Inside London’s Railway Termini, c.1870–1939

Abstract

This article explores the transformation of London’s railway termini from relatively simple, often provisional structures, designed to meet the essential practical requirements of travel, to extensive multi-functioning passenger environments in which commercial, civic, and leisure activities intersected and overlapped. Focusing on developments after 1870, it examines the ways in which expanding rail services, growing passenger numbers, new opportunities for leisure and competition from other forms of public and private transport shaped their development. Against that background it considers some of the tensions that arose as the railway companies sought to regulate their sites and exploit their commercial potential, balancing the efficient management and circulation of travellers and their belongings with the commercial opportunities afforded by a vast passenger traffic. With reference to often overlooked aspects of their visual, material and spatial culture — barriers, signage, kiosks, showcases and penny-in-the-slot machines, among others — it points to the practices and processes that influenced the growth of London’s terminal stations as socially and spatially complex commercial environments whose legacy is evident in the capital’s transport hubs of today.

KEYWORDS:

• Railway Termini
• Public Interiors
• Modernization
• Identity
• Consumption
• Leisure
• Transport
• Circulation

ORCID

Fiona Fisher http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8781-8849

Notes on contributor

Fiona Fisher is a researcher in design history and member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University. Her recent publications include Designing the British Post-War Home: Kenneth Wood, 1948–1968 (Routledge, 2015) and, with Penny Sparke, The Routledge Companion to Design Studies (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

1 Most of the stations under discussion were built before 1870; many of these were subsequently modernised and some were entirely re-built. Completed after 1870 were Liverpool Street (1874), Marylebone (1899), and Waterloo Station (rebuilt 1900–22). Victoria Station was substantially rebuilt in 1908. For a detailed discussion of the factors that informed their location, see Alan A. Jackson, London’s Termini (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1969), Chapter 1.

2 Thomas Bolton, ‘Wrong Side of the Tracks? The Development of London’s Railway Terminus Neighbourhoods’ (Unpublished Ph.D thesis, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, 2018).

3 On street traffic, the effects of London’s railway termini and proposed transport solutions, including plans for a central London railway terminus, see Carlos López Galvis, Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 72–96.

4 T.C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport. Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis, volume 1 (London: George Allen & Unwin Limited, 1963), 140; John R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 264–6.

5 Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, volume 1, 163.

6 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986); Matthew Beaumont, Michael Freeman, The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007); Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space: Mobility, Modernity and Place (London: Sage, 2002).

7 Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure. Women in the Making of London’s West End, (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146.

8 See Penny Sparke’s article in this issue.

9 See, for example, Jeffrey Richards and John M. Mackenzie, The Railway Station. A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Carroll L.V. Meeks, The Railway Station. An Architectural History (London: The Architectural Press, 1957).

10 The body of writing on London’s termini is extensive. See, for example, Alan A. Jackson, London’s Termini (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1969); Jack Simmons, St Pancras Station (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968); John Betjeman, London’s Historic Railway Stations (London: John Murray, 1972); Steven Brindle, Paddington Station Its History and Architecture (Swindon, English Heritage, 2004); Simon Bradley, St Pancras Station (London: Profile Books, 2007); and John Christopher’s series on London stations for Amberley Publishing.

11 Jackson, London’s Termini, 41.

12 George Revill, Railway (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 199.

13 Bolton, ‘Wrong Side of the Tracks?’.

14 Colin Divall, ‘What Happens if We Think About Railways as a Kind of Consumption? Towards a New Historiography of Transport and Citizenship in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Working Papers id 1179, eSocialSciences (2007) <https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id1179.html> [accessed 8 October 2018].

15 Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing, and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), Chapter 2.

16 Mark Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (Heijningen: Jap Sam Books, 2016), 10.

17 ‘Metropolitan Improvements’, London Evening Standard, 14 August 1868, 3.

18 Richards and MacKenzie, The Railway Station, 3.

19 ‘Improved Arrangements at Railway Stations’, The Spectator, 8 July 1848, 14.

