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The Inbetweeners: Ealing Common and Hounslow West

25/2/2026

Ealing Common Underground Station. Image from Bright Underground Spaces.

Charles Holden’s first set of stations for London Transport, the Northern Line extension to Morden in 1926, introduced a fresh new look for the underground, based on a three part screen facade. This design could be adapted for a variety of sites, easily fitting into an existing shopping parade or onto a street corner in the already built-up sprawl of London. The 1930s saw the tube rapidly expanding, stretching beyond the inner suburbs into Middlesex and Essex. This meant station buildings could sit in larger plots, not having to fit in with the existing suburban scene, and so could be more expansive in form. This led to some of Holden’s and the underground’s most celebrated stations; Sudbury Town, Arnos Grove, Southgate and a number of others. But in between the first Northern Line stations and the “brick boxes with concrete lids” as Holden called them, were a couple of stations that bridged the gap from one design to the other; Ealing Common and Hounslow West.

Ealing Common station under construction. Image from London Transport Museum.

The stations opened in 1931 as part of the Piccadilly Line extension westwards from Acton Town towards Hounslow and South Harrow, both replacing earlier station buildings. Ealing Common was opened on March 1st, with Hounslow West following on July 5th. Holden adapted the flexible screen facade from the Morden extension,into a fully fledged station building, using a seven-sided double-height ticket hall as the main structure. Around the seven sides of the upper portion of the ticket hall are rectangular windows with an underground roundel on six of them. The station also had a blue enamel name sign which went around the edge of the roofline (now removed at Ealing Common), and the first use of an illuminated name sign at the front of the station, an integral feature of later stations. Like the Northern Line stations, Ealing Common and Hounslow West were built in Portland stone, with concrete roof slabs. At these new stations Holden added a granite finish at ground level, intended to prevent wear and tear from passenger flow.

The ticket hall ceiling of Hounslow West station. Image from London Transport Museum.

At street level were shop units, and Hounslow West also had a drop off and pick up area for cars, a useful feature in the suburbs where the car was gaining ascendancy. The interiors of the stations used the seven sided structure to create a heptagonal shape in the ceiling. At Hounslow West this was adorned in the centre by a hanging light fixture designed by Basil Ionides. This shape was echoed in the ticket hall floor with the use of polished cement St James's tiles. Ionides also decorated both ticket halls with a dado rail in tile and terrace and a wall frieze in geometric tiled patterns, pink and yellow at Hounslow and green and grey for Ealing.

Ealing Common ticket hall interior. Image from London Transport Museum.

The platforms featured the curved concrete canopies developed by London Underground chief architect Stanley Heaps, and later used at other Piccadilly Line stations. Hounslow West had its platform area redeveloped in 1975 for the extension to Hatton Cross and beyond to Heathrow. As Ealing Common and Hounslow West opened, Holden had already moved on to ‘purer’ geometric forms, using the rectangle, square and the circle at stations like Sudbury Town (which also opened in 1931) and Arnos Grove (which followed in 1932). Both Ealing Common and Hounslow West were listed in May 1994, with the listing notes for the latter commenting on its “richness and completeness…as well as its unusual form”, and both still serve the Piccadilly Line 90 years after opening.

Ealing Common and Hounslow West are featured in our London Tube Stations 1924-61 book, available HERE

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Anatomy of a House No.25: Sewell's Orchard, Tewin

12/2/2026

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Anatomy of a House No.25

Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire
1936
Mary Crowley

The Garden front of the center house of the three at Tewin.

