When William Tress, architect to the South Eastern Railway, designed a station for Battle in Sussex, he decided to do it in gothic. He gave it pointed gables, the odd buttress, rough coursed stone walls and large windows with churchy tracery, all out of respect to the nearby Battle Abbey and field of the Battle of Hastings. You can’t see the station and the abbey in the same view, but Tress still felt the need to travel back centuries for his style. This was in 1852, the year after the Crystal Palace had shown the world the possibilities of building in glass and steel.

Tress was following the usual approach of the railway age. The stations may have been serving the most powerful and world-changing technology of their time, but the most important thing was to evoke some older, safer period, and to make the buildings look domestic. In the 19th century railways were trebly frightful – they caused terrible accidents, devastated urban and rural environments and prompted gigantic financial collapses and swindles – which was all the more reason to make their public faces look like reassuring old houses. Above all, the horses were not to be frightened, those beasts that were being put out of work.

William Tress’s gothic 1852 station at Battle. Photograph: English Heritage

So this iron monster was decorated with Jacobean manors, medieval vicarages, Italianate villas, baroque cupolas, a quattrocento arcade in Cambridge, a homage in Huddersfield to the stretched facade of the nearby stately home of Wentworth Woodhouse. This habit went up to the biggest termini, such as St Pancras in London, whose polychrome bespired front looks like the city hall of a fantasy metropolis that the middle ages themselves never got round to creating. A hundred years of critics, from Augustus Pugin to Nikolaus Pevsner via John Ruskin, reviled these stations’ pretension and deceit. “Railroad architecture,” said Ruskin, would have its own dignity “if it were only left to its work. You would not put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.”

All of which makes train stations the archetypal Victorian product, bold and dissimulating at once. Railway magnates were happy to rip through cities and landscapes, make thousands homeless, stink and pollute, but God forbid that anyone approaching their buildings should think that anything had changed. It was like clothing piano legs, but on an urban scale and more productively: hypocritical though they may be, stations like Battle and St Pancras are delightful.

The neoclassical facade of Huddersfield station. Photograph: Alamy

And then it turned out that these creations of capitalist and industrial savagery would come to represent the localities into which they had barged. There are few better places to check the pulse of a big city or a country town than its station. The topographic romance of Newcastle starts with its curving station. Brighton’s vaults seem to be breathed upwards by sea air. The atrocious ugliness of the postwar Birmingham New Street tells you something about the pragmatism of Brum.

The St Pancras Renaissance London hotel, frontispiece of St Pancras station. Photograph: Alamy

They became cultural and social entities. They forced the synchronisation of previously fractional time zones – Barrow, for example, was 13 minutes behind London – and were points of connection with the telegraphic systems that ran along the tracks. They grew hotels, and defined the class system with segregated waiting rooms, eating places and sometimes entrances. For better or for worse, WH Smith opened its first station outlet in the year of revolutions, 1848. Stations became settings for art and films: William Powell Frith, Brief Encounter.

They eventually became objects of nostalgia and preservation, when the energies that sustained them deflated: the loss in 1961 of the Grecian propylaeum known as the Euston arch was the defining defeat of the conservation movement, the later rescue of the nearby St Pancras its defining victory. Hence a new survey from English Heritage, The English Railway Station, written by the historian and scholar of stations Steven Parissien, which informatively recounts their rise and fall.

He describes how competing railway companies would define themselves with architectural styles, rather than the rivalrous repulsive graphics they use now, which contributed to the proliferation of gothic, Italianate, baroque, Tudor and Greek. He tells how the inability of these companies to cooperate led to the wasteful proliferation of non-connecting stations in close proximity to one another. In other European countries and the US, city governments insisted that everyone use the same unified central stations, but in Britain commercial interests were too strong for this seemingly sane idea.

The futuristic station at Southgate, built in 1933. Photograph: English Heritage

Parissien’s book favours smaller places such as Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Boxhill and Westhumble, and the local “chalet” stations created by Brunel, over the grand termini. He describes the Bethlehem stable of ferroequinology, the small brick house adapted to become the world’s first station by the Stockton and Darlington Railway. He tells how in the early days goods were seen as more profitable than passengers, and stations were therefore provisional and modest. He later moves beyond the heyday of stations into the 20th century to include such things as the art deco wonder of Surbiton station and London Underground’s Southgate of 1933, whose illuminated low cylinder makes it into a UFO before its time. You feel Parissien’s pain at the destruction of redundant buildings and his lack of enthusiasm for later works, like the “dismally uninspired” Telford Central of 1986. As it happens, British Rail’s architects’ department produced some not bad late-Miesian stations into the 1980s, but you don’t get much sense of them here.

It is, however, the 19th century that dominates, which was not only the boom time for railways but also the era about which Britain has long had the most complicated feelings. It is our daddy century, a time of exceptional power and creation, but also blatantly wrong and absurd in crucial respects. Train stations capture all of this, so their fascination endures. Parissien quotes one James Scott as saying in 1911 that “no one visits railway stations to look at architecture”. Now they do, and then they write books.

The English Railway Station is published by English Heritage, £25. To buy it for £20 click here