20 Ibid.

21 S. Sidney, Rides on Railways, London, 1851 <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13271/13271-h/13271-h.htm> [accessed 17 August 2018].

22 G.P. Putnam, ‘Some Things in London and Paris, 1836–1869’, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, 13:18 (June 1869), 735; W.J. Stillman, ‘Characteristics of London’, The Century, 26:6 (October 1883), 821.

23 ‘The New Victoria Railway Station at Pimlico’, Illustrated London News, 4 May 1861, 418.

24 By the 1880s the two stations accommodated services of the London and North Western Railway, the Great Western, the Great Northern, and the Midland Railway. See S. Rea, The Railways Terminating in London. Description of the Terminal Stations, and the Underground Railways (New York: Engineering News Publishing Company, 1888), 35–36.

25 H. Shin, ‘The Art of Advertising Railways: Organisation and Coordination in Britain’s Railway Marketing, 1860–1910’, Business History, 56:2 (17 February 2014), 189.

26 Rea, The Railways Terminating in London, 46.

27 ‘The Abbot’s Ripton Disaster’, The Globe, 5 February 1876, 4.

28 Ibid.

29 S.T. Abernethy, ‘Opening Up the Suburbs: Workmen’s Trains in London, 1860–1914’, Urban History, 42:1 (2015), 76.

30 Rea, The Railways Terminating in London, 27.

31 Richards and MacKenzie, The Railway Station, 138.

32 M. Daunton, Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1851–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 139.

33 ‘The Great Western Railway of England as a Holiday Line’, Sligo Champion, 19 June 1909, 8; advertisement for the G.W.R as ‘The Real Holiday Line’, Cambrian News, 13 December 1907, 4; advertisement ‘G.W.R. = The Holiday Line’, Reading Observer, 24 July 1909, 7; ‘Express Travel at Cheap Fares’, Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 25 July 1907, 7; ‘The Holiday Line Herald’, Acton Gazette, 1 September 1911, 7.

34 ‘Speculations on the Railway’, Illustrated London News, 7 December 1844, 360.

35 J. Christopher, Brunel’s Kingdom: In the Footsteps of Britain's Greatest Engineer (Stroud: The History Press, 2015), 31.

36 Jackson, London’s Termini, 311–12.

37 J.F. Gairns, ‘Notable Railway Stations, Marylebone: Great Central Railway’, The Railway Magazine, 29:172 (October 1911), 272; ‘The Great Western Hotels’, London Daily News, 17 March 1898, 6.

38 Jackson, London’s Termini, 69.

39 ‘Illustrated Interviews No.22, Mr William Pollitt, General Manager, Great Central Railway’, The Railway Magazine, April 1899, 299.

40 Advertisement, The Globe, 2 February 1894, 4.

41 Austin Corbin, ‘Quick Transit between New York and London’, The North American Review, 161:468 (November 1895), 513–27.

42 Advertisement, West London Observer, 14 June 1912, 3.

43 For example, on 11th November 1919 the chairman of the London and North-Western Railway company presided over a memorial service in the great hall at Euston Station ‘In Silent Memory’, The Yorkshire Post, 12 November 1919, 7.

44 ‘The Shah of Persia’, London Evening Standard, 21 June 1873, 2.

45 ‘The Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Opening by the Queen’, London Evening Standard, 5 May 1886, 3.

46 ‘The Shah of Persia. Arrival of H.M. in London’, Wigton Advertiser, 6 July 1889, 2.

47 ‘Paddington Station and the Coronation’, North Devon Journal, 29 April 1937, 6.

48 ‘London Jack’, Farringdon Advertiser and Vale of the White Horse Gazette, 13 April 1901, 2.

49 In connection with such sites of social memory within the underground railways of London and Berlin, Samuel Merrill has indicated how the cities’ transport authorities have managed approaches to the past to minimise impact on their commercial activities and the efficient movement of passengers. See S. Merrill, Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in the Railways beneath London and Berlin (Oxford: Peter Lang Limited, 2018), 329.

