Oliver Green - Londons Railway Stations

L ondon has more main line railway stations than any other city in the world. Its earliest terminals opened in the late 1830s when lines between the capital and the regions were built during the first railway boom. The original station at London Bridge, the capitals first passenger terminus, opened in December 1836, six months before the young Victoria came to the throne. The last main line, terminating at Marylebone, opened in March 1899, two years before the elderly queen died.

Over six decades, 15 railway terminals were built in London, an astonishing number that is not equalled by any other city in the world. By 1901, Londons railway infrastructure, built up throughout the Victorian period, was enormous. Stations, depots, yards, tracks, tunnels, bridges and other railway facilities such as hotels, warehouses and stables, covered huge areas of the capital. London had become a railway city, totally dependent on railways to function as a commercial, financial and industrial metropolis.

The great railway termini were the most obvious and visible features of the railway network. In the free-enterprise culture of the nineteenth century, the Government was not directly involved in planning, financing or managing railway development, but Parliament had a crucial role in authorising every project. Each proposed new line and terminus required a private Act of Parliament to give the railway company power to buy land by compulsory purchase. To secure this, every plan had to face detailed scrutiny from Parliamentary committees and, occasionally, Royal Commissions.

The black cathedral in steam days by Edward Bawden, showing the network of high-level walkways at Liverpool Street.

Railway development in London was particularly contentious and was complicated by issues of property ownership and the physical geography of the city. Throughout the nineteenth century, plans for London termini came to involve more than a dozen separate railway companies, often battling for access to adjacent station sites, but with little collaboration between them. They were also up against powerful obstruction from wealthy landowners and authorities such as the City of London Corporation, which wanted to limit the railways encroachment on the central areas of the City and Westminster. The result was a ring of main-line termini all round the central districts of London. Inside that ring, roughly marked out by what is now London Undergrounds Circle Line, rail access was only really opened up by the electric Tube lines built in the early 1900s. Of the 15 termini only two, Broad Street and Holborn Viaduct, have been closed and demolished.

More than a century later, two additional main lines are under development to bring high-speed trains to and from the capital. Although both are completely new railways on physically separate alignments from the Victorian main lines, both will operate from existing termini that have been rebuilt and extended. High Speed One (HS1) was opened to the renamed St. Pancras International in 2007 and a new station alongside Euston is now under construction for HS2, due to open in the late 2020s.

An architects view of how Euston 3 may emerge by 2030.

This book is a short history of Londons 13 existing terminals, laid out as a journey around central London, starting at Paddington in the north west and travelling clockwise. Most of the stations described are served by, or are close to, London Undergrounds Circle Line, which was originally intended to link the main-line terminals. This is the easiest way to travel on the circuit (with a Travelcard), although cycling is cheaper and probably quicker. Line changes or short walks are needed to get to Marylebone, Fenchurch Street or London Bridge.

Paddington is the best preserved of Londons Victorian terminals. To step off a train under Isambard Kingdom Brunels great triple-span iron-and-glass roof is one of the most dramatic ways to arrive in London.

What we see now is not the original terminus of the Great Western Railway (GWR). The line was built in the 1830s to link London with Bristol. In 1835, when work began on the section of line just west of London, the final site of the terminus had not been chosen. Brunel, as the GWRs chief engineer, had discussions with Robert Stephenson, whose London & Birmingham Railway (L&BR) was approaching from the north west, about creating a joint terminus at Euston. However, no agreement could be reached and the L&BR occupied the Euston site alone.

Brunel already favoured Paddington, probably because the site was adjacent to the basin of the Grand Junction Canal, which had opened there in 1801, followed by the Regents Canal in 1820. The potential for trans-shipment of goods on to canals was an important consideration for early railways and the two canals here had already encouraged the rapid growth of Paddington from a village into the developed western edge of London.

The first station at Paddington opened in 1838 and was replaced by a goods depot when the present terminus opened in 1854. This is now the site of the Paddington Central office complex between the railway and the canal.

The GWR could only afford to build a rather small wooden passenger terminus for the opening of the line in 1838. It stood just north of the current station on the site now occupied by the high-rise office development, Paddington Central, between the railway and the canal. The low-level cutting alongside Eastbourne Terrace, where the present station stands, was originally used as a goods shed. Later, the areas used for the permanent passenger station and a larger goods depot were effectively swapped over.

The first Paddington has been described as a makeshift affair. Architecturally, it was no match for Euston, and passenger facilities were very basic. Services to Maidenhead started in June 1838, extending to Reading in 1840 and through to Bristol in 1841. On 13 June 1842, Queen Victoria herself travelled by train for the first time, between Slough and Paddington, announcing that she was quite charmed with the experience.

As the GWRs traffic grew, the temporary terminus soon proved inadequate. In 1850, Brunel was asked to design a much larger new station on the present Paddington site. Building technology had moved on and Brunels second station was clearly influenced by Joseph Paxtons revolutionary iron-and-glass Crystal Palace, designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 an early example of pre-fabrication.

In January 1851, Brunel wrote excitedly to the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt, who was secretary of the exhibition committee: I am going to design, in a great hurry a Station after my own fancy it is at Paddington, in a cutting, and admitting of no exterior, all interior and all roofed in. Brunel asked Wyatt to act as his assistant on the decorative details and together they approached the engineering contractors Fox Henderson, who had worked on the exhibition building in Hyde Park, to construct the new trainshed.