THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON

VICTORIAN CITIES
STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY

edited by
HAROLD PERKIN
Professor of Social History, University of Lancaster

A catologue of books available in the

Studies in Social History and new books
in preparation for the Library will be
found at the end of this volume
HI &
LOI 2

THE IMPACT
OF RAILWAYS ON
VICTORIAN CITIES

by
John R. Kellett
Senior Lecturer in Economic History
University of Glasgow

the library
INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
EVANSVILLE CAMPUS
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Toronto: University of Toronto Press
1969

04G295
 First published 1969
in Great Britain by
Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited
and in Canada by
University of Toronto Press
Printed in Great Britain
by C. Tinling & Co. Ltd
Liverpool, London and Prescot
© John R. Kellett 1969
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism
RKP SBN 7100 6315 6
UTP SBN 8020 1584
to Margery Abrahams
 Contents
plates page xi
PREFACE XV
A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS xix
A NOTE ON THE MAPS XXi

I. Introduction and summary 1

1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. DELIMITATION OF SUBJECT 2
3. EARLY PROBLEMS OF RAILWAY ACCESS 4
4. TERMINALS IN THE 1 840’s 9
5. RAILWAY CONTRACTORS AND PROPERTY
OWNERS IN THE 1860’S 14
6. EFFECTS ON THE CENTRAL AND INNER
DISTRICTS 15
7. INTER-CITY COMPARISONS 17

Part One: ‘Natural Growth' in Urban

Railways
II. Did the Victorians count social costs? 25
1. INTRODUCTION 25
2. CRITERIA USED FOR EARLY IMPROVE­
MENT SCHEMES 33
3. ANALYSING COSTS AND BENEFITS IN
THE 1840’S 35
4. FURTHER DATA IN THE 1850’S 44
5. THE METROPOLITAN CRISIS IN THE
1860’s 49
6. MAJOR TOPICS RAISED IN THE LATER
NINETEENTH CENTURY 52
7. CONCLUSIONS 57
III. Railway profits and theVictorian city 60
1. INTRODUCTION 60
2. THE CONSTRUCTIONAL PHASE 65
3. THE ORGANISATION AND CONTROL OF
URBAN PROJECTS 72
4. THE EFFECTS OF CONSTRUCTION 79
5. OPERATIONAL POLICY 86
IV. Municipal authority and the railway companies 100
1. THE MACHINERY FOR RAILWAY REGULA­
TION 100
vii
 CONTENTS

2. THE INFLUENCE OF RAILWAY COMPANIES

UPON MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES 107

Part Two: Case Histories

V. Birmingham 125
1. THE PROPERTY OWNERSHIPPATTERN 125
2. CONDITIONS OF COMPETITION BETWEEN
RAILWAY COMPANIES 134
3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAY FACI­
LITIES IACHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH 137
4. SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONSIDERA­
TION 144

VI. Manchester 150

1. THE PROPERTY OWNERSHIP PATTERN 150
2. CONDITIONS OF COMPETITION BETWEEN
RAILWAY COMPANIES 160
3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAY FACI­
LITIES: A CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH 164
4. SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONSIDERA­
TIONS 171

VII. Liverpool 175

1. THE PROPERTYOWNERSHIP PATTERN 175
2. CONDITIONS OF COMPETITION BETWEEN
RAILWAYCOMPANIES 188
3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAY FACI­
LITIES: A CHRONOLOGICALSKETCH 196
4. SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONSIDERA­
TIONS 202

VIII. Glasgow 208

1. THE PROPERTY OWNERSHIPPATTERN 208
2. CONDITIONS OF COMPETITION BETWEEN
RAILWAY COMPANIES 220
3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAY FACI­
LITIES: A CHRONOLOGICALSKETCH 229
4. SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONSIDERA­
TIONS 236

IX. London 244

1. THE PROPERTY OWNERSHIPPATTERN 244
2. CONDITIONS OF COMPETITION BETWEEN
RAILWAY COMPANIES 262
3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAY FACI­
LITIES: A CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH. 268
4. SUMMARY AND GENERAL CONSIDERA­
TIONS 278

viii
 CONTENTS
Part Three: The Impact of Railways on
Victorian Cities
X. The railway as an agent of internal change in
Victorian cities; the city centre 287
1. INTRODUCTION 287
2. RAILWAY LAND HUNGER AND THE VIC­
TORIAN CITY 289
3. THE FUNCTION OF THE CENTRAL BUSINESS
DISTRICT, LAND VALUES, AND THE
ARRIVAL OF THE RAILWAY 295
4. THE RAILWAYS’ EFFECTS UPON TRAFFIC
AND LAND USES 311
(a) Traffic 311
(6) Land uses adjacent to the central stations 318
(c) Demolition 324

XI. The railway as an agent of internal change in

Victorian cities; the inner districts and the suburbs 337
1. PHYSICAL EFFECTS UPON THE INNER
DISTRICTS OF THE CITY 337
2. RAILWAYS AND THE LOCATION OF IN­
DUSTRY 346
3. RAILWAYS AND SUBURBAN GROWTH 354
(a) Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and
Birmingham 357
(b) London 365
The work journey 365
Early suburban travel and the growth
of the outer suburbs 367
The expansion of daily suburban rail
travel after 1860 371
The development of traffic in anticipa­
tion of demand 376

XII. Railways and the land market 383

1. RAILWAY SERVICES AND THE SOCIAL
GEOGRAPHY OF THE SUBURBS 383
2. UNDERLYING CAUSES OF RAILWAY
POLICY 388
3. APPORTIONING THE INCREMENTS IN
LAND VALUES 400
4. DEMAND AND SUPPLY FACTORS IN THE
URBAN LAND MARKET 405
(a) Demand 407
(6) Supply 412
5. CONCLUSION 419

APPENDICES 425
INDEX 439
 Plates
facing page
1. Map of projected railways in London in 1846 32
2. A Metropolitan line Workmen’s Train 33
3. Estate development in south central Manchester,
1794 64
4. The London, Chatham and Dover railway com­
pany’s viaduct across central London 65
5. London’s traffic in 1872 as seen by Gustav Dore:
London Bridge 288
6. South Laurieston, Glasgow, 1858 288
7. South Laurieston, Glasgow, 1913 288
8. London’s traffic in 1872 as seen by Gustav Dore:
a traffic jam 289
9. Original plan of area scheduled for purchase and
demolition at Victoria station, London, 1858 320
10. Housing conditions and land use in Manchester,
1904 320
11. The railway arches: paupers at night 320
12. The railway arches: unemployed by day 321

xi
 In the text
Sketch maps to show the built-up area, 1840 and 1900, with location
of the principal stations in order of authorisation.
1. London
2. Manchester
3. Birmingham I following page xxi
4. Liverpool
5. Glasgow
6. Graph to show weekly receipts on all railways in the
United Kingdom, 1864 page> 89
7. Property ownership and railways in Birmingham 127
8. Property ownership and railways in Manchester 151
9. Property ownership and railways in Liverpool 176
10. Central station, Liverpool, 1862 187
11. Property ownership and railways in Glasgow 209
12. Property ownership and railways in London 246
13. Plan of the Central Area of Liverpool, 1910 304
14. Location of Birmingham’s suburbs 361
15. Socio-economic zones of the London conurbation (Wester-
gaard/Johnson) 385

xiii
 Preface
It has long been clear on the other side of the Atlantic that the motor­
vehicle is an instrument which will prise apart the compact European
city. Since the Buchanan Report the minds of policy-makers in this
country have also been exercised to analyse and evaluate the city
as Europeans have experienced it. There is detailed professional
discussion of the mechanisms of zoning, ring-roads, pedestrian pre­
cincts, and mono-rails by which vestiges of ‘the human scale’ are to be
preserved in the reconstructed cities of the late twentieth century for
people to walk about and look at; rather as the parks, museums and
art-galleries of the Victorian city were preserved as shrines to the
aristocratic values the Victorians had themselves overthrown.
Some town planners, architects and academics, who had recognized
the problem a long time before the Buchanan Report made it a public
issue, had already despaired of the possibility of incorporating a rational
transport system within the fabric of a nineteenth century city. Instead
they have suggested variously, new towns—sweepingly modern in
lay-out but still recognisably towns; or linear cities—in which the
spinal function of urban transport was formally recognised, indeed
exaggerated. Perhaps in this ferment of ideas and formulae it is time
to look dispassionately at a chapter in urban morphology which is
closed—that of the steam age and the Victorian city.
The impact of the last revolutionary mode of transport upon British
cities was complete before Victoria’s death, indeed, it was almost
complete by 1880, as the material gathered below suggests; and the
horse omnibuses and tram cars acted, even from mid-century, as a
strong secondary influence. Yet it was the influence of the railways,
more than any other single agency, which gave the Victorian city its
compact shape, which influenced the topography and character of its
central and inner districts, the disposition of its dilapidated and waste
areas, and of its suburbs, the direction and character of its growth; and
which probably acted as the most potent new factor upon the urban
land market in the nineteenth century.
The first chapter, therefore, sets out the list of questions prompted
by the railways’ arrival in the major British cities, and indicates the
extent to which existing historical source material will yield answers.
xv
 PREFACE

Subsequent chapters, in Part One, consider the processes by which the

decisions re-shaping nineteenth century cities were arrived at; looking,
in turn, through the eyes of the central government, the railway com­
panies and the municipal corporations. Part Two gives detailed Case
Histories of the five cities chosen for study. Since they are the five
largest cities in Britain, and muster over 20 % of the national population,
there can surely be no quarrel with the sample chosen. And, in any case,
the research materials and techniques used can readily be employed for
other cities to modify the impressions gained from the present study.
Those readers who, for reasons of local interest, wish to turn to the
Case History of their own city should perhaps glance at the Birmingham
chapter first, where they will find introductory generalisations in each
section, and bibliographical footnotes which have not been repeated.
I should like to thank the University Court of the University of
Glasgow for kindly granting a period of sabbatical leave, which served
greatly to expedite the completion of the final stages of research and
writing, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for their
generous grant to meet the costs incurred in travel and research, and
Professor S. G. Checkland for his encouragement and practical help at
every stage from the book’s inception.
In the course of my enquiries I have incurred lasting obligations to
the staffs of the repositories visited. Above all to Mr. Maurice Bond’s
able and patient staff at the House of Lords’ Record Office, and to the
Assistant Clerk of the Records, Mr. H. S. Cobb, who placed his wide-
ranging knowledge unreservedly at my disposal. I should also like to
place on record my thanks to the staffs of the British Museum, the
County Record Offices at London and Preston, and of the civic refer­
ence libraries: the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, a ready source of infor­
mation, often at the shortest notice; the Central Library, St. Peter’s
Square, Manchester, where an excellent local history collection, and
helpful advice, enabled every moment of my stay to be put to the
maximum use; the Picton Library, Liverpool and the Central Library,
Birmingham, where the staffs gave unstinted help both during my visits
and in correspondence. The British Transport Commission’s Historical
Records sections, both at Paddington and Edinburgh, gave my en­
quiries a reception which combined enthusiasm for their subject with
an extraordinary grasp of detail.
At Glasgow University Library the staff also merit the warmest
commendation, particularly (if it is not invidious to mention individuals)
Miss Jack, the Supervisor of the Parliamentary Papers collection. I am
also greatly obliged to Professor Miller, and the members of the
Geography Department (Miss Robertson and Miss Brass), who gave
me cartographical assistance, to Mr. W. Forsyth who undertook the
planimetric measurements used in chapter 10, and to Miss Ross, Miss
xvi
 PREFACE

Moir and Miss Marlow for the typing and re-typing involved. To my
editor, Professor H. J. Perkin, must go a tribute for the ideal blend of
expedition and courtesy he has shown throughout. I should also like to
thank the editors of the Economic History Review and the Journal of
Transport History for permission to reproduce passages from articles
which I published in 1964.
It is obvious that—however much original material one may consult
—it is necessary to lean heavily upon the published work of one’s
academic colleagues, and of many other writers, in attempting to cover
so large a theme; and I hope that these debts have been fully acknow­
ledged in the proper places. My own interest in the matters discussed
below has also been sustained and encouraged by many meetings and
personal conversations, both with present and past members of my
own Department, and with colleagues in the Urban History group of
the Economic History Society. Since their names appear elsewhere, in
the text and index, it is not necessary to enumerate them all, but merely
to express my pleasure at finding that I share an interest in the history
of British cities with so many whom I hold in high regard.
Finally, and at a personal level, my warmest thanks must go to the
lady to whom this book is dedicated, and to my wife’s mother and
uncle, whose hospitality made possible, over many summers, the
extended research necessary; to my parents in Yorkshire, to my good
friends in Manchester, Liverpool and London, and to my wife, to
Penny and to Jonathan for the countless ways in which they have
helped.

xvii
 A Note on Abbreviations
Railway Companies
The question of abbreviating the descriptions of the large number of
railway companies which inevitably recur in the text has been solved by
compromise. Nothing could be more rational, in theory, than reducing
them all to strings of initials; nothing more exasperating to the reader
in practice. Initials have therefore been used only where the company
concerned has recently been mentioned in the text.

Printed Papers
The printed papers, often referred to ambiguously as ‘Parliamentary
Papers’, in fact comprise two complete and separate series, one pub­
lished for the Lords and the other for the Commons. Both contain
material from each other’s proceedings which it was thought of interest
to reproduce. These have been distinguished by the prefix H.C. or H.L.
Where the officially re-numbered manuscript pagination has been
employed the form becomes simply e.g. H.C., 1905, XXX, 560. Some­
times, however, unofficially bound collections—by Local Libraries,
Chambers of Commerce, Railway Solicitors etc.—may have been more
convenient to use. In these cases the printed page numbers of the
individual Command Paper or House Paper have been employed. On
this basis the same page number quoted in the example above would
become H.C., 1905 (Cd 2597), 16. This difficulty does not usually arise
where the questions have been officially numbered, and so, wherever
possible, the question numbers have been used.

Manuscript Sources
Since the MS. notes of Select Committee proceedings can only be
consulted at the House of Lords Record Office the designation HLRO
precedes such material. Once again the HLRO papers include both
Lords’ and Commons’ Select Committee Minutes (distinguished by the
prefixes H.L. and H.C.), and it is important to note that the pagination
starts afresh each day of the committee’s proceedings. Where it has
seemed of interest, the name of the witness giving evidence has been
enclosed in brackets after the day and page number.
Sometimes several references to the same Minutes have been neces-
xix
 A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

sary, sandwiched between footnotes containing entirely different

material. In these cases the original reference has been slightly teles­
coped so that e.g. HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 25 June, pp. 220-3, S.C.
on Birmingham Wolverhampton and Dudley Railway, would, if
repeated later in the same chapter, become HLRO, Min., (B.W. & D.),
25 June, pp. 220-3. Where one footnote immediately follows another,
referring to the same committee’s proceedings, the convention loc. cit.
has been used if the page reference is to the same day’s proceedings,
ibid, if the page reference is to a different day’s proceedings of the same
committee.

List of Abbreviations
BM British Museum
BRL Birmingham Reference Library
BTHR British Transport Historical Records
GRL Glasgow Reference Library
HLRO House of Lords Record Office
LRL Liverpool Reference Library
LRO Lancashire (County) Record Office
MRL Manchester Reference Library
P&S Plans and Sections
B. Ref. Books of Reference
Min. Select Committee Minutes
Ec.H.R. Economic History Review
JTH. Journal of Transport History

xx
 A Note on the Maps
The illustrations which follow are intended to act as diagrammatic
keys to the location of the principal stations, and the extent of the
built-up area at the beginning and end of Victoria’s reign. For con­
venience of reference they are placed together at the beginning of
Chapter I.
Other, smaller, diagrams accompany each of the Case Histories, on
which all buildings, except the railway stations, have been removed,
to show the underlying pattern of land titles. The station reference
numbers in these landownership diagrams correspond to those in the
introductory maps.

xxi
 <ts Sidings ■ Area built up in 1840
—— Railway Tunnel Area built up in 1900
LONDON
1. London Bridge

2. Euston

3. Paddington

4. Fenchurch St.

5. Bishopsgate

6. Bricklayers’ Arms

7. Waterloo

8. King’s Cross

9. Victoria

10. Charing Cross

11. Cannon St.

12. St. Pancras

13. Broad St. and

Liverpool St.

14. Marylebone
 MANCHESTER
1. Liverpool Rd.

2. Oldham Rd.

3. London Rd.

4. Victoria

5. Projected Central

6. Central

7. Exchange

Railway
Sidings
Railway Tunnel
Manchester South
Junction Viaduct
Park
Area built up in 1840
Area built up in 1900
Principal Stations 0 1/2 1
mentioned in text H mile
BIRMINGHAM
1. Curzon St.

2. New St.

3. Snow Hill
 LIVERPOOL
1. Crown St. 2. Lime St. 3. Exchange 4. Central
GLASGOW
1. Bridge St.
(Lower station
at Cook St.)

2. Queen St.

3. Buchanan St.

4. Southside

5. St. Enoch

6. College

7. Central
 I
Introduction and summary

1. Introduction
One of the main problems confronting urban historians in Britain at
the present moment is that of discovering ways in which valid com­
parisons can be made between the major British cities of the nineteenth
century without denying or reducing their highly individual character.
Their economic bases are similar only by coincidence and in limited
measure; often they are totally dissimilar.1 Their forms of enterprise,
the response of their business communities and the policies of their
civic administrations vary widely. Comparisons which do not take
account of these divergences can easily be misleading. Yet though the
local histories of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow
each have their unique flavour the urban historian cannot be content
to treat them individually, in isolation. They, and other British cities,
did not live in separate worlds in the nineteenth century, but were all
subjected to certain common economic events.
One such major incident in the life of all British cities between 1830
and 1900 was the impact of railways upon the urban fabric and economy.
By tracing the varying responses of British cities to this event compari­
sons can be made which often illuminate the subsequent form and
direction of urban growth in individual cases, and yet which bring out
the common, overriding influences to which all major cities were sub­
jected. After all, a distinguishing feature of the revolutionary new mode
of transport was that, unlike the profitable Victorian omnibus and
carting businesses, it did not perform its service within the existing
framework of social overhead capital.2 It had to provide a completely
new transport network within each town and new generating points for
traffic.
1 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (1963), 32, 46-54.
2 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport (1963), 241-4.
B 1
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

In the course of this transformation of urban traffic the railways made

a massive and tangible impact upon the fabric of each major British
city. By 1890 the principal railway companies had expended over
£100,000,000, more than one-eighth of all railway capital, on the
provision of terminals, had bought thousands of acres of central land,
and undertaken the direct work of urban demolition and reconstruction
on a large scale. In most cities they had become the owners of up to
eight or ten per cent of central land, and indirectly influenced the
functions of up to twenty per cent.2 3 The plans of British towns no
matter how individual and diverse before 1830, are uniformly super­
inscribed within a generation by the gigantic geometrical brush-strokes
of the engineers’ curving approach lines and cut-offs, and franked with
the same bulky and intrusive termini, sidings and marshalling-yards.
Even in the most cursory map analysis these block-like specialised
areas, and the rivers of steel flowing between them, stand out by their
scale and artificiality, and by the durable, inconvertible nature of their
function. In an environment where so much development was small­
scale and left to piece-meal speculation, the railway builders and the
great estate developers were by far the most important individual
figures. Fowler, the Stephensons, Vignoles, Hawkshaw, Sacre, were the
conscious moulders of Victorian cities.

2. Delimitation of subject
Before proceeding further with a study of the effects of railway building
upon Victorian cities it is necessary to delimit the practical scope such
an enquiry can encompass. It does not seem wise or practicable, for
example, to attempt to calculate the indirect effects of railways upon
cities. Yet this is not to deny their importance. In each town, large or
small, the economic base was affected by the fuller pursuit of specialisa­
tion which the cheap transport linkages made possible: and since the
logistic problems of supplying towns with food, building materials,
fuel, raw materials and labour were solved, a rapid rate of urban
growth could be maintained, in spite of the new dimensions of mid­
century towns. There were accentuated problems of administration and
public health in the 1840’s and 1850’s, but no signs of the slackening
rate of physical growth some had predicted.4
This profound indirect influence upon the internal functions and the
overall size of towns must be conceded: but insoluble difficulties arise
when we try to demonstrate it specifically. It is one thing to follow a
narrative of the opening of a certain terminus by a story of rapid growth
of population and output, illustrated statistically, and to assume
3 Infra Chap. 10, sec. 2.
4 A. F. Weber, The Growth of Cities (Cornell, 1963), 49 et seq.

