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Victoria Road
great white stark (Surbiton station, London, UK)
If you were looking for one of the British mainline railway network’s most significant Modernist stations, then a quiescent south-west London suburb might not be where you would naturally start your search.
Yet it is in Surbiton that one of the most radically modern stations of its day can be found. Surbiton station’s familiarity to its users means that few stop to think about just how startling it is, and today it is not well-known, but it’s one of the few mainline stations which can bear comparison with the great Pick and Holden London Underground stations of the 1930s.
The station’s design is all the more startling given the character of Surbiton itself. Surbiton was (and still is, really) frightfully ordinary, and rather conservative. It’s a place populated by well-heeled commuters in which continuity and tradition are valued over change and innovation. It’s the premise behind the central joke of an extremely popular 1970s BBC television situation comedy, The Good Life. Tom Good and his wife quit the rat race to become self-sufficient in their own house and garden, to the utter horror of their next-door neighbours, the latter of whom are appalled at the challenge to the status quo and, worse, the Goods’ sheer conspicuousness.
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