Christian Wolmar
RAIL columnist and prolific transport author CHRISTIAN WOLMAR introduces his latest work…
“The grime of the steam years which still discoloured many of the best architectural features Betjeman loved has been cleared away, and several of the stations have benefited from major refurbishments.”
On a rainy April Tuesday, I spent the day going round all the London terminus stations in order to complete the final chapter of my new book, Cathedrals of Steam.
The book relates how London ended up with a dozen terminus stations - more than any other city in the world. There are many remarkable aspects to this story, which encompasses the history of both the railways and of our capital - not least the fact that with the exception of Marylebone, they were all built between 1836 and 1874, a period of frenetic activity for the railways.
Savour that thought for a moment. These were all what today would be called megaprojects, creating upheaval for years on huge sites which ate up surrounding land for the tracks, for the various offices needed to operate the railway, and (almost invariably) for an associated hotel.
Moreover, on several occasions, terminus stations such as Nine Elms, Bishop’s Bridge, Maiden Lane and Bishopgate were built rather further away from the centre of London, only to be dispensed with as the various railway companies strove to get as near as possible to the lucrative markets of the City and the West End.
While in the intervening period a few minor stations such as Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill have disappeared, the only major casualty was Broad Street - sacrificed to save its neighbour, Liverpool Street.
The construction of these stations in such a brief period was a phenomenal achievement and testimony both to the power of the railways but also to the rapid economic growth which they stimulated.
The reason why London ended up with so many stations is, of course, a result of the way that the railways developed in the UK. Unlike in many other countries, competition, rather than co-operation or planning, was the driving factor. Every rail company worth its salt wanted to connect with London.
Interestingly, it was largely that way around - provincial entrepreneurs wanting to connect with the capital, rather than London capitalists seeking to spread outwards. Therefore, the initiative largely came from outside the capital.
Indeed, there was some disquiet in London over the incursion by the railway companies, and this resulted in one of the rare examples of railway planning.
A Parliamentary Commission decided in 1846 that no station should be built in the area defined largely today as Zone 1, as this would cause too much collateral damage.
As a result, a string of stations ranging from Paddington in West London to Bishopsgate in the City (eventually replaced by Liverpool Street, which breached the boundary set by the Commission in 1874) sprung up, connected by what was then called the Metropolitan Railway but which has become the Circle Line.
Without this plan and the ban on having a central massive joint station (like a German Hauptbahnhof), the pattern of the terminus stations in London would be very different and possibly there may have been fewer.
There were occasional efforts at co-operation. The Great Western was originally going to share Euston with the London & Birmingham, but the two companies failed to reach an agreement over costs and long-term plans.
London Bridge was shared by three companies, but eventually several other railways serving the area south of London emerged, and during the 1860s three stations all to the north of the river ( but with lines reaching southwards over new bridges over the Thames) were built - Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street.
This was part of another process that did much to determine the location of the stations - the desire to get as far into the West End and the City as possible. Railway companies realised that the high cost of building lines as close as possible to the centre was worth it in terms of attracting more passengers, and they tried constantly to overcome the Commission’s restrictions.
In a more rational world, there would be fewer stations - perhaps four or five would be sensible. Certainly, the last to be built (Marylebone) was conceived as a vain attempt to take market share off its rivals, but it never managed to achieve this because services were too slow.
It has found a good niche use over the past couple of decades after a long period of decline, and a new service to Oxford has revived competition with trains out of Paddington. But, by and large, the rivalry between the various railway companies was fruitless and resulted in a lot of waste and excess capacity.
On the plus side, all that crazy rivalry has left us with a wonderful collection of buildings.
My rainy-day tour in April during the first lockdown was, in fact, a homage to Sir John Betjeman - the poet and railway campaigner whose statue can be found on the upper concourse of St Pancras station.
Betjeman is there because his campaigning helped to save St Pancras from the same fate as Euston next door. At the time, he wrote a book ( London’s Historic Stations) to celebrate their vital role in keeping London moving and their importance in London’s history.
