Welcome to another installment in my series “London Station by Station“. I hope that you will enjoy it and be inspired to sahre.
FARRINGDON
The current Farringdon station opened in 1865, when the Metropolitan Railway (as it then was) expanded eastward for the first time from the old terminus just to the south of here at Farringdon Street (it had already reached west to Hammersmtih in 1864). As the colours of the heading indicate it is currently served by the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Metropolitan lines. There is also an overground station served by Thameslink.
I have a couple of shots from an old A-Z to show the area at surface level…
For three months in 1997 I worked (for experience plus travel expenses) at Interpretations, based in Bakers Yard, the near the junction of Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue, the first job I ever had.
Also, tying in with two of my interests (real ale and English literature), just to the north of this junction is a pub called the Betsey Trotwood, which I would recommend anyone to visit.
Just south of here is City Thameslink, a train station with exceptionally long platforms, owing to the fact that it was created by amalgamating two old stations, Holborn Viaduct and Ludgate Hill into one.
I end but setting this historic station in context with the aid of the Diagrammatic History…
Welcome the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station” I hope you will enjoy this post and be inspired to share it.
ALPERTON: A MINOR STATION WITH A MAJOR QUIRK
Alperton was originally opened in 1903 as a District Line station, but since October 1933 has been served only by the Piccadilly line. The transfer of services on this branch occurred in two phases as shown in the following extract from the Diagrammatic History…
Of course, typically, this important paragraph straddles a fold on the map, as you can see.
A legacy of the period of joint service is that all stations on this branch have platforms of a compromise height between that of tube and surface stock.
We come now the the sole reason for this very brief post – the quirk referred to in the title. Escalators can be found all over London Underground, but those at Alperton are there for an unusual reason on this network: to carry passengers up from street level to the platforms.
Welcome to the latest post in my “London Station by Station” series. These posts do not contain anything other than the title piece, and any links and pictures relate exclusively to that theme, as is not the case with my regular posts.
A BELGIAN PROVINCE AND AN OUTPOST OF LONDON UNDERGROUND
Hainault was important duchy in what is now Belgium in 14th century, although the modern province has subsequently lost the l and is now called Hainaut. The connection to this country dates from that same period, when Phillippa of Hainault, daughter of the then duke married Edward III. For more on this, I have a link to a short academic article.
As with the rest of the eastern end of the Central line, Hainault was originally served by the Great Eastern Railway before being transferred to London Underground in 1948. Hainault gives it name to the Hainault Loop, which the following extract from the diagrammatic history shows…
For many years, Hainault was a terminus station, with the northern segment of the loop being run by a shuttle service, but nowadays trains taking the loop run all the way round it to Woodford.
At one time the southern part of the Hainault loop was going to form an eastern extension to a planned Chelsea-Hackney line, but that line never got beyond the planning stage, and I have not heard it mentioned in the last couple of decades. This 1994 speculative map from Ken Garland’s “Mr Beck’s Underground Map” shows the plan along with one or two other plans of the time, some of which did come to fruition (though by no means all)…
As for the place itself, the only point of interest as that there is a country park, which would probably provide a decent walk if you were so minded.
I hope that you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it, and I leave you with one last picture…
Welcome to the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station“. I am treating these two together because they are so close to one another that it makes no sense to split them up.
EUSTON AND EUSTON SQUARE
Euston Square, served nowadays by the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines is one of the 1863 originals, and as with Baker Street has been restored to look as it would have done when first opened. The City and South London Railway station at Euston was opened on May 12th 1907 and the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway on June 22nd 1907. These two together are now the Northern line, and occupy four platforms here – although widely separated – to change between the two branches you would be well advised to continue northwards to Camden Town where the interchange is cross-platform. The Victoria line station opened on December 1st 1968.
The southbound platform on the Bank branch of the Northern line is very wide at this station because when it was opened as the City and South London Railway station there were two tracks either side of an island platform (an arrangement still in evidence at Clapham Common and Clapham North), and the extra width of that platform comes from the reorginastion when this arrangement was deemed unsuitable for such a busy station.
