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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Southgate station

Holden's flying saucer of 1933: a circular ticket hall whose flat roof seems to rest on nothing but a ring of windows, with a Tesla coil on top.

TransportModern movementYou can go insideFree

Photo by Sunil060902, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charles Holden opened it on 13 March 1933 on the Piccadilly line's last push to Cockfosters, and it is the strangest of the stations he built along it: a drum of brick, concrete and glass with a wider flat roof floating above a band of clerestory windows, held up, invisibly, by a single column in the middle of the ticket hall, and finished with an illuminated finial like something out of a mad scientist's laboratory. He designed the curved parade of shops and the bus station around it as one composition, and it survives almost whole: the escalators keep their bronze uplighters and the bronze panelling runs through the building. Protected at the higher historic grade. On the day it opened, local residents were given a free return to Piccadilly Circus.

Where
Station Parade, Southgate, N14 5BH
Nearest station
Southgate · 1 min walk

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