The tone of the book, though, is decidedly downbeat. Seeing the wreck of Euston, and its replacement with what he called “a great hall of glass [that] looks like a mini-version of London Airport which it seems to be trying to imitate”, Betjeman was convinced that British Rail was about to wreak havoc throughout the capital, removing anything of architectural merit and, indeed, shutting down several of these ‘cathedrals’.
At the time he was writing, not only had Euston just been demolished, other stations such as St Pancras, Marylebone and Fenchurch Street were in what seemed like terminal decline. The Location of Offices
My book is a celebration of the role played by these stations in keeping the arteries of the capital alive and buzzing.
Bureau was busily encouraging companies and government departments to decamp to more salubrious towns and cities in the regions, and London itself seemed to have passed its sell-by date with its decaying inner core and its ramshackle transport system. Betjeman died in 1984, at a time when London’s railway system was at its nadir.
Thankfully, partly due to his efforts and those of other campaigners, and partly as a result of a change in rules which allowed British Rail to profit from developments above its stations, none of this wave of destruction happened.
Instead, the grime of the steam years which still discoloured many of the best architectural features Betjeman loved has been cleared away, and several of the stations have benefited from major refurbishments which have greatly improved them.
Betjeman himself helped start the ball rolling by advising British Rail on its refurbishment of Liverpool Street - the first of these major stations to be redesigned since Waterloo, just after the First World War.
Liverpool Street was a mess of overbridges, different-length platforms, and a maze of confusing passageways, although blessed with a great cafe dispensing fabulous teacakes. Betjeman, who was a bit of a gricer, wrote: “I know of no greater pleasure for elevenses in London than to sit in this tea place and watch the trains arrive and depart.”
There is no doubt that the redevelopment of Liverpool Street, even at the cost of Broad Street, has been a triumph and an example for others to follow. Its concourse, I reckon, is the best in London.
That’s why I decided to make the last chapter of the book a tour of the stations accompanied by the ghost of Betjeman, to show how much the fortunes of the railways have changed.
In the late 1980s, London commuting started to increase again and the railways (reorganised by British Rail with the highly successful creation of Network SouthEast) began to flourish. With the rise in commuters, there was pressure to improve the terminus stations and to make life a bit easier for the hundreds of thousands of people using them every day.
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the stations have been turned around in recent years. Betjeman’s book is a great reminder of the extent to which the railways were neglected for a long period after the
Second World War, and how these great stations were allowed to decline because they were seen as redundant.
Just look at them now. My favourite is King’s Cross, both in terms of its wonderful blend of old and new, but also because of the sheer simplicity of its 1852 façade - the two arches either side of a small Italianate tower that has stood the test of time so well.
But it is impossible not to also admire its gaudy neighbour, St Pancras, if only for the sheer audacity of the Midland Railway in overlooking its neighbour. Then there is the recently redesigned London Bridge, never really one of the cathedrals but now a very pleasant space, relying heavily on the yellowbrown bricks that were used not only for its construction, but also for the 878 arches stretching out to Greenwich (the capital’s longest and yet mostly forgotten man-made construction).
So, on my ‘tour’ with Sir John, I suggested that he might be pleased with most of these recent developments, and that the condition of the stations was a far cry from the time when he wrote his rather sad book.
There was, though, on that April day, a cloud hanging over what should have been an entirely optimistic story. London was deep in the first lockdown and the stations were all but empty.
While the emptiness gave me the chance to admire at my leisure architectural features that I had never noticed before, such as the statue of the plumber’s apprentice at Cannon Street ( by the same sculptor, Martin Jennings, as the Betjeman statue), the sight of the closed sandwich shops, the empty platforms and a silence broken only by unnecessary announcements was fundamentally depressing.
My book is a celebration of the role played by these stations in keeping the arteries of the capital alive and buzzing. While passengers will return in some numbers next year, I do suspect that 2019 will be their peak for some time, quite possibly a decade or more. I just hope that those bagel stands will reopen for when I next hop on a train leaving the capital. R
■ Cathedrals of Steam is published by Atlantic Books at £ 25. A few signed copies are available at a discount from the author at Christian. wolmar@gmail.com
■ Turn the page to discover how you can win a copy of Cathedrals of Steam in our annual Stop & Examine quiz.