Section 2: Piccadilly Line - Uxbridge to Acton Town 1

This, the longer of the two western arms of the Piccadilly, shares quite a number of stations with the Metropolitan Line, including the terminus, Uxbridge. Now, let’s be honest, Uxbridge is a fair old way out of the centre of London. I remember going to stay with my cousin in Harefield, and taking the 207 bus from Hanwell to Uxbridge. The journey lasted about 4 days, as I recall it. 

When I arrived, I was quite struck by the appearance of the outside of the station. It’s Charles Holden, Jim, but not as we know it. The façade is curved, and the most interesting features are a pair of columns, and above them a pair of sculptures which represent, so I’m reliably informed, a pair of winged wheels. Ah, well, that at least makes some sense. The curve in the building was to accommodate a turning circle for trolleybuses, so I’m told. I’ll be honest, the inside of the station seemed a lot more interesting than the exterior, so I didn’t waste much time outside after I’d taken the regulation photographs for the sketch. 

For a long time every time I returned to London I’d use the M25 to transfer from the M4 to the M40/A40 Western Avenue. The first physical sign that I’d actually arrived in London was always Hillingdon tube station. I’d come this way because my younger brother lived a mile or two away from the station, and it was easier to visit him on the way into London. I was without a car for a time, and so ended up using this station a number of times, and probably know it better than most of the other stations on this arm of the line. To be honest, up until now it has always struck me as a particularly shapeless structure, but looking at it on this visit I saw that this was completely wrong. The station is full of shapes, and that’s the problem I had with it. When I look at a building, I can usually clearly see its outline in my mind. I struggle with Hillingdon because of its low roofs, canopies, exposed beams, exposed staircases, and what have you. It carries off the unusual feat of feeling large, yet at the same time insubstantial. 

I don’t know what I was expecting at Ickenham, next station eastwards from Hillingdon, but it wasn’t what I actually found. My first thought, on emerging from the building, was that I’d gone back in time to my schooldays. My school was first made into a comprehensive in 1975, the year before I first attended it, and the main site was a former Secondary Modern, which had been enlarged by a collection of hastily designed and built concrete blocks, faced with brick and plastic, and the obligatory flat roofs. Which is a pretty good description of Ickenham Station, which is their contemporary. Research suggests that even this is an improvement on what was there before, since it was a very simple halt. The original Metropolitan Railway extension had refused to build a proper station due to their concerns that enough passengers would use it to make it viable. You may remember how I called the stations at Hounslow Central and Hounslow East chalk and cheese? Well, Ickenham and the next station,

Ruislip are gypsum and stilton in that case. Ruislip was the oldest station I had encountered up to this point, dating back to when this line to Uxbridge first opened in 1904. As a result it resembles nothing quite so much as an Edwardian country railway station – and when you get right down to it, when it was built this was exactly what it was. Ruislip is one of those places which seems to be exceedingly well served with tube stations. There are 5 altogether with the word Ruislip part of their name. Mind you, there are 7 Actons, so maybe we shouldn’t go on about it. 

The current building of our next station, Ruislip Manor, was opened in 1938. The station bears some typical Holden features – the low, wide entrance, and brick tower above it, although this is the first time we’ve seen a station incorporating the wall of a viaduct as well. According to my research, the number of people using the station annually had risen from 17,000 in 1931, to over a million 6 years later, reflecting the spread of suburban development in the area. 

You’ve probably already worked out for yourself that I have a very soft spot for the Art Deco design ethic of Holden’s best stations, and I have to say that I think the next station on the line, Eastcote, is a particularly nice example. As you can see it’s similar to Rayners Lane although on a smaller scale. However the two semi circular wings face to the front of the station, and this gives the whole thing a very pleasing symmetry. 

I am very sorry, but I still can never see the name Rayners Lane written down without feeling a little bit of residual irritation. It goes back to the days of waiting footsore on Piccadilly line platforms, watching the next rain boards flash up train after train to Rayners Lane of Uxbridge, with narry a one for Hounslow for ages. Nonetheless, a station it is, so I resolved to grit my teeth, and try my best to play fair with the place. 

