Ticket Office And Waiting Room At Askam In Furness Railway Station

The ticket office and waiting room at Askam in Furness Railway Station is a group of station buildings, including lavatories, located on the west side of the railway track. Built in 1877 by the architectural firm Paley and Austin for the Furness Railway, the structure is made of rock-faced and ashlar red sandstone with graduated slate roofs.

The ticket office is positioned at right angles to the long, low waiting room, with ancillary rooms and lavatories forming the main range that runs north to south parallel to the railway. The ticket office is a single storey with an attic and features three windows on the platform side. It has a chamfered plinth, tall segmentally-arched windows, an impost band, and a string course above. The windows are fitted with 6-pane casements, and there is a clock in the central window. The gable has a round-arched window beneath deeply overhanging verges with a pendent finial, and an external end stack at the rear has offsets and a cornice.

The platform range has a catslide roof that creates a pentice supported by ten shaped angle brackets, covering a series of windows with glazing bars (some of which are boarded up), a sliding door to the waiting room, and three additional doorways. There are also two corniced ridge stacks. At the north end of the range, there is an elaborate gentlemen's lavatory with a hipped roof that features a tier of louvres supported by shaped brackets. The rear of the building has a high plinth and includes three pairs and two triplets of windows similar to those on the ticket office.

Inside, the waiting room showcases blue and red floor tiling and has a five-bay, king-post, collar-rafter roof. Overall, this building represents an imaginative, varied, and carefully designed work by an important architectural partnership and forms a group with the other station buildings.