Hertford East Station

Hertford East Station

This railway station, built in 1888 for the Great Eastern Railway, comprises a terminal booking hall, concourse, porte cocheres, platform canopies and screen walls. The architect was WN Ashbee, who later became Head of the Great Eastern Railway Architects' Department. It has undergone 20th-century alterations. The building is constructed of orange-red brick laid to English bond with stone windows, bands, dressings and cornices, beneath a hipped and gabled roof with 20th-century tile covering. The architectural style is Free Renaissance with mixed Jacobean and Queen Anne motifs.

The exterior presents a single-storey, four-bay main frontage to Mill Street. The facade is dominated by stone-coped Dutch gables with scrollwork and finials. The outer bays contain stone mullion and transom four-light windows set above a broad stone band and brick plinth. Moulded cornice bands and carved strapwork ornament the upper portion. The centrepiece features a bold projecting two-bay porte cochere, now roofless, with brick piers on plinths capped with moulded stone. The archways are elliptical with dripmoulds and projecting channelled keyblocks. Pulvinated responds flank the stone fascia, with dentil cornices and blocking courses. The return flanks of the porte cochere contain one elliptical and one semicircular arch with similar detailing.

Behind the porte cochere, a setback centre section contains two mullion and transom windows with carved tympana above, set within elliptical rubbed-brick arches topped with stone dripmould and carved keyblock. The booking hall features two central doorways, each with twin-leaf raised and fielded panel doors and rectangular traceried fanlights. Carved strapwork stone tympani sit beneath moulded ogee arches. Stone baluster columns on brick plinths with stone bands and caps divide the bays, with corbel blocks above supporting two broad segmental arches in which stone voussoirs alternate with rubbed red brick. The setback ends at the far left and right of the front range each contain a triple-light mullioned window with stone scrollwork and a carved panel above, and a stone cornice band with a small floating pediment above the centre light. An upper cornice and pierced stone parapet conceal the roof eaves.

The six-bay simplified return elevation to the north contains three- and four-light stone mullioned windows. The return elevation facing Railway Street to the south features a projecting three-bay porte cochere with red-brick piers having stone moulded bases and cornices and elliptical arches with stone voussoirs alternating with rubbed red brick. A stone cornice below a stone-coped brick parapet conceals three bays of part lead-roll, part glazed roofs. A stone mullioned window with carved scrollwork and foliated panels above is set back on the south return flank, returning north along the concourse with stone mullion and transom windows and door surrounds.

Platforms 1 and 2 have slender cast-iron columns with strapwork bases, fluted upper shafts and caps with moulded cushion blocks above inverted small Ionic volutes, supporting traceried arches and girders with ridge-and-furrow roofs terminating in scalloped boarded valances. Platform 2 is backed by a north range of buildings with piers and arcading corresponding to the platform bays, and a ridge-and-furrow parapeted screen wall beyond, reduced in height with flat coping beyond the now shortened limit of the platform canopy. Platform 1 has a similar canopy and outer screen wall with ridge-and-furrow parapet.

The roofs feature a central octagonal louvred cupola with a lead base and ogee-profile domed roof with iron finial. Prominent chimneys to the left and right of the principal west elevation have red brick with arcaded sides, stone moulded cornices and caps with pulvinated friezes, and upper cornices with blocking courses rising from external chimneybreasts with gabled links to the main roofs. Subsidiary brick-shafted chimneys on the north range have oversailing course bands. A glazed ridge-and-furrow roof spans over the south porte cochere, concourse and platforms.

The interior booking hall has a ceiling with coved moulded beams and moulded strapwork. The concourse is divided into three toplit square bays beyond the porte cochere, with a bold coved boarded and battened ceiling and pyramidal rooflights. The porte cochere contains wrought-iron tie-rod trusses above exposed steel girders.

Ashbee had previously worked in the office of Edward Wilson, the Great Eastern Railway Engineer, serving as Clerk of Works and Resident Architect during the construction of Liverpool Street Station in London from 1874 to 1876. Hertford East was one of several stations in the Free Renaissance style built by the Great Eastern Railway, others including Southend Victoria and Norwich Thorpe. The building replaced an earlier Eastern Counties Railway station further east along Railway Street, which subsequently survived as a goods terminal until 1964.