Feature History
Last year’s controversy over the proposals to close ticket offices inspired DR JOSEPH BRENNAN to pay tribute to some of the many booking offices that offer historical, heritage or visual significance
The fight to save England’s booking offices from closure was a key issue of 2023.
A consultation into the closure plans attracted a record number of responses (750,000 of them, of which 99% were reported to be objections), containing “powerful and passionate concerns about the potential changes at stations”, according to passenger watchdog Transport Focus.
Both TF and London Travel Watch objected to all proposals put forward by train operators, and the plans to close rail booking offices were withdrawn.
But the shadow of closure still looms. Here, we take a heritage angle, embarking on an England-wide tour of surviving booking offices of note (many still operational, and some no longer in use).
Traditionally, ‘ticket office’ seems to have been the preferred term in America, with Britain using the term ‘booking office’ (as an 1881 edition of The Railway Age Monthly and Railway Service Magazine explains).
Today, the two are often used interchangeably (as the recent ‘Save our ticket offices’ campaign shows), with the term ‘ticketing’ perhaps capturing more of the point-of-sale transaction and issuing of tickets within stations.
‘Halls’ and ‘offices’ are more distinct, with some stations featuring a booking hall as well as a booking office. As Bill Fawcett notes in a 2015 architectural history of British railway stations, booking halls sometimes doubled as waiting rooms and were accompanied by a booking office.
Some stations had multiple offices (and ticket kiosks could also be found in the booking spaces), while in some cases the enclosure of spaces for selling tickets within a booking hall is described as an office. Here, we adopt the descriptors used by the listing authorities in naming and delineating the booking spaces we visit.
Including both 19th- and 20th-century examples, our tour draws out some of the heritage details to enjoy on a visit. But we also have the bigger picture in our sights - what do the designs (and redesigns) of booking spaces have to tell us about England’s transport and cultural story?
There are some impressive terminus examples, but the importance of booking offices in towns and villages must not be overlooked. Indeed, it was in these smaller stations that the campaign to stop closures was most passionately felt last year.
