We are all celebrating the re-opening and re-building of London Bridge Station – but to my mind something is missing. I see very little mention of the man who started it all – George Landmann the engineer to the London and Greenwich Railway. He was the one who built and opened the very first station at London Bridge and whose brick arches still carry trains between London Bridge and Greenwich. It has been claimed that his 1836 viaduct is the biggest brick structure in the world - but why do we seem to know so little about the man who built it?
George Landmann was born in Woolwich in 1779. His family lived in the building on the Arsenal site which was the original Royal Military Academy. His father had been head hunted by the British government from France to teach the theory of fortifications and artillery to the military cadets at Woolwich. Isaac Landman’s origins remain unresearched but his background was the dark world of European spies and strategists. In his Woolwich childhood at the Royal Military Academy George was surrounded by important scientists, and the military elite – and others then famous like the transvestite spy and swordfighter, Chevalier D’Eon. His father, by the way, as Professor of Fortification was an expert on brick arches.
George joined the Royal Engineers as a Second Lieutenant when he was 16 and was first posted to Plymouth. He began to learn his job and did some repair work on fortifications. Two years later he was posted to Canada where he had all sorts of adventures - he later wrote a book about them. He built gun emplacements out on the border with the United States in places it took a week to reach by canoe up the Ottawa River; he worked on the construction of the St,Lawrence Canal; he visited New York when it was a small town, travelling by sledge – and much much more. And in Canada he hob nobbed with Royalty – Prince George, the future father of Queen Victoria. And he was still only in his teens.
Coming back to England was really very boring. He did a bit of work on the Martello Towers and he chatted up Queen Charlotte. He seems to have got married – he was to have three children, but the marriage went wrong and he never mentions it in his autobiography. .
In 1805 he was posted to Gibraltar and he liked that a lot better. He collected plants, made friends, drank a lot, but soon Gibraltar was boring too. He was a soldier and so, he thought he ought to see some action. It was the time of the Peninsula war in Spain and he was eventually sent to join the conflict. He was on various battlefields – one was Vimero - and he wrote a strangely surreal account of it. He described the dead soldiers, local people, and those who had wandered into the area, and some of the obscenities. His autobiography covers his childhood and youth but it finishes during his time in Spain.
What went on next is thus rather unclear and buried in military records. What is clear, is that his language skills – he was fluent in French, German and Spanish - had led him into negotiation and diplomacy and what, I guess, was spying. He worked with Spanish politicians, got a commission in the Spanish army, and at some stage undertook a long journey through Spain and Portugal (he wrote a book about that).
He left Spain ill and came back in England as a senior Royal Engineer,, He was given a series of boring postings as Royal Engineer in charge of an area but, from the records, the work really seems to have amounted to building repair work on military structures. Initially he was in Gravesend where he lived in what is now the Royal Clarendon Hotel, he was then sent to Durham and then to Ireland.
He sold his commission and left the army in 1824 – and that is where all official biographical notes and his obituaries end. They seem to assume that for the next thirty years he did nothing – but, we shall see! Why did he leave army?? It appears that he resigned following the refusal of a posting to Ceylon. What the military record does not tell us that he was living with a lady called Harriett Hayward – the daughter of the man in charge of flint production (for guns) in Brandon, Suffolk and that they later had a daughter. It may, or may not, be significant that his household, with Harriett, included his children by his abandoned first wife.
He became a consulting civil engineer. One of his friends from childhood was William Congreve, soldier and inventor of rockets. Congreve was interested in and active in the early gas industry and was a director of several gas companies. He was one of the people who set up the Imperial Intercontinental Gas Association which was designed to sell British gas technology abroad. Together Landmann and Congreve set off round Europe to persuade city authorities to invest in a gas works – and they were very successful. ICGA was to manage many Euoropean gas works and to open others and only finally went out of business in the 1980s when they were part of Calor Gas.
And so -- we come to the London and Greenwich Railway. This is not the place to go into a lot of detail about it – perhaps another time. It was the first powered railway in London and the first commuter railway. Spa Road Station in Bermondsey was the first station opened – and the first in the south of England. The railway ran from London Bridge in 1836 at first to Deptford, and then to Greenwich. There were plans to extend it through to Kent, and also to a ferry at Deptford but that never happened. While it was built George was living in Crooms Hill but in 1840 he moved to Hackney and then, when his first wife died, he married Harriett.
He was also involved in the promotion and construction of the Lancashire port of Fleetwood – promoted in the 1830s by Peter Hesketh –Fleetwood who had commissioned top architect Decimus Burton to lay out the town and design the buildings. Landmann, seems to have upset a number of people there, but he was responsible for the rail link – which was built all on the flat and nothing like as exciting as the London and Greenwich. Another project was the Devon and Cornwall Railway.
George Landmann eventually retired to live in Hackney, surrounded by his family and to write a gazetteer of the world - yes, the world, all of it.
I should ask why we know so little about him. There are a number of articles about him, mostly based on military records and his own books about his early life – and what I have written here is a brief summary of what he did. I’m sure he upset a lot of people – I have found several rows about expenses claims, and he seems to have got on very badly in Fleetwood. Although he did so much there is also a sense of moving downwards socially from a childhood among the military elite and a relationship with royalty to his death with his family, but in obscurity. He also demonstrates the influence the Royal Engineers had on the early days of our railways – and the versatility with which they worked result of their solid training in Woolwich.
The Greenwich railway was a great achievement . We take all those brick arches for granted. They have carried our trains now for 182 years – that’s a minimum of eight trains an hour, on most days and they are trains of a size and carrying numbers of passengers which would hardly have been believed possible in 1836. That has to be quite something!
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