The serious scholar of London railway stations will make the historical approach. I unfold the map of my Bradshaw’s Railway Companion for 1841. London shrinks to its size a hundred and nine years ago. I notice that there were fields beyond Regent’s Park and Pentonville and Islington and Hackney. Bethnal Green was in London, Stratford was not. South-east of Bermondsey and south of Walworth there were still fields between terraces and squares, fields that in two years were to be filled with either Italianate merchants’ houses amid laurel shrubbery or with rows of two-storey artisans’ dwellings. Chelsea and Brompton and Kensington still had separate personalities. No railways dared to invade the centre of London. Westminster was even more sacred than the City. There they are on the map, little pink lines, pushing tentatively towards the heart of the metropolis.
These early stations, you must remember, are part of the Georgian age. They are stately but not sumptuous. They are spreading but not soaring. They suggest coaches pulled by iron horses. They are merely another sort of posting inn, not something private, railed off and of another world, which railways have now become. They are the stables of the iron horses and they blend naturally with the drays which clatter over cobbles towards them and the carriages which are unloaded from them and pulled away by horses to the noblemen’s houses of Mayfair. Euston (1837), London Bridge (1838), Paddington (1839) are still on their original sites. Philip Hardwick’s magnificent Doric Arch of granite (1837) at Euston originally had two lodges flanking each side and was visible from the Euston road; the outer pairs of these have been destroyed. It was the gateway not only to all the country houses of the North, but also to a new age. The little iron sheds of the station behind it, so ridiculed by Pugin, are rather an anti-climax. Successive generations have treated this noble arch scurvily and its glory has been hidden by the Euston Hotel. As an essay of the Greek Revival, I consider the arch even now, almost shorn of its lodges, the noblest thing in London, nobler even than St. Pancras church or the British Museum or the Hyde Park Screen. Only one building rivalled it and that was Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge. The L.M.S. made determined efforts to remove Euston Arch altogether. British Railways will probably succeed in doing so, for no one, except you and me, dear reader, yet believes that there can be anything beautiful about a railway station.
London Bridge, now a shattered collection of girders and temporary-looking platforms, has little to show of the old terminus of the Greenwich Railway, that remarkable line carried on 878 brick arches, which was merged with the South-Eastern and Chatham. There is a spacious dignity, created by white brick walls and an arching roof, about the Terminus part of the station whence trains depart over a loop line via the Crystal Palace (Low Level) and Norwood to Victoria, through Italianate stations and brick cuttings and sudden elevations from which one may see the brick Italianate houses of Ruskin’s South London, the prehistoric monsters of the Crystal Palace Park and perhaps glimpse Sherlock Holmes hiding amid the laurels, lamp posts and ivy-clad clinker of a merchant’s private drive.
The severe nine-arched entrance of Paddington has disappeared entirely, though the space in front of where it stood, now under glass, is still known as “the lawn.” But two others of these six early stations survive. Nine Elms, erected in 1838 by Sir William Tite (architect of the Royal Exchange) as the terminus of the South Western Railway, may be found standing, classic, stuccoed and deserted, amid the gas-works, goods yards and factories of that district where strikes seem often to originate. There are no passengers and the more important goods yards seem to be in another part of Nine Elms, so that this building and its platforms are an early station survival. I know of no more complete example except Philip Hardwick’s Great arch at the old and disused terminus in Birmingham of the London to Birmingham Railway.
A smaller London station of this period is now out of reach of the public. It is the Blackwall terminus of the old London and Blackwall Railway. Those frequent and quite empty trains of the Blackwall Railway ran from a special platform of Fenchurch Street. I remember them well. Like stage-coaches they rumbled slowly past East-End chimney pots, wharves and shipping, stopping at black and empty stations, till they came to a final halt at Blackwall station, a handsome building in white brick and Portland stone, from an Italianate design by Sir William Tite. When one emerged there was nothing to see beyond it but a cobbled quay and a vast stretch of wind-whipped water, over one of the broadest tidal reaches of the Thames.
There may be, among the bomb damage, some remains of Bricklayers’ Arms Station (1840), long demoted, like Nine Elms, to a goods depot. Bricklayers’ Arms was known as the “West End Terminus” of the South Eastern Railway and marks probably the first and last time the Old Kent Road has been described as the West End of London.It was a classic structure.
Somewhere, too, among arches, goods yards and stables down a side street off Shoreditch one may still be able to find remains of the old Terminus of the Eastern Union Railway (1839) which was designed by Sancton Wood. It was the precursor of Liverpool Street and its architect was a pupil of Sir Robert Smirke and like his master a bold classicist. He