2
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

tacitly that the one partially results from the other. It is quite another
task to distinguish the components of growth which are due to the
railways from those which are due to independent factors.
One way this difficulty may be tackled is to select special examples
of towns like Crewe, Swindon, Wolverton or Redhill, all of them
railway creations, with railway companies providing 25-30 % of total
employment, dominating both manufacturing and service industry,
closely engaged in housing, and even taking over the ‘management’ of
the town.5 These railway towns are interesting and impressive examples
if one wishes to make out an extreme case for the impact of railways
upon urban development. In each town the influence of the railway is
so magnified that the need to isolate it from other factors hardly arises,
unless one seeks to explain the later progress of economic diversifica­
tion.6 But such company towns are by no means as common in Britain
as their counterparts in the United States; and though of great analytical
interest, they are of questionable value as a general guide.
Another approach would be to select for study the second flight rail­
way towns—those more representative towns which had a firm and
independent economic base of their own but gained abnormally, for
some reason or other, from their railway linkage. Examples of this type
are Middlesbrough and Barrow, where raw materials were unlocked
by unusually early and effective railway enterprise, or Carlisle and
Derby, where certain route advantages, which already gave a marked
nodality, were further confirmed by the railway’s arrival.7 Such towns
would be arguably more representative than Crewe or Swindon, and
it would be possible with them to put forward a strong case for the
railways as the predominant growth factor.
It is far more difficult, however, to isolate and assign a measurable
component for growth if we select our cities with reference simply to
their size and importance and not with a view to illustrating the effects
of railways. How much did the five principal British cities owe to the
railways? London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool
could hardly be described as creations of the railway. Indeed, one
5 W. H. Chaloner, Social and Economic Development of Crewe, 1780-1923 (Man­
chester, 1950), 40-66. P. Richards, ‘The influence of the Railways on the Growth of
Wolverton’, Records of Buckinghamshire, XVII (1962), 115-26. E. F. Carter, The
Story of Redhill as a Railway Centre (Redhill, 1954). D. E. C. Eversley, ‘The Great
Western Railway Works, Swindon’, A History of Wiltshire, IV (V. C. H., 1959),
207-19. B. J. Turton, ‘The Railway Town; a Problem in Industrial Planning’, Town
Planning Review, XXXII (1961-2), 97-115.
6 D. E. C. Eversley, ‘The Great Western Railway and the Swindon Works in the
Great Depression’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, N (1957).
7 S. Pollard and J. D. Marshall, ‘The Furness Railway and the Growth of Barrow’,
JTH, I (1953), 109-26. Asa Briggs, ‘Middlesborough: the Growth of a New Com­
munity’, Victorian Cities (1963), 247—82. J. D. Standen, The Social, Economic and
Political Development of Derby, 1835-88 (Leeds M.A. thesis, 1958).
3
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

manifest characteristic of the early railway age in this country was that,
at the time the railway arrived, the major British towns were already
further committed to machine production than most of their European
or Transatlantic counterparts.
Yet if we examine, not the incalculable indirect effects of the nine­
teenth-century railways but, more modestly, their specific impact on
the major British cities there remains much that is amenable to study.
What decided the location of railway facilities and the timing of their
provision in a town ? Who owned the land on which the railways were
built, what did it cost and why did those costs rise steeply? Is any
pattern discernible in the process of land acquisition on which urban
railway building depended? How critical was the particular stage of
rivalry or monopoly prevailing between railway companies serving a
town? What direct influence did railway building have upon the old
central core of a city? To what extent did the railways on the one hand,
demolish, on the other, preserve but dilapidate the existing urban fabric ?
Was any attempt made to understand the indirect social costs and
benefits which urban railway building incurred ? Was the railway’s role
in stimulating suburban extension as important as is usually assumed;
and how, precisely, did the provision of services by profit-making
companies link up with the promotion of suburban building ? Evidence
exists to suggest answers to all these questions.

3. Early problems of railway access

The initial phase of railway development in most towns in the 183O’s
was characterised by good opportunities for approach and terminus
building not fully utilised because of unduly low capitalisation for the
task in hand, this lack of means being accompanied by a corresponding
lack of influence in dealing with proprietors.8 The chief commercial
need at this time was, above all, to get a portion of the line into opera­
tion as quickly as possible and to see some return for the heavy initial
expenses on Parliamentary charges, rolling stock and permanent way.
The typical stations of this period were all, as the accompanying maps
show, on the outskirts of the then built-up areas.9 The main considera­
tion in their siting was to achieve the cheapest and simplest approach
and terminus, with the minimum disturbance of property, even if (as
in three of these cases) this involved a final stretch of line served by a
tunnel and stationary cable engine. Usually the last part of the approach
It was not until the second railway boom in the 1840’s that there was comment
upon the gieatly increased favour and support which, as compared with the pro­
jects of former years, these undertakings now receive from the owners of Landed
Property in the districts through which they pass’. H.C., 1844, XI, 5.
See captions to Figs. 1-5. The stations are numbered chronologically in order of
authorisation.

4
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

line ran through open land leased out in small market-gardens or

through slum terrace and cellar dwellings leased in batches of eight or
ten to middlemen, but, in each case, conveniently owned by a few larger
landowners whose goodwill had been secured. The termini themselves
were mere departure sheds with clumsy roofing covering only the track
and leaving the passenger platform exposed. Even at the finest and most
spectacular of the London termini, Euston’s splendid arch led only to
the ramshackle collection of one-storey brick ticket offices which so
much engaged Pugin’s scorn.10
Yet despite their anxiety to avoid adding to the total cost of their
projects by disproportionate expenses entering the city, the railway
companies of the mid-183O’s immediately encountered the shock of
urban land prices. ‘I think I may safely say that in our London termini
there is nothing extravagant and nothing done for display,’ claimed
William Reed, Secretary of the London and Southampton Railway
Company, ‘but yet it has cost us a great deal more money than we had
calculated for the whole of our stations.’11
At this early stage the expense was principally experienced by the
companies operating from London. John Moxon, Chairman of the
London and Croydon Railway, spoke for all the London companies.
‘Every railway we apprehend in its first mile costs more than in any
other part of the line, but ours is peculiarly so.’12 It was this burden,
and not, as so often repeated, the ransom payments to country land­
owners, which brought the London and Birmingham company back
to Parliament to secure permission to raise more capital in 1839. ‘The
very principal excess’, said Robert Stephenson, ‘or at least a large part
of the excess, arose entirely from the stations on the line.’13 The Secre­
tary, Richard Creed, supported him. ‘There is one expense no engineer
could estimate, the expense of stations, and there we have arrived at a
most fearful excess.’14 The extension of the London and Birmingham
from Camden Town to Euston alone, little more than a mile, cost
£380,000 and had to be supported by a special toll above the statutory
fares.15
The London and Birmingham Company’s credit was sufficient and
10 ‘This piece of Brobdingnagian fantasy must have cost the company a sum which
would have built a first rate station.’ Christian Barman, An Introduction to Railway
Architecture (1950), 16.
“H.L., 1839, XXIII, 61.
12 Ibid. 161.
13 Ibid. 351.
14 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1839, 20 March, p. 113, S.C. on London and Birmingham
Railway.
15 H.C., 1839 (442) XIII, QQ. 102, 776. By the end of 1838 land and compensation
costs had exceeded the original estimates by 115%, works, track and station costs
by 85%. H. Pollins, ‘A Note on Railway Constructional Costs, 1825-1850’, Econo­
mica, 19(1952), 404.
5
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

management good enough to survive this miscalculation, but another

railway, the Eastern Counties, must remain a classic example of a
railway which totally miscarried through failure to estimate urban
property values realistically. Henry Bosanquet, their Chairman,
disclosed to the Commons’ Select Committee that over three times the
total sum estimated for land purchase had already been expended and
the line had not yet been half laid down, to Colchester instead of Great
Yarmouth as planned.16 This was, in fact, as far as the Eastern Counties
company, as originally constituted, ever got. The section from Mile
End to Bishopsgate Street had proved too much for their resources.
Yet the obvious solution to these difficulties, the sharing of terminal
approaches and facilities, could not be made workable without a
measure of goodwill which the competitive nature of company promo­
tion precluded. In London the Great Western and the London and
Birmingham companies wisely decided not to share Euston as had
originally been planned: the long and bitter rivalry between the com­
panies and their technical disagreements over gauges would have led
to scenes of unimaginable friction and confusion.17 But the four south­
eastern railway companies which did share London Bridge station
found it quite impossible to agree on the terms of joint-ownership.
The Commons’ Committee which brought the four chairmen together
finally despaired of compromise and recommended Lewis Cubitt’s
plan for one of the earliest ‘secessionist’ stations, Bricklayers’ Arms
(No. 6 on London map).18
In Liverpool and Birmingham the problem of shared stations had not
yet arisen. In Glasgow the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock and Ayr, and
Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock companies, and in Manchester the
Liverpool and Manchester and the Grand Junction companies, shared
stations harmoniously, but only because the companies themselves had
a system of overlapping directorates: at the latter terminus the com­
panies soon followed their surrender of operational autonomy by
actual amalgamation into the London and North Western group.19
By the end of the thirties there were already indications that sharing
of termini by genuinely independent companies would raise endless
difficulties. ‘Joint Stations’, a witness said to the 1852 Parliamentary
Committee, ‘have been a more fruitful source of quarrels, litigation,
Chancery proceedings and disagreements than almost anything else
connected with the railway system.’20 Appreciation of this point is of
16 H.L., 1839, XXIII, 189-92 (Bosanquet). £200.000 had been estimated for land,
£650,000 had already been paid.
17 Ibid. 352 (Robert Stephenson).
18 Ibid. 261 (Cubitt).
19 Ibid. 234 (Moxon). For the amalgamations see Case Histories', infra.
29 H.C., 1852-3, XXXVIII, 137 (Huish). There were also, he alleged, ten times the
volume of complaints from the public at joint stations.

6
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

critical importance in understanding the network of urban railways and

termini.
The attitude of the railway companies towards terminal facilities
and the land-acquisition problems they encountered during this early
phase of their development can be shown in more detail by a brief
examination of the siting of two of the important new Manchester
stations; the Manchester and Leeds Company’s at Hunt’s Bank
(Victoria, 1839, No. 4 on map) and the Manchester, Sheffield and
Lincolnshire Company’s at Store Street (London Road, 1837, No. 3 on
map). The property designated by Charles Vignoles for the site of the
M.S. & L’s terminus was occupied by a smithy yard, small factory and
a group of houses, loosely arranged with a good deal of waste space
and all owned by a Joseph Dyer.21 The remaining 100 or so properties
through which the approach line passed consisted of occupied cellars
and houses, bakehouses, a coachmaker’s works and stables, wheel­
wright’s shop and houses building. A mere 200 yards and £40,000 was
enough to clear the built-up area to the fields beyond; though as the
Manchester Commissioner of Police, Mr. George Hall, stressed, the
delay, even of a year, would ‘cause the land in the neighbourhood to be
raised in nominal if not real value by this proposal.’22 In the previous
six months more building than he had ever seen in that area had been
commenced. In his opinion it was a deliberate attempt to enhance the
value of the land by opportune speculation; but it could also be inter-
pretated as the first signs of the genuine functional competition for
land in the area adjacent to the city centre. The Committee, in fact,
asked Mr. Hall directly whether he did not regard the building of houses
as of equal importance to the railways’ proposed use of the land.
‘Buildings are necessary of course,’ he replied, ‘but at least they are
erecting; but the Railway is also a very important accommodation for
Manchester.’23
In George Stephenson’s evidence for the Hunt’s Bank extension the
same resistance to the railway’s intrusion arose over issues of cost and
space. He was persistently attacked in the Parliamentary Committee
for his extravagant claims for land and his disturbing vagueness about
the uses for which it would be needed. He came before the committee
without a detailed plan for the terminal, explaining bluntly ‘I do not
like to lay out a Depot in the beginning.’24 Instead he preferred to lay
out the space for which compulsory purchase orders had been granted
2 1HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1837, Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Rail­
way. Properties 1 to 25. The site was shared with the Manchester and Cheshire
Junction Railway, H.L., 1836, XXXIII, 321-2.
22 Ibid. 436.
23 Loc. cit. The properties were probably those belonging to John Satterthwaite,
who is shown as owning 18 unfinished and 5 empty houses.
24 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1837,17 March, p. 22, S.C. on Manchesterand Leeds Railway.
7
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

‘with reference not to the present traffic, but to the possible or probable
increase of it.’25 The Liverpool and Manchester Company, for which he
was engineer, had failed to do this at both ends of their line for want of
capital’, and were now trying to increase their depots ‘by giving extra­
ordinary prices’ for small plots at the Manchester end (No. 1 on map)
and ‘by constructing a new entrance at Liverpool (No. 2 on
map).26
The provision for future growth at the new Hunt’s Bank terminal
which seemed, no doubt, eminently reasonable to George Stephenson,
was represented to the Committee in quite a different light by counsel
for the landowners. ‘Do you think you are justified in calling upon
Parliament to oblige men of property to part with their land without
first having determined how far it is necessary that the power should be
extended?’27 In fact, it had been largely to avoid these troubles with
existing landowners that the Hunt’s Bank site had been chosen, because,
although the approach to it ran through some 250 shops, cottages and
cellar-dwellings a large parcel of them were owned by one proprietor,
the Earl of Derby; and another titled proprietor, Lord Ducie, owned
most of the land adjacent to the proposed terminal.28 The necessary
property transactions involved were kept to a minimum by the route
chosen.
The scuffle for railway access to Britain’s major cities in the 183O’s
had already disclosed three features of considerable significance for
future urban development. In the first place all railway promoters had
grossly underestimated the expenses involved and so their schemes often
fell short, or remained modest and peripheral. The opportunity was
lost for a direct penetration to the central areas at a time when the
operation could have been carried out painlessly. Within a decade the
original stations on the outskirts were encrusted, like flies in amber, by
the rapid extension of building. The approach routes became longer,
more expensive and more limited in choice. At the same time difficulties
in station sharing had arisen which ensured that future terminal
projects would be put forward which made sense in the railway board­
rooms but not in terms of urban transport economics. Finally, the
intrusive land acquisition and change of use the approach lines and
termini required had already encountered a resistance compounded of
inertia and financial opportunism. This was reflected twice; once in
the delays and costs of securing the bill, and again in the ‘extraordinary
prices’ which had to be offered.
Already, by the 183O’s, the railway companies had begun to seek a
25 Loc. cit. p. 9.
26 Loc. cit. pp. 9, 17, 18, 22, 24, 28, 29. ’’
27 Loc. cit. p. 13, George Stephenson questioned by Mr. Hildyard Q.C.
28 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1839, Manchester and Leeds Railway.

8
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

way to avoid this resistance and delay by laying out routes through the
areas where they had managed to find groups of substantial prop­
rietors. These formed a species of fissure in the complex pattern of
ownership in Britain’s great cities along which the railways could chisel
their way to the fringe of the town centre. These ‘fissures’ frequently
provide, both in the 1830’s and later, the specific explanation for route
and site choices within the very broad limits suggested by geographical
and engineering factors.29
Yet in spite of the unexpected costs of the 183O’s the returns to early
establishment or improvement of terminals were very great both in
terms of traffic and profits. The one mile Hunt’s Bank extension and
Victoria Station of 1839, instanced above, was constructed for £475,000,
equal to 2£% off the Manchester and Leeds company’s 8.8% annual
distributed profit for one year; a small price to pay for an investment
which would assure the company’s long-term prospects and establish
a firm and permanent foothold in Manchester.30 In the amalgamation
phase of the following decade it was noticeable that the partner which
always came out on good terms was ‘the Company which works the
main Trunk fine and possesses the principal terminal Stations.’31
It is also clear from the confidential figures published by accident in
the Second Report of the Select Committee on Railway Acts, that the
profits of most railway companies between 1837 and 1846 were more
than sufficient to have digested a larger expenditure on provisions in
cities.32

4. Terminals in the 1840's

By the 1840’s the modest nature of the railways’ installations was
becoming apparent, as the profit-making and traffic-generating poten­
tial of steam transport unfolded in each great city. ‘The possession of
good railway communications’, the Board of Trade’s 1845 report on
railway schemes in Lancashire concluded, ‘has now become almost as
much a matter of necessity as the adoption of the most improved
machinery to enable a manufacturing community to contend on equal
terms with its rivals and to maintain its footing.’33 In Manchester,
where fluctuations of taste had always made time most important in
the staple industry, ‘the reduction in the period for the return of orders
29 By 1845 locomotives were sufficiently powerful to ascend gradients of 1 in 42
leaving urban terminals in Glasgow, London and Manchester, H.L., 1845, XXXIX,
40.
3n HLRO, Min.,H.C., 1837,16 March,p.4,S.C.on Manchester and Leeds Railway.
P & S, 1839, M. & L. Rly.
31 H.L., 1845, XXXIX, 35.
32 H.C., 1846 (687) XIV, 5 et seq.
33 H.L., 1845, XXXIX, 238.
B* 9
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and the shortening of the process of textile manufacture itself’ which

early railways brought, led to rapid expansion of employment, saving
of capital and even, it was claimed, improvements in machinery.34
In Birmingham it seemed equally urgent to improve facilities for
different reasons. ‘Economy of transit should be carried to the greatest
possible extent, more particularly in a district so far inland', the city
magistrates stated.35 Similar evidence is available for Glasgow where
the need to compete on equal terms with Manchester and Liverpool is
stressed. The competitive inter-city advantages brought by good terminal
facilities were sufficiently clear by the mid-1840’s to quieten criticism
and unlock funds for the assault upon the central areas of each city.
In London, in 1846, no fewer than 19 projects for urban railways
were put forward, involving so great a change in land use that the
Select Committees considering each bill on its individual merits were
reinforced by a Royal Commission to consider the general effects of
railway schemes upon ‘the thoroughfares of the metropolis and the
property and comfort of its inhabitants.’36 In Liverpool, likewise, the
urgent need for ‘extending station accommodation and giving increased
facilities for ingress and egress’, and the immense expense of achieving
it, was made the main argument for justifying the ‘union of capital’ of
the three companies terminating there, and the formation in 1846 of
the L. & N.W., the largest railway in Britain, with a capital of over
£17 millions.37
With the huge combined capitals amalgamation provided, and the
flood of new investment during ‘railway mania’, the railway companies
had ample means to command space even in the bidding against well-
established commercial land users. The central business districts,
where high rents and land values had always kept a species of monopoly,
found themselves unable to exclude the railways by the customary
sanction of offering central business district land prices. Nearly 1,000
acres of land had been authorised ‘to be taken for Warehouses, Stations
etc,’ by various acts in the 183O’s. Most of this had been taken up by
the mid-1840’s and stations built which cost, on the average, three times
as much per route mile as their European equivalents in 1844.38 The
railways’ land hunger added considerably to this in the next five years.
By 1849 the 26 largest railway companies had laid out £19,240,000 on
land purchase, the relative costs of this land varying in relation to
constructional costs from 64% for the mostly urban Manchester
34 Ibid. 237.
35 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 24 June, pp. 3-4, S.C.on Birmingham, Wolverhampton
and Dudley Railway.
36 H.C., 1846 (719) XVII, 21.
37 H.L., 1845, XXXIX, 267. Report on the proposed L. & N.W: amalgamation by
the Board of Trade (unfavourable).
38 H.C., 1844, XI, 610-30.

