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Cathedrals of Steam
How London's Great Stations Were Built â And How They Transformed the City
Christian Wolmar
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Cathedrals of Steam
How London's Great Stations Were Built â And How They Transformed the City
Christian Wolmar
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'Fascinating' 'Books of the Year', Financial Times 'London's twelve great rail termini are the epic survivors of the Victorian age... Wolmar brings them to life with the knowledge of an expert and the panache of a connoisseur.' Simon Jenkins 'A wonderful tour, full of vivid incident and surprising detail.' Simon Bradley London hosts twelve major railway stations, more than any other city in the world. They range from the grand and palatial, such as King's Cross and Paddington, to the modest and lesser known, such as Fenchurch Street and Cannon Street. These monuments to the age of the train are the hub of London's transport system and their development, decline and recent renewal have determined the history of the capital in many ways.Built between 1836 and 1899 by competing private train companies seeking to outdo one another, the construction of these terminuses caused tremendous upheaval and had a widespread impact on their local surroundings. What were once called 'slums' were demolished, green spaces and cemeteries were concreted over, and vast marshalling yards, engine sheds and carriage depots sprung up in their place.In a compelling and dramatic narrative, Christian Wolmar traces the development of these magnificent cathedrals of steam, provides unique insights into their history, with many entertaining anecdotes, and celebrates the recent transformation of several of these stations into wonderful blends of the old and the new.
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EisenbahnverkehrONE
STARTING SLOWLY
THE RAILWAYS CAME late to London, half a dozen years after the opening of the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester in 1830, but they quickly made up for lost time. Railways soon spread all around the capital and were a vital component of the rapid growth that turned London into the worldâs first megacity. London not only acquired the worldâs first underground railway network, beating all other cities across the globe by almost forty years, but also can boast today of having 598 railway stations and 756 route miles of line,1 and, most notably, more terminus stations than any other city in the world.
Those magnificent âcathedrals of steamâ, built between 1836 and the end of the nineteenth century, have shaped London in many ways, creating new districts and destroying old ones, and influencing the type and location of housing and other developments across the capital. They, in turn, were built and located for reasons that can be understood only by considering the history and geography of the Thames basin in which London grew from a small Roman settlement established in the first century ad around where Vauxhall Bridge stands today. The Thames, and in particular its meandering arcs, have caused trouble ever since to Londonâs transport system, and the railways are no exception. Almost uniquely, too, of the British railway system, there was an element of planning and forethought about the location of the terminus stations that explains their location dotted along a ring around the West End and the City.
It is impossible to untangle the symbiotic relationship between the railway and the growth of the capital. In 1831, Londonâs population of 1.7 million was squeezed into an area of just eighteen square miles. It was already on the way to being the worldâs biggest city and an incredibly cramped one. At the time, Hammersmith was known for its strawberries and orchards, and market gardens flourished on the gravel terraces west of Chelsea and up the Lea Valley. On the clay lands, large fields provided grain for people and hay for horses, while well laid out parks extended from the numerous country houses. Today, London, with its thirty-two boroughs and City Corporations, is thirty-four times larger at 618 square miles, whereas the population, at 8.8 million, has only grown by a factor of five. While undoubtedly the motor car has fuelled that expansion and allowed a reduction in density to take place, the process was started and developed in earnest by the existence of the railways, including the Underground and, later, trams.
Much of London before the advent of the railways was little changed from its Georgian heyday. It was still a dark place. Gas light was first used in London on Westminster Bridge in 1813 but spread only slowly until the mid-1820s, with most streets still being illuminated by infrequent oil lamps and pedestrians having to be escorted home by âlink-boysâ bearing lights. According to Peter Ackroyd, âthe outskirts retained a rural aspect⌠The great public buildings, with which the seat of empire was soon to be decorated, had not yet arisen. The characteristic entertainments were those of the late eighteenth century, too, with the dogfights, the cockfights, the pillory and the public executions.â2
However, changes were afoot. The area now encompassed by central London at the dawn of the railway age was booming, with massive developments on the great estates as some of their aristocratic owners realized that they were sitting on invaluable assets. London had undergone rapid transformation in the previous half century, particularly in the prosperous period in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Whereas John Nash had been the principal architect of swathes of London during the late Georgian and Regency periods, such as Regent Street and the various terraces around Regentâs Park, the mantle had passed to Thomas Cubitt who was responsible for even more notable developments. After creating much of modern-day Bloomsbury, including Tavistock and Russell squares on land owned by the Duke of Bedford, Cubitt turned his attention to the Grosvenor Estate south of Hyde Park where he established both Belgravia and Pimlico on land that had previously been used as market gardens.
