Broad Street Station

In 1846 the London and Birmingham Railway, in conjunction with the dock companies, asked Henry Daniel Martin to lay out a line connecting that railway with the London docks, essentially as a means of promoting the conveyance of merchandise, without any expectation of it becoming available for the service of passenger traffic.  The East & West India Docks & Birmingham Junction Railway was incorporated by Act of Parliament on 26 August 1846 to build the line which opened in stages from September 1850.  On 1st January 1853 the name changed to the rather snappier North London Railway.

An Act of 1861 authorised the NLR to build a branch to a terminus at Broad Street in the City of London.  This expensive piece of railway was completed in 1865 and Broad Street Station opened on 1st November that year, with the adjacent London & North Western Railway City Goods Depot opening in May 1868.  The station closed in 1986, when the remaining train services were diverted to the adjacent Liverpool Street Station.  The site became part of the Broadgate development.

Press descriptions of the station on its opening ranged between “free Second Empire with Lombardic elements” and “Italian Gothic“, whilst Sir John Betjeman considered it to be in the “best Town Hall style of 1866“.  Neither the NLR nor the LNWR (its majority shareholder as successor to the L&BR) employed a full-time architect, so the design was left to:

• William Baker (1817-78) – engineer to the LNWR from 1859, and
• J.B. Stansby – Architectural Assistant to the LNWR Chief Engineer.

The covered staircase, again in vaguely Italianate style, was added in 1891.  In February 1913, shortly after the Central London Railway tube line had been extended from Bank to Liverpool Street in July 1912, lifts were installed linking the station concourse with the CLR underground ticket hall.  Some 4 years later the lifts had been taken out of passenger service, but are known to have continued in staff use until the late 1930s.

The original purpose of the elaborate Vandyke Builders Ltd. premises is open to conjecture.  That company only dates from 1974 and went into voluntary liquidation in May 1986, having its main address in Pincher Street in east London.