Britain's Historic Railway Buildings: an Oxford Gazetteer of Structures and Sites

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2004 by Richards, Jeffrey

Gordon Biddle (ed.), Britain's Historic Railway Buildings: an Oxford Gazetteer of Structures and Sites, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003), 800 pp., £60.00.

Gordon Biddle, whose Victorian Stations became a bible for historic station enthusiasts, has deployed his encyclopaedic knowledge in the production of several major reference works. With O. S. Nock and other contributors he produced The Railway Heritage of Britain (1983) and with Jack Simmons he co-edited The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (1997). His latest project is by way of being a sister volume to The Oxford Companion and it is fittingly dedicated to his erstwhile collaborator, the late Jack Simmons, whose contribution to railway history deserved a knighthood rather than the OBE awarded at the end of his life.

The subject of this volume is railway buildings, including bridges and viaducts, stations, signal boxes, and hotel and railway workers' houses. Over 2,000 of these structures are now listed buildings, a significant increase on the 400 of twenty years ago. For the purposes of the gazetteer Britain is divided into eleven regions; each region is introduced by a map showing the present passenger rail network, together with freight-only or closed lines containing listed buildings. There is a standard format for entries: name of site, name of railway, engineer or architect, opening date, closure date (where appropriate), listing grade (where applicable) and Ordnance Survey grid reference. Each entry also has reference titles for further reading.

It is hard to do justice to the richness and breadth of this volume, with its 2,300 entries, in one short review. The entries are clearly and lucidly written, and informed both by careful architectural and historical analysis and by first-hand knowledge based on visits and inspections. Every variety of stone, brick, tile, glass, roof, gable, column, canopy, arch and doorway is faithfully noted, and past and present roles and functions are detailed. The pleasure offered by both random and systematic consultation of the text is enhanced by the presence of 900 evocative black-and-white photographs, drawn from the collection of the National Railway Museum at York. The book confirms once again, if confirmation were needed, how superb is the architectural heritage left by the railways. This beautifully produced, compulsively readable book should have an honoured place on the shelves of all who are interested in railways, railway history and railway buildings. It is a remarkable tribute to the industry, dedication and meticulous scholarship of Gordon Biddle and his team of assistants and advisers.

The book ends with an appendix of recent listings of railway buildings in England and Wales up to December 2002, brief background details of key architects, a useful glossary of architectural terms and a melancholy selection of the more important historic railway structures that have disappeared in the past 150 years, among them the Euston arch, Birmingham Snow Hill Station, Bradford Exchange, London Blackfriars, Kenilworth, Maryport, Newmarket, Tarnworth, Dundee West, Glasgow St Enoch and Oban, a litany of lost destinations in a cherishable variety of styles: classical, Tudor, Jacobean, Moorish, Scottish baronial and French Renaissance, gone but, thanks to this book, not forgotten.

Jeffrey Richards, Lancaster University