Euston Arch The Euston Arch, built in 1837, was the original entrance to Euston station, facing onto Drummond Street, London. The Arch was demolished when the station was rebuilt in the 1960s. Designed by architect Philip Hardwick, it was inspired by the Roman architecture Hardwick encountered on a trip to Italy in 1818 and 1819. Strictly speaking it was not an arch at all, but a propylaeum of the Doric order. The sandstone structure was designed for the London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR), complementing Birmingham Curzon Street station, at the other end of the companys mainline. The arch was to be not only a fitting gateway to the Midlands, but to the whole new world which the railway was to open up. In January 1960 the British Transport Commission served the London County Council (LCC) (the local planning authority) with notice of its intention to demolish Euston station. Conceived in the context of the BTCs plans to upgrade and electrify the main line between Euston and Scotland as part of its Modernisation Programme, the proposal called for the demolition of the entire station, including the arch and the Great Hall, which were both Grade II listed buildings. The existing station was regarded as inconveniently sited and impractically small. The archs imminent demolition sparked a preservation protest in which Woodrow Wyatt, John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner were prominent figures, and a wider debate about the modernisation of central London. There was public disquiet over how a local authority with a good track record for architecture and town planning such as the LCC, and the BTC, an important public service operator, could allow the demolition of such an important monument. Arguments which had been successfully employed to see off the previous attempted demolition in 1938 failed to sway the BTC which said that it was unable to afford the costs of reconstruction. Two weeks later Macmillan gave his response to the proposals. He stated that he had decided against adopting the suggested preservation strategy, and explained that every possible way of preserving the arch had been investigated by the BTC, but the lack of available land, the operational requirements of the station and the removal costs entailed made the project infeasible. Demolition began in December 1961. Leonard Fairclough Limited of Adlington in Lancashire were appointed as demolition contractors. The company revealed that it would take several weeks to demolish the arch, as the job would have to be done by hand — explosives being out of the question due to possible damage to the adjacent buildings. The ornamental iron gates from the Arch were saved at the time of demolition and are now in the National Railway Museum in York. In 1994 the historian Dan Cruickshank discovered that at least 60% of the stone from the Arch was buried in the bed of the River Lea at the Prescott Channel in the East End of London. The location of the stones, for which he had been searching for 15 years, had been revealed by Bob Cotton, a British Waterways engineer, who had acquired the material in 1962 to fill a chasm in the bed of the channel. Cruickshank revealed on the One Foot in the Past television programme, broadcast on 7 June 1994, that the stone had barely weathered at all. As he explained, This makes the reconstruction of the arch a tangible reality, [...] The arch is made of stone from the Bramley Fall quarry in Yorkshire which is incredibly hard, almost like granite. A section of fluted column was brought up from the river bed, where the stones with Euston marked in gold lettering are believed to be located. Other stones are lying in the gardens of those involved in the archs demolition. In March 2014 it was announced that a revived £1.2bn scheme to rebuild London’s Euston station as the gateway to the High Speed 2 line might include reconstruction of the Euston Arch. The Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: I will ... ask HS2 Ltd and Network Rail to develop more comprehensive proposals for the redevelopment of Euston, working with the rail industry and the local community. This work should include proposals for the Euston arch, which should never have been knocked down and which I would like to see rebuilt. Find out more about the The Euston Arch Trust campaigns for the rebuilding of the Euston Arch. The first great monument of the railway age eustonarch.org
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:59:21 +0000
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