The Inbetweeners: Ealing Common and Hounslow West

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