Architecture

Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.

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Arnos Grove station

A brick drum on a flat slab: the station that showed what the Underground could look like.

TransportModern movementYou can go insideFree

Photo by Chris Sampson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charles Holden opened it on 19 September 1932 at the end of the new Piccadilly line extension, and it is the best of the group he built along it. The plan is as simple as it sounds: a low single-storey block with a circular ticket hall of brick and glass rising out of it, capped by a flat concrete roof that appears to float. Holden had toured northern Europe with Frank Pick of the Underground looking at new buildings, and the debt to Gunnar Asplund's library in Stockholm is obvious once you know. What makes it worth the journey out is that it still works exactly as designed, with the original ticket hall, passimeter and light fittings, and it is free to walk into.

Where
Bowes Road, N11 1AN
Nearest station
Arnos Grove · 1 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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