“Station quarter”

The part of the Jičín around the railway station has no official name, and as such cannot properly be called an independent quarter. The arrival of the railway into Jičín (1871) and the construction of a railway station failed to differentiate this part of town, and despite valiant efforts even Čeněk Musil was unable to transform this south-eastern strip into a fully-fledged municipal quarter. 

In the visions of Vladimír Zákrejs and Čeněk Musil it was clear, nonetheless, that this quarter should fulfil two functions. Firstly, it was here, in the area demarcated by the respective roads to Moravčice and Popovice, that industry was to be concentrated. In fact, industry was very slow to develop here, and never exerted any powerful influence over the town’s character. Jičín’s largest industrial enterprise was the Knotek workshop, founded in 1882, which manufactured agricultural machinery and tools (later Agrostroj).

The second function involved establishing a dignified “entrance to the town” for those arriving by train. Whereas Vladimír Zákrejs suggested shifting the station for rail passengers a few hundred metres to the north and creating a new purpose-built terminal, fronted by a rectangular square, along the western edge of which would run a new street connecting to “Station Avenue” (Fügnerova Street), which led into town,  Čeněk Musil’s vision was to provide his “Station Avenue” with a grand prospect, especially by redesigning the intersection with Riegerova Street, where a small square (typified in Musil’s Regulatory Plan) would be developed. Musil did not envisage any need to move the station itself. On the contrary, he intended to make good use of the existing sightline connecting the station with the town centre, offering a view towards one of the town’s dominant features – Valdická Gate. The final design and its ultimate appearance depended on central government decisions regarding the definitive position of the station and especially its required capacity, which in turn depended on the strategy for developing the rail network in Eastern Bohemia. No decision was taken by the end of the interwar period, so that “Station Avenue” and the space fronting the station was never built, and the “entrance gate to the city” remains to this day, from an urbanist perspective, a disjointed mess.