Euston

Euston station opened in May 1907 as part of the City and South London Railway's extension from Angel station. A few months later, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened its own Euston station with a surface structure designed by architect Leslie Green. Despite having separate entrances the two stations shared an underground ticket hall. 

This is the old surface station.(Had the camera on a black and white setting, bizarrely. I didn't even know that was possible.)

From 1922-24 the station was closed to allow tunnels to be enlarged in preparation for both branches to join at Camden.

The station was rebuilt in the 1960s to accommodate the Victoria Line which began calling at the station in 1968. Tom Eckersley designed the illustration of the Euston Arch that once stood at the entrance to the mainline rail station. 

This is the front of London Euston National Rail station. It is the southern terminus of the West Coast main Line and was the first of London's mainline stations and the first to connect London with another city.  Euston was  opened in 1837 and the first inter city journey from London to Birmingham was made by the directors of the company in 1838.From here you can  travel to destinations like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I have been here on numerous occasions when travelling to and from Manchester. The current building was opened in 1968 and about all you can say about it is that it is functional.

I arrived at the station as all the alarms were going off and announcements for everyone to evacuate the station. It turned out that they were testing the alarm systems.

It's always incredibly busy.

On the plaza outside the station is a statue to Captain Matthew Flinders. The inscription reads:

In commemoration of Captain Matthew Flinders RN, 1774-1814, who named Australia and charted its 'unknown coast' with the help of Bungaree and the crew of HM S Investigator.

Two copies were made of this statue, one of which is in Port Lincoln, South Australia.

Outside the station is the London and North Western War memorial. It is a First World War memorial dedicated to all those LNWR employees who were killed in WW1

When Euston was first built a large Doric Arch was constructed to form a grand entrance to the station. All that remains are two accompanying lodges, one on either side of the approach road now.

On the exterior corner walls are quoin stones with the names of stations engraved in them. Inside this one is the Euston Tap pub. 

Across the Euston Road is Friends House, built in 1927, it houses the central offices for the Quakers in Britain.

 South of Euston Road is the University College London which is housed in a number of different impressive buildings.

But also in this area are a number of garden squares. Squares are one of the defining features of London making it very different from other cities. Mainly developed during the Georgian and Victorian periods they are a mixture of private and council enclosed gardens surrounded by houses. The locked private ones with their dense hedging are full of mystery whereas the public ones not only have a mixture of flowers and greenery but also recreational facilities such as playgrounds and tennis courts. The London Squares Act of 1931 was hugely important in protecting more than 400 of the city's squares from being built over. This one is Gordon Square. The gardens were designed and laid out by the 6th Duke of Bedford. They are now owned and maintained by the University of London. 

This drinks kiosk was once a gardener's hut.

The houses at Gordon Square were built between 1820 and 1850 and became the focus of the Bloomsbury Group. The group was made up of British writers, intellectuals. philosophers and artists in the early 20th cent. Among the people involved were Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and E. M. Forster. The social life of the group revolved around the London and country houses of the various members and friends. The lifestyle of some of the set seemed outrageous to outsiders, mainly because of their many love affairs with partners seeming to move from one person to another. The group continued until the 1940s. After the Second World War many of the houses were no longer residential but housed various parts of the University. 

Gordon Square was named after the 6th Duke of Bedford's wife, Lady Georgiana Gordon. This square is named after the Duke's family seat, Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. The houses in the square were narrower and less imposing than the houses on Gordon Square and hence had lower rents. Woburn Square. The southern half of the long, narrow shape of Woburn Square garden was lost when new buildings for the School of Oriental and African Studies and Institute of Education were constructed in the early 1970s..  

The Green Man near the entrance to the park.

This is Tavistock Court on the corner of Tavistock Square. It is an apartment block built between 1934 and 1935.

What attracted my attention to the building are the marble sculptures above the door which really stood out in the bright sunshine.

The garden in Tavistock Square is open to the public and is home to a number of memorials commemorating famous Bloomsbury inhabitants and visitors.

This is the Conscientious Objectors' Commemorative stone. It was dedicated in May 1994 with the inscription: To all those who have established and who are maintaining the right to refuse to kill. Their foresight and courage give us hope.

The Mahatma Gandhi statue has pride of place in the centre of the garden. It was unveiled in 1968. Gandhi was the leader of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule and is widely considered the father of his nation.

Louisa Aldrich-Blake (1865-1925), the first British woman to qualify as a surgeon.

On 7th July 2005 Tavistock Square became internationally known when a double decker bus was the target of a suicide bomber in a terrorist attack. The bus exploded outside the British Medical Association building where this plaque has been placed.

Also on the Square is BMA House (British Medical Association). The organisation has occupied the building since 1923. The building was designed by Edwin Lutyens for the Theosophical Society in 1913 as a site for their offices and temple. With the start of World War One the following year, parts of the building were taken over by the Army Pay Office. After the war the Theosophical Society did not have the funds to complete the project and the site was taken over by the BMA. Sir Edwin Lutyens as reemployed to complete the building. It is now a Grade II listed building. There is a plaque on the building which refers to Charles Dickens who lived in a house near the site.

Charles Dickens lived at Tavistock House, his last residence in London before he went to live in Gads Hill in Kent. It was during this period (1851-1860) that he wrote Bleak House and other novels and entertained his literary friends at his private theatre.

I left the square via Upper Woburn Place and turned right onto Woburn Walk. What a gem! I had no idea this lane of preserved 19th century shops existed. Apparently it is one of the first examples of a pedestrian shopping street in the Georgian era.

W.B.Yeats also lived in the street between 1895 and 1919.

I walked the length of Woburn Place and onto Dukes Road. This building was the headquarters and drill hall of the 20th Middlesex (Artists) Rifle Volunteers Corps.

The volunteers were made up of artists, writers, musicians, actors and so on.  Members included William Morris, Holman Hunt, Millais and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Unit served with the distinction in the Boer War and earned many honours during WW1. Today it continues as a Territorial Army unit, known as the Artists' Rifles within the Special Air Service.

On the other side of Dukes Road is the back of St Pancras Church. I really should have gone to the front of the church to take a photo but I didn't. I was so taken by these caryatids found at the north and south sides of the church.

The caryatids are female statues that take the place of pillars. Here they stand above the entrance to the crypt. The door was open so I went down the steps to the crypt which is now an art exhibition space. 








I was lucky enough to find the church open and also met the vicar who is a fairly recent appointment. He said that he wanted the church to increase the hours it is open during the day.

Many pre Victorian churches had box pews where the more well off parishioners could worship together as a family. The box pews raised money for the church. they were purchased, sold, inherited and also helped to keep out the cold as some of them even had stoves to keep the family warm. The vicar told me he had found records of money paid to pew openers who were employed by the wealthier families as another way of showing they were wealthier than others in the pews. Most pew boxes were removed in Victorian times and replaced by the more familiar bench type seating.

The church brings me back to the Euston Road where there was just one more building I wanted to research.

This building was formally the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. Built in 1890 and finally closed in 2002. It was established by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain who created a hospital in which women were treated by women only.

The building was fully restored and acquired by the union UNISON in 2011.