INTRODUCING THE RAILWAY DETECTIVE
Euston was the first of London’s railway terminals to open, serving the London and North Western Railway, and it was on that route that Edward Marston’s greatest creation, The Railway Detective (a.k.a Inspector Robert Colbeck) investigated the case that first earned him that title (and introduced him to his future wife). These stories are set thus far) in the 1850s, before the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in 1863, but I could see Colbeck still being in business when that momentous event occurs. He would undoubtedly embrace the underground railway wholeheartedly, although his colleague Sergeant Leeming would take some persuading of its virtues!
CONCLUSION AND PICS
I hope that you have enjoyed this post and will be inspired to share it. Here are a couple of pictures to finish…
A close up of the key areaThe Diagrammatic History
Welcome to the latest installment in my series “London Station by Station“. Whereas my regular posts contain links, photographs and sometimes infographics as well as the title piece, these posts contain no links, no infographics and only pictures that relate directly to the matter in hand.
HAMMERSMITH
The colours of the title are those of the modern lines that serve the station. The Hammersmith and City line, in the days when it was the original Metropolitan Railway reached Hammersmith in 1864, although the current station for that line was opened four years later in 1868. From 1877 to 1906 a viaduct diverging from the current line at Goldhawk Road and having a station called Hammersmith Grove Road connected to the District at Ravenscourt Park and thence to Richmond. The District line station at Hammersmith opened in 1874, and it was the original western terminus of the Piccadilly line in 1906.
The station which now serves the District and Piccadilly lines was completely redesigned a few years back, although the track layout remains the same – District line tracks on the outside, Piccadilly line tracks in the centre. Except for occasional services which also stop at Turnham Green, where the Richmond branch of the District diverges from the Ealing branch, Piccadilly trains run non-stop between Hammersmith and Acton Town. Just west of Hammersmith on the District and Piccadilly lines one can see the remains of the viaduct referred to in the opening paragraph.
Hammersmith is home to a major shopping centre (the reason for the redesign mentioned above) and also to the Lyric Theatre, at which I saw several good plays.
Here are a couple of pictures to conclude the post…
The Diagrammatic HistoryA close up of the key area for this post.
I hope you have enjoyed this post and I encourage you to share it!
Welcome to the next installment in my station by station guide to London. Following the success of my piece on Paddington I have gone for the other main line terminus among the original seven stations on the Metropolitan Railway…
HISTORY
King’s Cross and St Pancras are next door neighbours to one another, and therefore served by the same Underground Station. Although this was one of the 1863 originals, the platforms that now serve the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Metropolitan lines have been resited – the present ‘surafce’ level station dates only from 1941. The Piccadilly line station was part of the original section of that line which opened in 1906, while the City and South London Railway (now the Bank branch of the Northern line) got there in 1907. Finally, it was part of the second section of the Victoria line to come on stream in December 1968.
ST PANCRAS
Although King’s Cross (of which more later) is by some way the larger of the two main line rail terminals here, St Pancras is an extraordinary building, resembling an outsized fairy castle. St Pancras is now an international terminus, running trains to the continent, and meaning that over a century after he just failed to make it happen the dream of Edward Watkin, who guided the Metropolitan in its great era of expansion, of being able to travel by rail from Paris to Manchester by way of London is now a reality.
KING’S CROSS
King’s Cross is a station of two parts – the main concourse and platforms 1-8 which run long haul trains to the north and scotland, and off to one side platforms 9-11 from which trains to much more local destinations such as Peterborough, Cambridge and King’s Lynn depart. It is here that you will find the sign to platform 93/4 from which the Hogwarts Express departs in the Harry Potter stories. Having mentioned one literary association, King’s Cross plays a passing role in more than one of Edward Marston’s stories involving Inspector Colbeck a.ka. The Railway Detective.
