Historic London station is now a museum

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 32

Historic London station is now a museum

By

TONY ALDOUS

London In the not too distant future visitors to London will be able to enjoy a remarkable journey back in time to the Victorian age. Arriving at Woolwich, about 12km east of the city centre, on the south bank of the Thames, they will take a ferry across the river to North Woolwich and enter a rather grand looking nineteenth century railway station, now a museum of railway history. Then will follow a ride on a steam train for about Ikm to the Museum of Victorian Life, about to be created in a restored nineteenth century church. The railway museum is already open to the public. It is housed in the old North Woolwich Station built in the 1850 s, which is a grand affair in London’s docklands. In the Italianate style then favoured by railway company directors, it is in yellow brick with classical columns, stone dressings and twin central doors opening into a spacious booking hall. In those days the directors of the Eastern Counties Railway did not regard North Woolwich as just the end of another branch line. They reasoned that, with the pier they were building just opposite, they could pick up, passengers from sailing ships bound for the Port of London and get them into town quicker than the up-river journey. The coming of the marine engine partly frustrated this hope, but none-

theless the station did good business with the opening in 1855 of the nearby Royal Victoria Dock and factories along the riverside on former cattle grazing land. In its heyday, North Woolwich Station employed perhaps 20 men on the passenger side, including the station master (who lived in the building’s eastern wing), ticket, parcels and record clerks, and guards, shunters and porters. The adjoining goods depot probably employed another 20.

British Rail in the 19705, trying to cut costs on the unremunerative branch line, built a smaller, simpler station which could be run by one person about 20 metres up the track. What could be done with the old one, designed to house passengers and staff on a scale long vanished and which had official protection from demolition because it was listed as being of historical significance?

Suggestions came from several directions. The local Passmore Edwards Museum wanted the building to tell part of the story of the adjacent County of Essex, which once covered most of the area, and its railways. The Great Eastern Railway Society had a collection of artefacts and records to display, and British Rail wanted to dispose of the building to a user able to maintain it.

The London Docklands Development Corporation (L.D.D.C.), a Government agency charged with the

redevelopment and revitalisation of some 2000 hectares of redundant down-river docklands, wished to safeguard the architectural heritage and to provide visitor attractions. So it paid £330,000 for restoration and conversion of the building into a museum, and Newham Council, the local authority, undertook to pay, as it does with the Passmore Edwards Museum, the running and staffing costs.

Thus was bom North Woolwich Old Station Museum, dedicated to telling the story of the Great Eastern Railway (G.E.R.) and the companies that in 1862 amalgamated to form it. /

What you see if you go there today is impressive. The building, splendidly restored, might just have arrived on the riverside from a past age. Inside, the illusion continues. The staff have the uniforms of the old railwaymen and display cabinets are in Great Eastern colours and designs that echo the G.E.R.’s wooden and glass booking offices.

A handful of the old British pre-decimal coins and a brown 10-shilling note lie at the ticket window as if the booking clerk had just put down someone’s change, and inside are all the bits and pieces of a period ticket office, from pasteboard tickets and parcels labels to ancient upright typewriters.

Through the vestibule at the back of the ticket hall is perhaps the prize exhibit—a “Coffee Pot”

saddle tank 0-4-0 tank engine, No. 229, resplendent in black, red and gold paint. The museum retains one of the original station’s four tracks where visitors can see another G.E.R. steam locomotive.

At present you cannot ride on a Great Eastern train but the museum trust has obtained the use of the adjoining goods yard to house its larger exhibits, improved workshop, cafeteria and carpark. By 1989, the Eastern Counties’ 150th anniversary, it is hoped to be within striking distance of running the museum’s own trains alongside British Rail’s modern tracks for the Ikm to Silvertown.

There stands St Mark’s Church, not long ago a sad symbol of dockland dereliction but now reroofed and largely repaired. In this huge building, Passmore Edwards staff will soon begin creating their new Museum of Victorian Life.

So eventually you should be able to arrive by boat at North Woolwich Pier, enter the early twentieth century station museum and then take a train back into the nineteenth century—returning to the present to view that spectacular wonder of the 1980 s, the nearby Thames Tidal Barrier, with its six huge curved gates designed to rise from the bed of the Thames and control the tides surging from the North Sea.