped pyramid.

 Holden did assist in the design of Hounslow West. In its glazed panels, and liberal use of Portland stone rather than brick it clearly shows the influences of Holden’s slightly earlier designs for what became the southern end of the Northern Line. However the main architect was Stanley Heaps. Heaps had been assistant to Leslie Green in the 1900s, and his earliest designs very much followed the corporate style developed by Green, in stations like Kilburn Park. We’ll come to Green’s stations in the fullness of time. By the 1930s, though, Frank Pick wanted a more modernist approach, and brought in Holden, relegating Heap to less important stations, and less important buildings, although he worked with Holden on a number of occasions, Hounslow West being one. It’s a striking concrete structure, clearly of the same era as the slightly earlier Empire Stadium at Wembley. The heptagonal ticket hall forms a memorable structure, and is reminiscent to the similar structure at Ealing Common station, for example. Holden’s stations are as often described as ‘modernist’ as art deco, and this can be briefly defined as a rejection of ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake, and an adoption of clean, geometrical shapes, of which the heptagonal ticket hall is a pretty good example.

Hounslow Central is the oldest surviving station on this section of the line, dating from 1912, and it’s a rather cosy, quaint little structure, quite unlike anything else in this stretch. It’s almost as if the station has been temporarily sited within a suburban sub-post office. I don’t know why this particular station was allowed to remain while all the others between Hounslow West and Acton Town were demolished and rebuilt in one fashion or another, but I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. To use an analogy, a constant diet of caviar would possibly eventually result in one developing a hankering for a round of marmite on toast.

 

Hounslow East is the cheese to the previous station’s chalk. Opened in the noughties, this is a striking demonstration of what can really be done with steel, chrome and glass. It’s as far removed from the design of Hatton Cross, as that station is from Hounslow West. When I was growing up in the late 60s and the 70s, artists impressions of cities of the future were full of buildings which looked like this. During my research for this first section of the challenge, I tried to find photographs of what Hounslow East looked like prior to the rebuilding, but haven’t been able to unearth any, although I did find a very interesting Hansard debate from 1961, in which the station was described as – and I apologise for the language used here – “an abortion of a station”.