Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · November 2022
Sue Demont · Local historian and railway enthusiast
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the second of our three Autumn Heritage talks. Tonight we are talking, as you can see, about the railways of Wandsworth Common. I am Stephen Midlane, chair of the Heritage Group of the Friends. Tonight’s speaker is Dr Sue Demont, a mainstay of our Heritage Group: she wrote the introduction to our book and edited the section on society. Tonight’s talk is very much close to her heart — she is a huge railway enthusiast. She will be talking for about 45 minutes, which will leave us 15 minutes for questions, and we aim to finish by eight o’clock. Sue — over to you.
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Thank you very much, Stephen. Good evening, everyone. I am very pleased to be here this evening to talk about how Wandsworth Common was reshaped by the railways. If any train buffs are in the audience, you will know that the word “reshaped” is rather emotive — it is, of course, the official title of the Beeching Report in the early 1960s, when the railway network was slashed. Tonight, however, I am going to rove around a little, not sticking precisely to reshaping, but I would like, by the end of the evening, to have thrown out some ideas about the long-term impact of the railways on the Common, and which of the conflicting viewpoints people find themselves agreeing with today.
A very small amount about my own railway enthusiasms. They were probably kindled when I caught one of the very last steam trains in the 1960s, from Cardiff to Barry Island, to go to the beach. There were a lot of railwaymen in my family, as I know there are in some families here this evening. When I was fifteen I volunteered for what was then the Main Line Steam Trust, now the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire. I then worked for four years on the Festiniog Railway in North Wales. When I retired, my Diamond Wedding gift was a Belmont rail tour. And when I was sixty, I was given a ride behind the Royal Scot on the Settle–Carlisle Railway. I suppose all my life I have just been fascinated by railways — and I don’t drive a car, which is also not a statement, but an interesting side effect.
Let us start at the very beginning, on Wandsworth Common. What I did not know when I was at school, learning history, was that one day I would be living very close to the first long-distance freight railway in the country: the Surrey Iron Railway. It does not go across Wandsworth Common as we know it — it goes along the valley of the Wandle — but it was an early example, going right back to 1802. It was a very primitive operation: the wagons were horse-drawn and people paid tolls to have their goods carried along the line. It was never very successful or profitable, but it was a pioneering enterprise. It closed for good in 1846 and, as I say, it did not encroach upon the Common as we know it.
We need to think ourselves back to the whole area before the railways arrived. Battersea Fields, looking towards the Thames, was essentially farmland and market gardens — an awful lot of open space. You could argue that is quite inviting to anyone wanting to build a road or a railway: land without dense development, whose owners would require a certain amount of compensation but nothing like the cost and complexity of demolishing buildings and relocating people. And of course there was Wandsworth Common itself — obviously a modern photograph does not show us how it looked in the 1800s, but I want you to think for a minute about the impact of digging it up, and digging up Battersea Fields, on the landscape.
Over fifty acres of land were taken from the Common to build railway lines, quite early on. That was bad enough in itself. But the other problem was that whenever the railways were being developed, they needed vast quantities of building materials, and Wandsworth Common was a great source of gravel. A great deal of gravel was excavated to support railway building, and that is one of the things that had a very detrimental and long-lasting effect on the Common.
The railways are not the only predators on this beautiful landscape. There was obviously housing, there were enclosures for all sorts of purposes, and there were some very large institutions — most notably the Victorian Patriotic Building, which gobbled up huge amounts of land. But in some ways you could argue the railways were the most culpable, because they were not content with their cuttings and embankments and routes through — there was a propensity to annex surrounding land and go much further than what they had originally purchased. They were also on occasion guilty of selling it on for further development. And of course this was a time when the Common was meant to be a common for the benefit of all.
The first line to be built across the Common was the London and Southampton Railway. The original terminus was Nine Elms station in Battersea — not widely known, but Nine Elms was actually the third-ever London rail terminus, after London Bridge and Euston. It only held that status for ten years; the line was then extended to Waterloo, and Nine Elms station was closed to passengers and became a goods depot. In its brief heyday it was an important building, and it is scandalous that it was demolished in the 1960s, despite a campaign by John Betjeman to save it.
