West Acton Tube Station

Whilst clearly part of the family of buildings designed by Charles Holden for London Underground, this station was in fact designed in the late 1930s by Australian born architect Brian Lewis. Like many practitioners of early forms of modernism in Britain, Lewis was part trained at Liverpool School of Architecture, where Charles Reilly was a champion of the emerging styles. Lewis was chief architect to the Great Western Railway. Although built by the GWR, West Acton was amongst the New Works Programme for the London Underground that ran between 1935 and 1940. At this, the western end of the Central Line, most designs for the integration of existing stations and lines into the main underground system were completed by 1938. The construction programme was halted by the Second World War and subsequently many of Lewis' designs were modified by other architects. At West Acton, the station was completed to Lewis' original scheme. The building is noted as 'displaying confident handling of volumes and a dainty modernist style that was to come to the fore at the Festival of Britain', [1] effectively an early Festival Style aesthetic and a sign that preceding modern styles were already being amalgamated with British architecture. Lewis left Britain in 1946 to take a post as Professor of Architecture in Melbourne and went on to design the masterplan for the National University in Canberra.

[1] https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1400997?section=official-listing