The work of female architects was few and far between in interwar Britain. We have covered the house designed by artist Dora Gordine in Kingston on a previous Anatomy of a House blog, and there were others such as Justin Blanco White, Norah Aiton and Betty Scott. One female architect who would prove to be the most influential of those who practiced in the 1920s and 30s was Mary Crowley. Her work designing schools in the post war years, alongside husband David Medd, first for Hertfordshire County Council and then for the Ministry of Education, would help transform schools from the regimented Victorian-era layout to a more flexible, child-centred approach. But it is her house design we are interested here, and we will explore the group of three houses she designed at Sewell’s Orchard in the village of Tewin, Hertfordshire

Crowley was born in Bradford on 4th August 1907. Her father, Ralph, was the Chief Medical Officer for the Ministry of Education and was a Quaker, two strong influences on Mary’s future career. Mary attended the progressive Bedales school in Hampshire, a coeducational secular establishment where Mary would become Head Girl. She later attended the Architectural Association, where she met other young women studying architecture such as Judith Ledeboer, Jessica Albery and Justin Blanco White. After passing her qualifications, Crowley worked in the office of Louis De Soisson in Welwyn Garden City, where her family had moved in 1921. It was nearby that Crowley would design and build a terrace of three houses on a plot of land bought by her parents. Mary’s mother thought the plot of land was the right one for them, especially as Sewell had been a name in their family.

The three houses seen in their landscape.

The three houses that Mary designed were to house her parents, her sister Elfrida and her husband Cecil Kemp and the Miall family, all Quakers. Kemp was the head architect for the Miners Welfare Commission and the National Coal Board, designing modernist-influenced pithead baths at sites such as Snowdon Colliery in Kent. Kemp, and Mary’s friend from the AA, John Brandon Jones, assisted Crowley with the drawings and details of the house, but they were all her own design. Mary had taken a trip to Scandinavia in July 1930 as part of her architectural studies, and this proved to be influential on the design for Sewell’s Orchard.

A plan of the houses in their grounds

Most modernist houses built in Britain up to that point took their influence from the International Modern style as seen in the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other heroic figures from the continent. Crowley's houses however took their cue from a gentler strain of modernism as found in Northern Europe, with less emphasis on white walls and monolithic concrete and more on brick, tile and timber. The three houses are largely separate, with two connected by their garages, with mature trees and a vegetable garden in the shared grounds behind. The houses have sloping, monopitch roofs finished in blue pantiles with the facades on the southerly garden side having overhanging eaves. The windows in the houses were constructed from metal casements with wood frames. The bricks are a mixture of yellow local stock from nearby Hertingfordbury and blue brick used for a plinth. The houses were arranged with open plan ground floors with the dining and living areas flowing into each other.

The living room of the second house. Image from RIBApix.

Crowley worked with Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger from around 1934, assisting him as he set up his practice in England. She worked on the terrace of houses at Willow Road in Hampstead, which would be completed in 1939 and be home to Goldfinger and his wife Ursula throughout the rest of their lives. That project has some similarities in approach with the Tewin scheme, with both sets of houses showing how modernist design can fit into their environments and use local materials. The pair also produced a design for a prefabricated nursery school in the mid-1930s, something that wasn’t taken up at the time, but would prove influential to both of them.

In 1941 Crowley joined the education department of Hertfordshire County Council under the leadership of Chief Education Officer John Newsom, who wanted to bring the county's educational buildings into the modern world, and became part of the newly formed architects department in 1946. As part of the department, Crowley helped produce innovative designs for new schools, using prefabricated units to build schools quickly, and including commissioned artworks and landscaped grounds in the designs. A good example of Crowley’s work for Herts is Burleigh School in Cheshunt, built from 1946, and designed with David Medd and Bruce Martin using a modular system to enable quick construction.

5 Pennyfeathers Lane, Digswell (1954) David and Mary Medd. Image from RIBApix.

She married Medd in 1949, who she had met whilst working for Goldfinger, and the couple would work for Herts and live in a house they designed together in the village of Digswell in 1953. The house on Pennyfeathers Lane also takes its inspiration from Scandinavian modernism, with its single storey, stock brick structure, formed of two halves connected by a covered walkway. The couple then went to work for the Ministry of Education overseeing the design of the new schools throughout the country, such as Woodside Jr School in Amersham (1957). The houses at Tewin were listed in March 1982, recognized as a pioneering group of houses,with a design “which would not have appeared out of place thirty years earlier”. The Medd's house in Digswell was also listed in April 2007, with the listing noting its unchanged interior and careful integration in the landscape. Mary Medd had passed away in 2005, with her husband David dying in 2009.