Which wasn’t difficult really. This is a typically Holden arrangement, with the rectangular booking hall dominating the wide, low entrance. The distinctive things here are the semi-circular ends of the street level entrance. A little research showed that Holden collaborated with New Zealand born architect Reginald Uren, who could boast the John Lewis store in Oxford Street on his design CV. Uren also collaborated with Holden on the unbuilt design for Finchley Central. 

The next station along the line, South Harrow, is a rather strange looking beast. As with Osterley station, it is situated some distance from the original which still exists. 

As for the current Holden structure, it’s built in what appears to be a series of steps, although Holden still managed to incorporate a pleasing curve on the ground level. For me the appearance is somewhat spoiled by all the safety rails on the roofs, which are a later addition to the station, but I do understand the need for them, and it’s not exactly health and safety gone mad in this case. 

After the diversion from the template with the previous station, Sudbury Hill saw Holden revert to a trademark rectangular booking hall above a wider entrance. I wish I could find a bit more to say about it, but I do find that I’m at the risk of repeating myself here. This is the third ‘typical’ Holden station out of the last 4, and the next station, Sudbury Town, continues in the same idiom. Well, what the hell. It’s the style of station that, when I look at it, gives me a warm feeling of being closer to home, and that’ even though I’ve lived away from London for well over 30 years now. 

Research shows that it was this arm of the District Railway was the first overground stretch of what became the London Underground to be electrified, from the time when the line was first built in the early 1900s. One of the interesting things I noticed about this, and the next two stations as well, is that the station name isn’t on a dark blue, backlit panel, which it is on most of the other stations on the network, but picked out in brass letters. 

Similar in shape and style, as I said, is the next station, Sudbury Town. On the whole, though, it’s rather larger than the previous station. Not only that, though, Sudbury Town shows what a difference having the low flat entrance makes, not having one of its own. Take this away, and the station is much more like the brick box with a concrete lid’ of Holden’s description. The ironic thing about a station like Sudbury Town is that in any other city, it would be held up as a fine example of modernist art deco architecture. London, and this stretch of the Piccadilly Line, has such an embarrassment of riches, though, it runs the risk of being glossed over. 

I used to pass Alperton station on my way to Wembley Market on a Sunday morning. Thought that I’d just throw that one in. In the course of research before the trip, I read that Alperton has an escalator which used to go up to the platforms, which has been sealed up behind a war, which was originally used on the South Bank Festival of Britain complex. Personally I’d love to see it, because I find the Festival of Britain a fascinating subject. Still, that’s another subject for another day. The station itself buts onto the railway viaduct, which is one thing which makes it distinct from Sudbury Town, which its ticket hall closely resembles.Like Sudbury Town I personally feel it’s the poorer for not having the wide extended porch-like entrance .

I began the walked section of this particular trip by alighting at Park Royal station. When I was a kid, Park Royal, despite the grand name, was a really industrial area, synonymous with the Guinness Brewery. This art deco complex, the work of Alexander Gibb and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was the subject of a mini public outcry when it was demolished in 2006, but I have to say that my memories of it are as basically a series of massive brick sheds, without much to tempt the eye. The Western Avenue itself, like the Great West Road, saw a number of grand industrial buildings built in the 30s, including the Hoover Building in nearby Perivale, and to be honest, if it came to choice between the Hoover and Guinness Buildings, then the Hoover would have won hands down in my opinion.

At first glance Park Royal Station does have some of the characteristics of a Holden building, with the brickwork and the obvious art deco styling. Yet despite the circular section, the whole effect is somehow not quite as satisfying as a pure Holden station, rather than an ‘inspired by Holden’ station, which this is, designed as it was by the architects Welch and Lander. Apparently there was a temporary structure from 1931 until 1936 when this building finally opened.

