Croydon Modernism no 3 - the new Old Town fire station

One of the few examples of modern architecture in Old Town is the excellently designed new fire station at the Duppas Hill Lane - Southbridge Road junction.  One end of the shortly to be constructed fly-over will come out at this junction.

 Croydon Advertiser, 28 February 1964.

And indeed the fire station is worth approaching on foot from the flyover, where you can enjoy an elbow-bitingly bizarre pedestrian underpass mini-network. Having delved under the one road, you sort-of emerge, full of wonder, into a fenced-in trench underneath the suspended carriageways. It's as if it finally occurred to someone that having pedestrians milling about on the middle of a roundabout was a bad idea, so cadged them in. You can hear but not see the traffic whirling around as you dip back into another waterfall-mosaic underpass. Not town planning's finest hour.

The new fire station in Old Town is a competently handled building which speaks its purpose.  The administration block, with ancillary blocks beyond and garages for the fire tenders at the side, hold together well as a complete building.  Old Town will be brought to life if further development is carried out: the fire station, with the tall flats beyond, has given the area a tonic.

Article credited to 'A STUDENT OF ARCHITECTURE who writes regularly for The  [Croydon] Advertiser', I forgot to write down the date (but early '60s)

Those ancillary blocks, a range of low-rise offices, are standard late 50s-early-60s boxiform fare with generous strip windows and coloured spandrels, which gives a rather Harlow New Town feel to this part of Croydon Old Town. The garage consists of eight orthogonal arched bays, with runs of clerestory skylights and suitably bright red folding doors.

Strangely, neither of these old newspaper articles mention the tapering, rocket-like drill tower which, gleaming above the garages, is the fire station's most striking feature. This tower presumably enabled the fire fighters to train for tight stairwells in the speculative office blocks appearing in the town centre; and, plausibly, for any alien craft which might be found ablaze in space-age Croydon. The rocket tower is now topped with a cell mast, which fittingly evokes the telecommunications glamour of the contemporaneous BT Tower back in central London.

Cutely, this futuristic obelisk has been joined by a more recent pitched-roof mock up, for practising on all those Brookside-Bovis vernacular houses which came after Modernism.

Despite this minor and incongruous addition, the fire station is in remarkably good nick. This brings me back to another Advertiser clipping, from the official opening back in the early 60s (I really must write down the dates of these articles).

Looking at the building now, I reckon that this fire station comes the closest to how a brand new Modernist building would have looked like in 60s Croydon. Given the increasing threat that (re-)re-development brings to mid-century Modern buildings, and how many great designs are looking tired and distinctly unloved, it's refreshing to be able to see how bright and clean and novel these buildings were. It's a little bit of how the future used to look.