Railway Stations in Greenwich = as they opened one by one. even the vast rail network in the Arsenal

 

Railway Stations – How many stations are there in what is now the Borough of Greenwich?  How many have come and gone?  We had some of the very earliest passenger stations, and now new ones are being proposed and sometimes opened. We have had private stations too, and serving using all sorts of different types of railway.  I am aware that by writing this I am likely to provoke numerous experts on railway history but this article is intended as a brief overview– details can come later. Railway historians write about the history of railway lines and, endlessly, about the locomotives, but stations are what people use and know about.  Through them we can see how the area which is now the Borough of Greenwich has grown and developed over the past 180 or so years.

 Which stations are actually in Greenwich Borough? There are several on the borders or just inside other boroughs, including the very earliest.  The London and Greenwich Railway was the first powered railway in London and the first commuter line ever. It opened to Deptford from London Bridge in 1836 – and Deptford, now in Lewisham was then in Surrey so it can’t count as a Greenwich Station.  However from the start Greenwich people could use it to get to London. From 1836 they could buy tickets at Rose Cottage which was round the back of the North Pole pub in Greenwich High Road and then walk over to Deptford via a footbridge over the Creek on an unlit footpath past a large and muddy pond – into which a number of people fell.  So, does Rose Cottage count as our first railway station?

 Greenwich Station itself is of course one of the earliest railway stations and is suitably grand and architect designed.  It has however been altered and added to very frequently over the past 183 years.  A station opened here in 1838 – and there is a plaque inside the station to say so.  This was however just a temporary structure set back from the main road next to the Prince of Orange pub.  A couple of fires and a lot of mud later a proper station opened in April 1840. It was designed by local (and moderately famous) architect, George Smith.  Some writers have spent a lot of time working out how much of Smith’s design is left now – and it is the ‘design’ which remains, not the 'building'.  In the late 1870s the entire station was moved and rebuilt when the line to Maze Hill was added in and this seems to be the building we have now.  Except that of course, in 1999, the Docklands Light Railway station was somehow shoehorned in with new platforms and entrances.   

 So, what was the next station to be provided?  We can’t count Blackheath because it is on the Lewisham side of the road - so –Charlton was the next one opened in the Borough area. It was built in 1849 on the North Kent Line and was at the end of the tunnel from Blackheath and trains could then connect from London Bridge Station to Gravesend, the Medway Towns and beyond, while avoiding going through Greenwich Park. At first Charlton Station was pretty minimal but it was extended and improved in 1905.  Unfortunately it was bombed in the Second World War and the station we see now dates from the 1960s. It was ‘improved’ again in 2000 for the Millennium and happily the Charlton gardeners have now enhanced some of the surroundings.

 Around the same time – 1849 -other stations on the North Kent Line were opened to areas in the east, and particularly, Woolwich. Both Woolwich Stations were built in old sand pits. The Dockyard Station, restricted in its brick lined cutting, is said to have kept its original buildings until the 1960s but I can find no mention of the huge wooden doors I think I remember at the end of the platforms –were they the rail entrance into the Dockyard itself. Abbey Wood also opened in 1849 – it seems remarkable that they built this so early since it seems unlikely that the area had any significant population then. From the start it had buildings, and a goods yard.  Now, 170 years later, big changes are on their way at Abbey Wood which is set to become a terminus of Crossrail

 Woolwich Arsenal, as a town centre station, has seen lots of changes. It was opened six months after the Dockyard Station and it has been rebuilt several times since then. Most of what we see now dates only from the early 1990s and since then the Docklands Light Railway has been added in on the site of the old goods yard. Plumstead Station was not opened until ten years later in 1859. Like Woolwich Dockyard it is in a cutting with the platforms at the lower level and the design of the station is said to be unique.  Alongside the station were numerous sidings connecting it to the Royal Arsenal's internal railway systems.  Plumstead remains much as it was and we must note the current arguments about the footbridge.

 The next station to open after Plumstead might come as a surprise. It is Mottingham opened in 1866 near the southern outskirts of the Borough. It was an early station on the Dartford Loop – a line built by the South Eastern Railway to supplement the route between London and Dartford and help congestion.  It was originally called ‘Eltham’, later it was ‘Eltham and Mottingham’ and just ‘Mottingham’ only from 1926. Railways were thus opening up the south of the borough to new housing, new residents and expansion.

 It was another twelve years before the next station was built in the Borough in 1878. This was Maze Hill opened when the Greenwich line finally was able to connect to Charlton. There is a long, long saga about this piece of line and about the objections which were made about the railway passing near the Royal Observatory.  Today the line passes peacefully and unnoticed under the front of the Maritime Museum.  Like Charlton and Woolwich Maze Hill is built in an old pit and originally had several sidings.  I can just remember seeing the third ‘island’ platform in the late 1950s.   I think it had curly ‘barley sugar’ uprights, which by then were holding nothing up.  The station has been rebuilt several times and now the tunnel under the line has been filled in. The downside ticket office is now the Maze Hill Pottery – which you should visit.

