| ISSN 1357-4442 | Editor: Simon Denison |
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| COMMENT |
Oxford's Victorian railway station is to be demolished without public inquiry, laments Richard Morris
The railway reached Oxford in 1844. The Great Western Railway's service from Paddington then finished at a temporary terminus, but an extension to the midlands was soon completed, and with it a new station in the quasi-Venetian environs of North Osney where streets alternate with channels of the Thames and the Oxford Canal.
The railway changed Oxford, offering all classes affordable travel to distant places. By 1851 there was also another route, promoted by the London and North Western Railway, which connected the city to the Euston-Birmingham line at Bletchley. Bringing this line into Oxford was like threading a needle, but a terminus site was found not far from the GWRstation, in the angle between Rewley Road and Park End Street.
LNWR's contract for the station was awarded to the engineering partnership of Charles Fox and John Henderson. Their forte was iron, and new ways of using it. They had a large hand in Paddington Station, built Birkenhead Market, and accepted commissions as far afield as India and Russia. Acclaimed above all was their collaboration with Paxton to build the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The LNWR aimed to open their new terminus on the same day as the Exhibition. More than this, the station was a kind of remote vestibule to the Crystal Palace, employing the same innovatory techniques of system building, ornament and glazing. In the event completion was late, and the first excursion (3s 6d return, in `new Covered Carriages') did not run until several weeks later. On that festive day LNWR's directors invited 300 people of `much intellect, wealth, and respectability' to feast upon a `splendid cold collation' and drink champagne. Nearby church bells `poured forth a merry peal' and a `great concourse of people' thronged the station.
These scenes fade. The Crystal Palace burned down on its new site in Sydenham. The last passenger train puffed out of Rewley Road (which by then served the LMS, or London, Midland and Scottish Railway) in 1951. The former GWR station has been replaced by a building (Oxford's current railway station) which may help explain Inspector Morse's countenance when he travels up to London to interview suspects or visit the opera. With one exception, Oxford's links with that dizzy Victorian epoch have gone. The exception is the Rewley Road station itself. It is still there, shabby but substantially intact, and listed II* - among the top four per cent of listed buildings in the country.
Before dawn on 9 September this year, demonstrators who had occupied the station in protest against a proposal to demolish it, and fell the plane trees fringing its forecourt, were evicted. The site is needed for road widening as part of a transport strategy. Beyond it will rise a new University business school.
I was in Oxford that day. The trees were being dismembered behind a large contingent of policemen. Groups of dejected eco-warriors watched from a distance. Their ensign still hung above the station entrance. But they had lost, and they knew it. Later, I returned. The banner and trees had gone. The station was caged by metal fencing and garrisoned by police. Outside, six demonstrators mourned the trees. One offered leaflets. Another stood motionless among passers-by. She held out one shrivelling leaf.
The eviction followed an astonishing decision by Environment Secretary John Prescott to allow removal of the station without a public inquiry. Astonishing, because it is rare for any listed building, let alone one so exceptional as this, to be sacrificed before the case for doing so has been fully and openly tested against local and national policies.
This will not now happen. The defence case has not been lost: it has simply not been heard, just as assertions about the `unavoidability of removing the station' have escaped examination before an inspector trained to weigh all the relevant issues. Likewise spared are those who argue, some perhaps a little casuistically, that the station is not being demolished, only relocated - to a railway museum in Buckinghamshire. Aside from the fact that the station is anchored in a rich tilth of contemporary archaeology, disarticulation is demolition by another name (see BA, June).
The uprooting of a unique building from the neighbourhood it helped to create will impoverish that neighbourhood. Exiled to rural surroundings in another county, it will be a pitiable object. But left where it stands, Rewley Road station could again become what it was: a gateway in time and place, wherein the innovatory technology of one great age could be confederated with that of our own.
Dream on: neither imagination nor will were there. New plane trees may grow here. The station won't. If you see the Deputy Prime Minister, you may wish to offer him a shrivelled leaf.
Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA
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© Council for British Archaeology, 1998