Euston: we have an architectural problem (original) (raw)

Destruction’s our delight! That’s what the old hags in Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas cackle as they plot to ruin the Queen of Carthage’s day. Oddly, I caught myself humming the tune last week, and it hasn’t taken my lightning-quick brain more than four or five days to work out why. I don’t usually rejoice at the destruction of anything. But in the case of Euston Station, I shall make a very large exception.

Even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture, Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London: devoid of any decorative merit; seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst among passengers; and a blight on surrounding streets. The design should never have left the drawing-board — if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing-board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight. And the fact that it replaced a much-loved old station, wiping out the Classical portico of the Euston Arch, only compounds its offensiveness. Its only positive feature is that it is marginally less depressing than the station 90 minutes up the line — Birmingham New Street, a warren of subterranean platforms that I find impossible to enter or exit without losing the will to live.

What a dismal contrast these British railway stations make with Berlin’s fabulous new glass Hauptbahnhof. There the platforms seem to fly hundreds of feet above street level, giving passengers a stunning panorama of the city. Arriving by train you feel like a monarch entering a cathedral for your coronation. At New Street, Euston or Edinburgh Waverley you feel more like a mole burrowing up for air.

But enough! Sentence has been passed on Euston — and it’s the death penalty, thank God. At a cost of £1 billion, Network Rail is knocking down the 45-year-old station and rebuilding from scratch. Londoners are promised a new terminus in three years’ time. Good grief, that’s quicker than it sometimes takes to get from New Street to Euston! To judge from the computerised images, the new Euston won’t exactly be a Parthenon of railway architecture. Like nearly every new public building in Britain these days, from concert halls to libraries, it will be a shopping mall with an extra function — in this case, 20 train platforms — discreetly tucked in somewhere. But at least it will be designed to gladden its users’ hearts (or at least loosen their purse-strings) rather than oppress their spirits.

More important, though, is the symbolic significance of Euston’s destruction. All over Britain these joyless Sixties monstrosities are being torn down to near-universal acclaim. With a little help from the IRA’s bombers, Manchester has transformed its dreary postwar city centre beyond recognition. Birmingham had no convenient terrorist blast to demolish its ghastly Bull Ring, so it brought out the wrecking ball itself. The new Bull Ring, with its sensationally weird Selfridges, is a hundred times livelier.

And in London, too, the worst atrocities of postwar development are slowly being dismantled. Gone are the Environment Department’s hideous tower blocks in Marsham Street, lurking round the back of Westminster Abbey like muggers stalking an old lady. Gone are the windswept walk-ways round the Festival Hall. And gone, or at least humanised, are many of the grisly inner-London estates that have scarred at least two generations of lives since they were thrown up in the 1950s and 1960s.

This isn’t the result of some seismic shift in popular tastes. Au contraire. Ordinary people detested Brutalist architecture from the start. But the ruthless Modernists who imposed it on postwar Britain’s bomb-damaged towns (in cahoots with local authorities too overawed or gormless to resist) never paid any attention to the views of those who would have to live, work and play in these soulless concrete vistas.

No, what we are seeing now is a delayed triumph for democracy: a word that rarely features in discussions about architecture. The demolition of Birmingham’s Bull Ring, Manchester’s Arndale Centre and now Euston signifies nothing less than the revenge of the masses. And very sweet it is.

Much the same has happened, of course, in contemporary music, visual art and literature. Over the past 20 years the pretentious, charmless and incomprehensible claptrap of Modernism has been utterly banished. The difference is that nobody was forced to listen to Stockhausen’s music in the way that they were forced to use Euston Station or live in the badlands of the Elephant and Castle (another postwar London disaster zone overdue for its promised demolition).

Architecture may not be the supreme art-form. But it has the most power to inflict psychological damage on innocent bystanders. For whatever reasons — arrogance, ideology, snobbery — the people who built postwar Britain became distanced not just from the tastes of those for whom they were building, but from the consequences of their actions. That fatal rupture must never happen again. Sadly, as I look at the plans for spreading London eastwards on the marshy banks of the Thames Estuary, I fear that it will. But that’s another story.

Hypocrites of the first rank

What hypocrisy. Thousands jam hotlines to get Glastonbury tickets at £145 a go, netting the organisers a cool £20 million in an hour. The reaction? General rejoicing at a Somerset farmer’s entrepreneurial genius. But in the same week some marines and sailors are held in Iranian cells fearing for their lives, and then dare to sell their stories for a few thousand quid. The reaction? They are castigated for being mercenary. It beggars belief. Some of the pundits criticising them pay their au pairs more than a squaddie gets in Basra. The fates conspired to give these young people a story worth telling. If they aren’t breaking official secrets, they should be free to accept money for telling it. Why should the top brass and the derring-do boys of the SAS be the only ones allowed to sell their memoirs?

Catch a fallen Tsar

Business leaders in London have asked Gordon Brown to appoint an “Olympics tsar” to avert national humiliation in 2012. Oh dear. We already have “tsars” to coordinate everything from the war on drugs and child-bullying to healthcare for the elderly and music teaching in schools. They haven’t made a ha’penny worth of difference between them. The trouble is that the word “tsar” conveys an impression of huge power, whereas these people are nothing more than toothless fall-guys, appointed to give the illusion of decisive action about difficult problems that the Government doesn’t really have a clue how to tackle.

Besides, as anyone with even a sketchy knowledge of Russian history will recall, the tsars were always pretty hopeless at solving problems when they did have huge power.