It took somehow longer than it felt it should have to walk from Park Royal Station to North Ealing Station, most of which meant walking along the North Circular Road, an experience of which the kindest description is it’s less painful than a trip to the dentist. North Ealing station, though is worth the walk. It is as much of a surprise as Hounslow Central was on the previous section. Sandwiched between the Holden designed stations at Ealing Common and Park Royal, this charming little station resembles nothing quite so much as a station in a prosperous rural market town. I have no idea why it wasn’t rebuilt by Holden, but in a way I’m quite glad that it wasn’t. Variety is the spice of life, as they do say.

From North Ealing I walked back to the North Circular, until I reached the Uxbridge Road, very close to Ealing Common station. I’ll be honest, I never really saw the point of Ealing Common as a station. It’s relatively close to Ealing Broadway, and there really isn’t a lot which the station is closer to which might entice you to use it. It’s not as if you have to go to Ealing Common to change from the Ealing Broadway branch of the District to the Piccadilly, as you can just as easily do that at Acton Town. In fact, it makes more sense to do so at Acton Town, since you’ve more chance of an Eastbound train from Acton Town than from Ealing Common. 

Still, it is there, and my thought, as I remarked upon its similarity to Hounslow West from the previous section, was to celebrate it for what it is, rather than castigate it for what it’s not. Short of building a time machine there’s no way of me asking Charles Holden what he (alright, him and Stanley Heaps) was thinking in using hexagonal booking halls in only these two stations. Well, it’s a nice and pretty distinctive way of finishing this section of the line, and I returned to Acton Town. 

Acton Town is the first station eastwards after the two western arms of the Piccadilly Line have joined. From street level the station building is very reminiscent of Northfields, but it’s Northfields plus, if you like, almost Northfields squared. It has a similar rectangular structure above the entrance, but this has no less than 6 panels of glass, compared with Northfields’ one. Like most of the stations we’ve seen on this stretch of the line, the first Acton Town Station, then called Mill Hill Park, was part of the District Railway, then the District Line, and the current station was built in the early 1930s to service the Piccadilly Line extension. In 1994 the station received listed building status.

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.

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”.

Section 1 - Piccadilly Line - Hatton Cross

Hatton Cross station opened in 1975, and for two and a half years it was as close as you could come to the airport on the tube. To be fair, it is right on the airport’s southern perimeter road. As a young plane spotter, I often took the tube to the station, and then the short bus ride to the Queen’s Building. It would be nice to say that the station building itself has some distinctive features. It would be nice, but it would be a lie. The station resembles nothing quite so much as a municipal bus terminus from the same era. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, since it does have a fairly large bus station as part of the complex. I don’t hate Hatton Cross Station – it isn’t really distinctive enough to hate. But I do have an instinctive aversion to the brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 70s of which this is an example. If you removed the signs from the front of the building, and showed people a photograph of it, I somehow doubt they’d identify it as a tube station.

Section 1 Piccadilly Line - Heathrow terminal 5 - Heathrow Terminal 4 - Heathrow Terminal 2 and 3

Sketching Trip 1) Heathrow to Acton Town

Although the Piccadilly Line goes out to Heathrow now, there was no airport when the District Railway first opened the line to Hounslow West, which was called Hounslow Barracks. In fact there were no airplanes either, since the line was built in 1884, decades before even the Wright Brothers’ first flight. It’s not my brief here to give a full history of the London Underground – far better people than me have already done that. However, briefly, the District Railway, as the Metropolitan District Railway, came into being in 1864, the year after the Metropolitan Railway ran the world’s first underground railway service from Farringdon to Paddington.

Although separate companies, originally the Metropolitan Railway and the District Railway worked fairly closely together, although this era of cooperation didn’t last. Although the District Railway was originally formed so that a complete circuit of inner London could be made – which eventually became the Circle Line – this was not actually accomplished until 1884, the same year that Hounslow Barracks station opened.

The Piccadilly Line originated as the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and opened in 1906, serving stations between Hammersmith and Finsbury Park. The railway was acquired by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, owners of several of the lines which would come to make up the Underground network.

In the early 1930s the UERL’s CEO, Frank Pick, decided on an expansion of the Piccadilly Line from Hammersmith to Hounslow and to Uxbridge, using the District Line’s tracks. Many of the stations on these two western arms of the line were rebuilt at this time, and many of those stations still remain.

