London's Historic Railway Stations

Of all the millions who use London's main Railway Termini each year, how many of us ever bother to look at them as a nucleus of buildings or realise what magnificent and accomplished achievements they were and how exciting they are when properly seen and described. They were the work of masters who built with a similar sense of space and awareness of materials as they builders of the great cathedrals, and they still offer us a remarkable taste of the Great Railway Age. The twelve London stations dealt with in this book have never before had the attention or been written about in the way that rolling stock and other railway hardware have. While obviously of prime interest to the railway enthusiast, stations have a far wider interest when their splendours and miseries are fully revealed. There can be no better guide than John Betjeman. His inimitable affection for their unique and solid architectural features and follies - the variety of which it is impossible to imagine until one opens this book - is enhanced by the way he ranges over all the background history of their building and their particular area functions, and for spice he adds his own experiences of steam and electric journeys and adventures. On equality with the text, in fact almost an inevitable part of it, are the 150 superb photographs by John Gay, whose camera records, always dramatically and sometimes humorously, the peculiar atmosphere of stations, and acts, literally, as the eye for everybody.