10
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

South Junction railway, to a mere 15% for a line which was rural or
had running powers into urban termini like the Eastern Union com­
pany.39 In general, land costs ran at about a quarter of the amounts
expended upon the actual construction of railways, and were half as
large again as the cost of rolling stock, engines and plant.
As a broad item of national rail costs during the constructional
phase, the expenditure on land was more considerable than has recently
been suggested. Of course, it is possible by citing spectacular individual
examples of ‘blackmail’ land prices to give an exaggerated impression
of the burden laid upon railway finance by land purchase; and the
statements of an earlier generation of railway historians have been
subjected to sceptical analysis by Harold Pollins. The danger now
appears to be that of over-correction, for there are good reasons—
given in detail elsewhere—for believing that average land costs during
the period 1825-50 did not come to 13-9% as Pollins has argued, but
to over 16-5% of aggregate expenditure.40 In relation to the very large
amounts of capital deployed this proportion represents a considerable
expenditure, perhaps the greatest single influence of the period upon
the national land market; and nowhere were higher prices paid than
in the strategically placed approaches to Victorian urban terminals.
The particular need experienced by the major railway companies in
the mid-1840’s was for improved and more central stations for pas­
sengers, who still provided 61 % of overall revenues.41 The rapid growth
in volume of local, short-distance traffic, also placed the ‘annexe’
stations, a mile or more from the centre, at a further discount. An
irresistible solution to these traffic problems in the forties was to
convert the old terminals to goods depots and to extend the lines
further into the core of the city to new passenger stations. As the cities
extended outwards (and for many of them the 1840’s was the fastest
decade of their growth), so the railways penetrated further into their
central business districts. The practice was widespread (see maps) and
quite deliberate, as Robert Stephenson testified: the extension from
Curzon Street to New Street in Birmingham was exactly modelled on
the advance from Camden Town to Euston at the southern end of the
London-Birmingham line.42
39 The M.S.J. costs for land and property came to £200,000, the cost of actual
construction £313,000; for the Eastern Union the figures were £172,000 and
£1,158,000. This compares only land costs and construction costs. For a fuller
break-down of the figures, including Parliamentary expenses, Law charges, Engineers’
charges and Plant see App. 1.
40 See App. 1 infra.
41 H.C., 1852-3, XXXVIII, 299 (Simmons). By 1853 the proportion ofrevenue earned
by passenger traffic had declined to 53 %.
42 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846,12 June, p. 63, S.C. on London and Birmingham Rail­
way (Birmingham Extension).
11
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Of the five major cities, Birmingham came out of this phase of central
terminus building most transformed, with two new central stations
forming landmarks within which the shopping and business area
tended to be confined. Robert Stephenson’s New Street station (No. 2
on Birmingham map) had the advantage of being an extension by a
well-established company and of ‘removing a certain class of the
inhabitants living just behind the principal and best streets’, by its
chosen route through the slums and brothels behind Navigation Street.43
The contribution to social costs, which railway demolition in this area
constituted, secured the approval of the Birmingham Commissioners,
who were already considering building a commodious new road out to
the old Curzon Street station. ‘I need scarcely ask you’, counsel for
the Bill remarked, rhetorically ‘whether having been prepared to
make that sacrifice of the Town’s funds to achieve that object you would
think it a very desirable thing to have the Station brought into the
Town?’44 The properties on the terminal site were mostly owned by
small, non-resident proprietors in batches of two to eight, but municipal
goodwill, compulsory purchase orders and tempting cash offers broke
up this maze of titles.
Brunel’s rival central station at Snow Hill (No. 3 on map) was also
carried through, if not with the entire favour of the Birmingham
Commissioners, at least with the militant partisanship of a faction of
them, together with the M.P. for Birmingham, Richard Spooner. They
pointed to the limitations of New Street, a passenger station only, very
convenient for the carriage traffic from the middle-class Edgbaston
area, but not able to cope with the small masters, bringing in their
manufactures ‘on their backs and in carts to the neighbourhood of
Snow Hill.’45 Above all, a second station, of equal dimensions, and
linked with the G.W.R., would ‘free Birmingham from the thraldom
of the network which the London and Birmingham railway propose to
throw over it.’46
Brunel and MacLean had the slight advantage of dealing with only
one owner, William Inge, whose workshops, houses and yards, and
five or six warehouses, covered the terminal site: but their mile-long
approach routes by tunnel and viaduct affected nearly 1800 properties.47
In the other major cities in the 1840’s the transformation was less
complete. In Glasgow, though there were several schemes for river
43 Ibid. 11 June, pp. 58-9 (James, late Mayor).
44 Loc. cit. pp. 6-7, counsel addressing Daniel Malins, High Bailiff.
45 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846,25 June, pp. 220-3, S.C. on Birmingham, Wolverhamp­
ton and Dudley Railway.
46 Ibid. 22 June, p. 26.
47 HLRO, P & S, 1846, Birmingham and Oxford Junction Railway (Birmingham
Extension Railway). HLRO, P & S, 1846, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and
Dudley Railway.

12
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

crossings and ambitious central stations, none matured. In Manchester

the only new station was a minor one, though the existing termini were
enlarged and a unique new link railway was set in hand, Joseph Locke’s
Manchester South Junction Railway, entirely urban, crossing 30 streets
on its 1^ mile viaduct. In London, where the Royal Commission’s
intervention has been noted, three ambitious schemes for central
termini fell under the veto on central building, but at Waterloo and
King’s Cross (Nos. 7 & 8 on London map) two important fringe
additions were sanctioned and an inner ring railway commenced. In
Liverpool a second entry to the central business district was effected,
from the North at Exchange Station (No. 3 on Liverpool map), and
Lime Street station was greatly enlarged; the extension at Lime Street
by Joseph Locke being achieved by the stroke of a pen transferring 260
properties belonging to the Mayor and Burgesses to the existing station
site, in marked contrast to Thomson & Hawkshaw’s task, ploughing
laboriously and expensively through 500 multiply-owned properties
to reach the Exchange site.48
It is clear that in all of these central schemes a critical new factor in
the 1840’s was the approbation, or, at any rate, the friendly neutrality
of the new local authorities. Schemes which were insufficiently can­
vassed fell through, whatever their merits and whatever the resources
of the company. The choice of routes through cities and the dimensions
of the terminal sites were subjected to a new influence; the corporate
ownership of land (as in Liverpool), or corporate views on desirable
areas for demolition (as in Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow).
The costs of effecting these inroads into the central business district,
although they had not grown as rapidly as the railway companies’
resources, nevertheless increased beyond all reasonable anticipation.
Instead of the £135,000 (Lime Street, Liverpool, 1832) or £475,000
(Victoria, Manchester, 1839) of a decade earlier, £1,000,000 was needed
for the new Snow Hill Station at Birmingham (1846); and increases in
other towns were of a similar order.49 Some small part of this increase
came from the more substantial nature of the termini. Dobson, Wyatt,
Hardwick and Cubitt began to lay out permanent station buildings in

48 Fuller information and references to all the schemes mentioned in this paragraph
may be found in the Case Histories.
49 The figures quoted are engineers’ official estimates contained in the relevant
Plans and Sections. These cover the buildings, land purchase and immediate ap­
proach route, but, of course, were frequently exceeded by considerable margins in
practice. Unfortunately it is not possible to produce a comprehensive list of esti­
mated urban costs because in many other cases the engineer’s estimates cover the
whole railway without differentiating terminal expenses; e.g. Vignole’s estimate for
London Road station, Manchester, includes forty miles of track. The deposit of
overlapping plans for shared stations further complicates the problem of assessing
terminal costs. See infra Chap. 3, sec. 4.
13
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the late 1840’s in a style and with materials more fitting to those wealthy
and massive additions to the Victorian city centre.50 But most of the
expense arose from the rapid inflation of site prices which the railways
had themselves precipitated.

5. Railway contractors and property owners in the 1860’s

The railway companies’ purchase of a sizeable percentage of the central
business districts left a mark not merely on the Victorian townscape,
but also on the companies themselves, and affected the timing and
character of their last major assault on the fabric of British cities, in the
1860’s. The profits, even of the largest companies, tended to sag for a
time where an ambitious programme of terminus building had been
undertaken. George Carr Glyn, the Chairman of the L. & N.W., who
had stressed the cardinal importance of securing bills ‘for the improve­
ment of our stations in Manchester, Birmingham, London and Liver­
pool’ at the 1st General Meeting in 1846, had the mournful task of
reporting the halving of dividends over the next seven years. ‘In seeking
to find the reasons for this remarkable decline of dividend’ writes the
L. & N.W.’s historian, ‘we must attribute it partly to the large capital
expenditure on more or less unproductive improvements.’51
A result of the increased cost of sites in the larger cities in the 1840’s
was that the projecting of such schemes tended to become a separate
speculation, almost the monopoly preserve of a few great contractors
and engineers. John Hawkshaw and John Fowler were two ex-engineers
who, by dint of their expertise and their ability to act as intermediaries
between the railway companies and the large contractors, were able to
turn entrepreneur and amass great personal fortunes during this phase
of city railway building. Hawkshaw and Fowler between them accounted
for the building of Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria stations
in London, (Nos. 10, 11 & 9 on London map), Central station, Liver­
pool (No. 4) and St. Enoch’s and Central stations, Glasgow (Nos. 5
and 7). In each case a separate company was floated to build the
terminus and few miles of necessary approaches. Work was carried out
on credit, and share capital for these specialised terminus companies
was sometimes advanced (in return for monopoly privileges) by Waring
Brothers, Betts and Peto, the great contractors, who had by now
developed a vested interest in demolishing and remaking cities. In these
ways risk capital was concentrated by those most directly concerned
with urban railway building in the 1860’s, and sufficient leverage
„ Christian Barman, An Introduction to Railway Architecture (1950), passim.
Carrol L. V. Meek, The Railway Station: an Architectural History (1957).
L. Steel, The History of the London and North Western Railway (1914), 148,

14
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

obtained for the increasingly difficult task of breaking into the cities’
inner districts.52
Even so a great deal of ingenuity was needed to find the fissures in
the ownership pattern along which approach routes could be made.
Fortunately, for the projectors of the 1860’s, a few large individual titles
to land still existed. The Marquis of Westminster owned the greater
part of the property along the route of the Victoria Station and
Pimlico Railway Company. The decision to cross the Thames by
striking westward from London Bridge (No. 1) and setting up the Char­
ing Cross and Cannon Street termini was also influenced by the location
of large block holdings. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s and the Right
Rev. Lord Bishop of Winchester’s vast slum holdings in Southwark
and Lambeth alone made it possible to contemplate driving a surface
railway two miles across south London. In Manchester and in Glasgow
the last large central holdings in personal ownership were tempted onto
the market by railway prices in the 1860’s.53
Increasingly, however, the railways came to rely for urban land upon
corporate bodies, the Hungerford Market Co. and the Drapers’
Company, St. Thomas’s Hospital and Emanuel College, which owned
the terminal sites of Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Holborn Viaduct
stations respectively in London; the municipal corporations in Liver­
pool and Glasgow for the new central sites there; the Grosvenor and
the Rochdale canal companies, on whose basins Victoria Station,
London, and the projected M.S. & L. Central Station in Manchester
(No. 5 on map) were laid out. The 1860’s, however, was the last decade
in which such large units of ownership could readily be found: after­
wards the most important developments in urban railways were
underground.

6. Effects on the central and inner districts

The opening of stations in the central business districts of the provincial
cities, and on the immediate periphery of the central area in London,
produced both a redistribution of land uses and a re-alignment and
stimulation of internal traffic routes. The Select Committee on Railways
had already spoken, in 1844, of ‘the control which Railway Companies
possess by means of their Station-yards over the traffic of the neigh­
bouring districts.’54 The professional carrying companies redistributing
railway loads by horse waggon, Pickfords, Kenworthy’s and Baches
found themselves, like many passenger cab drivers, engaged in the
52 Infra Chap. 3, sec. 3.
53 Detailed source references for the statements made in this and the next paragraph
may be seen in sections 1 and 3 of the Case Histories.
MH.C„ 1844, XI, 32.
15
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

1840’s in endless squabbles concerning access and facilities; and litiga­

tion continued even after it had been recommended that ‘reasonable
preference may be given to favoured agents, but vehicles tendering
themselves to take up or set down Passengers, Luggage and Parcels
ought not to be excluded.’55 Inter-station traffic came to form up to
half the livelihood of some cab owners and influenced the framework of
central horse omnibus routes. Where river bridges interposed between
stations and the business areas, as at Jamaica Street, Glasgow, or at
London Bridge, the traffic-generating power of the new termini was
vividly underlined.56
More slowly, a realignment of land uses around the central termini
and along their access routes took place. The early misgivings of
insurance companies, three-quarters of which increased their rates for
sites adjacent to the railways in the 1840’s, were soon overcome, and
the new transport medium’s capacity to attract some expanding land
uses and to repel others was given free rein.57 Attracted to the termini
were retail shopkeepers and transit warehouses; repelled were residen­
tial and, on the whole, business users. Business users and specialised
warehouses built, like those in Manchester, for sale and exhibition
rather than mere storage, preferred to keep a reasonable distance
between themselves and the railway. Those heavy industries whose
bulk requirements called for special rail facilities tended to falter at the
central land prices and seek riverside or suburban accommodation.58
This gradual redistribution of uses was sometimes given specific
lines of demarcation by a massive new feature of the urban scene in the
1840’s, the railway viaduct, striding past working class houses at roof­
top level, ‘pinning down’ areas socially and intersecting them physi­
cally. Occasionally these great stone viaducts were constructed to secure
the right elevation for crossing a river or for entering a terminal site,
but usually their main purpose was to avoid street closures, and it was
this feature which gave them their extremely widespread use. Each
major town has its lengthy stretches of elevated track, but perhaps the
most striking example to take would be that of the Manchester South
Junction.
The M.S.J. had been conceived of by Joseph Locke as ‘a species of
bridge’ to provide a cross-town communication, and there could be
no doubt of the need it satisfied in the transport network.59 By the
1860’s it was so crowded with east/west traffic that an hour’s wait on

™Ibid. 33.
56 Infra Chap. 10, sec. 4a.
57 H.L., 1847-8, XLVII, 419-421. .
58 Infra Chap. 10, sec. 4b, Chap. 11, sec. 2.
59 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1866,9 May, p. 17, S.C. on Manchester Sheffield and Lincoln­
shire (Central Station and Lines).

16
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

its arches was not unusual.60 But the effects on the area it crossed were
dilapidating in the extreme. Those arches which were let were used for
‘smithies, marine stores, stables, mortar mills, the storage of old tubs,
casks and lumber, and other low class trades.’61 The condition of the
unlet arches was even more notorious. According to the city surveyor,
speaking in 1866, ‘No improvement has taken place in that district in
the proximity of the viaduct. We have still the low class of property
which was there years ago when the viaduct was built.’ Other parts
of Manchester had increased in value by 75% in the 20 years after the
M.S.J. had been formed, he estimated, but values had remained static
around the viaduct.62
In other cities where the line was not elevated, but passed at ground
level through the property enclaves where streets had not been laid out,
the effect was hardly less marked. Since the Parliamentary ‘limits of
deviation’ made a generous allowance for railway needs, the companies
often found themselves with a belt of superfluous land for disposal,
usually to non-residential users. This helped them to recoup some of
their expenditure, but increased the barrier effects of such routes.
Segregation ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ could have a disastrous
effect upon the development value of vacant land. By mid-century
smaller Parliamentary bills already show ‘shadow areas’ being created
by the criss-crossing of supplementary lines driven relatively cheaply
through a wilderness of so-called ‘gardens’, middens, claypits, ‘scaven­
gers yards with old boilers thereon.’63 Within two decades the outward
growth of building had made these disused areas potentially valuable
central land, but the maze of tracks now prevented the land’s develop­
ment. The completion of urban link railways and cut-offs, which con­
tinued during the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1870’s, came to cover
scores of acres of east and north Liverpool, east Birmingham, south
Manchester, Glasgow and London with a tangle of interconnecting
lines and sidings, crystallising these areas’ dereliction.64

7. Inter-city comparisons
A lengthy sequel to the work of the first 30 years of urban railway
building could be written. Continued inter-company rivalry and the
endless possibilities for friction which shared stations involved led to
a few more large ‘secessionist’ stations later in the century, of which
60 Ibid. 9 May, p. 28.
61 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1866,12 July, p. 8,S.C. on Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln­
shire (Central Station and Lines).
62 Loc. cit. pp. 6, 7 (Lynde).
63 HLRO, P & S, 1846, Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway
(Branch in Salford to join the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Railway).
64 Infra Chap. 10, sec. 2, Chap. 11, sec. 1.
17
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the most important were Central, Glasgow (No. 7 on map), built for
tactical reasons by the Caledonian Railway Company, and Exchange,
Manchester (No. 7 on map), built end-on to Victoria. Some stations
were substantially enlarged and their approaches broadened between
1870 and 1900 to cater for the doubling of traffic over those thirty
years. The territorial expansion of goods accommodation, moreover,
grew more quickly and in a more direct relationship to the increase of
traffic than did the passenger stations in the last decades of the century,
and this was reflected in the expanding yards and sidings along Thames,
Mersey and Clydeside. Again it was only in the last two decades that,
with the slow growth of cheap ticket commuter traffic, the railway
companies began to make a marked impression, in London, at any
rate, upon the Victorian suburbs, influencing their social composition
and their direction and rates of growth in a way which is only now
receiving attention from economic historians.65
Yet, on the whole, the main physical impact of railways upon the
heart of the Victorian city and upon the urban property market was
over by the end of the 1860’s. The claims to land staked during the
previous thirty years were sufficient, and the facilities established
sufficiently flexible, with improved traffic control, to cater for the trans­
port needs of the rest of the century without further re-shaping of the
central areas.
Comparison between the emergent railway systems of each of the
five cities brings out marked local differences in provisions. Liverpool
was the nearest to a monopoly town, held in the grip of the L. & N.W.
almost completely until the mid-1860’s, when the M. S. & L. and the
Cheshire Lines Committee introduced a competitive element. But even
after this, formal complaints of relatively high mileage rates, inferior
services and terminal charges 50% higher than anywhere else except
London were lodged by the Chamber of Commerce in 1867, and
reiterated in a memorandum to Mr. Gladstone in 1872.66
In Manchester, by contrast, the picture is one of the most extreme
competition, with the L. & N.W., Midland, G.N., Lancashire and
Yorkshire and M. S. & L. railways forming shifting temporary allian­
ces, building stations of tactical necessity, introducing projects whose
main purpose was to block attempts to improve services by rivals,
making no attempt to co-ordinate timetables, and even (some alleged)
arranging them to clash deliberately. ‘The jealousies of the companies
have prevented that convenience . . stated Mr. Thomas Bazeley in
evidence before the Commons’ Committee of 1852/53, ‘I am strongly
65 For a full discussion of this subject see infra Chap. 11, sec. 3, and Chap. 12.
66 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Pt. 2, App. K, Memorial by Henry Grainger, Liverpool
Chamber of Commerce, to T. Milner Gibson, M.P., President of the Board of
Trade. H.C., 1872, XIII, Memorial to Mr. Gladstone, 11 March.

18
 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

of the opinion there ought to be a controlling power.’ This from the

Chairman of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce.67
In Birmingham, although the early days of shared stations produced
similar scenes, including a classic pushing match between the loco­
motives of rival companies at the opening of New Street Station, these
early excesses soon abated to leave Birmingham the best provided
town.68 The provision of the principal stations and through routes
was carried through early, on paper by 1847, in iron and masonry by
the early 1850's, and despite minor criticisms, its central stations catered
for half a century’s traffic growth. Certainly there are no signs that
inadequacies in her railway linkages held back Birmingham’s develop­
ment in the later nineteenth century, quite the reverse. A balance of
genuine competition between the L. & N.W. and G.W., perhaps
arising partly from the incompatibility of gauges, provided all the
advantages claimed universally for the laissez-faire system. Even
Birmingham was not without its follies: the famous Duddeston viaduct
(see map) setting off on towering arches across the city to nowhere,
never completed but still standing, without a rail laid, a monument to
the tactical needs of a passing phase of railway competition.
In Glasgow a more substantial monument was left in the form of St.
Enoch’s Station, built by the G. & S.W. and its satellite Union company
in a vain attempt to exclude the Caledonian Railway Company. In
Glasgow the disposition of competitive forces was so equal and the
deadlock between them so bitter as to lead to the frustration of all com­
prehensive projects in the 1840’s and to needless reduplication later.
In London the formation of main line termini and urban link rail­
ways fell into a special category for two reasons: it was by far the largest
city and tended to magnify external diseconomies intolerably; it was
also the seat of the national government and came more particularly
under the oversight of central authority. Since it was also the focus for
nearly all the great railway companies it was subjected even more directly
than Manchester to the disruptive force of laissez-faire competition.
Schemes put forward in the one year 1863 proposed to raise £33 miffion,
lay out 174 miles of track in the Metropolitan area, build four new
bridges across the Thames and schedule one quarter of all lands and
buildings in the City of London for compulsory purchase and demo­
lition. Parliament could not stand back idly whilst London and West­
minster were torn to pieces by competing companies and so in the
1860’s, as in the 1840’s, fresh parameters for future urban railways were
imposed.69
67 H.C., 1852-3, XXXVIII, 228-9.
68 A full description of this, as of the other issues mentioned for each city will be
found in the Case Histories infra.
69 Infra. Chap. 2, sec. 3 and 4.
19
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The individual and distinctive nature of the impact of railways upon

each of the five major British cities cannot be glossed over, but at the
same time certain overriding similarities can be discerned in the
problems faced and in the general effects upon the fabric of each city.
It would be equally foolish either to underestimate the former or to
overlook the latter.
Differences in the competitive postures of the companies exploiting
each city and in the amount of surveillance exercised by local and
central authorities left their mark, quite literally, upon the development
of each city. But this diversity should not obscure the many common
features: the similar effects upon the central business districts and their
traffic, the demolition of certain areas of low quality housing in each
city and the perpetuation of others, the similar problems of securing
land title along the access routes and the similar effects upon the urban
land market. Here are topics which draw the study of British cities
closer together and afford an extensive field for urban comparisons.

20
 Part One

‘Natural Growth’ In Urban Railways

 II
Did the Victorians count social costs?

