thought this week I might do something about Maze Hill Station but
there are already so many interesting articles about the station on the net
that I’m a bit intimidated in such a crowded field. However none of them seem to mention some of the most
unlikely regular passengers who used Maze
Hill station in the past. When I
first moved to Greenwich in the 1960s our next door neighbour was a young girl
who used to work at the paddling pool in Greenwich Park. A couple of times a
year she’d pop round and tell me ‘the elephants are coming today’ - and so they
did. They would get off the train at Maze Hill to go up to the circus on Blackheath.
But first they would be taken into the Park for a wash and brush up in the boating
pond -which must have been really nice for the elephants though it can’t have
done the pool much good.
Maze Hill Station was built on a site cleared for gravel
extraction in the Middle Ages or earlier. To the South, where the flats now
stand, is a cliff face now covered in vegetation but which is now the site of
the Westcombe Woodlands wildlife site. I would very much recommend reading the
history section on their website in which Alex Grant gives detailed information
about the history of the area in far
more detail than I can put here. https://www.westcombewoodlands.uk/
I am aware of that in past centuries gravel from this site was
extracted for Morden College and shipped out from Ballast Quay. But by the time
it was being considered for the railway this activity had apparently stopped
A few weeks ago I did an article here about the construction of
the London and Greenwich Railway beyond Greenwich into Kent and the objections to it of local
residents. There had been many plans to
extend the railway on from Greenwich down into Kent but this had been halted by
the impossibility of getting a rail line through Greenwich Park. Can I recommend another author - the late Ron
Thomas in his 1980s book “London’s First Railway” which gives a great deal of
detail about some of these proposed rail companies and the problems they faced
in extending the Greenwich Railway.
It was not until the 1870s that it became possible that a way
could be found across Greenwich Park and so the South Eastern Railway made plans to build a line. They opened Maze Hill Station in 1873 but
accessing it from Greenwich by rail was still not possible and it could only be accessed from Charlton – making it effectively
the terminus of the line from Kent. It was another five years that a tunnel was
built under the park and joined up Maze Hill with Greenwich. This led to some complications because the
line from Greenwich was the other way
round to the one from Charlton with the down-line where the up-line is now.
The station as it was originally built was very much bigger than
it is now and there were several sidings. The area which is now Seren Park and
Tom Smith Close was the site of several ‘holding’ lines. I remember however that when I started commuting in the late 1950s, before
the flats were built, that this area has tennis courts on it - I certainly
don't remember there being railway lines there.
In 1889 something called a ‘travelling gas holder’ standing there
managed to catch fire. ‘the surrounding carriages were involved by flames . The
gas-man was blown some feet away.... the gas burnt nearly an bout. and there
were two explosions”.
On the downside was an island platform, more sidings, and a signal
box. Lemmon Road is now on the site of the sidings. I remember the island platform
which had ‘barley sugar’ columns but they were holding nothing up. I can remember sitting there in a never
moving ‘fast’ train on my way back to Gravesend when a some young woman was
taken off the jam packed train having fainted and was revived on the platform. When people say trains are crowded now- they
should be transported back to the 1950s –with the added delights of impenetrable
fog and manual signals – on thick fog mornings railway me were letting off flares
alongside the line as signals.
The remaining sidings were removed by
1969 and the signal box closed then too. Things did improve a lot then – once,
in 1966, I got a seat!!! By then the station was very much as it is now
although there have been several attempts at rebuilding the station building
and at least one fire. In
1970,robbers broke into the ticket office, tied up the clerk, and stole £200.
From the start there was an over bridge to get between the two
platforms –which may, or may not be the original. There was also a tunnel - which I remember well, as I guess a lot of other
people will. It closed when the platforms were lengthened. When it closed there
was an amazing graffiti/ wall painting of a sort of insect creature on the wall
facing you as you went in. I wonder if it's still there, bricked up and
forgotten
Into the late 1960s it was common for commuters from Vanburgh Hill
to walk down through what is now the path through Restell Close to the station
but when the flats were built by the NHS residents there were so frightened of commuters
breaking in to their homes that the NHS closed the access. Later in the 1990s
the Council tried quite hard to get a path from Vanbrugh Hill opened to the railway
and I remember meetings with various private rail companies on the subject of
this access. On a slightly different subject I remember the director of a
privatised rail company, who looked and sounded like a comedy show funny
Frenchman (do you remember Eurotrash?).
He insisted that he had never had a single complaint about the railway
and what was the fuss all about.
None of the sources which I have
looked at mention the down side building in Woodlands Park Road. I remember a
couple of years ago an article in a railway magazine where it was said that no
original buildings remained at Maze Hill.
When I challenged this the author admitted he had not got out of the train
to see what was there and of course the building is tucked away behind the
embankment. For many years now it has been the home of Lisa
Hammond’s very wonderful pottery and it is very well worth going to see it - not
just for it's railway interest but for Lisa's work. I hope that one day I can do her in to do a
talk for Greenwich Industrial History Society. https://www.lisahammond-pottery.co.uk/
The station originally had signage on the platform saying ‘Maze
Hill for East Greenwich;’ but I remember it later having signs saying ‘Maze
Hill for the National Maritime Museum’. I think this was a bit of a problem because
school parties would arrive and teachers would count the children out onto the
platform one by one by name, which meant
that the rail timetables were completely messed up.
Maze Hill Station was the site of a fairly nasty train crash in
1958. I really knew nothing about this
although in 1958 I was using the railway line up fairly regularly. It must have been very much in the shadow of
the terrible crash at St John's Station only seven months earlier - although not on the same scale it must have
been an awful reminder of what had happened only a few miles away. Unhurt at
Maze Hill was William King, a 62-year-old street trader from Belvedere. He had also
walked unharmed out of the down local train in the Lewisham disaster He said “I
certainly am a very luckv chap”.
The Maze Hill collision took place at
10.25 A.M. on Friday, 4th July . The 9.41 from
Gravesend to Charing Cross passed the "up" signal at danger.
Travelling at 25 mph it collided with a steam train going towards Charlton which
was shunting empty carriages from the sidings.. The motorman of the Gravesend train,
33-year-old Percy Hurst of Slade Green, said ‘we were coming round a bend
outside the station when saw the steam train right in my path coming towards
me. I jammed on my brakes and at the
moment of impact leapt out of the window. This was the first crash that I have been involved
in and it was horrifying - every second of it”.
His train was pushed back
eleven yards and the steam engine reared up above the damaged track and
mounted the front of the passener train. The steam engine came rest
about a third of the way along the coach smashing in the roof and derailing it.
43 of the 50 passengers were taken to hospital--
there were two stretcher cases and the rest were walking injured, in addition to the motorman and guard.
Men with oxy-acetylene cutters freed several people trapped in the wrecked
carriages and people were admitted to hospital but their condition was not
serious.
For the locals J Richbell of Tuskar-Street said ‘I heard a
terrible crash and a cloud of smoke rose above the station .. I rushed up and
saw people extricating the injured from wrecked carriages and laying them along
the track to be given first aid before they were taken away on stretchers...It
was horrifying’ .
Most recently in 2002 the station
was the scene of an organised fight between groups of football hooligans from
Charlton and Southampton. It emerged that this fight had been arranged by
the Head of History of a north of England Secondary School.
Small, obscure and busy
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