50 ‘Navy Week Preliminaries’, Todmorden and District News, 2 August 1935, 7.

51 ‘Navy Week Plans. Special Excursions to the Ports’, Nottingham Evening Post, 17 April 1936, 7.

52 The GWR introduced platform tickets when they ended the practice of locking passengers into their railway carriages. ‘Railways and Steam Navigation’, Gloucestershire Chronicle, 23 July 1842, 4.

53 ‘The New Euston Station’, London Daily News, 28 May 1849, 6.

54 ‘Caution Railway Travellers’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 6 January 1855, 4; ‘Police Intelligence’, Morning Post, 7 September 1868, 7; ‘Railway Thieves at the Waterloo Station’, Middlesex Chronicle, 24 October 1863, 8.

55 As several newspapers reported, between 70 and 80 arrests for theft were usually made on Derby Day but this was reduced by around half in 1874 when police monitored the barriers at London termini. ‘Thieves at the Derby’, Manchester Evening News, 26 May 1875, 3.

56 ‘Police Courts. Lambeth. The Cab Question’, The Morning Post, 29 January 1853, 7.

57 ‘Raid on Flower Girls’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 5 May 1889, 8.

58 Ibid.

59 ‘Travellers’ Aid Society’, Morning Post, 26 January 1899, 3.

60 Journalist W.T. Stead’s reports on prostitution, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Babylon’, serialised in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, are an important context for this activity. On Stead, see J.R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight. Narratives of Sexual Danger in late Victorian London (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). On ‘safe passage narratives’, see L. Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 40–65.

61 Alan Jackson dates the introduction of closed platforms at Waterloo to 1910 onwards. See Jackson, London’s Termini, 218.

62 Among them, the London and North-Western, the Great Western, and the South-Eastern. ‘Return Railway Tickets’, Daily Telegraph and Courier, 14 July 1903, 12.

63 ‘The Nod’, The Globe and Traveller, 13 July 1910, 1.

64 ‘Chained Season Tickets’, The Globe, 17 January 1917, 6.

65 A. Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 220.

66 C. López Galvis and D. Zunino Singh, ‘The Dialectics of Circulation and Congestion in History’, The Journal of Transport History, 33:2 (December 2012), 253–4.

67 J. Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 11; C. López Galvis, Cities, Railways, Modernities, 85.

68 See, for example, ‘Ladies’ Column’, Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, 18 August 1888, 3.

69 ‘The Easter Exodus’, The Daily News, 28 March 1902, 10.

70 ‘The New Liverpool Street Station. The Largest in the World’, The Bristol Mercury, 29 December 1893, 6; ‘The Largest Railway Station in the Kingdom’, The Lowestoft Journal, 20 January 1894, 3.

71 ‘An Ideal Victoria Station’, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 May 1902, 7.

72 ‘Alterations at Victoria Station,’ Croydon Guardian and Surrey County Gazette, 15 August 1908, 3.

73 ‘The New Waterloo Railway Station. A Great Public Improvement’, The Railway Magazine, December 1910, 444.

74 ‘The New Waterloo Railway Station. A Great Public Improvement’, 443–4.

75 ‘Waterloo Station Improvements’, The Observer, 24 March 1907, 3.

76 ‘The New Waterloo Railway Station. A Great Public Improvement’, 444.

77 ‘The Great Central Railway’, Banbury Guardian, 2 February 1899, 7.

78 ‘Messrs W.H. Smith and Son’, Pall Mall Gazette, 3 August 1892, 3.

79 J. Droege, Passenger Terminals and Trains (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1916), 225–6.

80 ‘Train Time Indicators’, Illustrated London News, 19 July 1924, 165.

81 Agreement between Great Western Railway Company and Benn and Cronin Ltd for train indicators at stations, October 1926, The National Archives, RAIL 252/2103.

82 ‘Loud Speakers as Train Indicators. Experiments at St. Pancras Station’, Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail, 5 June 1925, 6. As John Droege had previously observed, fog placed significant challenges on the smooth running of London’s termini, Droege, Passenger Terminals and Trains, 273.

