Monthly Archives: April 2025

Manchester Oxford Road station

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Oxford Road Station, Manchester

I must have travelled through, or changed trains at, Manchester Oxford Road station hundreds of times since my university days, but although I was conscious of its curious architecture I never got round to photographing it until recently.

Its laminated timber arches bear a passing resemblance to the Sydney Opera House (which is pre-cast concrete).  There’s nothing else quite like it in the British railway system.

The line through Oxford Road has been a vital transport link and a notorious bottleneck from its opening in 1849 to the present day.

It was constructed by the Manchester, South Junction & Altrincham Railway to connect the developing railways south and east of Manchester from what is now Manchester Piccadilly (originally London Road) to the west-facing Liverpool & Manchester Railway, as well as extending rail lines into Cheshire.

The “South Junction” is in fact the 1½-mile viaduct that makes that connection.  Though the viaduct carried double track there was only one through platform at Oxford Road, alongside a west-facing terminal stub, and while the station buildings were renewed in 1876 the platform arrangement remained until a further rebuilding in 1903-04.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the MSJ&AR was piggy-in-the-middle to contentious rivals, the London & North Western and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire (later Great Central) railways, and improvements took decades to accomplish, exasperating the millions of passengers who were obliged to put up with its tired facilities.

After 1922 the MSJ&AR was jointly owned by the London Midland & Scottish and the London & North Eastern railways.  Electric multiple-unit trains improved the comfort and speed of the passenger service in 1931, but the station itself remained unmodernised until 1960.

British Railways ultimately had no alternative but to redesign and rebuild the whole station in 1959-60, despite concerns about the structural condition of the 1849 viaduct.

The solution was to build in lightweight laminated timber, hence the adventurous and spectacular conoid shell structure which provides cover without supporting columns on the curved alignment of the trackbed.

It was designed by the British Railways London Midland Region architect, William Robert Headley.  His other designs for the Region, such as Coventry (1959-62) and Stafford (1961-62), are markedly rectilinear, yet he collaborated at Oxford Road with the furniture designer Max Clendinning (1924-2020).  His other laminated timber structure, the porte-cochère at Crewe station (1963) was replaced after twenty years.

Manchester Oxford Road is an attractive, ingenious, practical structure, deservedly listed Grade II.  Unfortunately, like many post-war innovative structures, it has needed repeated renovation.  It was last refurbished in 2004, and will presumably need further treatment in future.

There’s an excellent detailed description of the station at The Wonderful World of Wood (Manchester Oxford Road station, Greater Manchester, UK) – The Beauty of Transport.

Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, Istanbul

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Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, Istanbul, Turkey

© Richard Miles

When my friends Richard and Janet returned from their first trip to Turkey they had, as usual, lots of travellers’ tales and a couple of phones full of images.

One building they described attracted my attention particularly – the Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, a magnificently Baroque confection looking out over the Golden Horn, the river estuary that makes the shape of a horn as it drains into the Bosphorus.

St Stephen’s is fallaciously described in tourist literature as “the world’s only iron church”, when it may be the only iron and steel prefabricated Orthodox church in the world, an epithet which in no way diminishes its charm or significance.

Under the Ottoman Empire Christian congregations were classified as Greek or Armenian, and the Bulgarian congregation of Constantinople was administered by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy.  The Bulgarians persistently asserted their separate identity, objecting to the imposition of the Greek language in their schools and churches. 

The Bulgarian-born Ottoman statesman Stefan Bogoridi (1775- or 1780-1859) gave a wooden house in the district of Balat for use as a church in 1849.  Replacing it with a purpose-built stone structure proved impossible because of the unstable ground, so when it eventually burnt down it was replaced by a lightweight steel-framed iron church.

Iron churches had been manufactured from the early nineteenth century.  The Liverpool ironmaster John Cragg (1767-1854) used designs by the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) to market architectural components for prefabricated churches from 1812 onwards:  in Liverpool St George’s, Everton and St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth remain, and a third, St Philip’s, Hardman Street, came to light when the building that had enveloped it was demolished.

Architectural iron and steel technology was revolutionised during the nineteenth century.  Even after Bessemer steel became available in the 1850s, wrought iron remained the dominant material in building construction.  Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889) were both built of iron.  The first major steel structure in the world was the Forth Bridge (1890).

