All aboard!

Train stations are the quintessential building type of London. It seems that they are the organizing principle of the city’s urban fabric, and certainly the a determining factor of people’s varied trajectories through it. In an interesting parallel to the story of historic preservation’s birth in New York City following the demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Rome-inspired Pennsylvania Station in 1963, London’s Greek Revival-style Euston Station and Euston Arch were callously demolished in 1961, triggering a dramatic shift in public opinion about the virtues of modern planning and the presumed obsolescence of 19th-century buildings. We visited two of London’s most magnificent train stations, St. Pancras Station (Barlow & Ordish, 1863-65) and the Liverpool Street Station (Edward WIlson, 1874). The photos will hopefully say all that needs to be said about the monumental scale of these iron-and-glass structures, which represented the cutting-edge of engineering for their time. St. Pancras Station, which was recently refurbished and re-opened as a terminus for the high-speed Eurostar train, was constructed on a module determined by the width of the beer barrels originally stored in the building’s cellar. Applied engineering!