Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · February 2025
A veritable Grand Canyon of railway impediment
Tonight's speaker is probably well known to a lot of you: Sue Demont, former chair of the Heritage Committee of the Battersea Society and our local expert in all things railways. She is going to talk tonight about Clapham Junction. Sue, over to you.
My history with the junction goes back about forty years. There were whole periods of my life when I used its trains every day — going to work, going to family events, sporting events, births, marriages, deaths, christenings, weddings. It is an extraordinary facility to have on our doorstep: a railway junction from which you can literally travel to all four points of the compass within the UK.
This talk had its gestation in last year's Railway 200 celebrations, which marked 200 years of passenger rail traffic. Tonight's version looks at the junction more from a Wandsworth perspective, which is fitting: the junction is very close to the common, some of the land taken by the railways came from the common, and it remains the main local station for a large number of residents in this area.
If I were talking about Waterloo, I would begin with the magnificence of the 1922 entrance. If I were talking about Wandsworth Common Station — a very lovely little vernacular building — I would start with a photo of that. But if I am going to talk about Europe's busiest railway station, I can't begin that way, because Clapham Junction's entrance is, frankly, a shocker. For much of the late twentieth century it appeared to have got muddled up with a branch of Moss Bros and a Café Nero.
Instead, the image that really captures the essence of the junction is a painting — photographic, even cinematic, in its precision — made by Terence Cuneo as the artwork for a British Railways poster in 1961. Some of you may be thinking: surely you never had all those locomotives in those positions simultaneously? You would be correct. But Cuneo was an absolute perfectionist who took every possible precaution to ensure that what he depicted was possible in railway terms. The track layout, the points, the positions of the gantries — all of it was checked by the signalmen responsible for each individual section of track. He did much of his painting up on a signal gantry, which must have been both hazardous and inconvenient. He selected those elements he wanted in order to convey the scale of the place, and added two signature landmarks for orientation: in the top corner you can see the orange brick turrets of the Clapham Grand. You are looking south-westward.
Cuneo himself called the junction “a veritable Grand Canyon of railway impediment.” “Impediment” is an unusual word — it normally suggests something in the way, clutter, nuisance. But to operate the number of trains and the kind of layout Clapham Junction has, you need all those tracks, points, crossovers, gantries, bridges and platforms. There is nowhere else like it in the country.
The first railway to come through what would become the junction was the London and Southampton line in 1838. It arrived at a largely rural landscape: the farmland and market gardens of North Battersea. There were very few buildings in the way, no demolition required, and therefore the line was comparatively cheap to build.
The railway did not start in the centre of London. Its original terminus was at Nine Elms — famous today for other reasons, but at that time actually the third-ever London terminus, after London Bridge and Euston. It was a distinguished building by Sir William Tite, an eminent railway architect. In its ten-year existence as a passenger terminus it witnessed riots on Derby Day, the elopement of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, and distinguished passengers including the Duke of Wellington, Queen Victoria and Garibaldi — an interesting trio. Within a decade, however, Nine Elms became obsolete as a passenger terminus when Waterloo was built, being more central. Nine Elms was then converted to a goods station and retained that role until it was demolished in the 1960s, despite a campaign by John Betjeman and others to save it.
Other early lines soon followed: the Richmond Railway, running from what became Clapham Junction out towards Twickenham and Reading; and later the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway, which I will call the Brighton line for brevity. The development was entirely piecemeal: slightly random lines in slightly random directions, with equally random stations. What started life as Wandsworth Station quickly became known as Clapham Common Station, despite being nowhere near Clapham Common. New Wandsworth Station was also not really in Wandsworth. They were crying out for a single interchange station with a name that said where it actually was — and they failed on the second part.
The catalyst that finally forced the creation of a proper junction station was the West London Extension Railway and its bridge — known variously as the Cremorne Bridge, the Olympia Bridge, the Overground Bridge, the Kensington Bridge, and now simply as the Overground bridge, where trains curve from Clapham Junction over to Chelsea Harbour and Imperial Wharf. What made this line unique in south-west London was that it was a genuine through railway: unlike every other line leaving Battersea, it did not terminate but went northward and could link up with lines across the country. Suddenly the site of Clapham Junction mattered enormously, because you now had four rail companies running through the area, one of which actually connected the north and south of the nation. As the press remarked with some excitement at the time, you could travel from Inverness to Brighton via Clapham Junction. Which you could.
There were fierce arguments about the new station — not least about what to call it. The case for “Clapham” was simple: it was a recognisable brand name that would pull passengers in. Ironically, the good folk of Clapham had fought tooth and nail to keep any railway away from their common — which is why Wandsworth Common has two railways and Clapham Common has none. Yet Clapham was to give its name to the station while providing none of its land. Battersea, meanwhile, was being hammered in the press: described as a backwater, afflicted by poverty and industrial pollution, and — perhaps most damningly — “too unimportant to warrant a station.” There were in fact no stations at all under the Battersea name until after Clapham Junction had opened.
