ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century phenomenon, the railways were indelibly associated with iron. As the Art Journal reflected in 1857, eighteen years after the world’s first railway passenger service was opened and Britain was criss-crossed by thousands of miles of railways: “England may ... designate this her iron age ... the island is traversed in all directions by iron roads – iron buildings receive us at the ends of all the railways.”2 The growth of Britain’s iron industry and the railways were closely intertwined; not only did nearly all of the constituent parts of railways require iron in its two principal forms, from wrought-iron rails, bridges and station roof structures to cast-iron locomotives, footbridges and load-bearing columns in stations; but also the railways themselves created a new and highly efficient form of transport circulation, allowing the iron industry to expand its markets across the world.3 If iron defined the railways as a whole, railway stations were at the forefront of attempts to assimilate both iron and glass into architecture and to create a new, modern style appropriate for the age. In a similar manner to other new building types, such as market halls, pumping stations and glasshouses, the solution adopted for many railway stations lay in a dual architectural identity: an exterior structure, designed by an architect, built in conventional building materials and referencing historical styles; and an interior space, conceived by an engineer, supported by an independent iron-and-glass structure. Yet, railway stations were exceptional in how far they pushed this exterior/interior disjunction, the large terminus stations of the second half of the nineteenth century being characterized by railway hotels fronting colossal train sheds that bore little aesthetic relationship to each other. As such, ornament in railway stations has been conventionally seen by historians as being primarily located in their exterior frontages rather than the “functional” train sheds; that is, parts of the station that faced outwards and which tended to employ established building materials such as brick or stone.4
