Arnos Grove

Arnos Grove is an above-ground Piccadilly line station in the London Borough of Enfield, opened in 1933 and now Grade II* listed. Its centrepiece is a bold cylindrical brick drum housing the ticket hall — a form Charles Holden refined after a research tour through Scandinavia and the Netherlands studying, among others, the work of Dutch architect Willem Dudok. The commission came from Frank Pick, the Underground's chief executive who sought a unified Modernist identity for the entire network, and Arnos Grove is widely regarded as the high-water mark of that ambition. The influence of northern European rationalism is legible in every detail: the clean horizontal banding, the unornamented surfaces, the confident use of light through the drum. The station remains in daily use as a working commuter stop, yet functions equally as a pilgrimage site for those interested in twentieth-century design.