The line was never extended past Uxbridge on the more northerly of the two arms, but during the 1970s the line reached west, as far as Heathrow airport, becoming the first subway or metro system in the world to have a station in an international airport. Which is I think, the cue for my sketching journey to begin.

I tend to feel a certain gratitude towards the three stations at Heathrow. When I was quite a young child we’d often venture as a family into the centre of the city, and however good the day was, the inevitable end that all good things come to would inevitably mean waiting on a cramped platform for three Rayners Lane or Uxbridge trains to pass before our one service to Hounslow could come along. This started to change when Hatton Cross opened, and completely changed when the first Heathrow Station opened in 1977, as Heathrow Central. Today it’s just one of 3 stations, and called Heathrow terminal 2 and 3. There are also stations for Terminal 4 and Terminal 5.  To be honest, with their underground ticket halls, and lack of surface buildings, the Heathrow stations remind me very much of European metro stations. There’s no distinct station buildings as such, they are just part of the huge terminal buildings. Very nice if you like that sort of thing. Still, we must acknowledge that the original Heathrow Station was, I believe the first metro station in the world within an international airport. In fact, in my travels around Europe in the last few years, the only other one I have thus far encountered is in Madrid.

I have it on pretty good authority that you are not actually allowed to walk from one terminal building to another, and to be honest, even if you were, what with the understandable climate about airport security I wouldn’t have been tempted to kick off the walked part of this section of the line here anyway.

I admit it - I've been in a rut

- and I needed a new project. I've hardly posted since I finished my 365 day challenge earlier this year. It doesn't mean I haven't been sketching, but I just keep making excuses not to post. So I've come up with a challenge which I call - Drawing the Line.


(Cue: Mission Impossible theme music – followed by voice issuing from car cassette deck) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sketch all 270 London Underground stations. Good luck Dave. This tape will self destruct in 5 seconds.(Smoke billows out of cassette deck)

I like a challenge. In my previous article, I praised the street level station architecture of the London Underground, especially when compared to other European capital city counterparts, where striking station superstructure is very much the exception to the rule. This article was accompanied by a few sketches I’ve made. As I wrote it, I was struck by the thought – 4 stations? Is that all? Thus was born the idea of this challenge.

Any excuse for a return to London and a visit to the Tube is always welcome, but I realised that the best way to achieve this is to not make sketches on the spot, since even a lightning quick sketch takes over half an hour, but to take photos, and use these for reference back home and at leisure. So these are not true urban sketches, I hasten to add.

Rules

Yes, rules. What is a challenge if not a game, and what is a game without rules? The fewer the rules, the easier it is to stick to them, of course, but I decided that if I was going to take my task seriously, then a few boundaries would be necessary. So:-

Rule 1

No drawing stations you haven’t visited during the challenge.

Basically, this is to stop the challenge being too easy. Otherwise, what would be to stop me calling up photographs on Google Images from my comfortable desk in South Wales, and then sitting and copying them in my comfy armchair with a nice cup of cappuccino by my side?

I did consider stipulating that all sketches had to be made on the spot. But It takes me between 30 minutes and an hour to produce any sketch worth looking at, and working this way, bearing in mind the limited number of times I can actually get to London in a year, the task would threaten to last for several years. So In practise it involved emerging from each station building, and taking photos I’d need to make the sketches later on.

Rule 2

On each section of line, you must walk between at least 2 of the stations overground.

If I still lived in London, I might well have made it a rule that you have to walk between every stations. But again, this is ruled out by the time constraints. I still wanted to get a flavour of the context of some of the stations though, and it seemed to me that this was as good a way of doing it as any.

Rule 3

You have one year – 365 days – to complete the sketches.

250 sketches are a lot. Still, from March 2018 until March 2019 I set myself the challenge of making at least one sketch a day for 365 consecutive days. I completed the challenge, but it wasn’t always easy, and required discipline. So while I know that the project is do-able in a year, it’s also enough of a challenge to hopefully keep me interested.

Rule 4

Stations on more than one line only need to be sketched once.

Pretty self explanatory that one.