Arnos Grove Underground Station. Photo: © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection.
The Puritan and the Quaker
David Burnell examines a unique relationship
The success of London Transport’s design policy was rooted in the successful professional relationship between Holden and Frank Pick, the managing director of the Underground companies, subsequently London Transport.
Pick was a self-effacing man whose religious origins were a fusion of Wesleyism and Congregationalism. It is likely that the underlying success in their collaboration lay in the perhaps unrecognised deeply spiritual approach to their task. In 1942 Holden wrote: ‘…I was born in an industrial age: that I was urged by a passion for building and for service: and that I have an invincible belief in the power of the human soul, the God in man, to rise above, and master ugliness and desolating conditions’. Pick, in his quest for ‘Fitness for Purpose’ in the designs he commissioned from Holden for the underground, wrote: ‘Fitness for purpose must transcend the merely practical and serve a moral and spiritual order as well’. Pick suggested that he saw the building of a modern transport system as the equivalent of the construction of a medieval cathedral, ‘an integrated work of art that would be a joy to both maker and users’. In Holden, Pick found his master mason.
Holden described
Christian Barman, in his biography of Frank Pick, The Man Who Built London Transport, offers a first hand picture of Charles Holden: ‘…a man of short stature with a calm earnest face enlivened by reflections from the gold round-rimmed spectacles which he was never seen without. From each side of a lofty forehead… the hair hung down vertically; the little beard meticulously trimmed, suggested an unimpressive chin. Somehow when you got to know him a little you were not surprised to discover he was a Quaker; that he was a craftsman who knew how to use his hands; that he neither smoked nor drank; or that his home was in Welwyn Garden City. He spoke little, in a soft colourless voice; it was as though he distrusted speech and used only the barest necessity’.
The V&A, in partnership with RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), is hosting an exhibition of work by Charles Holden (1875-1960), the Modernist designer of many tube stations on the Northern Line. A number of the photos in the exhibition have been loaned by the London Transport Museum. The exhibition runs until 13 February 2011.
