The London & South Western Railway
Since railways first came to Battersea, their spine has been the main line westwards out of Waterloo, running roughly parallel with the river to Clapham Junction and beyond. This route was projected in the 1830s as the London & Southampton Railway. But when it was opened, neither Waterloo Station nor Clapham Junction was yet thought of. The London terminus lay at Nine Elms. Hence at the time of opening in May 1838 the tracks ran out to Wandsworth and on to Woking. By the time the route to Southampton had been completed in 1840, the name of the company and line had already been changed to the London & South Western Railway (LSWR)....
The reasons for selecting Nine Elms were set out by the architect Charles Fowler, the first witness examined by the Lords Committee of 1834 on the London & Southampton's bill, and probably then the intended designer of the terminus. Fowler emphasized its excellent location for 'diffusing a supply of provisions', notably 'country-killed meat'; it was, he explained, 'as convenient a one as can be found considering its relative bearings to the different markets in London'.
Supplies could pass efficiently from Nine Elms to the various bridges, so Fowler and Giles asserted, notably Vauxhall Bridge, opened in 1816 with links to the West End. In addition, valuable buildings and land were unscathed by the projected route. 'I never knew a public work that intersected ornamental property so little as this line', testified Henry Crawter, a surveyor who had examined the route from Vauxhall to the River Wey.3 Through Battersea the line bisected mainly market gardens; almost no buildings were to be demolished.
Preparations for earthworks in Battersea were being made in 1834, but full-scale construction started only in 1836. The main contractor for this sector of the line was Edward Dixon, while the bridges here and further west went to David McIntosh. For structures at Nine Elms the contractor was David Nicholson, probably assisted by Samuel Grimsdell for the station or depot itself.4
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From the terminus the line crossed a millpond on five timber spans before rising on to an elevated embankment some two miles long (Ill. 7.4).5 It skirted the southern edge of Battersea New Town, then crossed Battersea Fields, continuing straight to the later site of Clapham Junction, whence it bore south over Wandsworth Common. The one engineering challenge within the parish came where the railway passed over Falcon Road (then Lane) and just after that under St John's Hill by means of a cutting.6
North of the next bridge southwards, under Battersea Rise, lay the only other original station within the parish, at first called Wandsworth because it served that community, later misleadingly renamed Clapham Common.
This first railway elicited little controversy in Battersea. The Vestry set a pattern by acquiescing in compensation for rights extinguished when the company purchased parts of Wandsworth Common. The 2nd Earl Spencer, still then a large freeholder in the parish as well as lord of the manor, was claimed by Francis Giles 'always to be a consenting party'.7
Despite high fares and complaints about access due to unreliable steamer services and turnpike tolls, the line proved instantly popular. On Derby Day, soon after it opened, 'upwards of 5000 persons' arrived early at Nine Elms, only to find 'there were ten times more applicants for seats in the train-vans than there were seats for their accommodation'. A riot was narrowly averted.8
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In 1844 the LSWR's directors opened negotiations with independent promoters lobbying for a branch diverging from their line after the Falcon Lane bridge and running on via Wandsworth to Richmond. They now also resolved to protract their line eastwards to Waterloo, an extension foreseen even before Nine Elms had opened. These developments, carried out in 1846—8, had long-term consequences. From July 1848 goods traffic and engine sheds and works became the sole functions at Nine Elms. Having handled a million and a quarter passengers in its last year of operations, it was supplanted as a terminus by Waterloo, while for local traffic a new station opened at Vauxhall. The first track-widenings also began, though these fell far short of the railway's ultimate breadth. West of Falcon Bridge, the divergence of the Richmond branch from the line to Southampton foreshadowed the creation of Clapham Junction there fifteen years later.10
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The West End of London & Crystal Palace Railway
For seventeen years the LSWR line remained Battersea's only railway. An Act of 1847 permitted the costive West London Railway to extend from Kensington and Chelsea across Battersea Reach into South London, with the aim of continuing along LSWR tracks to Waterloo. But nothing was done for the moment.