The first cutting dug for a railway on Wandsworth Common — a cutting that goes broadly parallel to today’s Spencer Park — was dug for the London and Southampton Railway. (After grouping in 1923 it became part of the Southern Railway, but I shall call it the London and Southampton here because it is shorter.) It was not a very high-tech operation: a few workmen with picks and shovels and bowler hats. This was before the age of the navvy, and we are probably all familiar with images of camps full of navvies leading quite extraordinary lives building the main routes outside London. This was very early on — a primitive operation.
The cutting was known as Clapham Cutting, though it is nowhere near Clapham. There is a whole raft of misnamed railway operations in this area, which I shall say something about later. It is quite extraordinary how a railway station can be given a name that does not relate to where it actually is, and does not particularly help that railway to be profitable.
To give you some figures: 616,000 cubic yards of soil were dug out by hand. One thing particularly worth noting is the very strong springs of water that were destroyed by the building of the cutting, including the one that fed the Black Sea pond. This is what necessitated the windmill being built to pump water back to feed the Black Sea — the railway companies had basically cut off the feeder water supply. The cutting ended up being nearly two miles long and forty-five feet deep. A large amount of common land was removed. But, as I say, the photographs that show this best are much later ones.
The railway was going to go a lot further than Wandsworth Common, and in the same year as the cutting was built, the first local station was also built. It was initially called Wandsworth Station, even though it was not in Wandsworth. When Wandsworth Town station was opened on the Richmond line, they had to change the name, so they changed it to Clapham Common — which was even further away and even less appropriate. That may have been one reason why the station was not a great success. It was quite ramshackle, and there were plenty of complaints about poor facilities, expensive fares and an infrequent service.
To be fair, that was a feature of many inner-London suburban stations in this period. The railway companies were much more interested in going further out than in building up a local market of passengers. The concept of the commuter was not really in place in the 1840s and 50s. Companies were focused on long-distance travel.
Then in 1856 came the next railway line, and the station rather creatively named New Wandsworth. It still was not in Wandsworth, but at least it was new — briefly. The railway line in question is a great one to try to say when you have had a few: the West End of London and Crystal Palace Extension Railway, which is the line that eventually becomes the Brighton line, the London Brighton and South Coast Railway. What is interesting is that the one obvious name that should have been given to these stations — Battersea, because they are right on the edge of Battersea Rise — was never used. Battersea was seen as an impoverished area at the time, and it was not a name that anyone wanting to make money wished to use in their marketing.
New Wandsworth station only lasted eleven years as a passenger station, though it remained a freight station right into the 1960s. Getting through eight station masters in eleven years is, as I say, almost as bad as Prime Ministers of this country. There are wonderful examples of ill-discipline in Keith Bailey’s book on the subject: a negligent booking clerk here, rudeness to the station master there, and a telegraph clerk found to be writing obscene remarks in the water closet — graffiti, as we can see, is nothing new under the sun. We are talking about the 1850s.
The big change came in 1863 with the opening of Clapham Junction. I am not going to talk about that in detail this evening — it deserves a talk of its own, and there is a great deal of very good literature about how Clapham Junction came to operate and the impact it had on the wider railway network and the area.
The first impact for Wandsworth Common was the closure of Clapham Common station, which shut as soon as the junction opened. New Wandsworth struggled on a bit longer — it would have been a bit ridiculous to close it straight away, since they had only just built it — but it survived only until 1869, when it was superseded by Wandsworth Common station.
You might say: third time lucky. But to be strictly accurate, this is not the third station but the fourth, because there was also briefly a temporary station just north of the current Wandsworth Common station, serving that end of the railway line. It was very ramshackle, but it had the considerable bonus — particularly if you were a train spotter — of having a signal box. It was the one and only time a signal box was sited on Wandsworth Common, and it did not last long. But for a while there was this rather alien presence of a signal box on the Common.
Wandsworth Common station, which opened in 1869, differed from its predecessors in that it was popular — and desired by local residents. They actually wanted the station; they even offered to contribute towards its costs to ensure they had a station that ran efficiently and delivered a really good service. The station was popular from the outset, comprehensively extended and upgraded in 1890, and in 1907 they added the booking office which still stands today. Tim Sherwood, who has written an excellent book on the story of Clapham Junction, described it as a perfect example of a typical country-stroke-suburban station — quite a good description on one level, because it suggests that interesting juxtaposition of urban and rural that characterises Wandsworth Common.