MAPS
I have my usual style map images to help those of you not familiar with the area to orient yourselves:
CONCLUSION
I hope that you have enjoyed this piece and that you will be encouraged to share it.
Paddington was one the original seven stations that opened as The Metropolitan Railway on January 10th 1863 – it was the western terminus of the line, although right from the start there were track links to the Great Western Railway, which supplied the Metropolitan with rolling stock before it developed its own. In 1864 the western terminus became Hammersmith, over the route of today’s Hammersmith and City line, and the origins of the station can still be seen because the H&C platforms are structurally part of the mainline station, although ticket barriers now intervene between them and the rest. The second set of London Underground platforms to be opened at Paddington were also originally opened by the Metropolitan, although they are now served by the Circle and the Edgware Road branch of the District line. They opened in 1868 as Paddington (Praed Street) – as opposed to Paddington (Bishop’s Road), the original 1863 station. In 1913 a northern extension of the Bakerloo line included a deep level station at Paddington. By 1948 the suffixes of both ‘surface’ stations had been dropped, and all three sets of platforms were known simply as Paddington.
A LITERARY DISAPPOINTMENT
In 2013, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan Railway Penguin brought out a series of books, one for each line. I wrote about all of these books at the time, but I am going to mention Philippe Parreno’s “effort” about the Hammersmith and City line again. Given the line that contains all seven of the original 1863 stations Mr Parreno produced a book that contained no words, just a series of pictures. Had these pictures been meaningful and clearly associated with the line and its stations this might have been acceptable, but these pictures were blurry and meaningless (it was barely even possible to tell what they were supposed to be of).
OTHER LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
Of course, when thinking of Paddington’s literary associations the one that springs instantly to mind is that with the fictional world’s best known refugee: Paddington Bear. Also however, Dr Watson (see “Baker Street” in this same series) had his first practice here after moving out of Baker Street to set up home with his wife (see A Scandal in Bohemia for more details).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
I hope you have enjoyed this post and will be encouraged to share it. To tie everything together, here are a some pictures.
This is the latest post in a series I have been running giving a station by station guide to London. Today’s post will feature a measure of London Underground history, a bit of tennis and some music…
BARONS COURT – A MEETING OF TUBE AND SURFACE
HISTORY
Barons Court opened in 1906, as part of the original Piccadilly line section from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith. District line trains had been travelling the route since 1874 but there was no station at Barons Court before the Piccadilly line opened. The Piccadilly when it opened was either a compromise involving elements of three different plans or if you prefer a bodge job trying to combine elements of three different plans. Desmond F Croome’s “The Piccadilly Line: An Illustrated History” gives full details. Of relevance to our post, one of the roles that was subsumed into the making of the Piccadilly line was that of ‘deep level district’, easing congestion on the older subsurface level route. Thus, from South Kensington to Earls Court the Piccadilly follows the district, and from Barons Court, where the Piccadilly surfaces, it shares a set of four tracks with the district as far as Acton Town, and on the Heathrow branch as far as Hounslow West and the whole of the Uxbridge branch the platforms are at the compromise height used for platforms shared by ‘tube’ and ‘surface’ stock, as the district used to run these routes as well. A couple of pics between subsections…
QUEENS
Barons Court is the home of the Queens Club, host of the best known of all the Wimbledon warm up tournaments. For most of the year tennis is played on a variety of surface other than grass, and Queens gives men (it has no women’s section) a chance to get to used to both grass and London before the big one,
THE MUSICAL CONNECTION
Barons Court’s musical connection comes by way of St Pauls Girls School, just across the A4 from the station. For some years the Director of Music at that establishment was Gustav Holst, famous both as a composer and for collecting folk stories to serve as an inspiration for his composition. His best known work today is The Planets, which focuses on the attributes of the gods whose names the planets bear (yes I would wish for the focus to be astronomical rather than astrological/ mythological – but it is still excellent music).
