Section 1: Piccadilly Line: Walked section - Osterley to South Ealing

By train, then to Osterley, where I began my walked section. Osterley is another Stanley Heap station, although clearly influenced by Frank Pick’s espousal of Holden’s work. If Hounslow West’s building speaks of its debt to Charles Holden’s stations, Osterley practically screams it. Working east from Heathrow it’s the first station on the line to use the combination of brown brick, concrete and glass which is so conspicuously a feature of Holden’s style. It’s a pleasant looking building, this, with its distinctive tower topped by the concrete obelisk. One interesting fact about the station is that it’s just a few hundred metres down the line from where the former Osterley and Spring Grove station stood. More than that, the station buildings of the former station are still standing too, and they’ve been a lovely bookshop for the last few decades. Suggestions have been made that the decision to move the station was made because of the building of the nearby Great West Road – yet the current station is hardly any closer to it!

I’ll be honest, I never really intended to include any former station buildings in the challenge. However, the thing is that I really like the former Osterley and Spring Grove station building. It’s a bookshop now, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see it as a quiet, almost country station, which is surely what it looked like in its heyday. The platforms of the station are still there as well, although I have no idea whether it’s still possible to access them from the station building. 

I chose the next stretch of the line as the walked section for a couple of reasons. Familiarity with the area is one, although also, the Great West Road is still well worth walking along for a lover of modernist and art deco architecture. During the inter war years, many international industrial concerns set up their factories and headquarters along the stretch of the Great West Road reaching out from the North Circular, and also along the A40 Western Avenue. We’ll get to that when I do the other arm of the Piccadilly out to Uxbridge. In fact this stretch of the Great West Road was even nicknamed the Golden Mile because of the number of companies who built there.

Many of the most striking remaining buildings are actually past Boston Road, where I turned left to head towards the next station, Boston Manor. Still, I did at least get to walk past the distinctive clock tower of what used to be the Gillette Building. Boston Manor is named after a Jacobean Manor, whose grounds are now a beautiful public park, and I chose to walk through it to get onto Boston Road. The house still stands, and considering its proximity to the Great West Road, the raised section of the M4 Motorway, and Heathrow, it’s a very beautiful, calm and tranquil place to be. 

A short walk up the hill from the park then brought me to Boston Manor station. Boston Manor suffers a little bit for me because of its familiarity. Growing up close to the station, it was one of those things I just took for granted. It was always there. Well, doing this has been a good excuse for taking a new look at the building. I hope that from the sketch you can see that it boasts a couple of more flamboyantly art deco features. The semi-circular bay sweeping out from the station front on the right of the picture is one, and the tower is another. Looking at Charles Holden’s Boston Manor station, you can see what a debt Stanley Heap’s Osterley owes to Holden’s characteristic style. They’re different, but look like children of the same parent. Let’s remember that Boston Manor and Osterley are both stations in the relatively quiet, leafy suburbia of what is now the London Borough of Hounslow. They’re not showcase stations in the heart of the Metropolis.

From Boston Manor then, I walked down the hill, and turned right by the Royal Pub (scene of one or two underage drinking exploits at lunchtime when I was in the 6^th form, I’m sorry to say.) A few residential streets later, and I emerged on Northfields Avenue. As the name suggests, Northfields was just that, fields, until after the start of the 20^th century, and even when I was a young boy there was still open land past the Forester pub, up as far as Dean’s Park, where an estate was built in the 70s. Most of the road, though, was pretty commercialised, with a wealth of small shops, and a Budgen Supermarket in which I worked Saturdays while studying for my A levels. Like Boston Manor, and Northfields is built on the crest of a humpbacked bridge over the line.

This is the most recognisably ‘Holden’ station that we’ve encountered along this stretch. With its low, wide façade topped by a rectangular glass, brick and reinforced concrete structure. The cornice, curving outwards, gives this something of the appearance of ancient Egyptian temple architecture. The wide pavement in front of the entrance also adds to the building’s striking appearance. Some others of Holden’s stations have octagonal or circular structures above the main entrance. Even now, over 8 decades since they were built, the clean lines and unfussy appearance of stations like Northfields make them appealing to the eye.

Speaking of which, another striking large structure from the inter-war period stands on the opposite side of the road, just at the bottom of the rise, the former Odeon cinema, which is a remarkable, Spanish – style building, now the Ealing Christian Centre. 

It’s a relatively short walk to South Ealing Station, through streets that I remember being on the milk round I used to do before I got the job in Budgens. The current station was built in the late 1980s, not long after I moved away from the area.  The good news is that it looks better than it used to. The bad news is – not much. During my childhood the entrance looked like the square arch of a concrete railway bridge. This is because it was only ever intended to be a temporary structure. Northfields and South Ealing are the two closest above ground stations on the network. During the 20s and 30s there were moves to close South Ealing, and so when the stations were being built for the Piccadilly Line extension of the 30s, a temporary structure was erected for South Ealing station. This was so temporary that it only stayed for about 50 years.

Now, the whole thing is a little bit reminiscent of a newsagents opposite the school I used to teach in. It kind of cements the impression I’ve always had of South Ealing as a bit of an afterthought of a station. You can clearly see the platforms from the platforms of Northfields – the time it takes for trains to travel between the stations is approximately a minute, which interestingly is not the shortest on the network.