London

This page begins with links to specific pages devoted to two of London’s iconic buildings.  One very much still standing and returned to its original purpose after years of neglect and being threatened with demolition.  The other even more neglected until “assassinated” to make way for a modern complex of City offices.  Further down the page are examples of other sites and buildings either lost or restored.

MIDLAND GRAND HOTEL

Use this link for a look inside St. Pancras Chambers before the former hotel was restored and became the St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel.

BROAD STREET STATION

Sometimes referred to as French Second Empire or Italian Gothic, Broad Street Station was a much maligned minor masterpiece, but ultimately became irrelevant for most City workers.  Use the link to see what was lost.

LONDON TRANSPORT

In contrast to Victorian exhuberance is the modernist solidity and confidence of Charles Holden’s iconic stations.  Those shown here are all now served by Piccadilly Line trains.  The gallery is set out in date order of when Mr. Holden’s designs were completed – this is not necessarily the same sequence as when the original, pre-Holden stations were first opened.  Stations photographed are shown in bold italic.

Sudbury Town station was opened by the [Metropolitan] District Railway in 1903 on its northwestern extension from Acton to South Harrow.  When completed, this was the first section of UndergrounD surface lines to be electrified.  The original DR station was demolished in 1930 and replaced by Holden’s modernist design in July 1931 in preparation for handover of the DR’s Uxbridge via Rayners Lane services to the Piccadilly Line in 1932/33 (see below).

At the other end of the Piccadilly Line, the original Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton Railway between Earl’s Court and Finsbury Park was extended (mostly in tube) to Cockfosters.  Arnos Grove station opened in September 1932 and Southgate 6 months later, being completed throughout in July 1933.

A halt at Rayners Lane was opened by the Metropolitan Railway on its branch from Harrow to Uxbridge in 1906 – the branch having opened two years earlier.  The station became a junction following final completion of the District Railway line from Acton in 1910; the route being handed over to the Piccadilly Line in October 1933 (see above).  Subsequent housing expansion in the area required provision of a larger station, which opened in August.  For over 50 years from 1961 to 2012 the A60 stock served Rayners Lane.  Built by Cravens of Sheffield, the fleet was successfully refurbished (see photo) by Adtranz at Derby between 1994 and 1997.

Russell Square (opened December 1906) is the work of Leslie Green, architect for tube lines of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL/UndergrounD group) from September 1903.  Although his career was short, dying at 33 from tuberculosis of the throat in 1908, he designed or influenced the design of over 40 UndergrounD group stations.

LUDGATE HILL STATION & THAMESLINK

The London, Chatham & Dover Railway completed its line from Herne Hill across the River Thames to a temporary ‘city’ station on the north bank in December 1864 and to its still unfinished Ludgate Hill Station the following June.  On opening the four tracks were served by two island platforms each only 17 feet (5.2m) wide and reached by even narrower staircases; over time this arrangement led to dangerous overcrowding at platform level.  Between 1907 and 1912 one of the platforms was removed and the other widened, meaning that main line trains could no longer call there – the nearby St. Paul’s Station (later named Blackfriars) had already opened in May 1886.  Click on the adjacent thumbnail to see the location of the station on a Railway Clearing House 1903 map.

The Southern Railway closed Ludgate Hill station in March 1929 as more electric trains (which were too long to use the platform) were introduced.  However, the station building facing onto New Bridge Street survived.  This was eventually demolished as part of BR’s Thameslink works in 1990 and the space used for office development.

The LC&DR “Link Line” across Ludgate Hill to a junction with the Metropolitan Railway at Farringdon Street was opened in January 1866.  Ludgate Hill Bridge, designed by Joseph Cubitt (1811-72) and Frederick Thomas Turner (1812-77), joint engineers to the LC&DR, was embellished with architectural features by Sir John Taylor (1833-1912).  The bridge was demolished as part of the 1990 Thameslink works and the railway put underground.

BR RAILFREIGHT DISTRIBUTION

It is difficult to believe that Stratford was a largely rural area in 1847 when the Eastern Counties Railway established its rolling stock works on the site of an earlier Northern & Eastern Railway (part of the ECR from 1844) engine roundhouse near the junction of the Colchester and Cambridge lines.  After the ECR and several smaller railways had merged to become the Great Eastern Railway in 1862, Stratford Works was designated as the main works for the new company, steadily expanding into a vast complex.  After the Grouping in 1923 locomotive building ceased and in 1963 the majority of Stratford Works closed, leaving just the “1915 Shed” to continue until 1991 as a diesel repair shop, later referred to as the “Level 5 Facility“.  Separately, a new diesel Traction Maintenance Depot was opened in 1962 adjacent to the works site.  This closed in 2001 to make way for Stratford International Station.