A harsher era was heralded by an interloper from the south, the West End of London & Crystal Palace Railway (WELCPR), announced in October 1852 and authorized in 1853. As its name implied, it aimed to link the fashionable parts of town with the Crystal Palace, then re-erecting at Sydenham. Among its backers were several involved in that venture, including Francis Fuller, who originated the idea, Joseph Paxton, and Charles Geach, the company's first chairman. The choice of Sydenham for the renascent palace had been enmeshed with the ambitions of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (LBSCR), whose original metropolitan terminus lay further east, at London Bridge.11
The first plan was to bring the WELCPR line up from Streatham across Clapham Common by means of a cut-and-cover tunnel, and link up with the LSWR before terminating on the south bank next to Battersea Park.14 But the company was frustrated by defenders of Clapham Common, and by the LSWR's reluctance to admit its rival's trains into Waterloo.15 In the Bill presented to Parliament the WELCPR line therefore took a roundabout western route via less-defended Wandsworth Common. Engineered by Hamilton H. Fulton working with G. P. Bidder and, later, George H. Phipps, it met but did not actually join the LSWR main line just south-west of where the Richmond branch diverged. It then ran eastwards parallel with the LSWR tracks before swinging northwards under them and Battersea Park Road, and arriving at a terminus next to the Thames close to Chelsea Bridge, just east of Queenstown Road (Ill. 7.6).
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The Crystal Palace to Wandsworth Common section of the WELCPR was finally built in 1855—6 and the stretch on to the Thames (under Bidder) in 1857—8.
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Battersea's southern suburban landscape bears no resemblance to its northern topography. Here the presence of the railways has been less cruel. Beyond Clapham Junction the former LSWR main line and LBSCR/WELCPR line veer south, but the former soon passes out of the parish while the latter runs on in a cutting, emerging only at Wandsworth Common Station. Yet it was in the south, not nearer the Thames, that the companies' depredations aroused most animosity, because wealthy and articulate people lived there, and the railways ate up prized common land. Wandsworth Common was the main victim, noted the Clapham Gazette in 1866.
Two or three railway companies in succession fell upon the devoted common ... A space of open land was too tempting not to invite attack. The South- Western Railway seized a fragment; the Crystal Palace Railway appropriated 29 acres; and the London, Brighton, and South Coast 7 acres.45
The effect was to cut the common into three. The same fate would have overtaken Clapham Common had the companies not been stopped.
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Though the railways accelerated building development and commuting in Battersea, they were not built with that primary purpose. Even when the area had been built up, thousands of local residents travelled to work in central London not by railway but by tram, bus or even boat. Queenstown Road Station, opened in 1877 on the LSWR line only after housing around it was well forward, appears to support the maxim that suburban railway stations followed behind the house-builders.
On the other hand the LSWR's early halt at 'Wandsworth' or 'Clapham Common' featured in property advertisements of the 1850s, while the subsequent stations at Wandsworth Common and New Wandsworth were undoubted boons to development.46 New Wandsworth indeed briefly gave its name to the district around it, as stations often do. So too more permanently did Clapham Junction. But an equal stimulus of that great interchange was commercial. The emergence from the 1880s of Battersea's prime shopping centre south of the station relied on its accessibility by train.
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[Clapham Junction]
Calls for a station at this point were first heard in 1846, when the LSWR's new branch to Richmond and Windsor, parting from its main line west of Falcon Bridge, was mooted. The existence of a halt further south where Battersea Rise crossed the main line, known first as Wandsworth and then as Clapham Common (see below), allowed the LSWR directors to ignore these voices. The first stop on the Richmond branch was therefore made at Wandsworth Town. So things stood until the advent in 1858 of the WELCPR, whose tracks coming up from Wandsworth Common converged in this same locality, before running parallel with the LSWR on its southern side.
Next year a third company, the WLER, resumed its plan to build a westward spur from its projected line across the river to join the others at the same point. The spur made no sense without a station, and finally induced the LSWR to create a concentration west of Falcon Bridge, including an interchange station. Work began in 1860 with a 570ft-long carriage shed north of the Richmond line, built to relieve pressure of space at Nine Elms and help 'nourish the LSWR's terminus at Waterloo'.110 Sidings, later known as Clapham Yard, were laid out between the Richmond branch and the main line, while closer to Falcon Bridge came the first LSWR station. It was a rudimentary affair with a hip-roofed station house, reached by footpath and underground passage from Falcon Road or by a slanting drive accessible from a point beside the original railway bridge under St John's Hill.
Relations between the LSWR and the LBSCR, which had taken over the WELCPR, were poor. Only after lengthy squabbles did the LBSCR and WLER undertake their own platforms and accommodation south of the LSWR's. The combined station finally opened in March 1863 with the ever-misleading and snobbish name of Clapham Junction — not Falcon Bridge as first intended. The first LBSCR accommodation was meagre, with not even a closed-in shelter on the down line. Access to the company's platforms was mainly via a booking office at the north end of New (later Prested) Road.111
The 1863 station had six platform structures and twelve platform faces (Ill. 7.37). The LSWR's lines were on the north side and the LBSCR's on the south, but they were flanked by the WLER's up line on the outlying northern side of the station, and its down line on the extreme southern counterpart. From 1866 the LCDR also had access to one track on the northern side. Then as now, the platforms were numbered from north to south, yet confusingly. All interchange took place by means of a foot tunnel or 'tubular dungeon' lined with corrugated iron (at six feet, half the width of its present equivalent) east of the station-house structures.112 The rival companies ran their own booking and other facilities, and there was no proper linkage between their tracks.
