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© Ms Ruth Povey

IoE Number: 380663
Location: TEMPLE MEADS STATION, TEMPLE WAY (north east side)
  BRISTOL, BRISTOL, BRISTOL
Photographer: Ms Ruth Povey
Date Photographed: 30 June 2001
Date listed: 01 November 1966
Date of last amendment: 01 November 1966
Grade I

BRISTOLST5972TEMPLE WAY901-1/42/292(North East side)

BRISTOL ST5972 TEMPLE WAY 901-1/42/292 (North East side) 01/11/66 Temple Meads Station GV I Railway station. 1865-78. By Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt. For Great Western Railway and Midland Railway. Additional platforms of 1930-5. Conglomerate with limestone dressings. Booking office with forward projecting screens to train sheds. Tudor Revival style. 2 storeys; 3-window range, with single storey; 19-window range to right and 17-window range to left. Booking office has a symmetrical crenellated front with lower angled side blocks and a central 2-stage tower, and octagonal turrets to the corners; ground-floor 4-centred arches have banded Purbeck marble shafts, a label mould with quatrefoil spandrels, and C20 doors; first floor has 6-light square-headed windows with transoms and cinquefoil heads, stilted labels over panels with quatrefoils over the middle window; a half-quatrefoil arcade below the parapet, with blind lancets to the merlons; the turrets have 2 crenellated courses below pyramidal tops. The tower has an arcade of engaged shafts which pass through the drip to pointed arches, under a large square panel and clock with a trefoil-headed blind arcade above. The shed screens have mullion and transom windows separated by octagonal buttresses, with a glazed cast-iron canopy all around the frontage. INTERIOR: high booking office of brick with octagonal tas-de-charges, but a C20 concrete ceiling; mezzanine with panelled ceiling and 4-centre arched windows with 4 lights and intersecting tracery. The main train shed has a 2-centred trussed roof with traceried arch braces on octagonal corbel shafts and black diaper work under the eaves. Further platforms of 1930-5 by PE Culverhouse have cream terracotta buildings with BRISTOL in glazed letters. HISTORICAL NOTE: the station was a joint venture between the Great Western Railway and the Midland Railway, and was originally called Bristol Joint Station. It had a steep French Empire roof to the tower, which was destroyed in the Second World War, and crockets to the turret tops. The later Temple Meads station uniquely shows, with the Bristol Old Station (qv) at Temple Meads, the growth of a major terminus over more than a century. (Gomme A, Jenner M and Little B: Bristol, An Architectural History: Bristol: 1979-: 348).