As population and industry grew around Stratford, several railways established freight depots within the network of  lines in the area.  BR rationalised these in the 1960s, using the land to build a Freightliner Depot and the highly successful London International Freight Terminal (L.I.F.T.), an inland port with its own customs facilities, opening in July 1967.  Establishment of the European Union in 1993 removed the need for customs clearance and traffic through L.I.F.T. declined, with eventual closure in 1996.

After Sectorisation of BR  in 1982 responsibility for the TMD, Freightliner Depot and L.I.F.T. passed to Railfreight Distribution, and on privatisation of RfD in 1997 to English, Welsh & Scottish Railways.  The railway lands at Stratford were subsequently taken over as the site for the Olympic Park.

Other Railfreight Distribution facilities in east London were Ripple Lane Marshalling Yard and Traction Maintenance Depot originally opened in 1959 as part of BR’s Modernisation Plan.  The yard remains in use as a freight depot, but the TMD closed in 1993.  The former unwanted RfD freight depot at Plumstead has had a new life as a works site for the Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) project.  In the background is a large substation building originally containing rotary converters for the Southern Railway 1926 electrification of all three North Kent routes to Dartford.

222 MARYLEBONE ROAD

Known to railwaymen as “The Kremlin“, this building housed the headquarters of Britains’s nationalised railways for over 35 years.  It opened on 1st July 1899 as a luxury hotel and since 1993 again welcomes guests as one of London’s foremost 5-star hotels.

The Great Central Railway had intended trains on its London Extension to terminate at a rebuilt Baker Street Station.  However, after falling out with the Metropolitan Railway over the issue, the GCR Chairman, Sir Edward Watkin, determined to provide a separate grand terminus, with an equally grand hotel, a few blocks away.  Unfortunately, the finances of the GCR did not equal Sir Edward’s aspirations and the prime site earmarked for the hotel fronting onto Marylebone Road was sold in 1895 to Sir John Blundell Maple (1845-1903; Chairman of the eponymous furnishing company); a parcel of land one block back being retained for the station.  Two years later Sir John appointed Col Sir Robert William Edis (1839-1927) as architect for a luxury hotel which would also provide a showcase for his company’s highest quality wares and designs.

The GCR London Extension finally opened to Marylebone Station in March 1899.  To save money only half the intended number of platforms were built initially – the remainder of the space reserved for expansion was never used.  On 1st July 1899 Sir John Maple’s Great Central Hotel opened to the public.

The hotel was to have a short life.  During both world wars the hotel was requisitioned for military use.  In 1945 the LNER needed replacement office space and bought the building from Frederick Hotels.  On 1st January 1948 it became the headquarters of the nationalised Railway Executive and in 1953, when the functions of RE were subsumed into the British Transport Commission, the BTC moved there from 55 Broadway.  The building continued as the headquarters of the nationalised railways on creation of the British Railways Board in 1963 until the mid 1980s. 

In November 1986 “222” was finally vacated and two years later sold to a Japanese pop star only to change hands again later.  By 1993 the extensive refurbishment of the building was completed and it reopened as a hotel over half a century since its last paying guests left.

More history can be found on this page of the Landmark Hotel website.

MISCELLANEOUS

The historic building on the old Bishops Bridge at Paddington, part of which was designed by I.K. Brunel, was demolished when the bridge was rebuild as a multi-lane highway in 2006.  On the front was a stone marking the boundary between the Grand Junction Canal Company (GJCC) and the Great Weatern Railway (GWR) property.  There appears to be no information about the original purpose of the building.

Passengers would still have to endure travelling on the 4-SUB unit seen in 1979 at Waterloo for two more years before it was finally scrapped.  Others of this dismal class of unit continued in service until 1983.  Remarkably, although rapid decline in the fleet of the equally outdated 2-EPB units (like the one seen at Waterloo in 1966) began in the early 1990s following delivery of the ‘Networker’ units, some carried on until 1995!

 

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