Classicism and the Railway Station in the North-East

The proclaimed need to develop a distinctive railway style of architecture, and to move away from comfy Tudor or domestic classicism, was one that taxed architectural critics throughout the 1840s and 50s. Ruskin himself, in his Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849, advised that ‘railroad architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil’.  Following Ruskin, many railway architects sought to lend decorum and grandeur to a means of transport which was, in the eyes of many, fraught with danger and risk.

Thus station buildings needed to be simultaneously solid and spectacular – whether their model was Pritchett’s giant portico at Huddersfield or Prosser’s Brobdingnagian porte-cochère at Newcastle. The collapse of York-born George Hudson’s railway empire in 1849 seemed to confirm to many observers that the whole business was merely a vehicle for irresponsible speculation, and would prove a temporary fad. Classicism was employed to persuade them otherwise.