Why wasn’t it called Wandsworth Junction? Mainly because there were already rather too many Wandsworths: Wandsworth Town (on the Richmond line), New Wandsworth (on the Brighton line), Wandsworth Road (now on the Overground), and Wandsworth Common Station already on the drawing board. Adding another would not have helped. The 1860s were also not a great decade for the Wandsworth brand: the common was at its most degraded after years of gravel extraction, much of it by the railway companies themselves, and John Buckmaster was about to launch his campaign to save it — making it rather a political football. Other names were briefly considered: Falcon Junction (after the Falcon Brook, which ran directly past the site) appeared in some early documentation, as did Battersea Junction, but neither lasted long.
Later attempts to change the name all foundered. The Battersea Vestry tried but could not agree among themselves what they wanted instead. A campaign by the Daily Chronicle in the 1900s failed because by that point Clapham Junction had become a major centre of shopping and commerce, and changing the name after forty-five years seemed more harmful than helpful.
The companies that had to build the station together were not exactly fraternal. The Clapham Gazette praised them for “fraternising like a happy family,” but if you read the correspondence between the company secretaries, it was anything but: almost daily letters arguing about running lines, points, track connections, buildings, and land. The Brighton line, in particular, was disadvantaged from the start — it had no space for its rolling stock, whereas the London and South Western and the Richmond Railway had carriage sheds and ample room.
The station that emerged was not really a single station at all, but different stations dotted around the network. From 1865, however, the characteristic fan layout was already forming: running tracks on either side for trains picking up and setting down passengers, and in the middle a great fan of rails for storage and carriage cleaning. The Waterloo trains were based here for many years because there was no room to store them at Waterloo itself.
The footprint of the station was vast and largely level, which created a serious problem: how do you get passengers across the running tracks? Two options — an overbridge or a subway. They chose the subway, which has been a source of complaint, amusement and misery ever since. A Punch cartoon of the era captures it perfectly, showing a preoccupied traveller with two minutes to catch their train trying to find a porter or any official to point them in the right direction — while the platform numbering, devised independently by different companies for their own sections, offers no help whatsoever. In the 1870s they lined the subway walls and ceiling with corrugated iron to try to stop water dripping onto ladies’ dresses.
As the early facilities quickly proved inadequate, a race developed between the companies to build the most attractive station buildings. The London and South Western Railway generally won: their building had pavilion roofs, an elegant clock and ecclesiastical-style windows, built to a high specification. This was no accident — the LSWR was aggressively recruiting passengers from Surrey and Hampshire, and those were affluent areas that expected a high standard of provision.
The Brighton line’s contribution, on the other hand, was so poor that it became known as “the shanty.” The local press suggested it was really only suitable as a necropolis railway — fine for passengers, provided they were dead. But the Brighton line eventually redeemed itself magnificently by building a proper station, constructed in 1910, which still stands beautifully restored today: a proper signature statement on St John’s Hill, with arcading along the street frontage that has a faint ambition towards St Pancras, even if it doesn’t quite reach those heights. Ironically, someone has written very deliberately on the building “Clapham Junction, near Wandsworth, SW18” — which it is not. Extraordinary what’s in a name.
By the First World War the station had thirty-nine different running tracks between north and south, a doubled subway, and finally an overbridge — first designed, to give credit where it is due, by the Brighton line, who had recognised how unpopular the subway was. The overbridge now spans the entire site. The only comparable railway structure in scale is the great marshalling yards built in the 1950s — but those were all for goods traffic. Clapham Junction, with all that track and storage, was primarily a passenger station. That is genuinely unusual.
The junction had a couple of celebrated trains of its own. The Brighton Belle ran from 1933 to 1972: an electric train but with truly beautiful Orient Express–style Pullman carriages. Some of that rolling stock is still in use today for luxury rail tours. The Belle had a notably thespian following — Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud were known passengers, and by all accounts the last train back from Brighton was always rather lively.
At the other extreme, there was the Kensington Belle — a mysterious, unadvertised, untimetabled train, accessible only via a concealed staircase behind what is today’s Platform 17. One determined passenger who managed to penetrate the mystery and speak to the driver was told the man had never seen a passenger in living memory. The Kensington Belle also has the distinction of being the last steam-hauled passenger service in London.
There was, of course, quite a lot to excite the train-spotter. Boys at Emanuel School were allowed to do their lunchtime train-spotting from the school roof, provided they signed in with a teacher first. By the post-war period the Southern Region was dominant, but because of Clapham Junction’s unique compass — trains arriving from north, east, and west as well as south — there were engines and carriages from many different regions: Great Western chocolate-and-cream coaches, locomotives from the Midlands and the north, and much else to interest a young enthusiast.
The station became famous in the 1960s through Nell Dunn’s book Up the Junction and the subsequent film, which portrayed the somewhat squalid side of life around Clapham Junction. For a while the name “Clapham” did not protect the area from a decidedly downbeat image; this was swinging London, and the key message of the film was the lives of working-class girls in the Battersea–Clapham Junction area.
