Tubewhore (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tubewhore) wrote,@ 2007-03-02 22:30:00 |
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| Entry tags: | 30's styling, architecture, boston manor, northfields, osterley |
Osterley to South Ealing
More crazy pinnacles of deco insanity. It's like building the RKO radio spire out of house bricks. Lovely, lovely contrast between the wide horizontal planes and the illuminated obelisk on top.
All three of the stations for this post: Osterly, Boston Manor and Northfields are from the same European style from the 30s, with the same use of strong contrasting horizontal and vertical planes, brick and glass spires and turrets. I can't see that these rooftop details serve any purpose other than to give a dramatic skyline. Maybe it's because they are from the Golden Age of the Cinema, but I love the sweep of them: uncluttered, unfussy; a forward-motion thrust towards a glamorous future of fast cars and sky captains, cocktail parties and oceanliners, chrome plate and plate glass; a streamlined, clean-edged, stark modern world, free from class and gender division, jazz bright and exciting.
Annoyingly I've just discovered that there's an abandoned station about 300m to the East, but we were more concerned with getting a bit further along the line to Boston Manor to see the back of the Northfield Depot where all the Piccadilly trains go to sleep at night. We spot a platform roundel visible through a first storey window on our way back in, but once I get to the platform I realise it's the other side of the 'do not cross on danger of death' barrier, and another train is coming, so we totally fail to get platform shots at Osterley. Well, gives me an excuse to go back and look for the building for Osterly and Spring Grove.
So, one stop up to Boston Manor, which favours the white picket fence approach to platform design. The sun suddenly blazes forth again:
Goth Shun Sun!!!! Run! Run from the burny thing in the sky...
Goth Shun Sun!!!! Run! Run from the burny thing in the sky...
Outside, more European brick spires and turrets. I want to climb it. Actually I want to see a giant ape climb it, with biplanes zooming about as he swats them from the sky. I want to be the 'delicate, satin-draped frame', only the monster wouldn't die at the end. Weather bit nippy still for standing on rooftops in yer nightie...
Over the road, the more Classical potbellied balustrades on the road bridge have been filled in to prevent people throwing things on the tracks below which lead to Northfields Depot. You can see Northfields from South Ealing station, and many's the time I've stared down the platform willing a train to come, watching them just sitting there, hibernating. Have been curious for a long time to see the other side of the Depot. Oh, what a spotterish confession!
Now this will be a good image to play with - all those wiggling lines...I am keen to start a drawing based on the shapes going on here. The train tracks run alongside the depot as we travel up to Northfields and more deco style station design.
Inside, a Modernist cathedral space - all clean lines and right angles to the uplighters and furniture. When the station opened in the early thirties it would have been the very vanguard of design, and I think it's aged beautifully. How startling these stations must have seemed, with their simplicity of line in contrast to the organic vegetable shapes of Edwardian tiling and narrow, closed-in spaces of the earliest. We have the historical distance to see each design stylistic as equally valid, or maybe we are just so used to see the Modernist and the Nouveau together in the same system. Part of what I am really enjoying in this project is to see how the styles have become a holistic experience on travel through the network; we take it all as read; as a given, if people eve notice it at all. It's a triumph that the newest stations, as cutting edge in their design as these and the Edwardian stations were in their time, also form part of a seamless whole, a showcase of over a hundred years of industrial design and materials, that, being still in daily use, is more accessible than a museum.
Behind the tickets barriers is a staff member in dayglow orange. Wordlessly B and I split up with me looking out the window for him to take a shot of me up from the platform. We're getting good at sneaking shots in under the radar of surveillance.
And this time we remember to take platform shots. Standing on absolute tippy-toe, I can just peer over the signboard.
From Northfields we travel one stop up to South Ealing where rain pelts down again. The sun has finally given up the struggle, so with scarves over our heads we run the short distance to home. The house is sold, leaving the end of march so this might be the last trip out to Ealing. No more breakfasts at The Walpole. End of an era...