In his book A Short History of London, Simon Jenkins applauds these developments, suggesting that they were built to far higher standards than Nashâs terraces and that even today âtheir creamy cliffs of stucco⌠symbolize upmarket living to rich expatriates the world overâ.3 There were other equally successful developments during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, including on the fields owned by the Bishop of London in Paddington and Bayswater; but a speculative scheme further west just beyond Notting Hill, supported by the owners, the Ladbroke family, proved a step too far and the rather grand terraces were soon sublet to poor families described by The Times as âa more filthy and disgusting crew we have seldom had the misfortune to encounterâ.4 The pleasant squares built up by the large landowners remained interspersed with areas of slum housing, much of which would be cleared for railway development during the course of the century.
It is important to note that the outward suburban spread, which the railways would do much to stimulate, had already begun. To the north, St Johnâs Wood, Camden Town and Islington had grown up with sizeable housing suitable for the burgeoning middle classes. Further north, there was ribbon development of housing through Tottenham to Upper Edmonton, although away from the main road there were only fields and marshland. On the south bank of the Thames, there was continuous building between Rotherhithe and Lambeth, most of which were festering slums. Further south, however, there were more salubrious areas up to the New Kent Road and stretching out to Kennington and Walworth but nothing much beyond apart from villages.
In the west, beyond the elegant new squares, Chelsea remained a discrete village and along the Thames the Millbank slums were a terrible eyesore. The villages of Kensington, Hammersmith and Turnham Green, although linked to London by ribbon development, were not yet really part of the capital. Park Lane and the first section of the Edgware Road marked the north-west limit of London as Kilburn and Edgware were distant villages separated from the capital by large strips of agricultural land; the old Roman road itself was little more than a lane among the farms and fields.
In the east, thanks to intense activity in the Docklands, houses were replacing the fields in Bethnal Green. A few affluent master mariners and boat owners lived in the neat villas of Wapping and Shadwell but again there was considerable open space.
While for the most part the environs of London were sparsely populated and the various villages still small, with all this building activity London was well on the way to overtaking Peking (now Beijing) to become the largest city in the world. Its growth coincided perfectly with the advent of the railways.
Despite this growth, Londonâs social infrastructure lagged behind. Sanitation was non-existent, with periodic outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera and typhus; there was no welfare system apart from the very basic Poor Law and most children didnât attend school. Furthermore, although most building development in this period was on greenfield sites, the poorer people whose housing happened to be in the way were unceremoniously evicted without compensation or regard for their prospects. Consequently, they were forced to find alternative accommodation further away from the centre but still within walking distance as otherwise there was little prospect of finding employment. The concentration of people in the centre of what was then a relatively small city was mainly due to a lack of affordable transport for the masses; outer expansion to areas that millions of commuters now know as Zone 2 was the catalyst for all this to change. Around a tenth of Londonâs population still lived in the City of London itself but the wealthier merchants, bankers and lawyers had moved out to the West End or the villas of Sydenham, Clapham or Stoke Newington. The phenomenon of separation of work and home that the railways would both enable and encourage had begun.
The early stages of a transport system were emerging, thanks to the ingenuity of a number of pioneering entrepreneurs. The first horse-drawn omnibuses were introduced on Londonâs streets in 1829 by a coachbuilder, George Shillibeer, who had seen them being successfully used during a trip to Paris. While promoting the idea, he was commissioned to construct and operate an omnibus for Newington Academy for Girls, which became the worldâs first school bus. His company then went on to provide a regular service using twenty-seater coaches running between Paddington and the Bank of England in the City, anticipating almost precisely the route the Metropolitan Railway, the worldâs first underground line, would take three and a half decades later.
Passengers on these early omnibuses paid sixpence or a shilling (2.5pâ5p, or around ÂŁ3âÂŁ5 in todayâs money), which was still unaffordable for all but a small minority of the best-paid workers. The reporter in the Morning Post was impressed: âSaturday the new vehicle, called the Omnibus, commenced running from Paddington to the City, and excited considerable notice, both from the novel form of the carriage, and the elegance with which it is fitted out. It is capable of accommodating 16 or 18 persons, all inside, and we apprehend it would be almost impossible to make it overturn, owing to the great width of the carriage. It was drawn by three beautiful bays abreast, after the French fashion.â5 But the writer went on to warn rather presciently that there were concerns that the vehicle might find the narrow streets of the capital rather difficult to manoeuvre.
