Arnos Grove Underground Station

Inspired by the design of the Stockholm Central Library, a central rotunda set upon a rectangle of red brick; as well as the highly functional, superbly crafted town hall in Hilversum in the Netherlands with its streamlined metal windows and basic building materials.

SEVENTY FIVE YEARS ON, IT IS STILL THE FINEST BUILDING IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD - Arnos Grove station announces its presence in clean cut, crystal clear architectural terms. A great glazed and corniced, brick, steel and glass drum sits on top of what is essentially a hollow box made of the same simple and unadorned materials. The purpose of this overground London Underground station is straightforward: to smooth the flow of three and a half million passengers a year scurrying on and off Piccadilly line tube trains here, on to red London buses waiting outside, and so to the surrounding semi-detached housing estates built from the time when this calm and quietly self-confident masterpiece of modern design opened to traffic on September 19 1932.  When the station was built, this stretch of north London was still largely rural. It seems odd, and perhaps just a little sad, that the very building that spurred massive local housing development, and shops and schools and churches, and nurtured ever more commuters, was by far the best building in the new, if ill-defined suburb of Arnos Grove.

Seventy five years on, this world famous architectural emblem of what was the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), under the aegis of its brilliant chief executive Frank Pick, is still by far the finest building in the neighbourhood. Restored, carefully for the most part, in 2005, it remains the very model of a modern metro station. In its own modest, yet confident way, its design and structure is as perfect as a Bach fugue, a Greek temple, or the letters A and G from the typeface   modelled on ancient Roman precedent   that the calligrapher, Edward Johnston, designed for Pick and the underground in 1916, and which adorns the station nameplates along the length of peerless Arnos Grove.

Although nominally modern, the design of the station is as much rooted in antiquity and classical principles and proportions   as well as 20th century interpretations of these   as it is in any of the principles that were new when Charles Holden, its architect, took to his drawing board. Holden had begun work on the design of new stations for an extension of the underground's Piccadilly line from Finsbury Park to, eventually, Cockfosters immediately after a summer tour of new Scandinavian, Low Country and German architecture made with Pick in 1930. This was just two years after Le Corbusier's revolutionary Vers une Architecture had been published in its first English translation (Towards a New Architecture) and four years after Walter Gropius's Bauhaus, that crucible of modern German led design, had moved to its cultural power house home in Dessau.

 Up to a point, both Pick and Holden were interested in what Le Corbusier and Gropius had to say. Client and architect had met at the first meeting of the Design and Industries Association, both committed to the notion that good design had to be "fit for purpose". And, yet, both these Arts and Crafts movement inspired, teetotal nonconformists wanted something different, something more humane and English, from Le Corbusier's modern European "machine for living in" architecture. At once radical and conservative, Pick and Holden were also looking for an architecture that, new and distinctive, would be rooted, without fuss or adornment, in the pantheon of architectural history.

Which is why the two fell for the compelling design of the new Stockholm City Library, opened in 1928, by the great Swedish modern classicist Gunnar Asplund (1885 1940). Here was a Roman temple of sorts, founded or re-founded in the architecture of the Pantheon itself, yet translated into a particularly convincing modern Swedish architectural language. Arnos Grove owes much to Asplund and the Stockholm library. Equally, Holden and Pick were much taken by the striking new Town Hall at Hilversum in the Netherlands. This superbly functional, yet highly crafted public building by Willem Marinus Dudok (1884-1974), a former military engineer, provided much of the inspiration for the detailing of Arnos Grove; mostly it inspired Holden to use brick as his basic building material and metal for his streamlined windows.

The brickwork at Arnos Grove is at once well laid, handsome and unpretentious. The palette of materials Holden chose shaped a building that was different from anything that had gone before in London, and very impressive and yet somehow quite at home in bricky suburban north London. I can readily imagine a baroque style fresco on the underside of Holden's great brick, steel and glass drum at Arnos Grove representing the design of the station as the apotheosis of the world of modern transport.

Homely yet magnificent, modest yet capacious, the design of Arnos Grove is a brilliant architectural tightrope act. In London, despite the bravura qualities of some of the stations built in the 1990s for the Jubilee line extension, its design has never been bettered.  When it opened, the station was truly what German art historians would describe as a gesamtkunstwerk, a total and entire work of art. Not only did lettering used throughout the station complement the architecture, so did its benches, lamps, ticket machines and, of course, Harry Beck's underground maps. Adverts on display inside and outside the ticket hall, and along the lengths of its platforms, might be designed by such distinguished graphic artists as Edward McKnight Kauffer, Hans Schleger and Man Ray. Trains that came to serve its platforms included the sleekly purposeful 1938 tube stock designed, at Acton Works, by a team led by W S Graff Baker, the underground's chief mechanical engineer. By the 1950s, among the buses that met these trains were the RT double deckers designed, at Chiswick Works, under the direction of Eric Ottaway, Frank Pick's technical officer (buses and coaches). In the 1960s, these superbly proportioned and beautifully engineered double deckers were joined by the long lived, and now much missed, Routemasters, the last buses designed and built in London for Londoners. No detail was too insignificant for Holden, Pick and Arnos Grove station. From 1937, LPTB bus stops, at Arnos Grove as elsewhere, were standardised to a streamlined concrete design adorned with signs by Hans Schleger. Seat fabrics of tube trains and London buses - hard wearing, innovative moquettes - were styled by textile designers such as Enid Marx (1902-1998) and the American born Marion Dorn (1896-1964). No wonder architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described Frank Pick's LPTB as "a civilising agent". No wonder many of us still look at Arnos Grove station today and think, why can't we ensure such high standards of integrated, imaginative, wholly convincing and well- crafted public design today?

In my imagination, I see Holden's great drum starting to revolve, and then spin as if designed, like some great centrifuge, to draw in commuters from the suburban homes all around it, together with their cases, rucksacks and shopping bags, their umbrellas, furtive hoods and mobile phones, their paperbacks, laptops and newspapers, their brow furrowing concerns, daydreams and season tickets. In reality, I can't help hoping that this king, queen and all princes of a metro station raises at least one commuter's spirit each day as he or she passes into and out of what remains one of the finest of all 20th century buildings. [Jonathan Glancey  Guardian's architecture critic]

Reference           Great Modern Buildings: Arnos Grove Station: Charles Holden: Supplement to The Guardian, (London, England) 16 October 2007