1. Introduction
The study of Victorian railways begins with a paradox. On the one
hand the choices of particular railway routes and sites and of parti­
cular operational policies were made privately and according to the
ordinary calculations of profitability on investment which prevail
in a laissez-faire economy. The railway companies were business
enterprises floated with private capital, and in the long run their
success and survival depended upon the return they were able to give
their shareholders. The paramount consideration, therefore, in the
minds of the projectors and managers of Britain’s nineteenth-century
railway system when making decisions was a simple one: what balance
could be expected between the direct private costs and private benefits
of the investment?
Of course, the procedures for weighing the possible gains which
alternative decisions might bring were far from simple. It was not
merely a question of maximising immediate profit upon all parts
of a railway as soon as it was built. Investments which would bring
a doubtful, low or long-term return had to be undertaken to
strengthen a company’s future growth prospects; other funds had to
be deliberately wasted upon ‘blocking schemes’ which preempted the
development of important strategic areas, or upon the purchase of
complementary but over-valued rail networks or urban terminus com­
panies. Yet although formal decisions reached are recorded in the rail­
way Board Minutes, our insight into the exact nature of the calculations
which led to these decisions must continue, in most cases, to be founded
upon deduction, because of their extremely confidential nature and the
empirical and unsystematic way in which the calculations were made.
The Victorian railway entrepreneur was guided by experience and com­
monsense, raised to a very high order, not by systems analysis.
25
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Somewhere in the calculations, however, the indirect social losses and

gains caused by railway decisions entered into consideration, even from
the earliest days. This chapter attempts to analyse the changing emphasis
consciously given to social costs through the nineteenth century by the
railway companies and by those whom they had to consult to gain the
necessary authorisation for their schemes. Yet whatever the changing
weights given to indirect social costs and benefits, the search for orthodox
direct monetary return on investment remained the essential feature of
Victorian railway enterprise. The writings of such influential con­
temporaries as Herbert Spencer, Charles Dickens and the magazines
Punch, the Edinburgh Review and Fortnightly Review cast the railways in
the role of a mindless juggernaut, grinding private rights into the ground
in the blind quest for profit.1 Nowhere did this picture seem more appro­
priate than in the Victorian city, for it was against an urban background
that the chain of indirect social costs could be seen most clearly and
dramatically.
On the other hand, and here is the paradox, although British railway
companies existed and operated within the normal business rules of
price and profit, they were, from the beginning, granted two unusual
public privileges; corporate form and the power to acquire property by
compulsory purchase. The first privilege, granted by the Private Act of
Parliament incorporating each railway company, exempted it from the
ban upon raising capital from more than six people which had been
imposed after the fraudulent company flotations associated with the
‘South Sea Bubble’ in 1720. As far as English manufacturing industry
was concerned this prohibition remained in force until the 1860’s.2 Such
a privilege immediately removed railways from the world of private
partnership firms and family businesses, typical of the industrial sector
in early Victorian Britain, and put them amongst the small number of
concerns which had been allowed the unusual concession of joint-stock
incorporation by Private Act, or Letters Patent. Nearly all of these
exceptions to the ‘Bubble Act’ were in the field of public utilities, paving
and improvement projects, canal and turnpike companies, a few Fire
and Marine Insurance companies, the West India and London Dock
companies and so on; all large-scale undertakings, quite beyond the
means of half a dozen private individuals, and all enterprises which, it
could be argued, were in the public interest.3 The basis of their founda-
1 H. Spencer, Railway Morals and Railway Policy (1855), C. Dickens ed., Household
Words.
2 H. A. Shannon, ‘The Coming of General Limited Liability’, Economic History II
(1931), 267-91. In Scotland co-partneries and unincorporated companies had a
different legal standing. R. H. Campbell, ‘The Law and the Joint Stock Company
in Scotland’, Studies in Scottish Business History (ed. P. L. Payne, 1967), 148.
3 B. C. Hunt, The Development of the Business Corporation in England, 1800-1867
<Cambridge, 1936) 46-52.

26
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

tion was that they would provide services and benefits which would
accrue not merely to their shareholders but would spread outwards
through whole regions.
Added to this was the second privilege, of purchasing, by the com­
pulsory procedures described elsewhere, any property which lay on their
chosen line, within a generous band on either side, called the ‘Limits of
Deviation’. This statutory power, to which even the greatest landowners
had to bow once the Private Bill had been passed, placed the railways in
a position of even greater privilege than those companies which had, on
account of their supposed public merit, been allowed wide powers to
borrow or raise capital.
So here were two points for contact between the private commercial
criteria upon which the railways operated and their involuntary social
aspect; and they provided the main themes of Parliamentary legislation
and enquiry in the 1830’s and 1840’s. Respect for property, after all,
was one of the cardinal features of early Victorian society, and here was
one field in which the interests of a certain section of the public were
guarded with the greatest vigilance. Newspapers and Journals, M.P.s,
and counsel watched this aspect of the ‘public interest’ very closely
during the first generation of railway building. ‘Novel and extraordinary
powers have been given to the projectors of railroads’, complained the
Morning Herald in 1834. Tn besieged towns, or in conflagrations,
demolitions have been sanctioned, but they should not be for private
profit.’4 The question which was raised was not merely one of damage
but one of principle, and the type of property to be taken by compulsory
powers was irrelevant, as counsel for the landowners argued, on more
than one occasion. Mr. Talbot Q.C., put the matter most clearly to
Serjeant Wrangham, counsel for the abortive Manchester and South­
ampton Railway, on 20 August 1846. ‘If there were not a shade of
residential injury from one end of the line to the other, and if I
represented only so many lots of potato-ground, I am entitled to call
upon my learned friend to make out, affirmatively, his right to violate
the common law of the land; which common law says with respect to
the land, as to the house, of an Englishman, it is not compulsorily to be
taken from him, except upon the clearest proof of the greatest and most
undeniable public necessity.’5 Eighteen years later his words were re­
echoed by The Economist, speaking (as the Morning Herald had in 1834)
of schemes for scheduling land in central London. The power to take land
4 Quoted in Thomas Hammond, A few Cursory Remarks on Railways, showing their
Beneficial Tendency (1835), MRL, Tracts on Railways, Pl 163. Hammond disagreed,
and asserted his conviction that ‘the railway might extinguish one of the vilest
nuisances in London—the ill-ventilated culs de sac and dens of wretchedness in the
vicinity of Shoe Lane and Saffron Hill.’ Ibid. 9.
5 From one of the rare summing-up speeches of counsel, MRL, Tracts on Railways,
1396 h 17, 1846-55.
27
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

by compulsory procedures, it argued, could only be justified ‘by public

necessity as essentially national as an efficient iron-clad fleet.’6
In response to pressures such as these all property owners were, under
Parliamentary procedure given locus standi to object to schemes which
touched their interests directly. Standing Orders already evolved from
experience with turnpikes, canals and street improvements immediately
applied to railway bills, ensuring, by means of Books of Reference,
Lists of Consents and Dissents, that no Bills involving property could be
rushed through, undermining owners’ rights to oppose by keeping them
in ignorance.7 Of course, the whole scale of property acquisition changed
so radically as increasingly far-ranging and numerous railway schemes
were authorised in the 183O’s and 1840’s that these defences of the public
interest required substantial buttressing, by the Lords’ Select Committee
on Compensation to the Owners of Real Property, which considered
financial losses caused by the severance of property and injury to
residences in 1845, and by the Lands Clauses and Railways Clauses
Consolidation Acts, which clarified common law procedures for com­
pensation, in the same year.8 According to these procedures any member
of the public whose property was scheduled for purchase, either in
whole or in part, was entitled to oppose the Bill, or to use the threat of
opposition to force the railway projectors to settle with him. The use
made of this right tended to vary according to the size and value of the
property holding, as John Clutton, land agent and solicitor to the
South Eastern Railway Company, made clear in his evidence:9
‘It is only Parties who have some influence in opposing railway companies
that are settled with before the passing of the Bill.’
‘Some means of giving you trouble in the Committee?—Yes. With small
proprietors, and I would class with them all the middle men, the costs of a
petition to Parliament are so heavy that they are afraid of it.’
If this led to the exaction of inflated prices, such as those encountered
by the Eastern Counties railway company, which ‘paid more smartly
than any other company for land’, the Lords’ Committee concluded
that the additional charge was a legitimate price for the property
owners to exact.10 Tn the case of the Railways, though the public may
be considered ultimately the gainers, the immediate motive to their
construction is the Interest of the Speculators, who have no Right to
complain of being obliged to purchase at a somewhat higher Rate, the
Means of carrying on their Speculation.’11

6 The Economist, 13 February 1864,198.

7 H. S. Cobb, ‘Sources for Economic History amongst the Parliamentary Records
in the House of Lords Record Office’, Ec.HR, XIX (1966), 161-2.
8 H. C., 1845 (420) X. 8 Vic. c. 18, and 8 Vic. c. 20. ’’
9 H. C., 1845 (220) X, 29 May, QQ. 140-1.
10 Loc. cit. QQ. 50,77.
11 Ibid. Report.
28
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

The other main public consideration which preoccupied the legis­

lature was that of providing reasonable information to prevent re­
petition of the large scale swindling which had accompanied public
forms of enterprise on previous occasions. After all, the railway share­
holders (or ‘proprietors’ as they were called in the thirties and forties)
were members of the public, entitled to protection. At first, in the early
thirties, the investors were principally local businessmen, Quaker
financiers, country solicitors, and a hard core of Lancashire speculators
known as ‘the Liverpool Party’, who invested not merely in railways
in Lancashire but also in East Anglia and from London to Southamp­
ton.12 They were a relatively small group of men used to putting their
money out at risk, and they were capable of taking care of themselves
without any protective surveillance from the State.
In the investment booms of 1837 and 1846, however, the whole
character of the investing class changed. An entirely new range of small
shareholders pressed forward to offer their savings, or even the working
capital from their businesses. In the words of James Morrison, M.P.,
one of the most effective early critics of railway speculation, ‘There is not
a nook or cranny throughout the land into which it has not found an
entrance. Allured by the prospect of immense gains and rapid fortunes,
all classes have rushed eagerly into railroad speculation. The manu­
facturers and traders starve their businesses that they might buy
shares.’13 Because of the relatively high unit cost of early railway shares,
it can be assumed that the majority, if not all of this numerous group
were from the middle class, were politically enfranchised, and therefore
proportionately influential in making their disappointment felt when
they saw their investments more than halved in value in 1846 and
1847.14 Their resentment was increased by the knowledge that a great
part of their loss could be assigned not to legitimate business miscalcu­
lations but to the sharp practices listed by Lewin, Francis and others—
misleading prospectuses, payments of dividends out of capital, rigged
Board Meetings, accounts ‘audited by daring amateurs’.15 Perhaps the
fault lay ultimately, as The Economist suggested, with the ‘undue desire
for wealth which pervades the middle classes—the classes which have
taken a lead in forming and managing the railways. We are individually
12 H. G. Lewin, Early British Railways, 1801-1844 (1925), 71. J. H. Clapham,
Economic History of Modern Britain (2nd edit 1930), I, 386-7. R. C. O. Matthews,
A Study in Trade-Cycle History: Economic Fluctuations in Great Britain, 1833-42
(1954), 110.
13 James Morrison, The Influence of English Railway Legislation on Trade and
Industry (1848), 5.
14 C. N. Ward Perkins, ‘The Commercial Crisis of 1947’, Readings in Business
Cycles and National Income (ed. A. H. Hansen and R. V. Clemence, 1853), 12—16.
15 H. G. Lewin, The Railway Mania and its aftermath, 1845-1852 (1936); J.
Francis, History of the English Railway (1851). The phrase quoted is from John
Hollingshead, Ways ofLife (1861), 243.
29
 THE IMPACT OF KAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and collectively too much in a hurry to get rich. We would rather get it
honestly if we can, but we must get it somehow or other.’16 Yet the
game of charlatans and dupes had undoubtedly been made easier by
the apparent security with which Parliamentary sanction appeared to
invest each scheme. ‘It was specially sanctioned too by Parliament’
complained The Economist, ‘and spoken of with much honour by the
highest men in the land. When men of that class took up the project the
bulk of the community thought themselves perfectly safe.’17
From 1836 onwards, therefore, Standing Orders began to lay down
rules to protect the general investing public. The engineering difficulties,
the number of passengers and income expected, the estimates of cost,
were all subjected to closer scrutiny, by the first twenty Standing Orders
for railway bills, to make sure that the line had at least a reasonable
prospect of success; and it was not unknown for some of the less well
presented schemes to fail at the Standing Orders stage, without even
reaching a Select Committee.18 Of course, ways round the Standing
Orders could be found by ingenious and experienced council. The line
had to be plausible rather than viable, and so further attention was
given by a series of Railway Acts Enactments Committees in the
late forties to attempt to plug these loopholes, and ensure that railways
to which Parliament gave countenance were respectable, at least at their
inception.19

One might say, then, that the Government was aware, at an early
date, of the interests of the two sections of the public whose property
and purses were most directly affected; the owners of land scheduled
for purchase and the gullible small investors. Arrangements to scrutinise
railway schemes, by means of Standing Orders and, for a time, reports
by the Board of Trade, would not merely safeguard the interests of
property owners and investors, but would also, it was believed, benefit
the general public indirectly by eliminating extravagant schemes. ‘It
must be assumed’, ran one such report, in 1847, that the public are
directly or indirectly affected by any loss incurred by an unnecessary
expenditure either of labour or material.’20 But such a general concern
16 The Economist, 1854,1149.
Ibid. 1849,1185.
18 O.C. Williams, The Historical Development ofPrivate Bill Procedure and Standing
Orders in the House of Commons (1948), I, 61-3. Williams gives 1836 as the key
year, in which 57 railway bills accumulated, and M.P.s were asked to authorise
second readings without adequate information.
18 H.C., 1846 (687) XIV, S.C. on Railway Acts and Enactments. H.C., 1847-8,
XVI, S.C. on Railway Bills.
20 H.C., 1847 (461), Report of Commissioners on Railways on the Merits of two
Competing Railways between Harwich and the Metropolis, 3 June, p. 2.
30
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

for the public interest is a far cry from the systematic calculation of
social costs and benefits.
In the 183O’s and 1840’s the difficulty of extending the range of calcu­
lation further was accentuated by the novel and widespread nature of
the repercussions set up by railway building. Like many other great
innovatory forces it destroyed as well as created capital. If social costs
were to be measured, what compensation should be offered, for example,
to the innkeeper ‘measuring the time he must go into the Gazette’, with
his ‘empty yard, deserted rooms, pining chambermaids and mis­
anthropic ostlers’ ?21 And if the innkeeper was entitled to consideration,
what about the coach-owner or the Turnpike Trustees, who likewise
were called upon to pay part of the cost of the railway programme?
Even an econometrician equipped with twentieth-century statistics
would find it difficult to trace and measure the ripples which spread
outwards through the economy.
As far as the direct competitors were concerned—the Turnpike
Trustees and Canal Companies—the possible injury and financial loss
they might suffer was acknowledged by allowing them locus standi to
oppose any railway bill.22 Moreover, as the railway network grew there
were few routes which were not contested between rival simultaneous
schemes, or by companies already established. These were also given
the right to object, and draw attention to the possible social costs the
proposed schemes might incur; and, in fact, the greatest opposition to
each railway bill came from other railway companies. It was fondly
hoped that just as the public interest would be assured by competitive
management of fares and services, so the wider interest of the public
affected by railway promotion and construction would be guarded by
the Private Bill procedure.
The Speaker’s Counsel, Mr. Rickards, summed up the position very
clearly for the House of Commons’ Committee on Procedure. ‘It is only
through the medium of opponents, according to the mode in which
private legislation is carried on, that the public are heard at all against
the Bills. . . . The preamble states, in every Bill, that it is expedient for
the public interest that such and such works should be done; the
opponents controvert this, and they put themselves in the shoes of the
public and allege all the public objections they can.’23 The rival com­
panies left no stone unturned to have any new Bill which seemed to
threaten their interests thrown out. ‘The most plausible and forceful
means they can devise for doing that is to take up the cause of the
public, and they do that.’
This procedure meant, however, that the raising of public issues
21 Charles Knight, London (1841), 313.
22 O. C. Williams, op. cit. II, p. IX.
23 H.C., 1865 (393), QQ. 1052-3.
31
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

depended upon the fluke of opposition.24 No one took up the public

cause from public motives alone, and if they did they would only have
locus standi if they were affected directly themselves. Even the Chambers
of Commerce had to wage a long campaign into the 188O’s before they
were allowed the right to any hearing: and whilst Municipal Corpora­
tions could be heard, it was only with reference to their corporate
property, and not as general defenders of the public interest; although
the right to appear before the Select Committee did give their counsel
opportunity to raise wider issues.25
Such fortuitous representation of the public interest may at first sight
seem to be far removed from the detailed statistical calculations of the
secondary costs and indirect benefits of particular schemes recently
carried out by C. D. Foster, M. E. Beesley, and others.26 But it can be
shown that as the wide urban repercussions of railway investment
became apparent, there were increasing attempts, particularly in
London, where the incidental social costs of railway building were early
and hypertrophied, to accumulate the evidence necessary to understand
and measure such indirect gains and losses as, for example, the influence
of urban rail schemes upon street improvement plans, upon the speed
and congestion of road traffic, upon the amount and cost of carting
within a city, upon the health and living conditions of the poorer classes,
and upon the siting of new residential housing.
The techniques used for measurements were rudimentary, and the
final weighting was a qualitative rather than a quantitative assessment,
but they provide the key to the enormously important decisions taken
concerning metropolitan thoroughfares, improvements and property,
and explain the exclusion of railways from central London. To this
extent they meet R. N. McKean’s definition of a cost benefit study as
‘policy-oriented economic analysis’. ‘Typically their preparation is an
extremely complicated and time-consuming task,’ writes McKean,
‘though sometimes it should be mentioned, extremely valuable analyses
consist of simple, back-of-the-envelope-calculations. ’27 This was the
24 O. C. Williams, op. cit. I, 218-21.
25 The right to appear without proof that they were aggrieved was granted to
Chambers of Commerce by the Railway and Canal Traffic Act, 1888, 51 & 2 Vic.
c.25, sec. 7. For a sample of the campaign see Birmingham Chamber of Commerce
Papers (BRL L62.52), Letter from C. of Commerce to Pres, of Bd. of Trade (i.e.
Joseph Chamberlain), 23 October 1880. Their hearing, and that of municipal
corporations, took place before the Railway Commissioners and not the Parlia­
mentary Select Committees, unless their property was affected. W. Hodges, Law
of Railways (1888), I, 433-4.
26 C. D. Foster and M. E. Beesley,‘Estimating the Social Benefit of Constructing an
underground Railway in London’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 126 (1963,)
46-78. Nathaniel Lichfield, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis in Plan .Evaluation’, Town
Planning Review XXXV (1964), 159-69.
27 Roland N. McKean, ‘Cost Benefit Analysis and British Defence Expenditure’,
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, X (1963), 20.
32
plate 1 Map of projected railways in London in 1846 (see p. 35) (By permission of HLRO)
plate 2 A Metropolitan line Workmen’s Train (see p. 98)
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

type of calculation initially laid before the policy makers by James

Pennethorne, Charles Pearson, J. H. Stevens, J. W. Bazalgette, and
others.

2. Criteria used for early improvement schemes

Although it was the impact of railways which forced the first serious
essays at calculating the indirect benefits and costs of schemes involving
large changes in urban land use, tentative enquiries which pointed the
way had been conducted as early as the mid-thirties by a series of Select
Committees of the House of Commons on Metropolitan Improvements.28
Their remit was a general one, to consider all schemes for improving the
access and increasing the amenity of London, Southwark and West­
minster. No fewer than 15 fine new streets were proposed to them, and
are shown in their plans: from Oxford Street to St. Giles, from the Bank
and Newgate Street to the G.P.O., and etc. Their attention was also
directed particularly by the Commons’ resolution which appointed them,
to the problem of purchasing the Waterloo and Southwark bridges from
their proprietors and throwing them open free of toll. All the schemes
were praiseworthy, and it soon became evident that the major questions
to be solved were—How was the money to be raised and who would
principally benefit from the improvements ? Schemes for a lottery were
considered and dismissed, and the increase of the Coal Tax, levied by
the Corporation of London upon coal imported by sea, was hit upon as
the best method of finance. The coal tax only cost £250 per year to
collect, and an increase of 6d per ton would bring in the annual amount
necessary to service a loan for £1,500,000 to cover the cost of the
proposed improvements.29
The second problem facing the committee was that of deciding
whether those paying the tax increase would all benefit equally from the
improvement. The suggestion that coal merchants might absorb the 6d
a ton out of their profits, (that they could easily absorb 2s 6d if neces­
sary), was emphatically rejected by William Horne, Secretary and
Treasurer to their Society.30 Why should the Coal Merchants as a class
pay for London’s improvement? The tax would be handed on. Since
the average member of the labouring classes used two tons of coal per
year he would be indirectly taxed at Is per year.31 For those using the
Southwark and Waterloo Bridges, the saving on toll at Id per foot­
passenger would repay their tax in a couple of weeks. But large numbers
28H.C., 1836 (517) XX, S.C. on Metropolis Improvements. Other enquiries and
reports followed; 1837-8 (418, 661) XVI, 1839 (136) XIII, 1840 (410, 485) XII, and
a further six reports in 1844-6.
29 H.C., 1836 (517) XX, Q.80.
80 Ibid. Report, pp. Ill, TV.
31 Ibid. Q.274.
c 33
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

lived in areas where it was unlikely that they would make even twelve
crossings, and there was evidence, moreover, that the numbers who
would directly benefit were very small, simply because they already
avoided the toll by using the public Westminster and Blackfriars
bridges. The receipts at Waterloo Bridge were a disappointing 1 % on
the £1,000,000 capital expended—£12,500 a year less expenses. Most of
the daily traffic consisted of women crossing over between 5 and 7 a.m.
carrying 8 or 10 baskets of dinners; not a single stage or omnibus used
Waterloo bridge.32 The primary beneficiaries would be those who would
find it convenient to use the bridge if the toll were removed. ‘It would
be not only a benefit in point of convenience but a real benefit to the
poorer and labouring classes?—Yes, it would be a saving either of time
or money, which would be the same thing.’33 In the estimation of Mr.
William Routh, a member of the Corporation, the bridge and street
improvements together would cut down some journeys from 60 minutes
to 25 minutes.34 Others pointed also to the very considerable benefit
which would be felt, probably a 30 % increase in value, by the proprietors
of houses on the Waterloo Bridge road.35
Already, by 1836, one can see the stirrings of awareness that schemes
of improvement might yield their greatest benefit indirectly; and
although there was nothing approaching a systematic study of costs
and benefits, such statistics as were presented in evidence received a
weight in the Report which was out of proportion to their simple
character. By the time the Royal Commission on the Improvement of
the Metropolis presented its Report, in 1842, the great indirect benefits
of improved or newly-opened lines of communication were readily
admitted.36
‘This description of improvement is, perhaps, at the same time the most
useful and the most difficult. It necessarily involves the invasion of private
rights, and often, to a great extent, of private comforts, by the compulsory
acquisition of property for which the pecuniary indemnities may not always
be an adequate compensation. It also unavoidably requires some outlay
of the public money. But recent experience has fully demonstrated how
extensive have been the advantages of such changes to the community in
general, and how much exceeding the sacrifices made to obtain them.’
‘To such a city as London, with its immense wealth, its commercial
circulation, its retail traffic, its mechanical industry, and its manufactures,
far surpassing in these particulars every other capital in Europe, all such
increased facilities for social and commercial intercourse must be matter of
interest and advantage to every portion of its dense and varied population.’
32 Ibid. QQ. 443-86.
™Ibid. Q.136.
34 Ibid. QQ. 132-3.
35 Ibid. Q.516. Similar calculations were carried out later in the nineteenth century
when road tolls were removed. Mark Searle, Turnpikes and Toll Bars (n.d.), II, 685.
36 H.C., 1844 (15) XV, R.C. on Metropolis Improvements, Report, p. IV.
34
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

It is evident, in fact, from the early Victorian scrutinies of Improve­

ment Schemes, that whilst substantial agreement on policy could be
reached without too great a difficulty, the implementing of schemes
whose social benefit was beyond dispute tended to flag for want of a
strong incentive towards their completion, such as that which the price
and profit mechanism provided for the railways’ schemes of urban
reconstruction and demolition. Whatever the criticisms one might make
of them, the urban railway projects had, in comparison with municipal
improvement schemes, the pre-eminent merit of prompt execution. They
were impelled by one of the most powerful driving forces in early
Victorian society—the prospect of personal gain, which animated
engineers, counsel, directors, landowners and constructors. If this
urgency could be tempered with a sense of duty, the railway companies,
it became clear in the 1840’s, could carry out large works of public
merit with far more speed and address than any existing local authorities
or public bodies.