The other early form of public transport was the hansom cab. Introduced in 1834, the two-wheeled cab was pulled by one horse, making it cheaper than its predecessors. However, the drivers were infamous for their insolence and dishonesty, as well as, more worryingly, their dangerous driving, which was often made worse by their penchant for drink. Their fares, even before the customary overcharging, were out of reach of working-class Londoners but they were well patronized by the growing middle classes. Consequently, both forms of transport thrived with 3,000 omnibuses operating by 1854, a number that was surpassed by the number of cabs of various kinds plying their trade in the capital.
Given the cost of these new methods of transport, it was not surprising that it was the railways that were to become the real agents of change, particularly in respect of travel to and from work, because they could be both profitable and affordable. Their impact would be profound and long lasting. The success of the worldâs first modern railway, the Liverpool & Manchester, which opened in September 1830, had not gone unnoticed in the capital. While it was by no means the first railway, a concept that had its origins in the wagonways that had sprung up in the seventeenth century, the Liverpool & Manchester was groundbreaking in a number of respects â it was the first railway to connect two major cities carrying passengers as well as freight in both directions on a double-tracked line with trains that were hauled by steam locomotives throughout the route.6 The railway was, therefore, revolutionary, changing the very nature of transport in Britain and then, rapidly, across the world as the widespread benefits of deploying this new invention were so patently obvious.
It was, though, no accident that the railways had first been developed in the North of England, rather than in the capital. The North was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, where the various inventions that were beginning to harness the power of steam ever more efficiently had been developed. Putting the source of this power, a steam engine, on wheels that ran on rails had slowly emerged as the best way to make use of the energy that had become available as the equipment became ever more efficient. It had taken years, decades even, for the idea of wheels on rails to emerge, after many false starts. Attempts to run wheeled steam engines on roads had floundered because the surface of early nineteenth-century highways simply wasnât up to the task and steering for these behemoths had yet to be developed. So, iron wheels on iron rails was the answer as demonstrated by the successful opening of the Liverpool & Manchester.
After that, the railways never looked back. There were bumps on the way and a few half-hearted and abortive attempts to use horses rather than steam locomotives but essentially the development of railways across the world was unstoppable. By the start of the First World War, less than a century later, Britain would have 18,000 miles of railway, while the United States, which also opened its first railway in 1830, would have a quarter of a million miles, meaning that a staggering eight miles of track was built every day in the US for the whole eighty-four-year period.
Various extensions were soon added to the Liverpool & Manchester and a few other isolated lines popped up elsewhere in Britain, as far afield as Cornwall and Kent but not, at that stage, in the capital. London had, though, been the site of several early precursors of modern railways. The most significant was the Surrey Iron Railway, the cityâs first line. Originally, the intention had been to build a railway or a canal between the Thames and Portsmouth, doing away with the need for goods to be carried by sea through the straits of Dover where the ships might come up against a hostile French navy. The purpose of the line was to serve factories that had sprung up along the Wandle, a tributary of the Thames that gave its name to Wandsworth; although navigable, it was a very slow way to transport goods. A canal was considered but proved impractical because of water shortages and the difficulty of improving the meandering Wandle.
Therefore, the promoters pushed through a Bill in Parliament in 1801 to build a line from a wharf on the Thames at Wandsworth to Croydon, with the option of later adding a number of short branch lines. The first sections opened in 1802 and the line was completed the following year. However, the idea of eventually reaching Portsmouth never got off the drawing board, although an extension to Merstham, further into Surrey, was completed.
The railway, which, impressively, was double tracked throughout, was operated by horses pulling wagons on rails that were just over 4ft apart, considerably narrower than the 4ft 8½in that later became the standard gauge on railways in Britain, most European countries and the USA. Unlike the railways that, within a few decades, sprang up throughout the capital, the owners of the line did not operate it themselves but, rather, allowed all-comers to use it in exchange for payment of a toll.
Unfortunately, the Surrey Iron Railway struggled throughout its life, with the owners unable to pay any dividends most years and only stretching to modest ones even when the business was profitable. Despite this, the line somehow...