I thought this week I should do something about Kidbrooke Station. I’ve been doing these articles about the
various Kid Brook streams for months - and I’m halfway through doing the Middle
Kid Brook. It struck me that Kidbrooke Station is halfway between the Middle
and Lower Kid Brooks and doesn’t really come into the area covered by either of
them. But I clearly should do it. In the past I’ve done articles on local
railway stations – So why not add Kidbrooke to them?
There are three railway lines which go to Dartford
from London Bridge. First in 1849 there
was the North Kent line which went from Blackheath through the tunnel down to Charlton
Station and on to Dartford. Then in 1866 the Dartford Loop Line going via Sidcup opened. The line which goes
through Kidbrook opened in 1895 was the Bexleyheath Railway. That name of the
line gives you a clue - it was built to serve the Bexley area and Kidbrooke was
just somewhere you passed through to get
there.
The Bexleyheath line resulted from lobbying, and some finance, from
prominent people in the Bexleyheath area. Basically it was about land owners in
that area trying to raise value of land holdings
suitable for commuter housing. The company got its Enabling Act in 1883 but, as
ever, there were various difficulties and work on the line did not start until
1891.
The opening of the line was delayed. According to most histories this was
because of a landslip just outside the tunnel which takes the line from
Blackheath Station to Kidbrooke. I can find no newspaper report of this land
slip and the Board report to shareholders says “the tunnel at
Blackheath presented difficulties ...the workmen encountering a large shell bed
and considerable quantities of water”. The tunnel goes underneath part of the
posh and private Cator Estate. There appears to be minimal information about
this tunnel-= it doesn’t appear in lists of rail tunnels in the area, and a
webpage apparently devoted to it consists of only three words!. There are some
hints that local landowner, the Earl of St Germans, wanted to develop his land and
“get even with Cator”. Whatever!
The line was
finally opened on 1st May 1895. The opening day was marked by a brass band at Bexleyheath
and there is no mention of Kidbrooke in newspaper reports. By 1900 the Bexleyheath
Railway Company had been absorbed into the South Eastern and Chatham Railway
Company and thus in 1923 became part of the Southern Railway. The future of the
line in the 20th century was that most of the land around the
railway as it went into Kent was used for commuter housing but the land around
Kidbrooke Station became a large industrial site owned by the Royal Air Force. I’m
covering this site and its multiple uses in various articles here.
So what did Kidbrooke get in the way of a station in 1895?. Somewhat to my surprise the Kent Rail website says it was ‘a delightful country station,
demonstrating charm and antiquity”. What!.
Sadly there is no sign of any pictures of this station.
Kent Rail say the stations along the line were ‘standard
wooden constructions and ‘the
main building only featured bricks in the chimney stacks’. It
had sash window and an arched roof. There were ‘swan neck’ lamps with ‘barley sugar twist’ posts and
Southern Railway "Target" name signs.
In its early years the
station appears to have been very quiet and, while eventually surrounded by
government buildings, remained peaceful. Most of its users would have been
workers in the government complex coming to work every day rather than, as
everywhere else, local residents going off to work elsewhere. There are
newspaper reports of petty crime and reckless behaviour as it’s true of both
stations then and now. In the 1930s the
station made national press coverage for some weeks following the discovery of
a headless woman’s body on the lines outside the station. This turned out to be
a respectable married woman who had been in a first class compartment – screams
had been heard by passengers in other compartments. As far as I’m aware her attacker was never
identified despite intensive police work and stories in a wide newspaper
coverage. He had almost certainly left
the train at Kidbrooke.
The original
station buildings remained in place here although other
stations serving this
area were rebuilt in 1931, where timber main
buildings were replaced
by ‘sturdy red brick’. The Southern Railway electrified these suburban lines in
1926 on the third rail scheme – which
remains in use today. but steam did not
entirely disappear from these lines until the early 1960s.. In 1949 in order to
meet demand for the increasing number of passengers, double-decker carriages were
introduced. They were not a great success – I remember them well and how unsafe
and uncomfortable they felt - but they were used until 1971. In 1954 platforms were extended in order to accommodate ten car trains
In
1972 at Kidbrook the main station buildings from 1895 were replaced by ‘dreary
CLASP’ prefabricated ones. This in turn was replaced in 1994 by a brown-brick
construction with a tiled pitched roof. A new interim station building was
opened in 2014 along with a waiting shelter, bike racks, and a toilet, and a brand new station building was opened on 3 April 2021.
Originally passengers could only from one side of the station to
the other by walking over the rails and Kidbrooke’s
first footbridge was in prefabricated concrete. In March 2014 a new metal footbridge was lifted into
position.
There
was a goods yard, busy, particularly in wartime because of the adjacent military
depot. It was closed, along with others on the line in 1968. There was also a signal box built north west of the ‘up’
platform. It was two-storey with a
timber top and a brick base. it was taken out of use in 1970. It had overlooked
the only siding, which trailed off the down line.
Extensive sidings and a narrow 2 foot gauge network once served the huge government complex. The depot could only be accessed from the "down" line and the single-track link was protected by a gate, beyond which were a multitude of standard gauge sidings. A locomotive used on the site has survived and is in Leeds Industrial Museum. Its history and some pictures can be found at https://preservedbritishsteamlocomotives.com/manning-wardle-works-no-865-raf-no-111-aldwyth-0-6-0st// I will try and cover this site in more detail in a future article.
APOLOGIES AND CATCH UPS
lead
to a lot of additions here
I’ve
noted the need to do more on the internal rail system on the RAF site as well
as its implications for Kidbrooke station and I will put these as part of a
future article
I
am very grateful to Marion Kennet who wrote to me about the post office site at
Kidbrooke, after which Old Post Office Lane is named and which I had to say in
last week’s article that I could find very little about. Marion has been kind
enough to send some photographs and that again I will write up specially
Quite
a bit of last week’s article was about the Kidbrooke Barrage balloon site and I
was not aware when I wrote that that Peter Sydenham - who had been in touch
with me in some detail about the site = had written a book about it, published
in Australia. I have just received a copy and intend to do a brief review of it
which will go on the Greenwich Industrial History Facebook Page –once I’ve had
time to read it. And I will to add something else on here.