3. Analysing costs and benefits in the 1840's

The opportunity to harness the energy of railway schemes to social
purposes came as early as 1846 in London where, at the height of railway
mania, no fewer than nineteen urban lines and termini were projected;
and if sanctioned they would, as the map (Plate 1) shows, have
completely altered the topography and character of west and central
London, of Southwark and Lambeth. London was the seat of Govern­
ment and, as the largest city in the Western world, demonstrated on a
magnified scale the social consequences of railways in great towns. Not
even the most laissez-faire of administrations could sit back and allow
the wholesale demolition and severance of urban property and the
intersection of crowded thoroughfares which the schemes, if authorised
piecemeal, would involve. The Metropolis would literally have been cut
to pieces.
So the Select Committee procedure, by which each bill was considered
separately on its own merits, was on this occasion reinforced by a Royal
Commission with powers to invite evidence from a wide range of public
bodies which normally would have had no locus standi; the Corporation
of London, certain Parish bodies, the Official Referees of Metropolitan
Buildings, the Surveyor of Pavements and Sewers, the Commissioners of
Her Majesty’s Woods and Forests, the Improvement Committee, and
various independent valuers and would-be planners.37 Also called
before the Commission were the urban carriers and omnibus operators,
and the railway projectors, with their retinue of traffic managers,
solicitors, engineers and land-agents. But though the voice of self-
37 H.C., 1846, XVII, R.C. on Metropolis Railway Termini.
35
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

interest was as articulate and trumpet-tongued as ever, there were, at

least, other dissenting voices to be heard for the first time.
‘It appears to me too much to be borne with’ said one witness, to
whom the Commissioners paid particular attention, ‘that lines coming
only eight or nine miles are to cut up the suburbs and the town by their
separate rails and termini, and have liberty to take down property; in
fact to advance their own prospects of benefit, and annoy the public
beyond their value. It strikes me we have been a little railway mad, as if
everything was to give way to railways: there is an immense mass of
the public to be considered, hundreds and thousands, who have nothing
to do with railways, and never will have; they want to get about, and are
entitled to that consideration which is necessary for an increasing
population.’38
The witness who made these remarks was an independent valuer and
surveyor, Mr. J. W. Higgins, whose views and recommendations can be
seen almost exactly reflected in the Report the Commissioners finally
agreed upon. He was speaking to them on the subject of The Sacrifice of
Property, the second of the Commission’s heads of consideration, and a
subject upon which evidence was also heard from William Hosking, one
of the official Referees of Metropolitan Buildings, James Pennethorne,
architect to H. M. Woods and Forests (a body which dealt with urban
affairs in spite of its bucolic title), and Charles Pearson, solicitor to the
Corporation of London. These men, in particular, presented more
detailed evidence on urban affairs than had ever been submitted pre­
viously to a policy-making body.
The exact effects of demolition and rebuilding upon the rents of
neighbouring areas, were subjected to crude measurement. ‘I have in
my hand a report made to me’, stated Pearson, ‘by a gentleman ap­
pointed for the purpose, who has visited all the neighbourhoods
where these improvements have taken place. He has gone from street
to street, and from house to house, to ascertain what effect has been
produced upon the condition of the poor by these improvements. He
finds the rents of the wretched hovels of the poor increased 10, 15, 20
and 25 per cent in all the surrounding districts where these improve­
ments have taken place, and that the weekly rents of their rooms have
generally increased also.’39
The returns of these particulars were available for the Commissioners
to study, as was the detailed transcript of evidence by William Hosking
upon the comparative effects of railways in cuttings or on viaducts upon
the value of adjacent property.40 James Pennethorne and William
Higgins also examined in detail the evidence relating to two of the social
38 Ibid. Q.2200.
39 Ibid. Q.2351.
40 Ibid. QQ.2621-33.

36
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

benefits most frequently claimed on behalf of the railways, viz., that

they let in light and air by providing open spaces and air courses through
densely crowded and noisome areas of working class housing, and that
they improved the drainage.41
Higgins also raised the question of the loss of custom which extensive
demolition involved for small traders on the fringe of the area marked
for purchase, ‘especially trades of a sound character, and rooted as it
were, to a spot, no reasonable compensation does pay them. Many, in
a small way, waste the few pounds or hundreds they receive. With
regard to parties on the opposite side of the street, or in the neighbour­
hood, whose property is not touched, they do not get paid, and their
trade is damaged to a great extent by sweeping away their customers.’42
Other evidence was led, particularly by Pearson, which raised the
most important social question of all. What happened to the poor who
were displaced by railway rebuilding? ‘A poor man is chained to the
spot; he has not the leisure to walk, and he has not the money to ride.
They are crowded together still more, they are pressed together more
densely in a similar description of houses to those which they formerly
inhabited’, Pearson concluded, after an extremely lengthy examination.43
Higgins had even gone to the lengths of conducting, somewhat amateur­
ishly, an enquiry of his own to discover what happened to those who
were displaced.44 Higgins’ and Pearson’s evidence was supported by the
Rev. T. Gibson, incumbent of St. Matthew, Bethnal Green, who gave
detailed particulars about the streets to which the refugees from East
End railway schemes had moved.45
In addition to drawing this large issue to the attention of the Com­
missioners, witnesses also put forward for consideration, at various
times, the side effects of vibration, particularly upon the watchmakers
and other craft trades in the land traversed by the Eastern Counties
railway; the effects of tunnelling upon houses; of smoke, sparks and
noise; of the loss of intercommunication caused by embanked or
viaduct railways ‘enclosing the area as it were with a brick wall’; and the
effects of the railways’ arrival in an area upon the parish rates.46
Another major topic opened for discussion was that of the com­
parative social merits of the alternative courses of building a railway or
of building a road through a slum area. The main advocate for road
improvements was James Pennethorne who was called back to elaborate
“Ibid. QQ.708-30 (Pennethorne), QQ.2187-93 (Higgins).
42 Ibid. Q.2185.
43 Ibid. Q.2355. Pearson was recalled to give evidence a second time and answered
over a hundred questions, sometimes at great length. The answer to Q.2355 runs to
1500 words, for example.
“Ibid. QQ. 2207-18.
45 Ibid. QQ.957-67.
46 Ibid. QQ.8O3; 1218-26;818-19; 2807-10 and App. 1, p. 249 et seq.; 3029, 3100.
37
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

his views. In particular, he was asked to be specific about the contribu­

tion to public improvements which might reasonably be expected of the
railway companies. ‘If they consider it for their advantage to have good
access and good streets to their termini it must be to their advantage to
contribute towards making them.’ A levy of £2,000,000 should, there­
fore, be made, Pennethorne asserted; but he stumbled over the difficult
question of how much each individual railway company should be
required to contribute to make up this sum. ‘I have not considered the
subject, nor are there any data upon which I could form an opinion. It
would be necessary to have exactly where the termini are to be, what
traffic there would be likely to be, and how far they are likely to be
benefited by the new streets formed.’47 Nevertheless, in spite of these
practical difficulties, the idea of combining terminus building with street
improvement had a strong appeal; and railway projectors were obviously
aware of the weight attached to it by the Commissioners. ‘There is
scarcely one amongst the schemes which we have before us of which the
Promoters have not expressed their intention to combine, more or less
with their own works and at their own expense, the improvement of
existing or the formation of new thoroughfares for the benefit of the
public.’48
Indeed there can be no doubt, in view of the mass of evidence heard
by the Commissioners upon the head of The Sacrifice of Property alone,
that the range of topics raised in the course of their enquiry was wide
enough to delineate clearly the nature of the choice before them. On the
one hand, if they allowed the wholesale invasion of Central London
presently intended they would ‘fill in an area already crowded beyond
endurance’; on the other, if they left the termini too far out they would
block up the thoroughfares with ‘leviathan waggons and vans sometimes
creeping about the streets, having a few articles at the bottoms of the
waggons with their names “carriers by railway” displayed upon the
vehicle, as if by way of advertisement; at other times . . . with loads
overhanging on each side the foot-pavement of the narrow streets and
lanes through which they pass.’49
The other three heads of consideration for the Commissioners, As
to the convenience and benefit of the Public, As to the Interruption of
important Thoroughfares, and As to interference with Plans of Improve­
ment already suggested, enlarged the consideration of social costs still
further. On the last mentioned—the effect of the railways upon further
improvement—the evidence of Pennethorne, Richard Jones, of the
Improvement Committee, and Richard Kelsey, the Surveyor of Pave­
ments and Sewers, convinced the Commissioners of the serious impedi-
47 Ibid. QQ.731-49, 3047-72. Quotations are from Q.3366 and Q.3372.
48 Ibid. Report, p. 7.
49 Ibid. Q.2192 (Higgins); App. 23, p. 283 (Pearson).

38
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

ment to improvement already given by the Blackwall and the Eastern

Counties railways, and of the likelihood that the railway projects under
consideration would cause ‘the intersection of any future thoroughfare,
East and West, which may be opened to the north of Holborn, and the
want of which, as an accommodation to the traffic of the Metropolis, is
sensibly felt.’50
In the course of examination upon this and the other two heads of
enquiry a great deal of new statistical information was presented
relating to the relative direct and indirect costs of urban railway
schemes. What, for example, would be their effect upon surface traffic?
Upon the answer to that question might turn the whole issue of social
benefits; and detailed statements were made by W. J. Chaplin, B. W.
Horne, Joseph Baxendale and Joseph Hayward, to supplement the data
from official sources. Of course Chaplin and Horne, and Pickfords
(represented by Baxendale and Hayward), as the largest carriers in the
country, might be expected to show a strong bias against railway
intrusion, but this does not appear to have been their attitude for two
reasons. First, Chaplin was also Chairman of the London and South
Western railway company, and Baxendale Chairman of the South
Eastern; Benjamin Horne was likewise a large shareholder in several
railway companies and claimed, in so many words, that this offset his
partiality as a manager in the carrying trade.51 In the second place they
seemed to entertain genuine misgivings as to the possible effects upon
traffic circulation of the projected central termini, and to be anxious to
accumulate and lay before the Commissioners data bearing upon the
subject.
The key to their anxiety can be seen in Joseph Hayward’s answer to
the question. ‘Would the loss of time by the obstruction of the streets
be perhaps quite equivalent to the expected gain from bringing the
station so far into the metropolis?—It would be more. Our average
time of waiting at all the stations except the Great Western (where it is
longer) and the London and Birmingham (where we have our own
warehouse and work as we like) is two hours; now we can hire a horse
and cart at Is 3d per hour, that is equal to travelling two miles, so that we
might as well have the station two miles further off.’52 Far more to the
point would be to cut down the two hours queuing of waggons at the
existing termini instead of further congesting the streets by debouching
additional traffic into the centre from the projected new stations. ‘The
Railway Companies generally were too diffident in providing accom­
modation at their stations,’ claimed Baxendale. ‘The limited space in

50 Ibid. QQ.705-34 (Pennethome) ; 1202-5 (Jones); 2247-82 (Kelsey); Report, p. 9.

^Ibid. QQ.1541-52 (Chaplin), QQ.542-600 (Baxendale), QQ.441-6 (Horne).
™ Ibid. Q.1411.
39
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

which the stations are confined will put an extinguisher upon them
altogether.’53
A great deal of further evidence, running to many pages, was delivered
on the subject of alternative costs and overall journey times by rail and
road, both for goods and for passengers. Horne, in particular, presented
extremely exact information, specially gathered over a period of a
month, to show the direction and numbers of cab and omnibus pas­
sengers. From this it was possible to deduce the relative expenditure of
time and money which passenger journeys currently involved, and
would involve if the London and Birmingham terminus were carried
down to the proposed site at Farringdon Street.54 Because of the diffi­
culty of evaluating the time saved—a problem which contemporary
writers on cost-benefit analysis have described as ‘the hardest nut to
crack’—the commonsense assumption was made that delays and un­
certainties in cross-town travel caused, for the business classes, appoint­
ment books which erred on the side of conservatism, and cut down their
total number of business engagements per day, by causing them to
assume that all essential engagements would be subjected to the maxi­
mum delay.55 The effect was viewed not in terms of individual time lost,
but in terms of marginal transactions forgone.
Horne also furnished the Commissioners with the numbers of inter­
station passengers by omnibus and by cab, and raised the public ques­
tion of the traffic congestion caused by the alternative modes of
transport, using the modern criterion of assessing the road space occu­
pied. Since cabs took, on the average, a load of one and a half passengers,
eight, or even ten, would be needed to carry the number which could
leave by one omnibus. The omnibus traffic into the City and West End
from Nine Elms and Paddington was large, from Euston much smaller,
from London Bridge almost non-existent; those who did not walk from
the more central stations preferring to cab it and pay a shilling instead of
the 6d omnibus fare, ‘so that as they are distributed these passengers
occupy more space.’56 In other words, there was a marginal distance for
termini beyond which omnibus feeder services became much more
greatly patronised.
Horne’s interest in this matter, as an omnibus proprietor, was fairly
transparent, but the point he had raised remained a valid one, and was
taken further still by Richard Kelsey, Surveyor of Pavements to the
City of London. Was it in the public interest, given the extremely
crowded conditions prevailing in Cheapside, Cornhill, Ludgate Hill,
63 Ibid. Q.546.
64 Ibid. QQ.501-5.
65 Ibid. Q.1541; A. R. Prest and R. Turvey,‘Cost-Benefit Analysis; a Survey’,
Economic Journal, LXXV (1965), 683-735.
66 H.C., 1846, XVII, QQ.494-8.

40
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

Fleet Street and Charing Cross, that people should move by omnibus, or
occupy eight times as much road space by resorting to cabs and private
carriages? Then again, as Richard Jones of the Improvement Com­
mittee pointed out, when some of the thoroughfares required only a
little extra traffic to flow into them at an awkward spot to cause a
complete choke or stoppage, was it wise to give railway companies the
power to opt for mere fragments of street widening, and spaces for
cabstands on their private ground, as their sole contribution to easing
the traffic problem they created? Was it desirable, moreover, asked
William Hosking, that London’s thoroughfares should be abandoned
to the through traffic generated by stations situated in the heart of the
town and accessible only by its leading streets? Apart from the un­
necessary crowding and uncertainty in the timing ofjourneys this caused,
the streets’ trading and shopping functions would be impaired if they
were ‘inconveniently and unnecessarily used for the purposes of the
railways, independently of their more proper uses.’57
In spite of the wide range, the conscientious detail and the un­
expectedly modern nature of many of the topics drawn to the Com­
missioners’ attention, it cannot be denied that these early attempts to
measure social costs and benefits were extremely tentative. There were
obvious gaps in the information in two major respects, without which
properly calculated decisions were impossible. Neither the Commis­
sioners nor their witnesses were properly informed about the volume
and speed of the traffic flow, or the saving or loss of time which alterna­
tive schemes might involve; and this was one of the gaps in knowledge
which later inquiries attempted to fill. Nor were they supplied by the
railway companies with the essential figures for the costs and volumes of
passenger traffic which the projected extensions into London would
involve.
As a result it was possible for Mr. Arthur Wightman, traffic super­
intendent of the Blackwall Railway, to rebut Pennethorne’s evidence
concerning the expensive extension through the densely populated area
around Fenchurch Street. ‘It is possible’, Pennethorne had alleged, ‘that
if the Blackwall Railway Company instead of going to the expense of
extending their railway across the City, had only brought up the pro­
perty and formed a new street to their terminus in the Minories it might
have paid them better.’ By analogy, he suggested, the same argument
applied to the Eastern Counties’ projected advance to Finsbury Square.58
In answer, Wightman disclosed that the cost of the extension had been,
in fact, £250,000 for the 400 yards encroachment through the densely
built East End, and for the new station site. To offset this cost, however,
passenger traffic had increased by 50% in three years. Fares had not
«’ Ibid. QQ.2260-1, 2277 (Kelsey); QQ.l 157-66 (Jones); QQ.2603-6 (Hosking).
68 Ibid. Q.764.
c* 41
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

been changed, so what had produced the rapid growth of traffic was ‘the
great advantage of fast and rapid transit’ as near the centre of London
as possible. In the opinion of the railway company, ‘the whole of that
increase is attributed to the extension.’ William Tite, the engineer, who
had valued the Blackwall railway added his support. ‘The whole cost a
million, and it was better to spend the million to run to Fenchurch
Street, than to spend £750,000 and stop at the Minories. I am sure that
neither the Directors nor any one else ever regretted it.’ 59
Tite and Wightman might possibly have been right. Without the
relevant figures it was rather difficult to argue with them. The solution to
the problem adopted by the Commissioners is described in their Report.
‘It must be observed, however, that Traffic Tables, the usual data by which
the demand for railway accommodation, and the convenience which it will
bestow upon the public, are estimated, have throughout our investigation
been very imperfectly furnished to us. We do not mention this as a matter
of reproach to the promoters of the schemes which have been brought under
our consideration, for it is manifestly impossible to calculate the direction and
extent of the traffic which takes place to and from the different parts of
London and its suburbs, with the accuracy which is expected in dealing with
ordinary lines of railway; but because the want of such evidence has compelled
us to found our conclusions rather upon the judgment of persons of experience
and upon our own observation, than upon numerical returns.
‘We have not considered it necessary to determine whether the expense
which will be incurred by the companies in carrying their lines far into the
town is likely to be compensated to them by increased profits, although we
see great reason for doubting it.’
In spite of the reluctance or inability of the railway companies to
present them with a break-down of traffic figures the Commissioners
felt able to conclude that ‘the advantage to the public of such accom­
modation as would be afforded to them by bringing the railway stations
further into the City appear to us exaggerated.’60
This unfavourable ruling on the first head of consideration, As to
the convenience and benefit of the Public, was a foretaste of the decisions
on later counts. On the second head, As to the sacrifice of Property, they
found it difficult, in view of the evidence of appreciation of rents and
central land values, to reach an unfavourable conclusion. ‘Although in
most cases injurious, it is not necessarily and invariably so’. On the third

69Ibid. Q.1123 (Wightman); QQ.387-8 (Tite). George Hudson showed a similar

attitude towards the projected Eastern Counties extension. Tn a question of this
kind a couple of hundred thousand pounds never weigh against what we consider
a good and convenient access; it is spread over capital of a very large amount.’
Q.2684. ■'
60 Ibid. Report, pp. 5, 7.

