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| From the 1860s London had two growing sub-surface Underground
railways, those of the Metropolitan and District. Deep-level ‘tubes’,
in the form of the City & South London Railway and Central London
Railway, opened in 1890 and 1900 respectively. The owners all faced
the same problem - how to maximise the illumination of their gloomy
gas-lit platforms. The only answer until then was masses of plain
white reflective tiling. However, by the turn of the century, with
electric lighting improving all the time, thoughts of something more
than functional came from the world's of art and finance. |
| LONDON has been the home of the largest, most extensive
decorative tiling project ever undertaken in Britain - one that arguably
helped make London's Underground system the most famous in the world.
This site offers a small insight into this innovative graphic explosion
of design and colour. |
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| The focus of the scheme was the completion of three deep-level
tube railways, opened in 1906/7: the Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Hampstead
(now Northern) Lines. Their platform decoration forms the main subject
of this website, where about two million tiles were used at platform
level alone. |
| The tiling of over 90 tube platforms, and associated
passageways, staircases and surface-level booking halls, probably
amounted to the largest single creation of decorative art on public
display anywhere - and arguably the longest and thinnest art gallery
in the world. Each station had a unique coloured pattern along the
entire length of its platforms and some of them are reproduced here
to give just a small flavour of their impact. Platform walls were
tiled to over the height of a man and were up to 350 feet long - in
all some six miles long. For some years, station modernization has
meant that more and more of these polychrome decorations have disappeared
for ever. Now only a minority of the stations give any idea of their
original splendour. For the last quarter of a century, diligent and
punctilious work has captured them, sometimes only days ahead of their
disappearance. Some of them have been assembled here, so that the
dramatic effect can be appreciated in full, as never before. |
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