Burleigh Primary school, Cheshunt (1948) Herts County Council. Image from RIBApix

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The Archer

4/2/2026

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Eric Aumonier putting the final touches to The Archer statue, 1940. Image from London Transport Museum.

The casual commuter travelling along the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line may notice something a little unusual as they pass through East Finchley station. Come rain or shine, a determined looking figure points his bow and arrow south towards the centre of London and beyond to the line’s terminus at Morden. The Archer sculpture, poised on the eastern wall of the station just above the south bound track, was created by artist Eric Aumonier for the station which had been rebuilt from 1939.

The sculpture and the station rebuild were part of the ill fated Northern Heights programme, a plan to upgrade and extend the northern branches of the Northern Line. The Edgware branch was to be extended into Hertfordshire, and the Barnet branch was to have a series of station upgrades. The rebuilding of East Finchley station was the only part of the programme that came to pass, thanks to budget restraints and the outbreak of war in 1939.

The Archer seen acroos the platforms of East Finchley Station. Image from London Transport Museum.

The new building replaced the 1867 station which was built for the Great Northern Railway, with the rebuilt station primed for the underground which had been slowly making its way northwards. The initial plan by Leonard Bucknell and Ruth Ellis was revised by Charles Holden, who had been busy with his University of London scheme, another project which was curtailed, leaving us with Senate House.

The new station, completed in 1941, did not have the straightforward clarity of Holden’s earlier work along the Piccadilly Line. Partly this is due to the awkward nature of the site, with the station perched on a railway viaduct. However, at platform level, the streamlined platform shelters and glass bridge over the tracks containing offices, reflects the “Speed, Light and Modernity” that Holden and London Transport supremo Frank Pick brought to the network from the 1920s.

The South Wind releif on 55 Broadway, by Eric Aumonier. Image from London Transport Museum.

The symbol of the station and Holden and Pick’s vision, would be the 10ft statue, installed in 1940. Eric Aumonier was born into the family architectural sculpture business, Aumonier Studios, founded by his grandfather, in 1899. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and became the chief artist for the family firm. He would be commissioned to provide a relief sculpture of the South Wind for Holden’s 55 Broadway headquarters for London Transport in 1929, and a couple of years later would design two statues set into relief panels for the Daily Express building in 1932.

The Speed Underground poster by Alan Rogers, 1930. Image from London Transport Museum.

The Archer was created by using beech timber wood fastened around a steel armature framework, before being covered in reclaimed lead sheets. The bow is made of English ash, and covered in copper and gilt. The symbol of the archer was used to represent the former royal hunting grounds of Enfield that Finchley sits on the edge of, as well as nodding to the concerns of speed and accuracy that Holden and Pick were interested in. Of course the archer motif had also been used by Alan Rogers in his 1930 “Speed Underground” poster for the network. By 1955, the wood used for the original statue had already begun to decay, and it had to be replaced at a cost of £1500, a much steeper price than the £245 paid to Aumonier in 1940.

A sketch of the intended Highgate station with the Dick Whittington statue. Image from Bright Undergound Spaces by David Lawrence.

The Archer was just one artwork planned for the Northern Heights stations. A couple of stops down the line at Highgate, Aumonier was asked to design a statue of Dick Whittington for a new station building, but neither were ever completed. The statue at East Finchley, nicknamed Archie, has become a symbol not just of the station, but also of the surrounding area, with the local newspaper also named The Archer. The station building including the platforms and statue was listed in July 1987.

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The Inbetweeners: Ealing Common and Hounslow West

Anatomy of a House No.25: Sewell's Orchard, Tewin

Anatomy of a House No.25 Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire 1936 Mary Crowley

The Archer

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Anatomy of a House No.25

Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire
1936
Mary Crowley