The Sudbury Box

Sudbury Town Undergound Station. Image from RIBApix.

As the Piccadilly Line expanded in the early 1930s, Charles Holden refined his station designs, seeking to find the optimal layout for a suburban commuter stop. He had begun his London Underground programme with the Northern Line stations on the extension to Morden, a group that were largely fitted into an existing urban fabric. For these he used a three part screen of Portland Stone, creating a distinctive and dignified entrance to the underground. With the Piccadilly Line stations at Hounslow West and Ealing Common, he expanded this idea, turning the three part screen into a three dimensional, heptagonal ticket hall. For his next batch of stations, Holden would move on from the Portland Stone screen, and introduce Northern European modernism, mixed with an Arts and Crafts feeling for materials. 

The 1903 Sudbury Town Station. Image from London Transport Museum.

At Sudbury Town, a suburban stop between Wembley and Northolt, Holden produced his first “Sudbury Box”, a form that he would reuse and redesign for the rest of his time producing underground stations. The original Sudbury Town station opened in 1903 as a District Line station on the electrified extension to South Harrow. It was a simple single storey building with a sloping corrugated iron roof and a large name sign on top. Plans for a new station began in the late 1920s, with London Transport chief architect Stanley Heaps preparing a design along the lines of Hounslow West, with a polygonal plan in brick. Holden, who was not employed by London Transport but acted as a consultant, produced an alternative design, with a three storey square building with a central window adorned with a roundel. This proposal was thought to be too large for the site, situated among terraces of suburban houses.

A poster announcing the opening of the new station. Image from London Transport Museum.

Holden and his team of assistants then produced what became known as the Sudbury Box, a double height rectangular ticket hall in handmade Buckinghamshire brick with an oversailing concrete roof. Holden, never one to gild the lily in his words or his designs, called it “a brick box with a concrete lid”. One long side faces the street, with two entrance ways below large vertical window strips, divided by brick piers. The windows face northwards, allowing an even light into the ticket hall throughout the day. Above sits the concrete roof, overhanging to provide an element of protection to passengers from inclement weather. It was poured in situ directly onto the brickwork, and this led to leakages, with later box stations built around a concrete frame to avoid problems.

The station with its neon name sign, now removed. Image from London Transport Museum.

Originally, just below the roof was a neon name sign, with Sudbury Town in red with a blue border. A similar neon sign was also placed on the platform side, unfortunately both were removed sometime between 1939 and 1958 and replaced with simple bronze lettering. Inside the ticket hall featured a timber ticket passimeter, integrated curved kiosk, a clock and barometer on the wall and a ceiling partly painted with light blue paint to contrast with the concrete construction. A bicycle storage unit was also included in the original design, but was converted into a new ticket office and staff accommodation in 1985. ​

The interior of the ticket hall. Image from RIBApix.

The concrete bridge across the platforms. Image from RIBApix.

The platform on the ticket hall side of the station is home to a passenger waiting room, designed with a curved wall to allow commuters to see their train coming around the bend in the tracks. The ceiling of the waiting room was decorated with a new permanent artwork by Lucy Mckenzie in 2020 called Pleasure’s Inaccuries. The opposite platform is reached by a small concrete footbridge over the tracks.  Holden reused the Sudbury Box form for the neighbouring Sudbury Hill , and a number of other new stations along the extension of the Piccadilly Line to both the west and the east. Sometimes it was reusing the rectangular form, either with the long facade to the street (as at Acton Town) or using the shorter end as the entrance (as at Northfields). Even when he introduced the circular into designs at stations like Chiswick Park, Arnos Grove and Southgate, Holden used the same formula of a brick structure with a concrete roof. Sudbury Town was listed in 1971,  along with a number of other aforementioned Holden stations, a recognition of his achievement in changing the look of the underground with his brick boxes with concrete lids. ​

Sudbury Town and many more "brick boxes" are featured in A Guide to Modernism in Metro-Land, available HERE