‘Addison Park’: A fictional history

Look carefully at a map of West London and you might find Addison Park. It’s close to Kensington and the present day Olympia station, north of Shepherd’s Bush and just south of today’s M40 flyover. A single railway was built from Ealing to Addison Park in 1872. The goods yard and station were on one side of the high street, the locomotive shed and sidings on the other. It was taken over by the Metropolitan Railway in 1892 and the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933. With increasing growth in the area the line was included in the 1936 LPTB modernisation plans and became the site chosen for a new terminus for both the new electric District Line services from Hounslow and the Piccadilly Line from South Harrow. This new terminus represented a collaborative project between LPTB and local developers, with an imaginative Charles Holden-inspired station building incorporating shops, offices and a large housing estate alongside, mirroring a similar project at Park Royal, which sits alongside the A40 Western Avenue in north Ealing. A short section of track that led to the original station under the road was retained for goods traffic into a small yard, but this closed after the Second World War and the track lifted. However, the former trackbed, underbridge and some associated infrastructure survive… if, of course, any of the above was true.