42
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

head, As to the Interruption of important Thoroughfares, the Commis­

sioners did not find that the enlargements proposed, ‘and general accom­
modation which they offer to the public is, in any case, commensurate
with the inconvenience which might be expected to result from the
extension of their scheme’. On the fourth heading, As to interference
with plans of Improvement already suggested, they concluded, ‘Whether
the course which railways might take in passing through the Town
would be fatal to the future carrying out of any improvement, would
at present depend mainly upon the pleasure and convenience of the
respective companies. But this is a state of things which cannot, we
humbly submit, in safety continue.’61
However fragmentary and inadequate the data, therefore, the final
result of the Commissioners’ deliberation upon the evidence on social
costs presented to them by spokesmen of the public, and after the
production ‘of such Books, Documents, Papers and Returns, as have
appeared to us calculated to assist our researches’, represented a com­
plete rout for the railway interest. Of the 19 schemes 17 were rejected
and only conditional assent given to the other two, both of them
extensions south of the river. ‘Under no circumstances’, concluded the
Commission, ‘should the thoroughfares of the metropolis and the
property and comforts of its inhabitants be surrendered to separate
schemes brought forward at different times and without reference to
each other.’62
These conditions were later eroded in the 1850’s and early 1860’s, and
substantial exceptions were made to the veto imposed by Lord Canning
and the other Commissioners; but although the later railway encroach­
ments were extensive, the first battle for London in 1846 had not been an
illusory victory. Sweeping though the changes finally appear by the late
sixties, they were still not as drastic as those projected for the one year
1846, when the schemes, in the words of one of the witnesses, ‘appear to
require as much space as almost to take the whole City. ... If you took
a sponge and sponged out the whole of the City, leaving St. Paul’s
standing in the midst, I think you would have accommodation for
carrying on your traffic.’63
Almost two decades were gained, in fact, and although it is easy to
telescope mid-nineteenth century dates mentally, the seventeen years
between 1846 and 1863, when the next great railway intrusions were
scheduled, gave the legislature and newly formed public bodies the
opportunity to begin to come to grips with a phenomenon which pro­
duced so many novel and unanticipated effects.

61 Ibid. Report, pp. 7-9.

62 Ibid. Report, p. 21,
63 Ibid. Q.589.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

4. Further data in the 1850's

Because it was both unusually early and showed a remarkable and
detailed concern for the public interest, the Evidence and Report of the
Royal Commission of 1846 has been described in some detail. Clearly, it
would be impossible, for reasons of space, to give an equally full account
of each further step towards evolving techniques for understanding the
complex economic and social issues which railway communication raised
in Victorian London. But there would certainly be no shortage of
material with which to illustrate similar studies for 1854—5, 1863, 1864,
1872, 1884, 1895, and 1902. Each decade after 1846 brought the
problems of analysing and weighing the problems of railway costs and
benefits before a new Select Committee or Royal Commission; and with
each decade the techniques of measurement became less primitive and
inaccurate.
The evidence of Charles Pearson, of John Pennethome (now sur­
veyor for the new Board of Works), of Joseph Paxton, and of J. H.
Stevens (the surveyor for the Western Division of the City) laid before
the Commons’ Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications of
1854-5 a new range of subject matter, substantially filling out the data
presented earlier and raising a number of secondary benefits and costs
for consideration.64
Amongst these was the particularised discussion of savings improved
urban rail facilities might bring to the different consumer markets in
London, from perishable foodstuffs to coal, and to London manu­
facturers by reducing trans-shipment of goods during the actual process
of manufacture; the propriety of throwing all the cost of an improved
communications network upon the present generation, and the means
by which the costs could be postponed or amortised; the question of
whether capital expenditure might be reduced by combining public
improvements ‘such as economising the waste spaces of the river, or
opening new streets through poor neighbourhoods’ with newly sanc­
tioned urban railways; the exact percentages purely commercial under­
takings might be expected to return on capital, compared with the
percentage return on a semi-public scheme (like Paxton’s project for a
£34,000,000 government-sponsored ‘Girdle Railway and Boulevard’), or
the percentage loss on capital a strictly public improvement like New
Cannon Street had incurred.65
The far greater sophistication and accuracy of the techniques of
measurement is apparent, even in the space of eight years. Pearson had
appointed traffic-takers ‘at all the principal entrances to the city of

64 H.C., 1854-5, X, S.C. on Metropolitan Communications.

65 Ibid. QQ. 1231—51 (Stevens); QQ. 1442-78 (Pennethome); Report, p. IV; QQ.61-4
(Tite), 1029-32 (Gisborne), 762-93 (Paxton), 502-5 (Hall).
44
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

London, to take their station from eight o’clock in the morning till
eight o’clock at night. I had relays of them, so as to assure myself of
tolerable accuracy.’ The estimates were supplemented and cross-checked
by statistics from the railway companies, worked out from the tickets
sold and therefore ‘not so reliable as the others, which are an actual
enumeration’; by returns from the omnibus and cab proprietors; and by
the Excise licences for omnibuses and carriages.66 George Parrott, who
was co-operating with Pearson on what was to become the Metro­
politan Railway, London’s first underground railway, also carried out
a separate series of calculations concentrating on the Oxford Street/
Holborn and Piccadilly/Strand routes.67
With these painstakingly gathered figures it was possible to piece
together, for the first time, a rough picture of London’s traffic flows and
the elements which made them up. ‘The inference which I desire to
draw’ said Pearson, after presenting his statistics, ‘is that the over­
crowding of the City is caused, first by the natural increase of the popu­
lation and area of the surrounding district; secondly, by the influx of
provincial passengers by the great railways north of London, and the
obstruction experienced in the streets by omnibuses and cabs coming
from their distant stations, to bring the provincial travellers to and from
the heart of the City. I next point to the vast increase of what I may term
the migratory population, the population of the City who now oscillate
between the country and the City, who leave the City of London every
afternoon and return to it every morning.’68
Each of these elements was then analysed in detail. The first point
was supported by simple figures for the relative crowding in the inner
and outer wards of the city based upon the ratio of inhabited houses to
population; figures which were cross-checked both by a report from
Mr. Simon, Officer of Health, and by separate calculations ‘made by
Mr. Stevens without any communication with me’. To illustrate his
third point the comparative numbers arriving by train, steam boat and
omnibus or (still the majority) on foot were produced.69
Estimated number of Persons and Vehicles going into and out
of the City daily, counting them all both ways
Estimated number of persons brought into and taken out of
the City daily by omnibuses (counting both ways) .. 88,000
Estimated number of omnibus journeys ....................... 7,400
Estimated number of persons by steamers....................... 30,000
Estimated number to and from the Fenchurch-street and
the London Bridge Railway stations ....................... 54,000
66 Ibid. QQ.1340-4.
67 Ibid. QQ.965-8.
68 Ibid. Q.1345.
69 Ibid. QQ.l345-8; App. pp. 215-6, Tables II and IV.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Estimated number of vehicles of all descriptions, except

omnibuses .. .. .. .. .. .. .• 52,000
Estimated number of foot passengers into and out of the City
daily, omitting foot passengers from railways and steam­
boats .. .. .. .. .. .. .. •• 400,000
Estimated number to and from the distant Metropolitan
stations, Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross .. .. 8,440
Although these figures take no account of loading factors or speed,
they give us our first rough picture of internal traffic for any city and
may be used as the basis for further calculations.70 Further perspective
to the search for understanding internal traffic flows was also given by
the first rudimentary attempts to list and classify the types of building
which generated traffic.
Pearson’s remaining point was supported by evidence dividing the
railway traffic into three classes, according to the frequency of their
journeys and the relative amount of crowding of the streets each group
occasioned; viz, ‘Family’ or ‘Trade’ ‘Yearly’, or ‘Monthly’, and
‘Residential’ or ‘Weekly’. The daily commuter does not yet figure in the
calculations, but the family traffic coming to London from the provinces,
or going to Brighton or the Continent for a month ‘with the valets and
the ladies’ maids, and all portmanteaus and band-boxes and the bonnet­
boxes’ should, he argued, be assigned an importance out of proportion
to their relatively small numbers. In Pearson’s view each family created
more confusion and interruption in the stations and streets than ‘50 or
100 merchants or bankers, or persons coming for the purpose of trade,
from Liverpool, or Manchester or Birmingham .. . with a return ticket,
or perhaps spending the night, and bringing a carpet bag, as it may be.’71
Pearson’s detailed traffic observations constitute one important essay
to improve the techniques of understanding urban problems. Perhaps
even more in advance of their time for the mid-1850’s were the specific
calculations of one category of indirect costs and benefits suggested by
J. H. Stevens: the financing of street improvements by loans ‘extending
over a period of 40 years, on the security of the rateable difference
between the present annual value of the property to be purchased for the
improvements, and the additional value such property will derive from
its proximity to the new streets and railway.’72 In other words, one side
of the equation, the direct cost of schemes, would have been calculated
on a more reasonable basis than the railway companies’ simple rule of
thumb. Instead of merely accepting the contractors’ estimate of probable

70 Eg. T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 58 (footnote), where T. C. Barker
uses Pearson’s figures to deduce that probably 6,000 to 10,000 daily commuters
were using the London stations. See infra Chap. 3, sec. 5, Chapl-ll, sec. 3.
‘'Ibid. Q.1348.
72 Ibid. Q.1202. Stevens assigns the idea to Pearson.
46
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

costs, the accuracy of which affected only the railway company and the
contractor, the neighbourhood costs should be estimated in the follow­
ing way. Set on one side would be the total rental of the built-up area
before improvement and railway clearance, compared with the amount
realised for ground rents sacrificed for lands ‘thrown into streets’, and,
of course, the cost of acquiring and clearing the ground. On the other
side of the equation would be increased rentals realised after improve­
ment and railway clearance, together with the large, but incommensur­
able, sanitary gains from clearing the area.
Although giving clear money values to the calculation of benefits,
Stevens’ scheme was impractical for administrative reasons, and would,
in any case, fall into the category of ‘double-counting’. ‘We have to
eliminate the purely transfer or distributional items from a cost-benefit
evaluation,’ enjoin Prest and Turvey, ‘we are concerned with the value
of the increment of output arising from a given investment, and not
with the increment in value of existing assets.’ By this criterion a net rise
in rents or land values would simply be ‘a reflection of the benefits of
more journeys being undertaken than before’.73 One might also add that
assigning the whole of a given increase in rents or values in adjoining
areas to the spillover of the improvement itself is an extremely dubious
calculation, especially if carried out over an extensive span of time, and
that it raises knotty topographical problems in defining the areas, or
frontages, to be included in the equation.
Although it may be criticised upon these, and other grounds, Stevens’
proposals can at least be taken as evidence of the desire to quantify the
data laid before the Select Committee. Indeed, without further elabora­
tion, it is clear that the Select Committee of 1854-5 was considerably
better informed than any previous body of enquiry. There was talk of
consciously ‘developing a new and more convenient traffic’; and in
cross-questioning the phrase ‘taking it as a question of time and money’
is used, with the implicit assumption, found in modern cost-benefit
studies, that time is valuable and would be employed profitably if saved.74
There is also a dawning awareness that ‘the causes of the overcrowding
of the habitations of the poor by night, and of the street by day, are the
same, and the cure must be the same’, and a practical grasp of the
expediency of carrying out simultaneous schemes of improvement and
of private profit-making railway enterprise.75
As one looks through the great bulk of evidence and statistical
appendices, the same questions which arose with the Royal Com­
mission of 1846 inevitably recur. What were the fruits of this increased
73 A. R. Prest and R. Turvey, loc. cit. 688.
74 H.C., 1854-5, X, QQ.1220-1. The idea of ‘diminishing the great pressure from
traffic’ and redistributing it is taken further in H.L., 1859, VIII, 77.
75 Ibid. Q.1345, Report, p. IV.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

understanding of the complex influences at work, in terms of policy;

and how effectively were measures of restraint and control implemented ?
Once again, the direct results of the Select Committee of 1854-5 have
tended to be underestimated. The Metropolitan Railway and the Thames
Embankment were both foreshadowed in the Report, and both were
based upon recognition of the principle that railways in towns should
make a contribution to public amenity and not merely intrude at will.
The construction of co-ordinated arterial routes and removal of road
tolls were other issues indirectly connected with the railways and raised
by the Select Committee; it also begged ‘earnestly to impress upon the
House the extreme importance of practical steps being at once taken
by authorities, properly constituted and armed with full powers and
means’ to control the problems it had described. The establishment of
the Metropolitan Board of Works was ‘warmly welcomed’ as a step in
the direction of controlling or restraining the great commercial forces
of urban reconstruction.76
However, we are concerned at the moment, not primarily to assess
the outcome of the Select Committee in terms of effective policy, but to
ask whether the Victorians were conscious of the larger urban reper­
cussions of railway building, and to see what progress is perceptible in
the techniques of social accounting evolved for assessing the new
problems with which the Victorians were faced. And there is an un­
equivocal change, by the mid-fifties, in the type and volume of informa­
tion available for policy-makers, in London at any rate, to use as the
basis for disinterested public evaluation of the schemes placed before
them. This, perhaps, is as much as one can reasonably expect to demon­
strate, for even nowadays the most adequate and detailed statistical
analysis tends to become only one of several factors moulding final
decisions.
The essence of a ‘planning balance sheet’, according to a recent writer
on the subject, is to aid rational choice by rendering ‘systematically, in
descriptive and tabular form’ a set of social accounts, so that the costs
and benefits accruing indirectly can be seen, measured in money or
physical terms as far as possible, or otherwise noted as intangible and
merely listed, with their suggested weight. Its object is to ‘clarify the
issues and so reduce to a minimum the area of value judgement, opinion
and prejudice, over which so much of the debate rages’, and to enable
‘endless and meandering discussion, disputation and negotiation to be
cut down.’77
The data laid before Parliamentary Committees by the mid-1850’s
was already beginning to go some way towards this objective. Before
the 1850’s, the only people who really knew exactly what was going on,
56 Ibid. Report, pp. IV, V, VI.
77 Nathaniel Lichfield, loc. cit. 168.
48
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

were the railway solicitors and engineers; and they were not concerned
with the social side-effects of their schemes. They had no time, in the
press of rapidly-moving events, to take a detailed interest in the social
ramifications of their action, nor were they held accountable for them.
Although the railways arrived with the impact of a minor earthquake,
their constructors were able, when pressed for details of their schemes’
consequences, to reply tersely, in the words of one engineer, ‘I am
giving you the conviction of men’s minds who are spending their own
money.’78
Such brevity was clearly unacceptable to the 1854 Committee, and in
the 1860’s there is a general trend for those professionally concerned to
take greater cognizance of the social effects of their projects. Edward
Watkin or William Birt represent the second generation of railway
managers to whom it came naturally to speak of social consequences;
though it remains an open question (discussed elsewhere) as to how
much of this was lip-service and how much a genuine change of spirit.

5. The Metropolitan crisis in the 1860’s

Succeeding enquiries brought further refinements of technique. The
House of Lords’ Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications
heard evidence, reproduced in their Third Report of 1863, from new
spokesmen of the public interest: J. W. Bazalgette, Engineer to the new
Metropolitan Board of Works (which had been granted special locus
standi to appear by means of designated witnesses); Colonel Yolland,
Inspector in the Railway Department of the Board of Trade, (appearing
at the request of James Booth, Secretary to the Board); and W. Hay­
wood, Surveyor to the Corporation of London. Witnesses were also
called who represented a wide range of opinion amongst contemporary
railway engineers and managers: G. P. Bidder of the Great Eastern, a
strong advocate of elevated, as opposed to underground, urban rail­
ways, and desperately concerned to gain more central access into the
City for his company; Frederick Slight of the London, Brighton and
South Coast and Cornelius Eborall of the South Eastern railway
companies, who both reflected, for similar reasons, the conservative
railway point of view; and John Hawkshaw and John Fowler, whose
key roles in the construction of central termini have already been noted.
The evidence heard from these and other witnesses was voluminous and
searching in the extreme; and it is difficult to believe that the public
78H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.438 (Tite). This attitude was sympathetically reflected by
writers in the 1840’s. ‘Let those who advance their money be the best judges of that
question.’ The Economist, 6 July 1844, 962. ‘Could there be any other country in
the world where it is so hard to obtain leave to spend one’s money.’ Charles Knight,
op. cit. 310.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

interest was not thoroughly aired, either by design or by accident, during

the arguments and counter-arguments of the different railway interests.
One of the shortcomings of earlier evidence concerning the indirect
social costs caused by congestion of the streets had been lack of informa­
tion on traffic speeds. William Haywood now attempted to put this right
by the use of police returns, and by carrying out experimental timed
journeys, with an assistant, on the omnibuses and four-wheeled
carriages on various routes through the City. The mean of from 35 to 69
observations on different routes gave 3-28 mph to 4-55 mph.79 His
conclusion, however, was that, although some of the underground or
link railways under discussion might ease this flow, and the projected
Central Station might worsen it, equally marked effects in the saving of
the public’s time might be achieved more simply, ‘If powers were given
to determine the course which public vehicles might take’, and if the
omnibus proprietors’ extraordinary freedom from observing fixed
stopping places or timetables, or consulting about routes, were curbed.80
Apart from questions of traffic speed, another new public issue
raised before this Committee concerned the comfort and convenience of
urban travellers. Already mentioned earlier by Joseph Paxton, who
had hoped in 1854 to make London travel ‘pleasant’, the point was
taken much further in 1863 when the comparative merits of underground
and elevated travel, from the public’s point of view, were argued by G. P.
Bidder and John Parson. The subway saved in the cost of land and
reduced ‘public disfigurement’; it could also be more easily combined,
by the new ‘cut-and-cover’ method, with street improvement. The
elevated railway did not interfere with the network of gravity-fed
sewers or cause damage by vibration, and gave a cleaner, better lit and
ventilated ride with easier station access.81 Bidder even went so far as to
assign a quantitative figure to the difference between the two modes,
though he spoke with commercial, rather than cost-benefit considera­
tions in mind. ‘The Metropolitan has been a great commercial success
undoubtedly but, in my view, in spite of its being underground. If the
Metropolitan had been on a viaduct, as far as my opinion goes, it would
be worth a million more money than it is.’82
Another technical alternative considered, not merely in terms of
profitability, but of its possible public amenity, was the pneumatically
operated railway, to which were ascribed many of the merits actually
possessed by the electric trains of thirty years later. Here again a ruling
79 H.C., 1863, VIH, QQ.1226-8.
80 As a result of the S.C.’s recommendations the City authorities were empowered
in 1863 to regulate omnibus operation, but did not even insist upon the picking up
and setting down of passengers on the left-hand side of the road until 1867. T. C.
Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 243.
81 H.C., 1863, VIII, QQ.778-800, 963-5, 1025.
82 Ibid. Q.623.
50
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

of permanent importance was given by the Committee; for just as the

underground was preferred, on balance, because it could ‘be combined
with the contemporaneous construction of new streets’, so the pneumatic
railway was forbidden on the grounds that it was not desirable that
experiments should be carried out on important Metropolitan routes.83
A further practical point affecting the public interest was raised by
John Thwaites, of the Metropolitan Board of Works. He and other
public engineers had had only three weeks to study the submitted plans
of new railways through London, and to make their tracings. ‘Besides
which, we do not know whether they propose to pass an important
street by a graceful curve or whether they propose to erect those
hideous girders we now find everywhere crossing our streets. We do not
know the span, nor do we know the headway. Many of the schemes
before Parliament are perfectly silent upon these important points.’84
The reticence of railway projectors upon such technical points did not,
however, prevent J. W. Bazalgette, from submitting a detailed statement,
covering four pages, of the damage to public works the schemes
could involve.85
The outcome, in terms of policy recommendations, of the 1863 Com­
mittee, and of the 1864 Joint Committee of Lords and Commons which
considered the same issues, was again a noteworthy victory for the
public interest. 1863 was the peak year of Britain’s third and last
railway boom of mania proportions, and the 13 bills referred to the
Committee on Metropolitan Communications proposed to schedule
property along 174 miles of Metropolitan routes and demolish a quarter
of the City of London.86 The ordinary Private Bill Committees could
not be expected to cope with this onslaught, and the standard procedure
of considering each bill separately on its individual merits would clearly
have broken down in the face of such a complex and overlapping series
of simultaneous projects. ‘A protracted and costly Parliamentary
struggle between the promoters of the rival projects must therefore
be looked for, if this is to be permitted’, concluded the 1863 Committee.
‘Nor can any confidence be felt that such a contest would lead to a
satisfactory result; not one of the projects brought before Parliament
might prove to be in all respects a good one, and yet the Committees
of the two Houses to which they would be submitted would possess no
power of making changes of importance in the schemes which they
83 H.L., 1864 (87), Joint S.C. on Metropolitan railway schemes, Report, p. 2.
84H.C., 1863, VIII, Q.1056.
85 H.C., 1864 (59), Report of the Engineer of the Metropolitan Bd. of Wks in
return to H. of C. Order 8 February 1864, 13-17.
86 ‘London is to be burrowed through and through like a rabbit-warren’, wrote a
resident who had contributed 5 % of the rental value of his house towards a campaign
fund to oppose the railways. Quoted in T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit.
148.
51
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

were asked to sanction but would only have the chance of passing or
rejecting them.’ The resulting rivalry could not be tolerated ‘in the
constricted interior of the metropolis.’87
Ten of the thirteen bills, including most of the larger and more
elaborate ones were, therefore, rejected. In deciding upon this, it was
explained, ‘The Committee have been strongly influenced by the
consideration of the great public inconvenience and pecuniary loss to
the inhabitants.’ On the other hand, a link underground railway in
continuation of the Metropolitan Railway was sanctioned, because by
providing a substitute for cab and omnibus traffic it might relieve the
streets and so perform a public service. To guard against this leading to
an unduly profitable monopoly for the Metropolitan, it was suggested
that half of any dividends over 8 % should be paid to the Metropolitan
Board of Works for public uses; although this recommendation was
both extremely difficult to enforce and, as it turned out, quite un­
necessary.88
The only major new intrusion into the central area permitted was that
from the east by the Great Eastern’s Liverpool Street extension, and this
was only allowed upon condition that clauses were included in the Act
compelling the company to run cheap workmen’s trains daily.89 This
was the first major attempt to force a commercial company to offset the
social costs incident to an urban terminal scheme by providing, as
Pearson had advocated in 1846, a bulk service at low margins of profit
per unit; a significant new development, and one which had far-
reaching effects upon the growth of later nineteenth-century working­
class suburbs to the east and north-east of London.

