Heritage must be treated as a precious commodity
EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTIONS
BACK in the days of the tail end of UK steam in the 1960s, the wholesale Beeching closures had left the UK littered with redundant railway buildings, most of them with no track to ever link them again.
The car had long been crowned king by then, and while there were those who wistfully longed in vain for their local railway to return, most accepted the march of progress and accepted the eradication of station buildings, engine sheds, signalboxes, footbridges, and water columns as they made way for modern developments as the inevitable march of progress.
In three years’ time, we will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, which gave the concept of a steam-hauled public railway to the rest of the world and shrank it in the process. One message will again sound loud and clear: the seeds of the social and economic patterns of our 21st century way of life were sown by one of the greatest fruits of the Industrial Revolution, namely the railway concept.
Yet what will those towns and villages that have allowed their railway buildings to be swept into oblivion have to show for it?
Historic railway buildings are markers to the past and historically guided modern settlements just as much as castles, manor houses, market halls and churches. To eradicate them is to lose sight of local heritage.
In recent times, Highways England, the Government’s road agency, has with much justification come in for criticism for its policy of infilling redundant railway bridges, thankfully halted in its tracks for the time being. However, I cannot shower sufficient praise on Highways England for its willingness to find a purposeful new home for a historic and largely forgotten set of station buildings that have not seen a train since 1929. Long buried deep in a cutting by a thick belt of mature trees that render it barely visible from passing cars, Wansford Road station in Cambridgeshire stands in the way of plans to turn the busy A47 which passes behind it into a dual carriageway next year.
Maybe 20 or even 10 years ago, planners might automatically assume that the straightforward and only way to proceed is to flatten the boarded-up building without a second thought. However, that approach – it now seems in this case – does not hold true today.
The agency has a plan to take the yellowstone buildings down brick by brick and spend £200,000 on relocating it to the Peterborough terminus of what else but the Nene Valley Railway, a few miles to the east. Wansford Road will again hear the sounds of steam whistles and also act as a gateway to the adjacent Railworld Wildlife Haven, while doing much to keep a classic piece of Victorian heritage in the locality.
I sincerely hope that this very enlightened move will act as a springboard to fresh national policies regarding the way that all historic buildings, not just survivors from the railway age, are treated everywhere. I would like to see an automatic legal obligation placed on all developers to ascertain the true value of structures they wish to remove and to show that they have undertaken detailed consultations with the communities whose heritage would stand to lose out.
I’m sure that many buildings like Wansford Road station would find a willing home among our myriad of heritage railways and museums, and so well done to the Nene Valley and Railworld, too.