Blog archive September 2026
15.09.26 / 02 / northern line extension centenary
Holden’s Northern Line extension stations opened 100 years ago on 13th September. They are overshadowed now by his 1930s work, but at the time they were a startling achievement. In their context of elaborate smoke-blackened Victorian buildings, they stood out white and minimal, with the new Underground roundels in red and blue big in coloured glass or cantilevered out over the pavement. There were even searchlights on top of the buildings pointing up into the sky - which will have worked in the smoky atmosphere of the time but would just class as light pollution now.
The intention was to display the Underground as clean, modern and efficient. It’s hard to believe now, but the Underground was having financial troubles due to competition from trams and buses, no longer horse-drawn. Publicity genius Frank Pick was on a drive to re-present - rebrand we would now say - the disparate, Victorian Underground as a unified modern system. The Northern Line stations were the culmination of the first phase of the rebrand.
Pick had an acute sense of how modern to be without alienating the public. So did Holden. This couldn’t be an exercise in Corbusier/Bauhaus revolutionary Modernism. It had to be soundly built and wear hard. Nowadays we notice the residual Classicism and touches of ornament, but then people noticed all the ornament that was not there. It was shockingly bare, but not quite stark. Holden never saw the need to abandon tradition and ornament entirely, but he did believe in stripping buildings right back to their essentials and letting that speak.
Holden’s great leap forward was to reimagine the entrance to an underground station as a double height space lit by huge windows. At night the light from within, through the big glass roundel, would advertise the station. The entrances were as wide as possible with no doors. The blue glass canopy edge carried the station name, illuminated at night. The formula, first tried at (now-demolished) Bond Street and rolled out on the Northern Line extension, is still followed in ever-updated forms. It’s what a London Underground station is.
15.09.26 / 01 / project holden
Back in March, I was reading about Charles Holden’s Piccadilly Line tube stations - and realised that I had never visited any of them (except the ones in Ealing which don’t count). So I went, and photographed, and one trip led to another, and it turned into a project.
Holden has a couple of major buildings in Bristol, so I photographed them when I was down there. Went on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Central Library to do a proper job. There is only one full biography of Holden, published in 2007, so I got that. The author began the book in the late 80s as a doctoral thesis, and drew on family members and people who knew and worked with Holden, so in many ways it will never be beaten, as those people are all dead now.
But I was dissatisfied with the photos in the book. Many are from the 1980s, and it’s striking how grubby London was back then - so much has been cleaned and restored. This spurred me on to get good sets of photos, for some as-yet-undefined purpose. The long hot summer has been a great help. My inability to get out of bed in the morning has not been a help, as some buildings have better light in the morning. And getting my no-people-in-shot shots has been challenging, by the time I get to a tube station in the late afternoon rush hour. Same issue for traffic - most tube stations are on busy junctions, and the best place for the shot may be in the middle of the road.
It can be done. People and traffic come in pulses, and there is almost always a moment when there is nothing in shot. I have to be patient and watch for the upcoming gaps. Just a split second - click and job done. The only place I had to really compromise was Leicester Square - I swear it’s more busy than Piccadilly Circus. Probably I need to be there at 6am on a Sunday in November.
Holden’s non-tube buildings in London mostly only need to be photographed from the outside. The exceptions are the former Underground headquarters 55 Broadway, which I toured in 2017, and the University of London’s Senate House. I have never been sure how open Senate House is to the general public. There was an exhibition in the library in May that was public, I used my entry ticket to explore without flagrant trespass. I returned at Open House Weekend to photograph some spaces I couldn’t access before, so I’ve probably done my best without being a student or a security risk. I wish I could go to the top of the tower.
