Thursday 24 September 2009

In The 60's One Of London's Landmarks Was Pulled Down,

it was the Euston arch, the was how it looked in 1838, it was the biggest Doric gateway in the world,
and this is where it was, well it appears it might be coming back, thanks to the Euston Arch Trust which has campaigned for the rebuilding of the Greek revival landmark, co-founder Dan Cruickshank said: 'The forthcoming redevelopment of Euston Station provides an unmissable opportunity to reinstate the spectacular Euston Arch', the arch dominated the station from 1838 until 1962 when both were controversially demolished to make way for a modern station,the protests at its destruction attracted prominent figures such as Sir John Betjeman,
a group of students even climbed scaffolding around the arch as demolition of the 4,500 ton structure was due to take place and unfurled a banner pleading for it to be saved, but it was all to no avail and its stones were dumped into a tributary of the River Lea in East London to fill a hole in the riverbed, but British Waterways dredged the channel and managed to salvage the discarded rock on behalf of the Euston Arch Trust as it carries out repair work to the waterways around the 2012 Olympic site,
the whereabouts of the arch's stones, however, were unknown until architectural historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank tracked them down in the Prescott Channel in 1994, since then he and others, including former Monty Python Michael Palin, have been campaigning for the restoration of what has been described as ‘the first great building of the railway age'
but not all of the stones were dumped in the river Lea, some were shipped to a private garden in Bromley, Kent, I know, I used to drive past it twice a day when I commuted to work, not a lot of people know that or where it is, I wonder if Dan Cruickshank does? but in any event it is so nice, as far as I am concerned, that a bit of our destroyed heritage is being replaced.

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