Summary
Bus shelter, 1947-1949, built to the designs of Oliver Hill for London Transport.
Reasons for Designation
Newbury Park Station Bus Shelter is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
Architectural interest:
* for its bold yet graceful structurally expressive design, defined by the broad reinforced-concrete vaulting and the slender copper-panelled roof arch;
* as one of only 19 buildings to be granted an award of merit from the panel of the 1951 Festival of Britain Special Architectural Awards, which is commemorated by the plaque bearing the 1951 Abram Grahams Festival motif mounted on the vault to Eastern Avenue.
Historic interest:
* as a well-preserved example of the post-war work of a leading architect of the period, Oliver Hill, the design charting a key staging post in his move towards architectural modernism in the later years of his career;
* as an important, early, and influential post-war building for the London Underground network; commissioned prior to the war by Frank Pick, the progressive executive of London Transport noted for his patronage of new art and architecture in the period.
History
Frank Pick initially commissioned Oliver Hill to design Newbury Park railway interchange in 1937 as part of London Transport’s New Works scheme. The original, unrealised design produced by Hill proposed a new station complex which was to integrate decorative glass by Hermes and McGrath from Hill’s British Pavilion for the 1937 Paris Exhibition (Powers, 1989, p51). As with other stations on the Central Line eastern extension route, the Second World War forced plans to be put on hold. The commission was postponed until 1947, when a scaled-back arrangement consisting of the bus shelter and a small staff cafeteria was eventually begun. The open, vaulted shell structure was designed by Hill to allow the station booking hall, kiosks and other facilities to be added later. The shelter, completed in 1949, was originally designed with curved forecourt walls and a London Transport roundel sign raised on a spiral brick platform to the south, subsequently lost to a road widening scheme and the building of access stairs for the Eastern Avenue underpass.
The Newbury Park Station shelter was one of the first post-war works to be undertaken by Oliver Hill (1887-1968), a leading British architect of the inter-war years who began his career as a follower of Edwin Lutyens in the 1920s and gravitated towards modernism in the 1930s. It was one of 19 projects granted an award of merit from the panel of the 1951 Festival of Britain Special Architectural Awards. The architectural critic Ian Nairn described the shelter as ‘an extraordinary bit of bravura from an architect who designs in every style; an old-style romantic in an age which wants its romanticism rough and rude, if at all’ (Nairn, 1964, p74). The shelter was added to the List at Grade II in 1981, making it one of the first buildings of the post-war era to be protected through statutory listing. It was restored as part of a scheme undertaken between 1994 and 1995 (Harwood, 2001, p172).
Details
Bus shelter, 1947-1949, built to the designs of Oliver Hill for London Transport.
MATERIALS AND STRUCTURE: reinforced concrete vaulted structure (using Chesil Beach pebble aggregate) with copper panel roof cladding.
PLAN: rectangular plan, with the shelter set perpendicular to Eastern Avenue to the south. The forecourt is arranged with the shelter positioned to the west of the plot, parallel to the railway line, allowing space for a turning circle for buses to the north and entrance and exit points to the south.
EXTERIOR: broad hangar-type shelter, with the sides left open to reveal a series of seven semi-circular vaults sheathed in copper cladding. The vaulting has a broad span (approximately 60m wide) with strip light fittings and copper shields mounted to the soffit of the roof on both sides. An ‘Award of Merit’ plaque bearing the 1951 Festival of Britain Abram Grahams motif is mounted on the southern face of the vault to Eastern Avenue.
Under the powers of exclusion in s1 (5A) (b) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990), the walls and portals with Bostwick gates leading into the attached underground station ticket hall and its ancillary offices on the west side of the shelter (which fall within the mapped area) are specifically excluded from this List entry.
