Curzon Street Station, Birmingham: Past, Present and Future

Introduction

From its origin as the northern passenger terminus of the London & Birmingham Railway (L&BR), the first railway to connect the capital with a major provincial city, to its downgrading as a goods yard, followed by use of part of the site as a Post Office distribution depot and eventually, dereliction, we have seen constant change at Curzon Street over the past 190 years. The decision to site the Birmingham terminal of HS2 there adds yet another layer to the palimpsest.

The research project

In 2014, in view of the enormous changes that were coming to the area, I was asked to provide an assessment of significance and context of the major surviving structure on the site, the architect Philip Hardwick’s celebrated grade 1 listed monumental building of 1838 , often referred to as Curzon Street Station, although it was never actually used as such. It is instead a structure, called ‘the Principal Building’ on Hardwick’s plans, intended to act as a frontispiece to the station beyond.

I also investigated the other remaining structures at the site including the cut-down remains of the screen walls of the Grand Junction Railway (GJR) station, which connected Birmingham to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR) to the north and argued for archaeological investigation to be carried out to see if remains of the stations and locomotive facilities marked on early maps could be traced.

The Principal Building epitomizes just how far railways and the new age they represented had come in merely 13 years since the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) was opened . It marked the completion of the L&BR (Engineer: Robert Stephenson) and was the companion work to Hardwick’s Euston Arch or propylaeum (monumental gateway) which fulfilled a similar symbolic function at the south end of the line. Arguably, now that the Euston ‘Arch’ has been destroyed, it is the greatest monument to the early railway age, not just for what it is but for what it represents.

It is simply on another level to the relatively functional buildings put up by the S&DR in its earliest years. Contemporary descriptions and Hardwick’s drawings (preserved at the National Railway Museum, York) make it clear that it was built as the L&BR company’s offices and boardroom, with a refreshment room on the ground floor. Contemporaries recognised its symbolic role: Arthur Freeling in his Companion to the London & Birmingham Railway, published in 1837, said of the railway ‘This is a Roman Work, conceived in a Roman spirit, and accomplished with Roman perseverance and determination’.

In such circumstances, only a neo-Classical building on a grand scale was appropriate and the giant Ionic order and austere, well-proportioned entrance hall provide the necessary gravitas.

The Principal Building

The building was never used for its intended purpose. Within a year of opening, Hardwick was asked to make alterations to convert it into a hotel and then, in 1841, the L&BR decided to enlarge the hotel portion by adding a north wing by Robert B Dockray, Robert Stephenson’s assistant engineer. The wing’s elevations, with heavy eaves corbelling, did not visually match those of the Principal Building, and, subsequently seen as an afterthought, it was demolished in the early 1980s.

The Principal Building is owned by Birmingham City Council, and its future use is still under discussion.

The Roundhouse

The locomotive roundhouse, which was in use on 12 November 1837, is probably the earliest roundhouse to be constructed in the world. It is nearly two years earlier than the other leading contender, the extant North Midland Railway structure of 1839-40 at Derby. The roundhouse form was never as popular in Great Britain as it was in Europe or the United States where it was practically synonymous with housing locomotives. Circular roundhouses rapidly became obsolete due to the increasing size of locomotives while a turntable failure could paralyse the whole facility. Those early structures that have survived were converted to other uses after a relatively short period, such as inclusion in a works at Derby and Stoke-on-Trent or as a store at Camden. Many, like Curzon Street, torn down in 1860, were demolished.

The roundhouse, like the other structures at Curzon Street, is well-documented with Robert Stephenson’s plans and elevations surviving. These reveal the roundhouse to be an impressive, albeit small, structure making use of a pumping house (which provided the water for the locomotives) with a large water tank above, flanked by two chimneys to form a grand entrance to it. It was evidently done with an eye to architectural effect as it formed a frontispiece to the building in the same way that the Principal Building did to the station. Again, we are reminded of Stephenson’s need to project a sense of grandeur in the works undertaken.

The remains revealed by the excavations, undertaken in 2020 by MOLA Headland Archaeology on behalf of HS2 Ltd, show precise conformity to Stephenson’s plans and consist of the exterior walls, the base of the central turntable and inspection pits under each of the shed’s 16 roads, together with the walls of the 1852 extension at the north end of the building. Also revealed were remains of a tunnel from the canal to the roundhouse to enable coke to be transported from boats to a subterranean vault to supply the locomotives.

As may be seen in the photographs, the surviving parts are extensive and, since excavation, have been reburied with the intention of preserving them, except for a small portion at the north end where the HS2 viaduct requires deep foundations.

The station buildings

Very little remained of the L&BR station buildings as successive redevelopment of buildings on the site had removed much of the archaeological evidence. However, much more was discovered about the GJR station. The lower part of the screen wall of the GJR station remains in place and its possible retention is under consideration.

The buildings behind the screen wall in the part of the site occupied by the GJR station were all demolished following closure of the goods depot in 1966 but surprisingly substantial remains of the foundations of the GJR station were found following extensive excavation. It became clear that much of the station was re-used when it was relegated to goods use. Departure and arrival platforms, vehicle turntables, stables and the booking office were all revealed, along with evidence of later buildings such as two large grain sheds of 1864 and 1868.

The archaeological work gives us a much clearer understanding of how such early buildings functioned as the equivalent station buildings at Euston on the L&BR and the two stations at Liverpool at Crown Street (L&MR) and Lime Street (GJR), all of which were later extensively rebuilt, have never been investigated in this way.

The legacy of Curzon Street

Taken as a whole, we have had in Curzon Street a remarkable opportunity to investigate an early major railway station complex which can be used to inform the future development of the site. We have learnt much about the internal arrangement of the Principal Building and how it was used, how the GJR station was set out, and discovered the largely intact foundations of what is probably the first locomotive roundhouse in the world.

The understanding we have gained from the archaeology and fieldwork at Curzon Street has added substantially to that gained from study of the surviving passenger station and warehouse of the L&MR at Manchester Liverpool Road. In the 1830s, Britain led the world in railway technology, its importance reflected in the neo-classical symbolism implicit in the L&BR’s architecture.

The Curzon Street complex is therefore, taken together with the extant bridges, viaducts and tunnels of the L&BR and with the remaining infrastructure of the S&DR and L&MR, of the highest international significance as primary evidence of a key aspect of industrialisation , arguably the most fundamental driver for worldwide change in the nineteenth century. That it co-exists with the rail technology of the future is a happy coincidence.

Further information

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