Peter York

The man who built Britain’s first skyscraper

Charles Holden's 55 Broadway is the symbol – and was, until recently, the headquarters – of the greatest public patron of the modern in 20th century Britain: London Transport

In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish home of Transport for London, which sprouts up from St James’s Park Station — said that the building was important in a number of ways: its architect Charles Holden, the designer of Senate House and a range of breakthrough modernist Tube stations in the 1930s, was increasingly recognised as major. The building’s scale and structure were pioneering for London in 1929. And the sculpture on its otherwise plain façades was by important artists including Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and the young Henry Moore (his first work on a public building and a rare figurative human-in-motion figure).

Most importantly, the whole thing was the outward and visible symbol of the greatest public patron of the modern — modern architecture, art, graphics and design generally — in 20th-century Britain: London Transport. The two people most responsible for this were CEO Frank Pick and his architect Charles Holden.

When Pick met Holden at the Design & Industries Association in 1915, they recognised something in each other — a kind of impatient reforming urge. In 1930, Pick and Holden, these two high-minded provincial non-conformists from very ordinary backgrounds — Spalding and Bolton; both draper’s sons (both declined knighthoods) — went on Frank and Charles’s excellent adventure: a long tour of northern Europe’s fashionable modern architecture. They looked carefully at the newest things in Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Holland. The slow-burn influence of what they’d seen showed up in Holden’s early 1930s Piccadilly line Tube stations, like the startlingly new, circular spaceships of Arnos Grove (based on Stockholm’s daring Public Library of 1928) and Southgate, which landed in suburban Metroland in 1932. Even these modern marvels, however, are faced in red brick, the material of the typical Home Counties arts and crafts house.

Charles Holden said later that his architectural style — which had evolved and radically simplified since he’d first come to London to work for the arts and crafts architect Charles Ashbee in 1898 — had placed him in a ‘rather curious position, not quite in the fashion and not quite out of it; not enough of the traditionalist to please traditionalists and not enough of a modernist to please the modernists’.

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