Paddington Station

There’s a certain slant to the light in Paddington Station. As the sun comes through the glass* roof, between the arches, it softly diffuses. It creates a haziness, a sense of mystery that seems in tune with the excitement of travel, of the anticipation of a journey. It’s my favourite of London’s stations. Growing up in West London, arriving at this station signaled home. Now, as I live in Bristol, it’s the capital city’s front door. 

There's one feature of this cathedral-like Victorian station, in particular, that I love. The delicate ironwork tracery over the end window. Look up – you can’t miss it. I’ve always wondered if the ambitious and visionary engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was himself responsible for it – he was, after all, creating a ‘Station after my own fancy’. Based on the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, his iron and glass construction was both the largest station of its era and part of a grander plan. Brunel envisaged it as the starting point of a seamless journey ending in New York: London, Neyland (South Wales), New York. Means of travel: train and Brunel’s boat, the Great Western.

But, as I discovered thanks to Professor Google**, apparently decorative design was where Brunel’s expertise and imagination ran out: ‘for detail of ornamentation I neither have time nor knowledge.’ So the engineer enlisted the services of Matthew Digby Wyatt, a British art historian and architect, who later became surveyor of the East India company and the first Slade professor of art at Cambridge University. His legacy includes the India Room at the Foreign and Commenwealth Office and parts of Temple Meads station. Wyatt’s striking Paddington design has gently curling fleur-de-lys-like scrolls  and interlacing arches, perhaps echoing the Moorish influences he used elsewhere in the station. Made of metal, it looks strong, part of the railway and modernity; on the other hand there's a softness and movement in the curves. That's what just my layman's eye has observed, anyhow. If anyone with more expertise has any observations to make about why this is so striking, I'd love to hear them.

*It’s actually now, so the web tells me, polycarbonate glazing. Accurate but not exactly evocative.

**Some kind of official Network Rail report I stumbled across also rather poetically described the darker platforms at Paddington as having ‘the essence of Birmingham New Street’.