
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.