6. Major topics raised in the later nineteenth century

By the mid-sixties the basic techniques of measurement on which in­
formed decisions concerning the public interest could be made were
already well developed. The final assessment was still a qualitative
weighing of the factors rather than a quantitative and systematic
calculation of costs and benefits, but though less exhaustive and
thorough, it served the same purposes as a modem cost benefit study.
It enabled choices to be made between different proposals involving
87 H. C„ 1863, VIII, Report, pp. XII, XIII. The contrary view had been put to them
most forcibly by John Hawkshaw. ‘It is difficult to get parties to believe in schemes
which are laid down by committees. If it be attempted to stereotype them and say
these are to be the railways for London I think it would be a mistake.’ Ibid. QQ.1109,
1092.
88 H.C., 1864 (87), Report, p. 2. H.C., 1863, Vin, Report, pp. IV, XIV.
89 Great Eastern (Metropolitan Station) Railway Act, 1864, 27-& 8 Vic. c. 313,
sec. 80. The earliest insertion of special ‘workmen’s’ clauses took place in 1861 in the
North London (City Branch) and the Metropolitan (27 & 8 Vic. c. 233) Acts.
52
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

investments which were large and indivisible. It provided a valuable

means for marshalling issues, enumerating affected parties, and indicat­
ing who might suffer and who might gain. After all, the claims for
statistical accuracy made by modern exponents of cost-benefit analysis
are disarmingly modest. ‘Judgment plays such an important role in the
estimation of benefit-cost ratios’, concluded a recent survey, ‘that little
significance can be attached to the precise numerical results obtained.’90
It is clear that the ultimate value of modern cost-benefit studies—the
rejection of inferior projects, ‘promoted for empire-building or pork­
barrel reasons’—may also be realised by non-statistical consideration
of the benefits and costs. This is particularly the case if consideration of
non-statistical material, for all its shortcomings, has genuinely preceded
and illuminated the political decisions, rather than vice versa.
In the later nineteenth century further enquiries added to the accumu­
lated information already available to policy-makers. The Royal
Commission of 1867 heard evidence on urban railways from Edwin
Chadwick and Rowland Hill, both well known for their public services
in a wider context. Its appendices and text include the first information
upon the relationship between urban railway costs and their terminal
charges, upon the seasonal patterns of passenger demand, upon the
railway companies’ excursion and cheap fare policies, upon the fre­
quency and cost of suburban services, and other topics which can more
properly be discussed elsewhere.
From their evidence, however, and that of William Galt, emerged the
first indications of a new public concern—railway pricing policy. After
all, as the urban surface railway networks began to assume a definitive
and final shape, it was natural that discussion should turn from securing
the public interest during construction to securing it during operation.
The same major issue was brought into still clearer focus in the evidence
placed before the Select Committee of 1872 by Captain Tyler and T. H.
Farrer, Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade. What should be the
policy pursued over urban and suburban fares, and what surcharge
could reasonably be levied on goods to defray the expense of urban
terminals? These two topics dominated legislation, railway law cases
and local Chamber of Commerce proceedings in the 1870’s and 80’s.
They raised again, in slightly differing form, questions of social
accounting. Given the fact that the social costs incidental to urban
railway construction had been, or were, in large measure, being paid, the
scale of benefits depended largely upon the facilities for residential
escape, and for the cheap supply of goods and foodstuffs, which the
railways could now offer in return. The extent of these benefits de­
pended, in turn, upon the railways fares policy, which now became one
of the two major social issues in the field of communications in the last
90 A. R. Prest and R. Turvey, loc. cit. 728, 731.
53
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

quarter of the century. To put it in cost-benefit analysis terms, ‘distribu­

tional constraints’ now came to figure more largely in the process of
decision-making. Maximising the net gain, or minimising the net loss, to
particular groups whose economic welfare was of increasing political
significance in the closing decades of the century became a major issue;
and this issue was seen to be inextricably entangled with railway
pricing policy.
The other major topic, which had already been prematurely and
ineffectually ventilated in the 1850’s and 1860’s, was the effect of railway
demolition upon working-class housing. As already mentioned above,
the effects upon residential densities had received attention as early as
1846. By 1853 a committee had met, under the chairmanship of Lord
Shaftesbury, to consider ‘whether those houses can be taken without
occasioning any pecuniary or other injury to such persons (of the
labouring class), and without being likely to occasion any overcrowding
of any other dwellings.’91 From 1853 onwards the ‘Shaftesbury Standing
Order’ (S.O. 191), required the preparation of a statement as to how
many working men were likely to be evicted by each urban railway
scheme; and these ‘Demolition Statements’ have already formed the
basis for a pioneer study by H. J. Dyos which will be familiar to readers
of the Journal of Transport History.92
The shortcomings of the ‘Demolition Statement’ procedure as a
formal safeguard of the public interest was apparent to all by the early
1880’s, and was subjected to critical comment, both in the Select
Committee on Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Report of 1882, and
in the evidence laid before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Working Classes of 1884-5. Detailed and specific evidence by Miss
Octavia Hill, H. G. Calcraft (Assistant Secretary to the Board of Trade),
Joseph Chamberlain and the Rev. William Denton set forth clearly the
relevant information concerning rents, fares and land prices upon
which policy conclusions could be based.93 At the same time, their
evidence emphasised the link between the problems of re-housing the
urban working class and of providing cheap bulk transport. They were
not alternative, so much as complementary methods of tackling one of
the most pressing urban problems of the late nineteenth century.
Steps were taken, on the first count, to tighten up Standing Orders.
91 H. ofL. Journals, LXXXV (1853), 140. The committee at first recommended that
if more than 30 houses be taken in one parish ‘adequate provision be made by the
undertakers within three years and within a convenient distance’, but this crucial
phrase was dropped in the Standing Order. Fuller history of the S.O. is given in
O. C. Williams, op. cit. II, 65 et. seq.
92 H. J. Dyos, ‘Workmen’s Fares in South London, 1860-1914’, ‘Railways and
Housing in Victorian London’, ‘Some Social Costs of Railway building in London’,
JTH, I (1953), 3-19, II (1955), 11-21, 90-100, III (1957), 23-30 respectively.
93 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.8841-9112, 9991-10138, 12426-12522, 10667-10737.
54
 DID THEJ1CTOR1ANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

The local re-housing by the railway companies of those displaced by

their schemes was recommended, clearance was to be gradual, re­
housing to proceed simultaneously, and the local authorities to ensure
that notice to quit was not served subsequently on those re-housed.94
On the whole these new provisions were of limited effect. If one com­
pares the short formal statement of the numbers displaced which accom­
panied the schemes of the late fifties or sixties, with the voluminous and
detailed plans, showing the position of working-class houses scheduled
in 1892 for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway’s exten­
sion to Marylebone, and ‘stating the number of persons residing therein,
so far as can be ascertained by house-to-house enquiry’, it is possible
to see how much less casual the approach to social costs had become.95
But this did not prevent marked delays in rehousing during the Maryle­
bone scheme, leading to a further overspill into the adjacent slum area
of Lisson Grove; and the difficulty of securing that the same tenants
were readmitted to the new upgraded accommodation was virtually
insoluble.96 Nevertheless the approach to demolition in the nineties was
much more solicitous for the public interest.
However, the building of Marylebone Station was the last and only
major terminal scheme to be carried through in London after 1884.
The new provisions to reduce ‘systematic evasion’ and ‘gross inaccuracy
of returns’ by bodies demolishing residential housing unfortunately fell
most heavily not upon the railway companies, whose major construc­
tional phase was over by the 1880’s, but upon the Metropolitan Board
of Works, demolishing for street improvements, and upon bodies
proceeding under the Torrens (1868) and Cross (1875) slum clearance
acts.
On the complementary problem of supplying suburban transport
which was cheap, ran at convenient times, and in adequate quantities,
policy recommendations were still less effective. The 1882 Artizans’ and
Labourers’ Dwellings Committee was directly responsible for the passing
of the 1883 Cheap Trains Act; but this measure was itself of debatable
practical influence. However, the point which is germane here is that,
after the Cheap Trains Act of 1883, at least there was a systematic
attempt to collect statistics; and the direction in which the statistics
pointed, as they accumulated over the next two decades, was towards the
principle of a publicly controlled and operated network of local
rail and street tramways. The data which was gathered enabled the
94S.O. 184.
95 HLRO, P & S, Demolition Statement, 1892, Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln­
shire Railway (Extension to London).
98 Many of the inhabitants of Lisson Grove were already refugees from an earlier
demolition, when New Oxford Street was cut through St. Giles, Charles Booth,
Life and Labour of the People of London (1892), I, 289. Also H. J. Dyos, JTH, II
(1955), 19.
55
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Board of Trade, the new London County Council and the public
pressure groups (The National Association for the Extension of
Workmen’s Trains, and the London Reform Union), to conduct a
campaign which came to a successful conclusion in the Select Com­
mittee on Workmen’s Trains, 1903-5, and the Royal Commission on
London Traffic, 1903-5.
One has only to contrast the many volumes of detailed statistical
evidence available to these early twentieth-century policy-making
bodies with the hearsay, the private impressions and personal opinions of
sixty years earlier, to see the progress made towards listing exhaustively
for consideration the wider social costs which might be incurred, and the
wider social benefits which might accrue, from an efficient network of
urban rail transport. There is a heading, in the Royal Commission’s
Report of 1905, for example, which lays down the following principle
for assessing the Characteristics and Functions of Urban Railways. ‘It is
necessary at the outset to form a clear conception of the function of
railways’ states the Report, ‘as part of the general scheme for locomotion
and transport in London.’97 It goes on to distinguish between the types
of railway accommodation required for trunk, suburban, urban and
merchandise traffic, and in every point of its analysis the implicit
assumption is made that the primary consideration which it is proper
to set before Parliament is that of the public interest. The basic yardstick
applied is not profitability but functional adequacy. How can the ‘im­
perfect and disjointed’ organic system of railways serving a great city
like London, be adapted to changing public requirements? This is
the question the Commission sets before itself and the vocabulary,
concepts, and terms of reference it uses are already those of the modern
planner.
‘The occupation of any location must be regarded as a permanent
assignment to the railway, and, both for physical and financial reasons,
any substantial interference with it in future is impossible. Hence it is
essential that the railway system, as a whole, should be supervised, in
its growth and development, on definite, consistent and carefully-formed
principles, directed towards the achievement of a clearly conceived
result.’98
The same criteria and the same mode of thought can be seen in the
Draft Reports of the Select Committee on Workmen’s Trains, in 1905.
Though not as compendious as those of the Royal Commission on
London Traffic, which ran to eight volumes, its statistics were sufficiently
elaborate to enable the fixing of suggested fares. Details of working
class budgets, rent differentials between suburban and central areas, and
valuation of the time spent in travelling, indicated a figure of 2d per day
97 H.C., 1905, XXX, 605-11.
98 Ibid. 605.

56
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

as the marginal fare if the working classes were to become daily con­
sumers of railway services. In putting this figure to the railway com­
panies the Draft Report observed, ‘In the case of London, and probably
also in other towns, a workman has some inducement to live in the
outlying districts, from the fact that he can obtain housing accommoda­
tion at a lower rent. This difference in rent counterbalances the amount
paid in railway fares provided the latter are low. The time spent in
travelling to and fro each day has also to be taken into account as well as
the fact that the workman cannot obtain his meals at home.’99
In other words, not merely was the pattern of railway services to be
judged by functional rather than financial criteria, but some, at any
rate, of the fares were to be fixed by marginal social cost pricing.

7. Conclusions
In London the counting of the social costs incidental to urban railway
building began surprisingly early, in the mid-forties of the century, and
the methods used were refined and extended in the fifties and sixties. Of
course, the presence of well-digested studies did not necessarily lead to
immediate and single-minded action in the mid-nineteenth century any
more than in the days of the Buchanan Report-, but the fact that such
conscientious investigations were carried out and given a hearing should
correct the widely-held impression that the Victorians were entirely
careless of the effects of the great works of urban reconstruction they
were executing.
Whilst it cannot be argued that the evidence presented satisfies the
exacting statistical standards of modern studies, it does fulfil several of
the major requirements of cost-benefit analysis. The proposed schemes
or groups of schemes were fully defined, together with some possible
alternatives, within the limits imposed by the Parliamentary time-table;
even though the time taken for deliberation was shorter, and the deci­
sions at least as binding, as in present-day enquiries. Approximate
estimates for costs were given, and attempts made, from the mid-185O’s,
to value the different benefits from the proposed schemes by methods
appropriate to their nature. In the Bidder-Parson debate on elevated
railways, in the studies of the comparative returns on public and private
investments, and in discussion on the influence which railway projects
might have upon the speed and costs of street traffic, there can be dis­
cerned the first efforts to decide which courses would yield the most
widely spread social benefits. Likewise, the consideration, under
separate headings, of evidence concerning the railways’ demolition or
depreciation of adjacent property, their interruption of street com­
munications or public works, and their blocking of future improvement
1905, VIII, 511.
57
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

plans, represents the first attempt to distinguish benefits and costs

which were real, and not cancelled out by corresponding gains or losses
to other sections of the community omitted from the accounting.
Indeed the later studies—such as the Memorandum submitted to the
Royal Commission of 1903-5, by Sir John Wolfe-Barry and R. C. H.
Davidson, upon the monetary value of the time lost to persons and
vehicles through defective communications—begin, in some respects, to
resemble sketches of modern statistical analyses. Wolfe-Barry eliminated
those engaged in domestic occupations, and those not likely to be
affected by the time spent travelling, from the 1901 Census occupational
categories for the London area, assigned a daily wage based upon
Charles Booth’s calculations to the remaining proportion, and assumed
the earning capacity to be spread over an eight hour day. On this basis,
an extra quarter of an hour spent travelling would equal three per cent
of the total, i.e. time worth £5,000,000per annum, to the employers. ‘The
whole of the time estimated as lost is treated as having the money value
of the various classes of persons employed. . . . Thus the money taken
from the ratepayers to pay for such improvements may be justified and
more than justified by the value to them of the extra travelling facilities
gained.’100
Though these types of enquiry were far from being exhaustive or
systematic, one must not overlook the fact that they were original essays
in an entirely new field of public administration. On the other hand,
Victorian enquiries fell short of modern analysis in several important
ways. No attempt was made to exclude benefits which would emerge in
any case, even if the investment under consideration were not executed.
There was a tendency at first to accept uncritically even the most partisan
claims for indirect benefit—for example over the good effects allegedly
created by railway employment. But from the 1860’s onwards, attempts
to assess the costs as well as the benefits became increasingly searching.
In summary, one might say that, apart from the leeway allowed in
the selection of witnesses, the evidence presented to Parhament on the
occasions described above at least escaped the charge, sometimes levelled
at cost-benefit studies, of being commissioned to justify rather than to
influence political decisions; and that, in addition, it went a considerable
way towards identifying a wide range of costs and benefits which ought
to be taken into account, and deciding what political and administrative
constraints applied. On the other hand the major tasks of measurement
were only sporadically and partially accomplished; and consequently
there was a general tendency to undervalue the social importance of
time-saving.
However incomplete, by modern standards, the material gathered for
the ‘planning balance sheets’, of the 1840’s and 1860’s, or however in-
100 H.C. 1906, XLVI, 675-7.

58
 DID THE VICTORIANS COUNT SOCIAL COSTS?

adequate the manner of its presentation may seem to be, there can be
no doubt as to the importance of the decisions which emerged. Not
merely was the topography of London’s West End and City profoundly
influenced by the veto on central schemes but, in the opinion of the
Royal Commission on London Traffic of 1905, ‘the whole course of
railway construction around London was influenced by the policy adop­
ted in excluding railways from the central area.’101
Between 1864 and 1905 the search for positive standards for the
development of future urban and suburban rail services was gradual
and laggardly in relation to the marked social, political and demo­
graphic changes of those four decades. The principal emphasis of social
accounting, one might argue, was a negative one during these years.
This was certainly the view expressed by Sir Benjamin Baker, in an
outburst to the Joint Committee on Electric and Cable Railways (1892),
which is worth quoting in full.
‘I thought it would be not at all unnatural that the Committee would wish
to know how it is that for 25 years past nothing whatever has been done in
the heart of London to meet the growing necessities of the City traffic.
Nothing whatever has been done for 25 years; that I think I can offer an
explanation presently, whilst at the same time New York, which followed
the lead of London some years afterwards, has not stood still as London has
done, but has gone ahead, and has got 40 miles of urban railway now; so
that a New York business man can travel almost anywhere at ten miles an
hour, whereas a man in London has to travel six miles an hour. In the last
30 years the whole of that map has been scored with proposals of lines for
promoters, many of them following very nearly the same routes as the present
lines, and you can hardly draw a red line on which some line has not been
deposited; and yet not a single one of them has been carried out. And the
reason is this: That in the first instance, when Sir John Fowler was promoting
the original Underground railway, he got the cordial co-operation of all the
public bodies. Since then, the public bodies have not assisted in the same
way as they did originally, but they have too much sought the advice of
professional advisers, and when, of course anyone consults an engineer, he
thinks he must get something always for his client; and the result is that when
the Bills leave the Committee, they are so often loaded with onerous clauses
that you cannot raise the money.’102
Baker’s comments were shrewd, and by no means untypical of the
point of view held by many late Victorian railway promoters and
managers. To them it seemed that in the last decades of the nineteenth
century far too much concern for public costs and benefits was shown
by too many local and central bodies.
101H.C., 1905, XXX, 611.
102 H.C., 1892, XH, 132.