The architecture of the station has been praised by railway historians as Renaissance style — they spell it W-R-E-N — vaguely Queen Anne-ish, decidedly Edwardian, an interesting look. The booking office is actually very unusual: there is nothing else like it on the London to Brighton line, and that is one reason it has been preserved. The station has also been praised for its “Arcadian setting” — a lovely phrase, and if you can blind yourself to the tarmac and the cars, there is still something to it: some Autumn trees, some greenery. It is one of the nicer settings for a station in London.
Wandsworth Common station is also a good example of how the railway companies took over more land: the whole Jagged Way area today was occupied by coal wharves, goods depots and sidings, and there was quite a healthy distribution network going from there by horse and cart to the big houses in Nightingale Lane, Trinity Road, and south to Balham, to make sure the wealthier local households were well served with goods.
There were many lovers of Wandsworth Common who were horrified by the impact of the railways — though the railways were not the sole source of the degradation of the Common. The ornithologist W.H. Hudson specifically mentions “a railway line cutting very nearly through the whole length of the common” as something that “still further detracts from its value as a breathing space.” He was quite clear that the railway was unwelcome and had a detrimental effect. One of the known consequences was the dramatic change to the habitats, flora and fauna of the Common over the course of the nineteenth century.
There was ongoing fury at the way the railways were enclosing bits of land. John Buckmaster — the primary instigator of the campaign to save the Common, successfully achieved in 1871 — was very clear that the destruction of Wandsworth Common was avoidable. As he wrote: “No such closures or encroachments have ever been permitted on Clapham Common. No railway has been able to cut a turf or make a tunnel there. You can protect your common from the railways.” Only, that did not happen in Wandsworth. He was particularly incensed when a long-standing footpath from Bolingbroke Grove across to New Wandsworth station was fenced off by the railway company, removing public access. That was one of the occasions on which he led a move to pull down the fences and challenge the railway company to sue him.
But there are alternative perspectives. One commentator, writing from inside Wandsworth Prison, described the Common as still “a pleasant and countrified spot, with no sign of the bustle of London life,” adding that the passage of trains “can only be heard and felt rather than seen, being almost on a subterranean trajectory.” This is quite surprising, because that line was very heavily used by the 1860s. I did wonder whether he was a little over-persuaded by writing from behind walls ten feet thick, whose soundproofing was probably rather good. It is not the most reliable of comments, but it is an interesting different perspective — from a prison reformer.
The 1860s were an extraordinary period in the development of railways, and there were all kinds of fascinating schemes being proposed. My favourite is the Thames Viaduct Railway, which literally planned to build a line all the way along the Thames through the City of London. It came to nothing, but it got onto the drawing board. Wandsworth Common itself had its own putative scheme: the Putney, Balham and City Railway, which would have cut across the Common just south of the lakes, then gone along past Ralph Road and across Trinity Road. It would have been incredibly destructive — it would have destroyed Bellevue Field and the area by the lakes — and happily it came to nothing.
We should spare a thought for the people of Battersea, whose lives and homes were massively affected by untrammelled rail development. Basically every railway company that wanted a route through Battersea was allowed to have one. You have an incredible tangle of lines — not just double-deck formations but, in places, triple-decker: lines upon lines upon lines. The impact on a built-up area was in some ways really quite shocking.
The existing housing either became degraded and unpleasant to live in, with property values collapsing, or — extraordinarily — new building took place in the little parcels of land between those tangles of lines. People were literally almost living on top of the railway. Across London in the second half of the nineteenth century, 76,000 people were displaced by the railways, which gives the impression that when the railways moved in, the people moved out. In Battersea that is not what happened: they simply built in between the embankments and the linking lines, or they retained the houses that were already there, and that made for a really quite distressing environment.
The railways created a lot of dark places — dark because of soot, and dark because of the tunnels, viaducts and bridges. The arches in North Battersea became the location for some quite unsavoury behaviour: criminal gangs, anti-social behaviour, people living on the margins of society. There was some anti-social behaviour around the railways on Wandsworth Common too — a nice little vignette in the book about some small boys throwing stones at a train and receiving twelve strokes of the birch — but nothing on the scale of North Battersea.
