The enduring appeal of Arnos Grove station

It's not in Whitehall nor Westminster; not on the central London tourist trail. Instead it’s ten miles away, on the wrong side of the North Circular, an obscurity in the suburbs, rarely visited for its own sake. But Arnos Grove Tube station is one of the masterpieces of 20th century British architecture – and this week it celebrates its 90th anniversary.

Until September 1932, the northern branch of the Piccadilly line ended at Finsbury Park. Then five new stations were built: Manor House, Turnpike Lane, Wood Green, Bounds Green and, finally, Arnos Grove, all commissioned by Frank Pick and designed by Charles Holden. Suddenly it was only 20 minutes to Leicester Square.

Pick was the leader of the then new London Transport and had a vision of creating a coherent visual identity for the brand, encompassing everything from the typeface on their famous posters to the trains and their stations. Central to the latter was Holden, previously best known for the Oscar Wilde grave in Père Lachaise in Paris and dozens of cemeteries for the fallen of the Great War. The pair had travelled to the continent together to check out new work by the likes of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus before embarking on a spree of new station-building in London – and Arnos is widely regarded as their masterpiece.

Rowan Moore, architecture critic at The Observer, said: ‘It’s an exemplary piece of design showing the strong influence of modernism but also with some lingering notes of classicism. There is a great generosity of space and a lightness and elegance about it. It says that ordinary working people – the people who would be using the station daily – were entitled to have good design.’

Architecture writer Owen Hatherly said: ‘Arnos Grove is the finest monument to London Transport's 1930s attempt to integrate art, design, architecture and transport to give the metropolis a unified aesthetic, but it's also an incredibly fine work of architecture in its own right, serene and elegant even in rush hour.’

The station’s star status is nothing new – as long ago as 1943 Nikolaus Pevsner in An Outline of European Architecture placed it alongside the great buildings of Europe dating back two millennia, calling Arnos and its Piccadilly peers ‘suburban station buildings as good as any on the continent, functional in plan and restrained in elevation’. 

But perhaps its greatest champion was critic Jonathan Glancey, who selected it as one of his ‘12 great modern buildings of the world’ alongside the Empire State Building and the Sydney Opera House, calling it ‘a modern fanfare for the common man’. It was no doubt under Glancey’s influence that in 2007 the Guardian gave readers a large fold-out poster of Arnos as a free gift – surely the only occasion in media or station history such an honour has been bestowed.

Pick and Holden’s 1930s stations were mostly new extensions on existing lines – the eastern end of the Central, the southern end of the Northern (including Colliers Wood, where there’s a pub named after Holden) and both ends of the Piccadilly. These extensions didn’t just help create the new suburbs – providing the burgeoning commuter class the means to get to work from their then-new homes – they also became emblematic of them. They created the idea of metroland, giving the new suburbs purpose by linking them to the city centre. ‘Come in to play!’ as the slogan of Paul Nash’s 1936 poster had it, extolling the Tube as the key to the suburban lifestyle.

The first road to the right after Arnos station is Brookdale, the childhood home of one Paul Dacre. His upbringing there arguably informed his view of what middle England was and how it should continue to be – which he later expounded to considerable effect in editing the Daily Mail. Brookdale and dozens of other streets like it were built as a consequence of the trains coming. And the ambitious modernist architecture used by Mount seemed to influence the developers: there are regular iterations of art deco as well as timber frames.

Whitehouse Way, where I live, just down from Brookdale, was built in 1935. Standard semis were sold for £750. It was another £50 for the more chic art deco version with a flat roof.

A second expansion of the Piccadilly line followed just six months after the opening of Arnos, pushing the new suburbs out further still – to Southgate, Oakwood and Cockfosters – into what had hitherto been mostly open countryside. The arrival of the North Circular in the same year, 1933, sped development further; local populations would almost double by the end of the 1940s.

A celebrated contemporary to Arnos was Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool at London Zoo (1934). But while the pool closed to penguins 18 years ago, deemed no longer user-friendly, the station continues to be used almost completely as originally designed. And so, penguin-like, we commuters still shuffle down the stairs and along the platforms just as our grandparents may have done between the wars. There is, of course, routine fury for contemporary users at the unreliability of the Piccadilly line, but it’s offset by joy at being late for work in such a sublime space.

This autumn the car parks that surround the station on both sides are to be developed into flats of up to seven storeys. The inspector who approved the planning application insisted this would ‘enhance the setting’ of the Grade II*-listed station. We shall see.

For now, for me, it remains magnificent, at its finest lit up at night like some hovering 1930s flying saucer – if flying saucers were flanked by number 184 buses. It would be nice if more people came to see it. It’s only 20 minutes from Leicester Square.