Let me venture a disclaimer. I am ill qualified for the task I am now taking on. I was once a teenage commuter in and out of Waterloo daily. Ten or 15 years later I was a commuter once again, this time in and out of St Pancras.
My contact with railways has not been entirely my own doing. A neighbouring vicar had a nine-inch gauge pacific loco in his garden. Wilbert Awdry was good enough to introduce me and my readers to the speed of the City of Truro, the acceleration of the Decapod and other wonders of the steam age. I had a grandfather who drove express trains from Waterloo to Southampton and a colleague who had been a civil engineer with British Rail. But in all those years as a commuter I had been blind to the architecture that had put its stamp on the railway environment.
This was reprehensible. I more readily recognised the place of churches in an urban or rural landscape. It had not occurred to me that railway stations might be equally significant. When I was enjoying a cup of coffee in what had been Melrose railway station or when I was blinking my way out of Newcastle station, ‘the grandest of provincial stations’, after a night in a sleeper, I was similarly unaware of my surroundings.
A 2017 book changed all that. I looked at railway stations with new eyes. I realised that my own home station was something special. I began to understand that stations were similar to churches and indeed cathedrals in providing enduring landmarks in town centres and village localities.. The book was Simon Jenkins’s ‘Britain’s 100 best railway stations’. Things began to fall into place. I had noticed that Southgate underground station was something special. I saw that it belonged to Charles Holden’s series of stations for the Bakerloo line. I began to realise that Brunel’s great class canopies and Tite’s Citadel station in Carlisle had something special about them.
‘I was blind and now I can see,’ said the man we read about in John 9. ‘That’s all very well,’ said the Pharisees, ‘but we know what God does and does not do.’ They in their way were as blind in one aspect of their lives as he had been in another aspect of his.
At the end of the day it is regrettable to fail to see good design round about us. Good design deserves appreciation, whether it concerns Paddington station or Peterborough cathedral. But other failures of understanding are more serious. Sometimes it takes more than a superb essay by a man with a track record like that of Simon Jenkins to open our eyes to what is of lasting worth. Being blind to railway architecture is one thing. Being blind to God’s design in creation and in Christ is something else.
BAPTISM – AT UPTON
Everything about the website of St Mary’s, Upton, Wirral suggests vitality and order. Helpful details are given of services for life events such as marriages and christenings together with pictures of members of the congregation taking part in festivities. Prominent are pictures of adult baptism in the pool inside the church. Leader of a largely female ministry and admin. team is Nikki Eastwood.
AND AT CULLOMPTON
Baptism in a pool inside the church is just one of the events in an outstanding video of activity at St Andrew’s, Cullompton, Devon. Hardly any member of the congregation can have escaped the camera as Ed Hobbs, the Vicar, conducts a viewer around the church. It’s a superb production.
AND LAMBETH
St Mary’s church, Lambeth, London, next door to the Archbishop, has a built-in pool for baptism by immersion. It is approached by two flights of marble steps. The church closed in 1972 and is now a museum of garden history.
AND NEWCASTLE
St Thomas’s church, Newcastle-upon Tyne is undergoing a massive re-ordering. Everything, from the floor upward, is getting a make-over. A central feature of this city church will be a baptistry. Leading the ministry and admin. Team is Ben Doolan. Interviewed by the Bishop of Newcastle, Christine Hardman, he declares himself an out-and-out northerner.
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