Southgate Underground Station, Including Surface Buildings And Platforms

Southgate Underground Station opened in March 1933, designed by Charles Holden of Adams, Holden and Pearson for the London Passenger Transport Board. The station comprises surface buildings and platforms, along with associated pylons and lamp posts.

Construction and Materials

The station is built with a reinforced concrete frame. The street-level entrance building is clad in red and brown brick on a Cornish granite plinth, with high concrete cornices and oversailing flat roofs.

The Surface Buildings

The surface buildings form a circular drum set within a roundabout. At the centre is a high booking hall, surrounded by lower offices and kiosks. The exterior of this drum is surprisingly complex in detail. Around the vent covers runs a cast-iron dado with a geometric Greek key pattern. Steel window frames are set in timber surrounds, arranged in pairs on either side of blind timber poster boards. A projecting illuminated sign band stands proud of a narrow glazing band. Broad projecting eaves are formed of a slim concrete slab. Above this is a high clerestory with a strongly horizontal pattern of steel glazing bars, topped by a shallow concrete slab roof. The roof is crowned by a distinctively Scandinavian-style finial composed of five swirling bands between opal light fittings (which slide open), surmounted by a ball. Some shop units retain contemporary bold signage in individual letters. Many of the signs, particularly the roundels, are late-20th century replicas of 1930s originals.

The station building sits in the centre of an oval island. The paving includes some original and some replaced radial-cut paving slabs, as well as late-20th century brick pavers.

The Booking Hall

The booking hall features bronzed framed information panels in the entrances and stepped ceilings incorporating specially designed inset lights. A passimeter is set around a central concrete pier, which is cylindrical with flat eaves incorporating floodlights directed upwards and round inset lighting projecting downwards. The pier is glazed above a linoleum-coated timber lower section, with cupboards and shelving below dado level.

The main drum has a black curved plinth with black tiles and fretwork-decorated soffit panels below the shopfronts and ticket counter (the latter modified in 1987). Shopfronts retain contemporary bold signage in individual letters. Around the perimeter and between shops are twelve single rectangular lights of opaque glass. Above these runs a concrete ring beam, here tiled with a fluted cornice band. The exposed concrete roof above the clerestory forms ripples of concrete around the top of the central pier. The interiors of non-public spaces are not of special interest.

To the Platforms

A sign reading 'TO THE TRAINS' marks the head of the escalator hall, reached through tiled reveals. This plastered hall is segmental-arched and contains long escalators flanking a central stair. These were sensitively modernised in 1991, retaining the eight pairs of bronze uplighters that are a special feature of Southgate, as well as the bronze escalator casings with stepped details and handrails.

The lower hall contains two further uplighters, with a bronze manager's door below a clock, flanked by windows at the end of the hall. To either side are segmental-arched openings to the platforms. Suspended illuminated signs with two feathers to their arrows give directions. Vertical flutings decorate the passageways. The flooring is cream terrazzo with black subdivisions.

All this area is tiled to cornice height in cream tiles with dark yellow roll mouldings at entrances and narrow surrounds to poster areas. This tile pattern is repeated on the cylindrical and slightly curved platforms, with the roof soffit on the platform side, black plinths, and precast concrete paving. All this tiling was replaced in replica during the 2007-08 refurbishment, with the exception of that on the far side of the tunnel walls. Yellow surrounds mark the tunnel entrances.

Fixed timber benches line the platforms, with station roundels with black edgings and 'WAY OUT' signs above. The arrows have four feathers, indicating they are contemporary with the station, as are the arrows on the direction boards towards Cockfosters and central London. Staff letter boxes, water and fire service points (while not themselves included in the listing) are outlined in the coloured slip tiles used elsewhere. Bronze doors are positioned at the ends of the platforms, and on the eastbound platform is a former bronze sales point.

The pair of pylons, four lamp posts, and the shops at numbers 1 to 8 (consecutive) Station Parade and number 1 Chase Side, to the west of the station, are all listed separately.

Historical Context

Southgate Underground Station was approved in 1930 and opened in 1933 on the northern extension of the Piccadilly Line. This seven-mile extension beyond the original terminus of Finsbury Park required a parliamentary act and was intended to serve the enlarging suburban areas in north and west Middlesex. The first section of the line, from Finsbury Park to Arnos Grove, which included the stations at Manor House, Turnpike Lane, Wood Green, and Bounds Green, opened on 19 September 1932. Southgate and Enfield West (now Oakwood) followed in March 1933, and the terminus at Cockfosters opened on 31 July 1933.

The London Passenger Transport Board was created on 1 July 1933. The Piccadilly extension line stations were commissioned by Frank Pick (1878-1941) and designed by architect Charles Holden (1875-1960), who together created an architecturally distinguished group of buildings. Pick worked for London Underground from 1906 to 1940, throughout his career striving to promote high-quality, well-detailed design that he believed was essential for serving the public. Holden was a notable Arts and Crafts architect in the Edwardian period who uniquely made the transition to modernism, following a 1930 study tour (with Pick) of continental railway stations and modern architecture. Together they firmly promoted functionalist modernism for the new station designs, taking advantage of newly available materials and adopting the continental and American idea of a primary concourse as circulation space, with the ticket hall as the dominant element of the new buildings.

The station was restored in the 1990s and again in 2007-08.

Significance

Southgate station is of more than special architectural and historic interest for several reasons. Its bold massing is demonstrated by the low circular tiers of the station building with central finial and the effective counterpart of the soaring pylons with their integral circular seats and Underground logo. While characteristic of Holden's work, the station is also a unique design. The ball finial motif was adopted from the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, which would effectively influence British architecture for the next 20 years as a primary source of the Festival of Britain style.

The station demonstrates logical planning as an integrated bus and underground transport interchange in an effectively grouped ensemble, further identified as a transport circus by the curved routes defined by the buildings and the landmark pylons with signage. It has group value with these other listed structures.

Attention to detail is evident throughout, with dramatic interiors featuring original elements such as bronze shopfronts, the central passimeter that grows into the main finial, the bronze fluted uplighters (a feature of all these stations), and distinctive signage.

Southgate is one of the best of Charles Holden's fine London Underground stations, designed in partnership with Frank Pick of the London Transport Passenger Board. These stations are among the first and most widely celebrated examples of modern architecture in Britain. The station is also highly significant as an example of the modernist approach to corporate identity, which subsumed architecture, design, and graphics to a common idiom.