We need to remember the human cost of building and maintaining the railways. Think of our bowler-hatted men digging out the Clapham cutting by hand. The goods yards, sidings, depots and engine sheds were almost as dangerous to work in as the coal mines that fuelled them. The rate of accidents was huge; the rate of fatalities was quite high. One of several engine drivers who died in a shunting incident is buried in St Mary’s Cemetery in Bolingbroke Grove, his gravestone carved with a small steam engine. When Bolingbroke Hospital was built, within a decade it had to open the equivalent of an A&E to deal with the number of serious injuries in North Battersea, the majority of which were caused by the railways. Ten percent of all the men in North Battersea worked in the rail industry. It was dangerous, hard-won work, and there was a heavy cost in human suffering.
Arthur Conan Doyle thought Wandsworth Common a fitting setting for Sherlock Holmes to be lost in a mysterious, semi-rural area quite close to central London — and by 1893, the only way out of that middle of nowhere was by train. It is quite a good vignette of how the railways and Wandsworth Common were being perceived, from a slightly different angle.
Both of the Common’s two large institutions had strong connections with the railway. The Royal Victoria Patriotic Building took up a huge amount of land — 52 acres — and it becomes very important when we look towards the First World War, when it was made the Third London General Hospital. It was very well sited as a hospital because it was right next to the railway cutting: it was possible to stretcher the wounded soldiers up the railway embankment from the trains directly into the building. As one account puts it, “few things can evoke for us the carnage of the First World War as directly as this gaunt building next to the railway cutting.”
At the same time, Emanuel School boys were involved in a different way: members of the OTC were charged with patrolling not just the school grounds but the railway itself, which must have been extremely dangerous. On a lighter note, the school was also a great place for train-spotting. One old Emanuelist who confesses in his book that his lifelong railway fascination derived from his time at the school — he does not name it, but it is unmistakably Emanuel — describes how pupils who were registered train-spotters were allowed to spend their lunch hour on an otherwise out-of-bounds iron fire escape, which gave a panoramic view of the main line to Brighton. By then the age of steam was over, and most of the traffic consisted of rather samey Southern Region electric trains, but there was always the more exciting possibility of a diesel-hauled freight going past. That old boy is Simon Bradley, whose book on the railways of Britain is outstanding.
Then there is the other side of the coin: in 1988, the school became a makeshift hospital after the Clapham rail disaster, and school boys helped pull people from the wreckage and ferry messages between the tracks below and the building above. They earned a visit from the Prime Minister the following year for their heroic deeds, and the official history of Emanuel School records their contribution in some graphic detail.
The architectural historian Ian Nairn, writing in 1966, described a view across the railway from Windmill Road as “the edge of tomorrow’s landscape”: a big spiky Victorian school framed by trees and by a collection of LCC point blocks of the mid-1950s, and a grassy bank running down to the rail tracks, the main line out of Waterloo with a continuous shuttle of electric trains “without heads or tails like long green worms.” He called it “an exciting place,” and titled the photo “Wandsworth Common.”
Not everyone agreed. The journalist John Walsh, who grew up on Battersea Rise at exactly the same time as Nairn was writing, described the area as “a dump — a service area for Clapham Junction, the busiest, noisiest, dirtiest rail junction in the country, a boring, dusty junction-serving corridor between the smart end of Clapham and the newly proliferating suburban sprawl of Wandsworth.” He was not a man who returned to his roots very often.
Another commentator, writing around 1970, described the Common as “this poor, emaciated, ill-used open space, cut up by roads and railways more than any other common.” I think you can take issue with that factually — anyone who has walked across Tooting Common will know it has plenty of roads and railways — and of course Latchmere Common and Stockwell Common do not even exist any more. The idea that Wandsworth Common is uniquely damaged is a surprising claim. I do agree with him about Trinity Road, though I will leave it to you to form your own view about the trains.
In conclusion — and I promise this is the conclusion — there is a rather nice photograph of the Common today showing its beautiful, silvery setting: lovely views, trees, grass, a sunny day. There is just one small puzzle about it: why is the bench looking in the other direction, when the view is all behind it? Well, of course — it is so people can watch the trains.
Thank you very much for listening.
[Applause]
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Were the early stations made of wood? Yes, they were largely wooden structures.
Nine Elms was mentioned as one of the main London termini — what was around it that made it a natural starting point? It was right by the river, so it was as close as you could get along the South Bank into central London at the time. It was never meant to be a permanent terminus, but there was space there to build the station and space to bring the lines out through Battersea Fields. Once the site for Waterloo became available, that was where the railway companies wanted to be.