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Wandsworth Common area
West of Nine Elms, the original London & Southampton Railway as opened in 1838 included one station within Battersea parish. This was situated in a cutting just north of the bridge which took Battersea Rise over the railway. It enjoyed two names during its twenty-five year life, both misleading: Wandsworth from 1838 till 1846, and Clapham Common from 1846 to 1863. The former was understandable, as the station lay within a mile of Wandsworth to its west. Once the Richmond branch of the LSWR supplied that community with a station of its own, Wandsworth Town, the name had to be changed. 'Clapham Common' was an utter misnomer. It proved, as a correspondent complained to the Clapham Gazette, 'a mere trap for the unwary. The luckless traveller who took his ticket for this station found himself at the end of his journey turned adrift on Wandsworth Common, two miles distant from Clapham Common.'149
The station, happily recorded by photograph, was perfectly plain, with an office at the east end of the road bridge and stairs down on both sides to timber platforms, perhaps both with shelters (Ill. 7.47). Though it closed in 1863 when Clapham Junction opened some way to the north, it conferred its mendacious name upon its successor. As the same writer observed, Clapham Junction 'deceives ten passengers where the Clapham Common Station deceived but one.'150 The buildings survived until the LSWR tracks were widened in the 1880s.151
Just east of the above, on the eastern branch of the railway from Clapham Junction southwards as it crosses Battersea Rise, lies the site of the former New Wandsworth Station. Another short-lived station, it existed only between 1858 and 1869, yet lent its name to the developing area around it.
New Wandsworth was built as a local stop on the WELCPR when that railway was taken on from Wandsworth Common to the Thames in 1857—8, replacing the temporary terminus of the WELCPR at the next road bridge southwards. Like its LSWR neighbour it stood in a cutting, in this case south of the Battersea Rise bridge. There was a booking office on the east side, and a shelter on the east or down platform. Also on this side at a higher level was a coal and goods yard, opened along with the station. The creation of Clapham Junction near by in 1863 made the station otiose, but it hung on for another six years.
New Wandsworth Goods Yard carried on longer, was extended probably in the Edwardian years, and closed only in 1968. The site is now covered by housing on the west side of Chivalry Road.152
The one surviving station in this sector is Wandsworth Common, south of Nightingale Lane and accessible from Jaggard Way or from a roadway out of St James's Drive. The present site dates from 1869, but it had a predecessor further north, beyond the Nightingale Lane bridge. There lay the original temporary terminus of the WELCPR, constructed from Crystal Palace up to here in 1855—6 before carrying on to the river. The neighbourhood was as yet all but empty of buildings. In the customarily maladroit way, the station was at first denominated plain Wandsworth, 'Common' being added about a year after its official opening in December 1856. Nothing is known of its appearance. It closed in June 1858 when the line continued northwards, and was briefly replaced by New Wandsworth Station, leaving little trace behind.153 The current Wandsworth Common Station owes its existence to the opening of Clapham Junction in 1863, which made New Wandsworth Station obsolete. But an intermediate LBSCR station was now needed between Clapham Junction and Balham, as development was taking off hereabouts, with the Hope Tavern and other buildings mushrooming up on Bellevue Road in the mid 1860s.
The new station opened in October 1869. The original station office, in a minimal brick Gothic style, survives on the north-east side of the line (Ill. 7.48), reached from Jaggard Way. The rest of the station has been much reconstructed in tandem with track widenings.
In 1887—8 new platforms, a waiting room and a footbridge were reported.
Works of 1894 corresponded with further widening on the south-west side, when the footbridge was no doubt lengthened. A stationmaster's house of 1897—8 is perhaps the extension north of the 1869 building. Further alterations costing over £4,000 were made by the builders Kirk & Randall in 1907.154 These must have included the single-storey booking office of brick and brown stone in a handsome Wrenaissance manner protruding on the St James's Road side; it is pierced by what was originally a porte cochere (Ill. 7.49), and hipped back at the end either side of a pedimented gable over a round-headed window. The coverings of the outside platforms have been removed, while those on the island platform have had a shallow pitch added.
Adjacent to Wandsworth Common Station on the north-east side were sidings and a small goods yard, controlled from an office slapped directly in front of the station building in 1891. These have disappeared in favour of commercial premises ranged along Jaggard Way.