Patrick Comerford
I was looking at the Victoria Library, a Victorian library near Victoria Station, in a posting yesterday. On the facing street corner site of Buckingham Palace Road and Elizabeth Street, Victoria Coach Station at 164 Buckingham Palace Road is one of London’s most prominent Art Deco landmarks.
With its soaring art-deco frontage, Victoria Coach Station harkens back to a more stylish era in public transport. It was built for London Coastal Coaches, known simply as Coastal, and was designed by the architect Thomas Wallis (1873-1953) of Wallis, Gilbert & Partners.
Wallis originally began working as a grocer’s assistant. He was articled to Sidney RJ Smith (1858-1913), who designed the National Gallery of British Art on Millbank, now Tate Britain, and in his early career worked for the Office of Works designing public buildings.
He was introduced in 1916 to the American engineer and architect Moritz Kahn (1879-1939) and his brother Julius Kahn (1874-1942) who pioneered the ‘Kahn trussed bar’ in the US, a method of concrete reinforcement, and the ‘Kahn daylight system’, a basic structure of concrete column, beam and slab, infilled by glazed units. The system was used extensively in the US, mainly in building large factory buildings.
Wallis was also influenced by American approaches to employee welfare and production need and he transformed design for industry and transport in the 1920s and 1930s. By the early 1930s, Wallis, Gilbert & Partners had become ‘specialists in industrial buildings’, responsible for many outstanding buildings of the inter-war period.
The identity of Gilbert in the name of the partnership has never been established, and ‘Gilbert’ may even have been an invention by Wallis to add an appearance of gravitas to his business.
Wallis considered the symbolic potential of buildings and saw a striking façade as free advertising for a business and its goods. He described his style, which featured large, adaptable spaces behind elaborate Art Deco façades, as ‘Fancy’, seen in his ‘fancy’ factories built in 1927-1935, with coloured glazed ceramic decorations and Egyptian styling.
His notable interwar projects include the first purpose-built recording studios in the world at Abbey Road, St John’s Wood (1930-1931). His other works include the Grade II* listed Hoover factory in Perivale, West London, described by Historic England as ‘possibly the most significant arterial road factory of its date’, although the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner has described it as ‘perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities’ in the area. It was recently converted to residential use.
Wallis’s other designs in the 1920s and the 1930s include the now demolished former Firestone Tyre Factory in Brentford and factories for Wrigley’s chewing gum, EMI, Glaxo, Hayes Cocoa Ltd and Coty Cosmetics.
Wallis drew up his plans for the new coach station in January 1931 in his offices in South Kensington, and it was built by Wilson Lovatt & Sons of Wolverhampton. The new station was formally opened on 10 March 1932 by the Minister of Transport and Liberal MP Sir Percy John Pybus (1880-1935). With parking and loading space for up to 80 coaches, Victoria Coach Station was said to be the largest coach station in the world at the time.
The central tower is recognised for its distinctive art deco style and was admired for its beauty and strength. Its concrete was reportedly made by combining cement with recycled coloured glass. The passenger facilities includied a booking hall, shops and refreshment spaces. The site operated a one-way system, with buses and coaches entering from Buckingham Palace Road and exiting onto Elizabeth Street.
Wallce wanted his buildings to have good amenities for the workers, and a notable feature of his Victoria Coach Station was the staff restaurant, where a good meal could be had for a shilling. There was a 200-seat restaurant with a dance floor, painted pale green and pink with a gold spray.
In addition to the offices for London Coastal Coaches, there were private offices on the upper floors. Wallis, Gilbert and Partners were based there from 1933 until Wallis retired in 1946. Other tenants of these upper floor offices included the architect Wells Coates, decorators Mollo and Egan, and the Inland Revenue.
Although Wallis’s designs were controversial and his approach to architecture was considered unconventional by his contemporaries, he revolutionised how architects considered workers and incorporated their needs and welfare into plans and designs. He is commemorated with a blue plaque at Victoria Coach Station, which he designed, and where the Wallis, Gilbert and Partners had their offices.
Victoria Coach Station was listed as a Grade II building by Heritage England in 2014 for its architectural and historic interest. These days it sends 10 million or passengers to 1,200 destinations across the UK and 400 throughout Europe every year.
Sadly, time has not been kind to the coach station, now almost 100 years old, and it has become a shadow of its former self. The entrance and interior of Victoria Coach Station have been changed over time and it has also lost its decorative faience. Indeed, I might wonder whether its listing may have been too late to save the original fabric of the building.
