STATION OF THE YEAR 2020!
NUMEROUS settlements big and small mushroomed around railwayworks and stations in the 19th century. However, thereexistsone settlementwhere the railway not only created it, but gave itaname andanumber too into the bargain.
The origin of the name of Twenty, a lonely hamlet in the Lincolnshire fens, has been a perennial matter of debate. It came to international attention in September 1982 when someone overpainted the words “Twenty. Twinned with the Moon. No atmosphere!” in fluorescent paint on a road sign, and TV pictures of it were networked around the world.
In 1993, the hamlet again made headlines when The Sun newspaper published a story using Twenty to promote a cut in its cover price to 20p.
Origin
Thestation wasopened on August 1, 1866, by the Bourne- SpaldingRailway Company, which in1893was absorbed into the Midland& Great NorthernJoint Railway ( M& GNR). It had been decided to have three intermediatestations, mainly for the transhipment of farm produce. As no settlements existed near thereat the time, namesof local features were chosen, the other two beingCounterDrain and North Drove.
One theory for the name runs that the station was sited near to a milestone on the main road from
Bourne to Spalding, now the A151, indicating that it was 20 miles to Colsterworth.
A second theory suggested that the engineer in charge of building the line saw that the station would be sited in a field in Section 20 of his Ordnance Surveymap, and decided that Twenty would beamore distinctive name than North Fen, which was originally proposed.
However, the most widelyaccepted explanation is that the station took its name from the Twenty Foot Drain, amajor but controversial part of the drainage scheme of Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, which was completed in 1638. Local fenmen were angered by the Lindsey Level scheme, and that was one of the many local grievances which led to the English Civil War, in which the earl died at the Battle of Edge Hill on October 23,
1642. The drain was incorporated into the later Black Sluice scheme, and now the section at Twenty village has long been infilled.
Eventually, buildings sprang up along the road leading to the station, including a row of council houses, a school, a village hall, a children’s playground, private dwellings and even at one stage a police station.
Closure