Welcome back to Londonist: Croydon Edit. Piloted by Londonist editor and Croydonian Will Noble, it's about all things in the borough of Croydon. Although in this edition, which is exclusively for paid subscribers, we’re taking the train to Victoria…
I hope you all had a great Open House Festival. I kept it largely Croydon this year, but did venture into central London, specifically Victoria, because there was one particularly building I really wanted to get inside. And, of course, it has links to Croydon. In fact it used to have some very literal links to Croydon.
Edging into Victoria station on the train from Croydon, you may well have gazed out of the window and spied a handsome art deco clock tower presiding over the north-west of the station. Who gets to work in a dashing building like this? Since 1984 it’s been home to the 600-odd folk working at the National Audit Office. But the building’s past life is infinitely sexier—that of an Imperial Airways/BOAC/British Airways air terminal.
In 1939, the first passengers stepped into what was then called Airways House—this magnificent wing-like sweep of a Portland stone building on Buckingham Palace Road. With E.R. Broadbent’s gargantuan ‘Speed Wings over the World’ sculpture looming over you above the doorway, you stepped into the foyer, with its thick, fluted, mahogany pillars, and made your way across the rubber floor (the building’s architect Albert Lakeman also worked for the rubber company Dunlop, designing their factory in Buffalo) to the check-in desk. Here, scales built into the floor surreptitiously weighed both you and your luggage.