There was a short period when iron was employed to clad lightweight steel structures, before the steel-frame construction developed by the Chicago School of architects meant that buildings of any height were not dependent on the weight-bearing capacity of the walls, so the exterior could be clad in any weather-proof material.

The Bulgarian Church in Istanbul is arguably the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century iron churches.  It was designed by the Ottoman-Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur (1854-1935) and the highly detailed exterior was manufactured by the Viennese Rudolph Philip Waagner Company, which was responsible a century later for the Reichstag Dome (1999) and the Great Court of the British Museum (2000).

Only the iconostasis, the screen that partitions the east end of the interior, is wooden:  it was the work of the painter Klavdy Lebedev (1852-1916).  The 131-feet-high tower contains six bells cast in the Russian city of Yaroslavi. 

St Stephen’s was inaugurated on September 8th 1898. 

Its contemporaries include the San Sebastian Church, Manila, (1891) built primarily to resist earthquakes, and St Louis’ Cathedral, Fort-de-France, Martinique (1895) built to resist also to survive hurricanes and fires like that which destroyed its predecessor.

All these buildings are beautiful and fascinating, and Istanbul’s Bulgarian Church deserves a visit alongside the city’s first-order experiences of seeing Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.

Great Court

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British Museum, London: Great Court

The British Museum is an all-encompassing treasure house that has collected art and artefacts since its inception in 1753.  It has eight million individual items from all over the world but the one experience that always takes my breath away is the light, spacious, uncompromisingly modern space that is the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, opened by Her Majesty in December 2000.

The Museum’s acquisitiveness has repeatedly overstuffed its premises and sections of the collections have been hived off to create other celebrated London museums and galleries – the National Gallery (1824), the Natural History Museum (1881) and the British Library at St Pancras (1997).

When the late seventeenth-century Old Montagu House, its original home, could take no more contents the architect Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867) designed a neoclassical structure around a quadrangle, which was constructed between 1823 and 1852.

For its day, it was an ideal base for a national museum with a worldwide collection, but as the inexorable pressure of acquisitions mounted, the central courtyard would sooner or later have to be sacrificed.

In particular, King George IV’s 1823 donation of most of his father George III’s library, added to his grandfather George II’s original 1757 bequest of his Old Royal Library, came with Parliamentary confirmation that the British Museum should act as a legal deposit library, entitled to a copy of every book published in the country.  That’s a lot of books.

After thirty years, Sir Robert Smirke’s younger brother, Sydney Smirke (1797-1877), was commissioned to create the Round Reading Room (1854-57) in the courtyard, and the spaces between his circular bookshelves and the inner walls of his brother’s buildings were filled with three storeys of iron bookstacks which eventually extended to twenty-five miles of shelving.  There were table spaces for 302 readers at a time.

This celebrated, much-loved space was the birthplace of the works of a pantheon of writers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Ghandi, Rudyard Kipling to Virginia Woolf.  Vladimir Lenin signed in under the name Jacob Richter, as if he’d got something to hide.

Indeed the Reading Room dome recalls the Pantheon in Rome, though it’s actually a couple of feet smaller (140 feet).  Its ceiling is made of papier-mâché suspended from the structural cast-iron shell.

The British Museum’s library collections were transferred in 1997 to the new British Library at St Pancras, designed by Colin St John Wilson (1922-2007) and his wife M J Long (1939-2008), leaving the Reading Room without a purpose.

The architects Foster & Partners developed a 1970s scheme by Colin St John Wilson to clear the surrounding clutter of stacks and other structures to create a circulation space serving the entire site.

This required ingenuity, because the Reading Room didn’t have walls:  the bookshelves that readers knew actually backed on to the stacks.

A plain white wall now embraces Sydney Smirke’s great study space, which has been restored and was used first for exhibitions and later as the home of the Museum’s archive.

Brief public tours of the Reading Room have been restarted.  Pre-booking is required and photography is not allowed:  Visit | British Museum.

The pièce de resistance, a triumph of late twentieth-century architecture and engineering, is the tessellated glass roof of the Great Court, designed and fabricated by the Austrian manufacturer Waagner-Biro, which had completed the Reichstag Dome in Berlin in 1999.

The Great Court is light, airy and relaxing, with space to sit down and enjoy refreshments from the café.

It’s London’s answer to I M Pei’s Louvre Pyramid.