Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power. Karen Farrington
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1863 the notion of one mighty central terminus for all the capital’s railways was once again rejected by a House of Lords Select Committee, anxious that no more housing in an already overcrowded city should be sacrificed for the sake of the railways. The following excerpt from Hansard reveals the extent of railway schemes laid before the Select Committee the following year.
We found that those schemes were of vast magnitude for so limited an area as the metropolitan district. The new railways proposed to be constructed within that area extended over a length of 174 miles in the aggregate, and involved the raising of capital to the amount of about £44,000,000. It was, of course, impossible all that mileage could be constructed, or all that capital expended for metropolitan railways, because many of those schemes were necessarily competing schemes. At the same time, my Lords, it must be confessed that there was sufficient cause for considerable alarm among the holders of property in the metropolis, and much reason to apprehend that, if any large number of these lines were sanctioned, the traffic of many important public thoroughfares would be seriously interfered with during the construction of those works. Those schemes, as they came before us, included the construction of no less than four new railway bridges across the Thames, two of them – and these of a very large size – being intended to cross the river below London Bridge.
© National Railway Museum/SSPL
Construction of the Arches of St Pancras Station's Cellars, London, by J .B. Pyne, c. 1867.
There was by now an undercurrent of public feeling against the railways as they deposited viaducts, tracks and tunnels at will, altering the complexion of the capital forever. London, perhaps more than any other city, was almost entirely remodelled by the converging transport companies.
As early as 1864 the satirical magazine Punch asked plaintively: ‘Are there no means of averting the imminent destruction of the little beauty that our capital possesses?’ The article went on to say that, given the railway frenzy existing at the time, St Paul’s Cathedral might just as well become a railway station.
The graveyard at St Pancras was removed for the sake of the railway. A coaching house that escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666 – in which about 13,500 homes and 87 parish churches were razed to the ground – lying in the shadow of St Paul’s was destroyed in 1875 to make way for lines and stations. Hundreds more buildings were flattened to make way for tracks, including Sir Paul Pindar’s house in Bishopsgate. Pindar, an ambassador to the Ottoman court for James I, owned a fine house with one of the most distinctive frontages in Victorian London that likewise escaped the Great Fire. In 1890 the house’s distinctive Jacobean façade was dismantled in favour of an extension to Liverpool Street Station. Fortunately, the wooden structure found a new home in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
London’s population was being squeezed into its outer reaches. Those houses that remained were smeared with smoke as steam trains brought dense and eerie pollution into the city. Only the very rich could resist the onward march of the railways.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE LONDON TERMINALS
1836 London Bridge Station was built in primitive form for the London & Greenwich Railway and was soon subject to a rebuild.
1837 Euston, operated by the London & North Western Railway.
1838 Paddington, still bearing the hallmarks of its designer Brunel, built to receive Great Western Railway services.
1841 Fenchurch Street, the smallest of the railway terminals in London, originally constructed for the London & Blackwall Railway, and rebuilt 13 years later in time to accommodate the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway. It was the site of the first station bookstall.
1848 Waterloo Bridge Station, as it was called, opened after being linked to the busy outer-city satellite at Nine Elms for the London & South Western Railway.
1852 King’s Cross opened for the Great Northern Railway on the site of smallpox and fever hospitals. It was designed by Lewis Cubitt along remarkably simple lines save for an Italianate clock turret. A hotel was built to accompany the station and opened two years later.
1858 Victoria, named for the nearby street, was the home of London, Brighton & South Coast Railway trains, although it was soon popular with other companies.
1864 Charing Cross, arguably the only London station to breach the West End, opened with six wooden platforms for what was initially a limited service to Greenwich and mid-Kent.
1866 Moorgate came into being in an extension to the Metropolitan Line and only became a main-line terminus in 1900.
1868 St Pancras was built by the Midland Railway after it found King’s Cross too expensive. It became remarkable for the railway hotel’s vast Gothic frontage.
1874 Liverpool Street was built to replace Bishopsgate Station, being closer to the city centre and more user friendly.
1899 Marylebone was home to the final main line to enter London, the Great Central, but plans by chairman Sir Edward Watkin to continue expansion with a channel tunnel were never realized.
© National Railway Museum/SSPL; © National Railway Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library
Charing Cross Station, London, c. 1864, a coloured chromolithograph by the Kell brothers. The station was designed by John Hawkshaw and was the London terminus of the South Eastern Railway.
Railway company managers were powerful people but some left a more distinguished legacy than others.
Sir James Allport spent a career in railways, ending up as the boss of Midland Railways for 27 years, excepting a short spell spent at a shipyard in Jarrow. He was also instrumental in forming the Railway Clearing House, which managed payments between different companies to cover journeys spanning several networks. After his retirement as manager in 1880 he became a director of the company.
Under his leadership, Midland Railway services expanded and the grand station at St Pancras was opened. But he is best remembered for transforming the journeys of third-class passengers. He was the first to realise that, rather than being a hindrance to the railway company, third-class passengers were in fact a valuable asset.
Accordingly, he made third-class carriages much more comfortable and, from 1872, included third-class carriages on every train, charging passengers a penny per mile for a journey. When some angry passengers boycotted Midland Services he scrapped second class, at the same time lowering first-class fares. The result was better revenues for the railway company and a more equitable system of travelling.
© National Railway Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library
Seats for Five Persons by Abraham Solomon (1824–1862).
For his services to cheaper travel Allport was knighted in 1884. But in his later life it wasn’t the gong at the forefront of his mind:
If there is one part of my public life on which I look back with more satisfaction than on anything else, it is with reference to the boon we conferred on third-class travellers. I have felt saddened to see third-class passengers shunted on to a siding in cold and bitter weather – a train containing amongst others many lightly-clad women and children – for the convenience of allowing the more comfortable and warmly-clad passengers to pass them. I have even known third-class trains to be shunted into a siding to allow express goods to pass.
When the rich man travels, or if he lies in bed all day, his capital remains undiminished, and perhaps his income flows in all the same. But when the poor man travels, he has not only to pay his fare, but to sink his capital, for his time is his capital; and if he now consumes only five hours instead of ten in making a journey, he has saved five hours of time for useful labour – useful to himself, his family, and to society. And I think with even more pleasure of the comfort in travelling we have been able to confer