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND PICTURE
I hope you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it. My final picture is of a Piccadilly line promotional poster…
Welcome to the latest in my series “London Station by Station“, the second post in this series to feature a station to have fallen victim to the axe (see also the piece on Aldwych).
THE ONE TIME NORTHERN OUTPOST OF LONDON UNDERGROUND
Ongar became a London Underground station immediately post World War II, and was closed, along with North Weald in 1994. There had been a station between North Weald and Ongar called Blake Hall, but that was closed in 1981. I travellled out there more than once before it closed. The village of Chipping Ongar is home to a 900 year old church among other things.
Ongar is 24 miles from the centre of London, and with no interchanges to other lines between Stratford and Ongar, and the fact that one had to change trains at Epping (now the end of the line) it took a long time to get there. This meant that few passengers actually did use the route. This graphic, taken from Danny Dorling’s “The 32 Stops”, shows how far beyond the boundary of Greater London even Epping, the current outpost is:
The solid black route is the 32 stops from West Ruislip to Woodford that Dorling covers in his book, while the grey lines show the other parts of the Central line that are still open.
11.3 miles beyond Ongar is Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, and home to a major rail station with a fairly quick route into London (this picture, extracted from google maps, illustrates):
You might notice from the above picture that there is not a great deal between Ongar and Chelmsford, and indeed my idea for an extension to integrate an otherwise very isolated branch into a wider network features just one intermediate station, at the village of Great Baddow.
An even bolder notion than the one already outlined that occurred to me when I gave such a scheme serious thought some years back was for the Central line to reopened to Ongar, running straight through rather than having the change at Epping, and for Ongar to become the Northeast node point of a London Orbital Railway (with the Ongar-Chelmsford link being a spur off this to the Northeast (well actually rather more east than north). The southeasterly node point would be at Maplescombe in Kent with a spur to Maidstone to connect with existing railways there, the southwesterly at West Byfleet, linking to the existing routes to and through Woking, with the northwesterly node at Rickmansworth, connecting with a northwesterly route to Aylesbury. The northern arm of this orbital route, from Rickmansworth to Ongar makes extensive use of existing but currently lightly used routes (reopen the connection between Rickmansworth and Watford, take over the Watford to St Albans branch, connect to St Albans (Thameslink). Between St Albans and Ongar would be new track with stops at Welwyn Garden City, Hertford North, Hertford East and Broxbourne (all offering connections to the existing network.
To finish, here are some more pictures which might help you grasp some of the detail I have covered above…
A close up of the the end of the Central line as it used to look (from The Diagrammatic History)An illustration of the Rickmansworth-Watford connection mentioned in the text.A view of the Watford-St Albans links mentioned.An old London Connections Map with the emphasis on main line railways.
I hope you have enjoyed this spectacularly speculative post and will be encouraged to share it.
Welcome to the latest installment in my “Station by Station guide to London’. Previous posts in this series are available on this link.
MUSIC, MAPS, A MARKET AND A MUSEUM
Although Covent Garden is on the original 1906 section of the Piccadilly line it did not open for business until 1907. This may be because with being only about 300 yards from Leciester Square the need for an extra station there was not immediately obvious.
That said, as the title of thsi section implies, Covent Garden is a major destination. Access from the platforms to the street is either via lift or by climbing 200 steps (I generally choose this latter option btw since I am not a big fan of lifts).
The music part of the title refers to the English National Opera, housed in a splendid building in Covent Garden. I have not been there for good while but I remember enjoying a performance of ‘Simon Boccanegra’ there.
Covent Garden Market is well worth a look around. Also, adjoining the market, is the London Transport Museum, a place I have visited several times and which I thoroughly recommend.
Finally, as a map lover, I cannot mention Covent Garden without mentioning Stanfords, THE map shop. On the subject of maps I recommnend to those with an interest in such things the blog mapsworldwide.
Before I finish with a couple of pics, a couple of last comments:
1)I hope that you have enjoyed this post and that you will be encouraged to share it.
2)A reminder that previous posts in that series are can be seen here.
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