Holloway Road Underground Station, 6 April 2023. It was built by the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway (GNP&BR) in December 1906 (by then part of the Underground Electric Railways of London, and eventually becoming the Piccadilly Line of the London Passenger Transport Board) and designed by Leslie Green, the UERL’s first Chief Architect from 1902 to 1907, when he became ill with TB, tragically dying in 1908 aged only 33. He was an early user of the American steel framed structure so that his two storey station buildings would be able to have offices or flats built on top at a later date – not achieved in all cases, as at Holloway Road.

Green favoured a British Arts & Crafts style and wanted to adopt a corporate style for the UERL. The exterior of his stations therefore featured ox-blood glazed faience tiles and his ticket office green glazed tiles. His platform tunnels all had the name and signage in tiles and featured coloured geometric tile patterns unique to each station.

Holloway Road is a Grade II listed building and is probably the most complete Green station. Although designed with two lift shafts, initially only one lift was fitted – the other was used for the first experimental escalator in Britain, a frighteningly steep and narrow spiral one designed by the American Jesse W Reno which proved so unsafe that it was never put to public use and was soon removed. It is now in the London Transport Depot in Acton. A case of Health & Safety not going mad.

Pictured is the ticket hall with green tiled pedimented architraves over the three ticket windows with downlighters above. Superb. To see the spiral escalator click below.