When the railways crossed Wandsworth Common, who was paid for the right to build? The owner of the land was the Spencer family. Successive Earls Spencer sold off different parcels of land for railway-building purposes. The system was remarkably unchecked: it was much harder to get an Act of Parliament to build a railway through North London, but South London was underdeveloped and not seen as really part of the capital city, so permission was comparatively easy to obtain. What happened around Park Town and Queenstown Road in North Battersea was quite extraordinary given how obviously detrimental it was to the whole area.
Why does the railway go through the middle of the Common rather than around the edge? The two main considerations were engineering — where was the easiest and cheapest route — and whether anyone would be in the way requiring compensation or buying off. Going straight down the middle was, from the railway company’s point of view, splendid, because they were not having to clear anything else out of the way. Quite a few routes did end up going round in a loop, partly because of the very effective defence of Clapham Common, where there was strong protest and objection. But on Wandsworth Common, the objectors came too late.
Why were the first three attempts at a local station all failures? It is partly a question of timing. The concept of commuting did not really exist in the 1830s and 40s when the London and Southampton line was built. Regular train travel only exploded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wandsworth Common station, as it exists today, had really good timing: it was when the idea of commuting, the development of the area around Bellevue Road and the Between the Commons district, and a national move towards people travelling by train to work all combined in a happy synthesis. The market simply was not there for the first two or three stations — and they compounded the problem by not running a particularly good service.
Why does the railway go through the middle of the Common? See above. One would add that the excellent defence of Clapham Common — which is why Wandsworth Common has two railways and Clapham Common has none — forced some of the companies into a loop, but on Wandsworth Common the resistance came too late.
Was there a station that was listed and had to be rebuilt? Wandsworth Common station itself survived bomb damage during the war and was rebuilt to look exactly the same, but that is different from a listing. The current station has survived remarkably intact.
Were there any protests against the building of the railways? [Philip Boys, from the floor] The gravel-digging probably aroused more fury than the railways themselves, oddly. The protests about the railways tended to come once they were built — people were moved around and then got annoyed about the fact that it was too late. It was a bit like the Qatar World Cup in that sense: why are people complaining this week? The naming of Clapham Junction, in a way, was historically an early form of spin.
How long before people demanded a bridge across the cutting to reunite the two halves of the Common? The bridge was not in the original plans. Philip Boys recalls that it was a very flimsy bridge at first, with constant complaints that it was falling apart and endless protests for a proper bridge. There were similar problems across the area — in Battersea particularly, where the crossings were so flimsy that people died trying to use them. The railway companies never made proper provision for pedestrians a priority.
Why was the Patriotic Building chosen as a hospital in the First World War? The government requisitioned it because they needed a very large building very quickly that was equipped for multi-occupation — which, as an orphanage, it was. The injured troops coming back from the Western Front came up from the south coast, so the building needed to be on the railway line. The fact that trains could stop in the cutting right next to the building meant it was the quickest way of stretching the wounded directly into the hospital.
[From the floor] The soldiers in the painting you showed are actually Australian soldiers, coming from Gallipoli — Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians.
The headstone in St Mary’s Cemetery with a steam engine carved on it — do we know anything more about it? I think the Heritage Library has a clearer photograph with the inscription legible. I took my photograph about five years ago, but when I first came here thirty years ago it was easier to read — it has deteriorated. You can make out words to the effect of “heroic” and “giving his life in the service of others.” Whether it was an accident on the railway, I am not certain.
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One of our members, David Baxter, put forward an idea a couple of years ago that seems worth raising tonight. He suggested a mural on the Cat’s Back Bridge — which is not a very interesting bridge since the replacement: you can no longer see through it, which is a great loss to a certain young man we all know who loves to watch the trains. We thought it a wonderful idea. David has, on our behalf, approached Network Rail, and — after what you can imagine has been a slow process — we do have permission to go ahead, on the understanding that things can change and they could paint over it. We would like to hold a competition for local artists, graffiti artists or mural artists, to paint something on the bridge, either nature-focused or heritage-focused. When we know more, we will put something in our newsletter. If anyone knows anyone, or has ideas about how we might go about it, please do get in touch.
[Applause]
Filmed at NatureScope, Wandsworth Common, 15 November 2022, for the Friends of Wandsworth Common by John Crossland.
— Friends of Wandsworth Common
— Wandsworth Historical Society