Euston Arch

They adopted accordingly a design of Mr. Hardwick's for a grand but simple portico, which they considered well adapted to the national character of the undertaking.The arch was supported on four columns, and bronze gates were placed behind them.

Initially it had very little embellishment and no descriptive title until 1870, when the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) incised "Euston" on the architrave in letters of gold.

In 1881, however, the westernmost pier and lodge of the arch structure were demolished to make way for offices, and soon afterwards a hotel extension blocked the view from Euston Road.

[5] A suggestion to move the arch was made in 1938 by the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS), which proposed rebuilding Euston Station according to an American-inspired design by Percy Thomas, a respected architect hired with the help of a loan provided by the government.

Gerald Wellesley and Albert Richardson of the Georgian Group, a conservation organisation, managed to persuade Lord Stamp, chairman of the LMS, that it could be resited on the Euston Road, even though Thomas had insisted that it would not be possible to move it.

[6] In January 1960 the British Transport Commission served the London County Council (LCC) (the local planning authority) with notice of its intention to demolish Euston station.

Conceived in the context of the BTC's plans to upgrade and electrify the main line between Euston and Scotland as part of its Modernisation Programme, the proposal called for the demolition of the entire station, including the arch and the Great Hall, which were both Grade II listed buildings.

[7] In the House of Commons, the MP Woodrow Wyatt tabled a motion demanding that the arch as well as the Great Hall and Shareholders' Room in the station should be retained.

[9] In 1960 the Royal Fine Art Commission, the body responsible for advising on questions of "public amenity or of artistic importance", asked both the BTC and the LCC to consult it.

The BTC referred the commission to the LCC which itself avoided the issue by stating that it was for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to call-in the planning application.

[10] In May 1960 Henry Brooke, the Conservative Minister for Housing and Local Government, was asked to issue a building preservation order in respect of the arch under Section 29 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

The Royal Fine Art Commission contacted the minister in June 1960 expressing their concern for the arch, and again requested to be consulted on the proposals for redevelopment of the station site.

On 12 July 1961, in a written answer to a parliamentary question by Sir Frank Markham,[11] the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, confirmed that he had given approval to the early reconstruction of Euston station which, in his view, was urgent not only because of the electrification programme but also because three 50-year-old Underground lifts had almost reached the end of their useful lives.

[12] The arch's imminent demolition sparked a preservation protest in which Woodrow Wyatt, John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner were prominent figures, and a wider debate about the modernisation of central London.

[15] On 24 October 1961, a group of campaigners including J. M. Richards, the editor of the Architectural Review, went to see Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister, to plead for the preservation of the arch, arguing that if it really had to be moved, that it should be dismantled and re-erected elsewhere.

He revealed that the only place the arch could be put where it would not look "incongruous" was the traffic roundabout on the Euston Road, a possibility which had been considered unsuitable by the LCC.

The company revealed that it would take several weeks to demolish the arch, as the job would have to be done by hand – explosives being out of the question owing to possible damage to the adjacent buildings.

In spite of [...] being one of the outstanding architectural creations of the early nineteenth century and the most important – and visually satisfying – monument to the railway age which Britain pioneered, the united efforts of many organisations and individuals failed to save it in the face of official apathy and philistinism.Frank Valori, a representative of Leonard Fairclough Ltd., later revealed to Lord Esher that he had undertaken the demolition "without pleasure" and had offered to provide the government with an alternative site at his own expense at which he would store the stones of the portico with a view to re-erecting it elsewhere.

In 1994 the historian Dan Cruickshank discovered that at least 60% of the stone from the arch was buried in the bed of the River Lea at the Prescott Channel in the East End of London.

The location of the stones, for which he had been searching for 15 years, had been revealed by Bob Cotton, a British Waterways engineer, who had acquired the material in 1962 to fill a chasm in the bed of the channel.

A section of fluted column was brought up from the river bed, where the stones with "Euston" marked in gold lettering are believed to be located.