Hardwick’s Great Hall

The success of the London and Birmingham line prompted other lines from the Midlands and the North East to use the Euston terminus as their gateway to London, putting pressure on the already rudimentary facilities of the station. It might have had an impressive but purely decorative propylaeum but the directors of the newly formed London and North Western Railway Company (L&NWR) wanted to build equally imposing but utilitarian facilities. In 1846 they approached Philip Hardwick once more to use his architectural acumen to design a waiting room for its passengers and a boardroom for the company’s directors.   

Passing the responsibility to his son, Philip Charles, the younger Hardwick showed he was a chip off the old block, designing a waiting room like no other, an iconic expression of the power and innovation of the railway age. Based on the proportions of a double cube, rather like that deployed by Inigo Jones in his Whitehall Banqueting Hall in 1622, it had the largest ceiling span of any building in the world, 61 feet and 3 inches.

The room, known as the Great Hall, was surrounded by Ionic columns, sumptuously lit, by the standards of the time, with a diamond-shaped staircase at the foot of which was placed a statue of George Stephenson. The walls were richly decorated with carved consoles and two panels at each corner with plaster reliefs representing the key destinations from the station, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Carlisle, Chester, Lancaster, and Northampton, together with oil paintings of prominent landmarks.

Placed above the Doric portal framing the entrance to the Directors’ meeting room was a high-relief sculptural group, showing Britannia accompanied by a lion, a ship, and the Arts and Sciences, while the ceiling was inspired by the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. The walls were finished in grey Martin’s cement to give the impression that they were granite, while the columns were finished in red granite with white marble caps and bases.

Immediately north of the Great Hall was the proprietors’ meeting room, a hall five bays long and three bays wide, divided by Doric columns, with a coved ceiling pierced by lunettes, and, at either end of the room were grey marble fireplaces surmounted by busts. East of this room was the board room, panelled in stained and polished oak and with Corinthian pilasters and columns at each end. Above a fireplace made of purplish-grey veined marble was the L&NWR monogram in a roundel surmounted by busts of three eminent engineers associated with the Company, Robert and George Stephenson and Joseph Locke.

While many used the Great Hall to while away the time before their train departed, some just came to marvel at the splendour of the architecture and others, as this anonymous piece in the Daily Mirror from 1931 shows, sought inspiration from the quiet. “Years ago, when hard up, I had the largest study any author had. It was the Great Hall of Euston Station, which was then set with tables and chairs; many of my early poems and stories were written there”.

The Great Hall opened on May 27, 1849, but the constraints of the site meant that it did not line up precisely with the Arch. Arrivals were funnelled to the east of the Hall and departures to the west. Over time as the station expanded, it increasingly resembled a ramshackle rabbit warren and, inevitably, plans were laid to start afresh. Plans to merge Euston and St Pancras into a new mega-station were scotched by the advent of the Second World War but in 1959, ironically only a few years after the Great Hall had been comprehensively restored, British Rail submitted plans to completely redevelop Euston in readiness for the newly electrified West Coast main line.

While the focus of the objectors’ campaign was the Arch, the fate of what was considered to be one of the finest examples of Victorian railway architecture flew under the radar. The battle was lost and in late 1961 the site was completely demolished. The station’s ornate iron gates, a dedicatory plaque from the Great Hall, and the statue of George Stephenson were relocated to the National Railway Museum in York while all that remains on the original site are two lodges, one of which houses the Euston Tap pub.    

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.