Fast-speed trains are a possibility to revitalise the stations Stephen Bayley

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The railway had no precedent. Its attainment caused a reduction of insanity and dismay. George Godwin, the Victorian architectural reformer, spoke of the unique goodness, whilst Ruskin despaired since it broken nature. And a new construction sort was introduced: the station. At initial they did not even have a name for it. The strange was the Liverpool Railway Office.

If you investigate a Victorian map of London, the good stations see similar to spermatozoa tentatively perspicacious an egg, trailing at the back of them lines stretching in to faraway provinces. It was not possibly to run marks in to the bustling centre of the collateral so, when they were new, Euston and St Pancras, for example, were in steer of fields.

But afterwards these stations catalytically generated their own cities inside of a city. As the slag settled, the transformations began. The railway companies construed their terminals as advertisements as well as places where the sight stops, so each had an pithy character: the no-nonsense practicality of Kings Cross, the pretension fantasy of St Pancras or the vaguely Frenchified Victoria portion the channel traffic of the day.

And as scenes of attainment and departure, a embellishment of hold up itself, the good stations acquired romance. You listen to Rachmaninovs Piano Concerto No 2 and you think of Carnforth, Lancashire, with the steam swirling about a weepy Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. And has there ever been a improved pretension than Elizabeth Smarts By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept?

BACKGROUNDAdonis sum 30bn high speed rail networkHigh speed rail network to cost twenty billionEuston: we have an architectural complaint

But in the second half of the last century British Rail and the successors consumed a good estate and longed for a good opportunity. Cack-handed philistines needlessly demolished Eustons Doric physical condition and built a charmless shed. Kings Cross is still defaced by a preposterously clumsy Seventies extension. But the latter abhorrence is, at last, being private in the desirous KX2.0 growth by the designer John McAslan and will be assimilated to the former to have Europes largest ride hub.

The desuetude of hire design in the past 60 years, magnets for vagrants and sell crapola, was a effect of a flitting breakthrough with the fad of air transport and the autocracy of the car. Now these can be seen as delusions: we are solemnly coming the destiny by fast train.

Can the new high-speed stations recapture any of the intrigue so calamitously lost by the pudding-faced suits who ran the old BR? Not if, similar to the airports, they are run as selling malls. Nearly 200 years ago railways altered attitudes to time and space: there is a metaphysics of timetabling. And they altered the figure and character of cities with dauntless and strange architecture. Thats the event again.

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