 New Eltham Station was also opened in 1878 and called ‘Pope Street’ but by 1886 it was ‘New Eltham’   I think that is a shame; I rather like 'Pope Street'. It is yet another station in a cutting and many of the buildings were replaced in the 1980s  New housing followed in the area.

 Within a year Maze Hill was followed by Westcombe Park, opened in 1879. It was called ‘Combe Farm Lane’ and Coombe Farm itself remained just south of the station. The station remains much as it was except that the down side ticket office and buildings were demolished in the 1970s – I was always told that this was because they were haunted!

 It was another ten years -1888 – before another station was opened. This was a station in central Greenwich called Greenwich Park - as the terminus of a complete new railway line which could take trains to central London stations like Victoria and Holborn Viaduct.  It was opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway as a line through to Nunhead Station. The station itself was on the site of what is now the Ibis Hotel in Stockwell Street.  Today residents who need to get to London might well ask ‘where is it now’? It never did well and closed during the Great War, never to reopen. There are a considerable number of relics in Greenwich and beyond of the line, if you know where to look.

  The next new railway line was more successful, opening up new areas of the Borough for housing and business. Significantly the Bexleyheath line was only opened following considerable pressure on the railway company by local business, landowners and residents.  The first station was Kidbrooke opened in 1895 in what has been described as ‘deep countryside’.  By the Great War the countryside was no more and the site around the station was a huge depot of warehouses and office units manly owned by the Royal Air Force. The station was busier with local workers than London commuters. Eventually the RAF site was replaced by the Ferrier Estate, itself now being replaced by newer housing. Eltham Well Hall Station was also opened on this line in 1895, at the insistence of the local landowner, and housing development soon followed.  It has since been replaced by Eltham Station on a different site on the other side of Well Hall Road.

 In our list of station it is perhaps also worth noting that inside the Royal Arsenal was a vast railway network which included a timetabled passenger service.  This is said to have had 12 stations – although I am very unclear what a ‘station’ inside this factory consisted of. What facilities did they have? What were the called?  Where were they?  We have noted 13 public stations above, so 12 private ones in the Royal Arsenal doubles the number at a stroke!

 The 20th century began with almost our complete set of today’s stations– but there was one more, and one which rather pointed the way to the future. This was Eltham Park opened in 1908 by a reluctant railway company but with considerable input from the landowner and from housing developer Cameron Corbett.  It was built to look impressive for the commuters buying Corbett’s houses. Eltham Park eventually closed in the 1980s with the construction of the M2 which runs below it.  The road level building remaining in Westmount Road is gradually being converted to shops

 Nearly a century was to pass before anything else of any real significance happened. Greenwich Park station closed in 1917, Eltham Well Hall and Eltham Park closed to be replaced by Eltham in 1985.  In all that time one station did briefly open. This was Church Manorway Halt, opened in the Great War to provide a station for munitions workers in Plumstead. It stood on what r the end of Church Manorway, near the junction with Bracondale Road, and there is now a footbridge over the railway at that point.  It closed in 1920.

 So after a century we are seeing new railways coming into the Borough and new stations opened. The Docklands Light Railway stations at Cutty Sark, Greenwich and Blackheath Hill opened in 1999. This followed relentless lobbying by Lewisham and Greenwich councils to get the light railway extended across the river. This has been joined by the opening of North Greenwich Station as an extension of the Jubilee Line. Again this followed lobbying by Greenwich Council to a very reluctant London transport authority which declared that such a station would never be used. It took the coming of the Millennium Dome to change their minds and a grand station resulted from that.  It is now busy, over capacity and a rebuild is planned.

 

And soon –we will hopefully soon have Crossrail with a station in Woolwich and the terminus at Abbey Wood.  This is again the result of lobbying a reluctant Ministry of Transport by Greenwich Council. The result has been that while other stations on the line have been provided as part of the overall package Greenwich Council has worked with a developer on the Woolwich Station. This is very much an echo of Eltham Park Station on the Bexleyheath Line a hundred years earlier.  The railway company reluctant   to provide a railway in an area they see as without potential; and a wealthy developer who thinks otherwise and used the situation to his advantage.

 

This has been a very quick resume of all the Boroughs Stations; and how they have impacted on the development of our area.  All of them have their own detailed histories and I have only had space above to hint at some of these.

 

For much more detail I would recommend the Kent Rail web site https://www.kentrail.org.uk/kent_infrastructure_index. and for closed stations Nick Catford's Disused Stations site http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/.   There are endless books and magazines featuring railways but for local detail try London Railway Record.