The title also attracted two fine songs. The first was by Manfred Mann. The second — perhaps more enduring — was by Squeeze, written by Jools Holland, whose lyrics capture the seamy side of life with considerable skill. When teaching at Burntwood School in the 1990s, Sue recalls that Friday nights always produced the same phrase from the girls discussing their plans: they were going “up the junction.”
The junction features in children’s literature too, notably in the Gasworks Alley Gang series (written around 1960), which provides a vivid Battersea backdrop. And on Platform 10 there is now a plaque to Oscar Wilde, with a direct Wandsworth connection: he was being transferred from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol when he was subjected to a public ordeal on that platform.
Finally, a plaque on the Brighton Yard entrance to Clapham Junction commemorates John Charles Buckmaster. At the time he launched his campaign to save Wandsworth Common, he was living in what was then called New Road, now Prystead Road, very close to the environs of the station itself. He was campaigning desperately to keep what remained of the common intact — and it is fitting that his name is on the building, given that land from the common was taken to help create it.
For those who want to know much more, Tim Sherwood’s book Change at Clapham Junction covers the origins and history of the junction in rich and reliable detail.
When was the station officially given the accolade of being Europe’s busiest? Formally, it never has been — the designation has never been scientifically established. But it has gained wide currency at various points throughout the station’s history. It was called the largest in Britain, then the largest in Europe, and occasionally the world’s largest or busiest. The Edwardian period — just before the First World War — was probably its first heyday. There has also been a massive surge in use in the last ten to fifteen years because of the Overground, running four trains an hour on two different services, standing room only, all the time. Where all those people travelled before the Overground existed is a genuine puzzle.
Where is the best place to stand to get a sense of the junction? The overbridge is very good. At certain points you are looking westward across the sidings and carriage storage, and the scale is extraordinary. Sunsets from up there can be spectacular. The first of the road bridges over the junction also gives a good perspective, though you need to be tall to see over the parapet. The footbridge within the station is probably the best accessible vantage point.
Was there any parliamentary control over how the railways developed? Companies did require an Act of Parliament to be constituted as formal railway companies. But beyond that there was almost no coordination. All over the country you have ludicrous scenarios — two competing lines through a village of four hundred people, because one company arrived first and the other refused to use its tracks. The Battersea Tangle diagram makes this vivid: you would never design that railway layout from scratch in any shape or form. North of the river, where you have the great termini and trains radiating outward from them, is considerably more rational. South of the river it was essentially a free-for-all.
Were the railway workers housed locally? A great deal of the artisan housing built in Battersea was occupied by railwaymen, though it was not specifically built for them. The railways were by far the predominant industry in Battersea: approximately 6% of the London and South Western Railway’s entire workforce — across a huge geographical area — lived in Battersea, particularly in the Park Town area and on the Shaftesbury Estate. The railway hierarchy was clearly reflected in the housing: the lowest grades lived in some very rough areas, the skilled and semi-skilled in more respectable streets. It was nothing like Swindon, where an entire town was built for railway workers; it was more organic than that.
Who owned the land before the railways arrived? Going back to the beginning, it was small-scale farmers and minor landowners. The railway companies began buying cheaply while land was easily available, then moved on to larger farms — Long Hedge Farm, for instance, was about three hundred acres, covering much of what is now Battersea. Earl Spencer also owned a great deal of land in the area, and bits of Wandsworth Common were absorbed into the junction site as well. There was no single dominant landowner, which is actually one reason the companies found it relatively easy to acquire the land they needed: there was rarely concentrated resistance.
Are there any plans to improve the station entrance? Work is under way on the Brighton Yard entrance. The toilets have already been transformed — a genuine revelation compared to what was there before. The lower end, near the St John’s Road exit, seems harder to improve given the limited space, and the clutter of shops and the flower stall show no signs of abating. There have been several controversial schemes over the years to build high-rise flats over the junction and use the revenue to create a more coherent and dramatic station above it — but none has ever come to fruition.
Why is there no underground connection to the junction? There have always been campaigns to link Clapham Junction to the London Underground, and it is an entirely reasonable ambition. The most obvious opportunity would have been via the Battersea Power Station development, but the value of real estate in the Nine Elms area now makes it financially very difficult. It might have been achievable fifty years ago. There has never been the political will to make it happen, and it seems unlikely now.
Will the subway ever be brought up to a decent standard? We have not managed it in 162 years, which is not encouraging. Network Rail is responsible. There are precedents for transformation — the Falcon Road railway bridge, which used to be a truly hideous experience after dark, has been given excellent murals and lighting and is now pleasant to walk through. So it can be done. Whether the subway, which has been leaking since the day it opened, will ever be properly waterproofed remains to be seen.
Thank you so much, Sue — wonderful, fascinating and very entertaining. Thank you all for coming out on such a horrible wet evening.