83 R. Sennett, ‘The Civitas of Seeing’, Places, 5:4 (1989), 82.

84 T. Edensor, ed., Geographies of Rhythm. Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 4.

85 ‘The National Coffee Tavern Association’, London Evening Standard, 7 June 1894, 2.

86 ‘Late posting of letters at London railway stations’, London Daily News, 25 March 1864, 2.

87 Letter to the Editor. ‘Railway Accommodation’, London Evening Standard, 5 September 1865, 2.

88 ‘Automatic Trading’, Brighton Gazette, 1 June 1889, 5.

89 ‘Ladies’ Lavatories at Railway Stations’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 31 October 1892, 2.

90 Meeks, The Railway Station, 58–60 and 81.

91 ibid.

92 Rea, Railways The Railways Terminating in London, 16–17.

93 The Graphic’s ‘Bystander’ column as reported in a wide range of regional newspapers. See, for example, ‘Railway Station Comforts’, The Warminster and Westbury Journal’, 25 July 1891, 6.

94 Untitled editorial, Nantwich Guardian, 5 March 1879, 6.

95 On the railway bookstall and railway literature, see Hammond, Reading, Publishing, and the formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914, 51–84.

96 H. James, ‘London’ in Henry James, London Stories and Other Writings, edited and with an introduction by D. Kynaston (Padstow, Cornwall: Tabb House, 1989), 263.

97 ‘Studies of Life and Character at a Railway Station’, The Graphic, 13 September 1890, 293.

98 An agreement of 1889, between the Great Western Railway and Henry Thomas Tallack, for example, allowed the placement of two Stanley’s Patent Automatic Height Measuring Machines at Paddington Station at an annual cost of £20 for the two. Agreement between Great Western Railway and Henry Thomas Tallack, dated 1 January 1889. The National Archives, RAIL 252/892.

99 H.S. Tayler, ‘Some Joys of Railway Travelling’, The Railway Magazine, volume (1901), cited in Andrew Dow, ed., Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 228.

100 G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, 1909, cited in Richards and MacKenzie, The Railway Station, 11–12.

101 J.B. Priestley, Adam in Moonshine, cited in Andrew Dow, ed., Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations, 214.

102 ‘Railway Station Bank: Waterloo Experiment’, The Manchester Guardian, 21 December 1923, 5.

103 ‘The Great Central Railway’, Banbury Guardian, 2 February 1899, 7.

104 J.F. Gairns, ‘Notable Railway Stations’, 272.

105 H. Shin, ‘The Art of Advertising Railways’, 187–213.

106 ibid.

107 ‘A Tribute to Railway Publicity’, The Railway and Travel Monthly, May 1912, 428.

108 C. Divall, ‘Civilising Velocity: Masculinity and the Marketing of Britain’s Passenger Trains, 1921–39’, Journal of Transport History, 32:2 (2011), 164–91; A. Medcalf, ‘“We are Always Learning” Marketing the Great Western Railway, 1921–39’, The Journal of Transport History, 33:2 (December 2012), 186–211.

109 ‘Brighter Railway Stations’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 31 December 1924, 7.

110 ‘Waterloo Station. Modern Comforts for Travellers.’, Bournemouth Guardian, 5 July 1913, 8.

111 ‘How to Make London Brighter’, Pall Mall Gazette, 8 February 1922, 9.

112 ‘Paddington Goes Gay’, Western Daily Press, 16 December 1933, 5.

113 In the following year twelve interior columns were transformed into giant Christmas crackers. See ‘Paddington Station Goes Gay’, Western Daily Press and Daily Mirror, 18 December 1934, 4.

114 ‘Transport Vision’, Birmingham Daily Gazette, 4 May 1937, 5.

115 Architectural Correspondent, ‘Cinema in Victoria Station: For Those Waiting for Trains’, The Observer, 17 September 1933, 19.

116 Meeks, The Railway Station, 92; Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project, 149.