59
 Ill
Railway profits and the Victorian city

1. Introduction
The various public enquiries studied in the last chapter, however dis­
similar their subject matter, shared one common feature. They were all
conducted against a metropolitan background, and a substantial pro­
portion of the problems raised were discussed in an exclusively urban
context. Consequently the connection between the content of the
Reports and Evidence alluded to, and the subject matter of urban
history was sufficiently clear to need no underlining.
This is not the case when we turn to examine Victorian railway
development through the eyes of the railway entrepreneurs. To them
the impact of their railways upon urban affairs was of distinctly peri­
pheral importance compared with the general, day-to-day business
tasks of raising capital and organising a profitable and competitive
service. The great bulk of railway records, whether Accounts and
Statements for public consumption or internal Minutes and Special
Reports, show little or no grasp of the immense influence for good or
ill their business schemes exercised upon the towns which were the
scene of their operations. There was not any attempt to break down
traffic figures or divide costs and charges in such a way that the direct
impression a company made upon a particular town could be dis­
tinguished. The business statistics upon which operational decisions
were based remained undifferentiated, overall figures. The total num­
bers carried, the fares paid, the changing proportion of receipts between
goods and passengers, and the changing proportion of the passenger
classes; these were all dutifully reported, together with the overall
working expenditure.1 These statistics, all produced by the companies
1 H.C., 1890, LXV, 680-1 gives the working expenditure, receipts, etc. for each
year from 1860-89. Railway Returns and Abstracts provide other figures, used for
tables in B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge, 1962), 225-7. The limitations of the information given are discussed in
W. M. Acworth and G. Paish, ‘British Railways, their Accounts and Statistics’,
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, LXXV (1912), 687-730.
60
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

to the order of Parliament or the Board of Trade, are extremely

interesting in themselves and reliable indicators of general growth; but
they are of distinctly limited use for analytical purposes. Indeed the
railway companies found it to their advantage, W. Burdett-Coutts
M.P., Chairman of the Railway Shareholders’ Committee, alleged,
deliberately to suppress the publication of figures which were ‘too
illuminating’. ‘We turned to the reports of the companies for informa­
tion and could make nothing of them’, he told the Departmental
Committee on Railway Accounts and Statistical Returns, in 1910.
Even at this date the statistics available to a shareholders’ committee
did not enable a breakdown to be made on the earnings from ordinary
passenger traffic and cheap ticket traffic, or—‘a still more serious
omission’—the average distances travelled. Tn fact we could discover
nothing about the passenger traffic which would assist us in ascertaining
whether or not the railway companies had performed more work for
the money they received from passengers to account for the pro­
portionately greater increase of expenditure than of gross earnings.’2
Evidence placed before this committee of the Board of Trade by the
Traffic and General Managers of the L. & N.W., North Eastern, Great
Central and Great Northern railway companies, did little to suggest
that the managers of these companies were themselves better informed;
and the same impression, of decisions taken upon very limited and
general statistics, is confirmed in George Findlay, General Manager of
the London and North-Western railway company, The Working and
Management of an English Railway, 1891.3
Since the statistics collected were inadequate, even for the examina­
tion of major topics of contemporary concern, such as changes in
operating efficiency or returns on capital, it is not surprising that they
should be of still more limited value for the urban historian. The
questions to which one would really like to know the answers were
considered either too troublesome or of insufficient immediate interest
for constant numerical measurement. Where did the passengers get on
and off, and how far did they travel? What traffic used the suburban
stations and how did it vary over a given time span? How much was
actually spent, by stages, upon acquiring the land, building, recon­
structing and running each of the great urban terminals and goods
yards ? What traffic did each deal with and what relationship did the
2 H.C., 1910 (Cd 5052), 320 -1.
3 George Findlay, The Working and Management of an English Railway (1891),
244-57. W. R. Lawson, British Railways: a Financial and Commercial Survey (1913),
repeats the charges of ‘foolish expenditure’ and ‘useless statistics’... ‘A loss distri­
buted amongst many being too often regarded as in effect no loss at all’, 19-22.
Still more serious was the allegation by Burdett-Coutts that ‘the resources of these
great companies, both as to funds and staff, can be, and will be utilised by the
boards against shareholders who ask for such information.’ H.C., 1910 (Cd 5052), 327.
61
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

traffic bear to the costs which had been incurred in siting, constructing
and operating it? What was the pattern of traffic in and around the
major cities at different seasons of the year and at different times of
day? Except in a handful of cases mentioned later, the material upon
which answers to these questions could be based was simply not
collected. Indeed, even in the late 1950’s, one of Dr. Beeching’s com­
plaints about railway costing was that it was ‘global’ in character. All
moneys for one region were put into a bag, so to speak, from which
certain traditional disbursements were made, and the resultant surplus
or deficit was left on general account.4
The only exceptions to this rule came into three categories. There
were the individual analyses made, usually for submission to Select
Committees or Royal Commissions; like those of 1867, 1872, 1881 and
1884/5, which were each supplied with tit-bits of specific information
by the railway managers. There were a few individual reports, like that
of the General Manager of the G.W. railway to his Board when it
required ‘some information on the progress of the Suburban passenger
traffic’ in February 1869. There were the far more detailed break­
downs of traffic dealt with at each station and goods depot on the G.W.
and G.E. railways compiled after 1903.
Future research may, one hopes, uncover further internal evidence
of systematic and continuous analysis by the railway companies of the
factors which they encountered in their urban operations. But there
seems little doubt that a great deal of the necessary operational data
was never accumulated, because of the great railway managers’ ability
or imagined ability to ‘play it by ear’, using their long and detailed
first-hand experience of the growing railway system’s notorious failures
and successes, rather than preliminary traffic studies and costing break­
downs, to guide their decisions.
The usual method of making decisions which concerned investment
in new urban sites or services was empirical and opportunistic rather
than rational. The managerial approach can be glimpsed in some of the
topics raised in the Special Report of 1869 mentioned earlier. Although
the Great Western railway had put up money for the Metropolitan line
and negotiated for access to the new Victoria station ten years earlier,
the Special Report still finds it necessary to pose the belated questions,
How can the Victoria Station and line best be utilised? and, What
number of trains should be run over the Metropolitan railway under
the agreement with that company? Some of the problems facing the
G.W. company arose from technical and operational difficulties in
4 The Reshaping of British Railways (H.M.S.O., 1963), I, 5. On early traffic analyses
in the 1840’s and 185O’s see BTHR LNW 1/716 and T. R. Gourvish, British Railway
Management in the Nineteenth Century, with Special Reference to the Career of
Captain Mark Huish (1808-67), (London Ph.D. thesis, 1967).
62
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

underground, joint station and broad gauge working, some from rail­
way politics; but none of them was unforeseeable.5
It may seem reasonable that such detailed and practical considerations
might well have preceded the large investment decisions concerning the
Metropolitan line and Victoria station, but this, in fact, was typical
of the railway companies’ mode of procedure. The territorial claims
were staked upon general grounds; the detailed traffic consequences
were faced later. If they led to embarrassment then the authorised work
could be slowed down to a crawl, a Bill allowing further extension of
time could be procured, and the landowners, Chambers of Commerce
and general public kept in suspense for a decade or more.
A similar approach is revealed, in the Special Report, towards the
development of suburban traffic. The large traffic from Windsor and
Ealing takes the General Manager of the G.W. by surprise, so he opens
stations at Hayes and Acton, which produce only forty or fifty pas­
sengers a day, ‘nothing like the amount of traffic which was anticipated.’
In spite of this he affirms to the Board ‘It will be desirable to afford
further accommodation from time to time for the suburban traffic with
a view to inducing City people to live down the Great Western line, as
frequent service of trains upon the Southern lines and now upon the
Midland and Great Northern afford considerable advantages to
passengers living on those lines.’6
The decision, in other words, is based simply upon observation of a
competitor’s success under dissimilar circumstances of landownership,
income and employment patterns, in a different area. There is no
attempt to assess the attitudes of landowners on the Great Western’s
route, survey the possible market for season tickets, define, even
approximately, who the ‘city people’ were likely to be, how frequently
and how far they would travel, and whether they would find accom­
modation at the rents they could afford, or to take into account the
fact that the southern and south-eastern commuters arrived at terminals
on the fringe of the City, not at a remote West End station. Not
surprisingly the Great Western’s schemes for developing suburban
traffic in the sixties miscarried and managerial interest waned.7 By the
end of the century, when a new campaign was begun, the Great Western,
5 BTHR, General Manager’s Report, 4 February 1869, GW 18/6. For the clash
between the Metropolitan and Great Western railways see T. C. Barker and Michael
Robbins, op. cit. 122-6.
6 BTHR GW 18/6.
7 Another possible interpretation, reading between the lines of the Report, is that
Grierson was satisfied to run a traffic limited in numbers. The Great Western
suburban services (defined by Grierson as stations to Wycombe and Reading)
carried 800,000 passengers in 1867 for receipts of £100,000, i.e. an average fare of
2s 6d per ticket; by comparison the Metropolitan (Hammersmith branch) averaged
3d per ticket.
63
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

together with the L. & N.W. and the Midland, had earned the reputa­
tion of being the most indifferent and exclusive of London-based
railway companies in the provision of suburban services.8
The social and urban consequences of railway building, it will be
suggested in the Case Histories which follow, were, in a majority of
cases, precipitated inadvertently by the railway entrepreneurs. It was
not that their actions were hasty and ill-considered, though some
decisions fell into this category. It was rather that their horizon was
contained by the ephemeral and rapidly changing business situation in
which they found themselves; and that the need for circumspection and
calculation was reduced by the character of Parliamentary procedure,
and by the increasingly monopolistic nature of railway operations.
Once Parliamentary authorisation had been given to take the land for a
certain urban site, or once a rival, however small, had established a
claim to certain routes or terminals, a new balance was struck between
the competing companies which only amalgamation, a Bill conceding
running powers over the rival line, or the construction of duplicate
facilities could redress. If it were determined, on general strategic
grounds, that it was desirable to gain a stronger foothold in a town, all
that remained was to pay whatever current price was necessary. In the
course of this reasoning it was not unusual for a railway manager to
find himself in the position of a man at an auction who found after­
wards that he had bid far too much. The Liverpool Street terminal, at
£2,000,000 ‘when it was first built was looked upon by everyone’
writes Acworth ‘as a white elephant of the very largest size.’9 But
having got it, it was necessary to charge for it upon every branch of
traffic. In William Birt’s words, ‘There it is, and it must be paid for.’10
To a greater or lesser extent all the other railway companies found
themselves, at different times and in different cities, in situations where
the only course of action seemed to be to pay first and to meet the cost
afterwards. Indeed it is an open question whether the financial burden
their urban land acquisition laid upon them was disproportionately
heavy, even for their vast resources.
Before touching upon this important question, however, it would be
best, in the interest of clarity, to take in sequence the other main topics
of urban significance in which the investment decisions, or operational
practices, of the railway companies, whether inadvertant or no, left a
mark on Britain’s major cities. These can be discussed under four main

8 In the years just before the First World War the G.W. launched a ‘Homes for All’
campaign to provide services, information and a ‘Residential Guide and Property
Register’ for those who could afford to buy houses ‘in Chalfont country or Beechy
Bucks’. BRL. L47.37. ’•
9 W. M. Acworth, The Railways of England (1900), 410.
10H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10197.
64
plate 3 Estate development in south central Manchester, 1794 (see p. 154)
plate4 The London, Chatham and Dover railway
company’s viaduct across central London (see p. 281)
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

headings; the first connected with the constructional phase of urban

railway building, the second with the organisation and control of urban
projects, the third concerned with the effects of construction, the fourth
with operational policy. Associated with these is the still larger issue of
the railway’s relationship to the urban and suburban market for land: a
topic in which, more than in any other, the railways are seen as a product
as well as a cause of wider social and economic changes. Discussion of
this, though relevant to the issues treated below, is postponed to a later
chapter.

2. The constructional phase

There were several ways in which the competitive spirit could
manifest itself during the first quarter century of urban railway build­
ing. One was by price competition, reducing fares and paring profit
margins to a minimum; and as the trunk railway system neared com­
pletion, in the early eighteen fifties, such contests reached a climax. In
1854 the Edinburgh and Glasgow and the Caledonian railway comp­
anies, competing for inter-urban traffic, reduced the fares to 6d. third
class for a journey (by the Caledonian route between Edinburgh and
Glasgow) of 57 miles. The contest lasted until July 1856, when the two
companies made a joint purse agreement, argued to an incredible two
points of decimals; 30-64% to the Edinburgh-Glasgow, 69-36% to the
Caledonian.11 From October 1857 to the end of 1858 a most intense
price competition raged between the London and North Western
railway and its new rival in the northern cities, the Manchester, Sheffield
and Lincolnshire, during which the fare from Liverpool to London was
brought down to 5s return. ‘Then we came to our senses’, said Sir
Edward Watkin, General Manager of the M.S. & L.12 Similar examples
can be multiplied for cut-throat competition between the South Eastern
and the London, Brighton and South Coast railway companies, or the
London and North Western, the Midland and the Great Northern
companies, during which fares fell to |d per mile first class, |d per
mile second class.13 ‘Larger and larger advertisements are issued,’ the
Illustrated London News remarked, ‘and larger placards; “sandwiches”
perambulate the streets in various directions; and individual touters,
armed with piles of small bundles, pester and bespatter the passengers
with their recommendation and announcements.’14
Such fierce price competition in regular services and in excursions
brought nothing but benefit to the poorer classes in the great cities,
11BTHR RAC(S) 1/73, July 1856.
12BTHR PYB 1/128, p. 6.
13 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.7362.
14 Illustrated London News, 23 February 1856.

D 65
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and the fifties was the decade in which occasional railway travel became
part of the life of the humbler artisan and factory worker. From the
companies’ point of view, however, although traffic increased by up to
40%, with a corresponding strain upon terminal facilities, the margins
of profit fell, in some cases very markedly.15 ‘Coming to their senses’
involved principally the signing of legally binding private agreements
to divide traffic and share receipts, accompanied by the tacit and
simultaneous raising of fares. In many cases the agreements were
binding for periods of up to twenty-one years.
These agreements to moderate the extremes of price competition did
not lead to the immediate and complete suppression of rivalry, so much
as to its diversion into new channels. Of particular moment for the
urban history of the five great towns of Victorian Britain was the
tendency for the expression of rivalry to shift to competition over urban
sites and facilities.
Looking back in 1872 over the previous decade, James Allport,
General Manager of the Midland railway, described the course of
events as follows:
Counsel (alluding to the close similarity between fares on the L. & N.W*
and Midland lines)
‘Is it not the fact that in places where two great companies compete,
there is almost always an agreement as to what shall be the charges made to
the public ?—That is true, but still you will always find that the competition
is very keen. I do not mean competition by charge but competition by accom­
modation, and you will find that the public are generally very much better
accommodated.’
‘In keeping up competition you want to lower the rates to the public?—
Not lowering the rates; I think the rates are low enough now speaking
generally.’
‘Then all you must compete for is not to lower the rates for the advantage
of the public, but for the purpose of keeping up the present high rates and
putting them in another pocket?—I do not say that at all; I say that the
rates are not high by any means; I say that the present rates are very much
below the (statutory) maximum, and although it may not be a competition
of rates it is a competition of accommodation.’16
Later in his evidence Allport went on to make it clear that a feature
of this competition for accommodation tacitly accepted by the railway
managers was that it could be carried on even during the period of a
Traffic Agreement between two companies.17 The period of truce could
be used for strengthening and reinforcing a company’s territorial grasp
on a major city, and at least two of the major urban terminal schemes
of the 1860’s were conceived in these terms. Like the L. & N.W. and
15 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.7372, Tables 4, 5 and 6.
10 H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.428, 457-8. My italics.
17 Ibid. QQ. 506-7.

66
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

the Midland railway companies, the Glasgow and South Western and
the Caledonian, or the London, Chatham and Dover and the South
Eastern companies, went through the phase of rivalry which Allport
had described: the signing of a truce and traffic sharing agreement,
followed or accompanied by an intensified rivalry over urban accom­
modation.18 The continued vigilance of the signatories to the truces is
shown by the tone of the communications between them, which read
like diplomatic notes between sovereign powers. ‘If either endeavours
to shut out the other from what should be neutral ground’, the Cale­
donian Committee of Management determined, ‘or monopolise the
whole trade of the District, it is evident that peace is impractical.’19 Or—
to take an example of the language used by two rival southern com­
panies later in the century—the L.C. & D. speaks of ‘unwarrantable
acts of aggression’, and the need for ‘the principle of absolute neutrality
and forbearance from all encroachments by one company upon the
other’, whilst the Chairman of the South Eastern denies the intention
‘to carry the sword into a neighbouring country’, and speaks of the
desire ‘to live peacably and harmoniously with their neighbours.’20 It
is clear, without multiplying examples, that the language of diplomacy
and military strategy came naturally to the minds of railway company
managers; for the detente, the fait accompli, the treaty, alliances, truces,
territorial boundaries were the terms in which railway managers thought
of their vocation. Consequently when a particularly violent phase of
price and traffic rivalry had pared away all profit, competition tended
to be diverted into other channels rather than suppressed.
Competition over terminal sites and routes had also been a feature
of the earlier railway booms, in 1837 and 1847. George Carr Glyn,
Chairman of the L. & N.W. had admitted, in 1848, that the principle of
competition had ‘forced upon us the necessity of defending our own
property, by compelling us to undertake schemes which, I take upon
myself to say, on behalf of the Board, would otherwise never have
entered into our imaginations.’21 As the competition over fares was
curbed, however, and as the absolute volumes of passenger traffic
doubled, in the 1850’s, the emphasis shifted to even more intense
competition over terminal facilities. Only in the 1870’s did it move back
to a contest over speed, improved rolling stock and service.22
18 John R. Kellett, ‘Glasgow’s Railways, 1830-80’, Ec.HR, XVII (1964), 365.
P. S. Bagwell, ‘The Rivalry and Working Union of the South Eastern and the
London, Chatham and Dover Railways’, JTH, II (1955), 68.
19 BTHR CAL 1/7, 26 February 1847, p. 556.
20 P. S. Bagwell, loc. cit. 68, 74.
21 Speech to shareholders, 18 February 1848, quoted in Samuel Salt, Railway
Commercial Information (1850), 86.
22 W. Ashworth, An Economic History of England, 1870-1939 (1960), 120-3. O. S.
Nock, British Steam Railways (1961), 131-60. Jack Simmons, The Railways of
Britain (1961), 24-6, 114-7, 144.
67
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

What this meant to Victorian cities can best be particularised in

detail, but it would be a reasonable generalisation at this point to say
that those eligible areas of the older city centre which had escaped the
railway companies’ attention in the forties, especially those covered
with cheap lower-class housing, held in large, easily-acquired units,
were now torn down. In his study of Demolition Statements for London
H. J. Dyos comments upon the comparatively short period during
which the most intense activity was concentrated: 37,000 displacements
of working-class inhabitants between 1859 and 1867, out of the (re­
corded) total of 76,000 between 1853 and 1901.23 A brief glance, in
turn, at the parenthood of some of the schemes put forward in Glasgow,
London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham in the early sixties,
may serve to illustrate the competition over accommodation to which
Allport referred.
In Glasgow the first central terminal for trunk routes from the
south, St. Enoch Station, and the first crossing of the river Clyde, was
deliberately devised during a period of truce between the main rivals
for trunk traffic, the Glasgow and South Western and the Caledonian
railway companies. The avowed intention of the terminal was to give
the G. & S.W. company competitive advantages when the twenty-one
year Agreement it had signed in 1853 with the Caledonian expired.24
In London, apart from the extensive river crossings carried through,
and the Great Eastern’s metropolitan extension, the Midland railway
company also forced its way, at great expense, to a separate station of
its own at the Euston road. Half the Somers Town slums were demolished
to make way, at St. Pancras, for a large passenger and goods station
linked by tunnels to the new Metropolitan underground. The under­
lying idea at St. Pancras, as at the other termini of the sixties, was to
stake a claim on future traffic by estabfishing an advantage in terminal
facilities. As a contemporary periodical pointed out, ‘The Metropolitan
tunnel to bring passengers from Manchester directly to Moorgate . . .
or by Metropolitan Extension to Victoria Station at Pimlico will
probably give the Midland company an advantage over the chief
competitor, the L. & N.W. railway.’25 South of the river the London
companies likewise spent enormous sums, not on improving their
rolling stock, which was ‘filthy and poverty stricken’, but on cutting
into the central district and establishing new stations at Victoria,
Charing Cross and Cannon Street.26
In Manchester the feud between the M.S. & L. and the L. & N.W.
had reached the stage of open warfare at the London Road station
23 H. J. Dyos, JTH, II (1955), 14.
21 Infra Chap. 8, sec. 2.
25 Illustrated London News, 15 February 1868.
26 C. Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History (1954 & 9) I, 244.
68
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

by 1857, when the L. & N.W.’s directors formally returned their 17

ivory free passes.27 The division and rebuilding of London Road
station, and the proposal of drastic new schemes for a large new
Central station in 1866 and 1872 were the results of this acute rivalry,
and involved large encroachments on central property. In Liverpool
also, the cutting of a new Central station, product of the L. & N.W.
and Cheshire Lines Committee’s rivalry, dates to the same period;
and in Birmingham extensive reconstruction, doubling the size of New
Street and bringing the Midland railway into the city centre, carved
out a further fifteen acres for exclusively railway uses.28
In short, the outcome of the railway companies’ shadow-boxing over
fares, combined with their real competition over sites, facilities and
territory, was a renewed and determined invasion of the central core of
the Victorian city in the 1860’s. Even though the most ambitious plans
for urban through-railways were abandoned, in Liverpool because of
the expense, in Manchester because of Corporation opposition, in
London because of Parliamentary disapproval, the transformation of
central land uses reached its peak in the decade of the 1860’s. In this
decade, more than any other, the railway engineers and managers, by
their decisions, remoulded the fabric and accelerated functional changes
in the central districts of the major Victorian cities. Indeed it is arguable
that no other group of men exercised, to the same extent, such a
conscious power to alter cities in the nineteenth century. Certainly the
essays at urban renewal by municipal authorities, under the series of
Cross and Torrens Acts and Amendments, appear by comparison
small in scale and dilatory in action.29 Even the cutting of boulevards
by Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham and by the Metropolitan Board
of Works in London, or the razing of the older parts of Glasgow by
the Improvement Trust—all impressive and difficult achievements—
did not require such extensive uprooting of homes and businesses, or
demolition of property, as the railway operations of the sixties.30
One can only speculate about the possible scope for alternative or
different decisions which might have existed. As already suggested, it
appears likely that full information on the larger effects, or even the
direct impact, of railway schemes was not taken into consideration at
board-room level. Land agents and solicitors working for the com-
27 Which had permitted them to travel gratis over the M.S. & L. railway. G. Dow,
Great Central (1959), I, 180.
28 Infra Chap. 5, 6 and 7, sec. 2 and 3.
29 31 & 2 Vic. c. 130, Torrens Act, 1868; amended by 42 & 3 Vic. c. 64, and 45 &
6 Vic. c. 54. 38 & 9 Vic. c. 36. Cross Act, 1875; amended by 42 & 3 Vic. c. 63, and
45 & 6 Vic. c. 54.
30 Asa Briggs, op. cit. 228-40. C. M. Allan, ‘The Genesis of British Urban Develop­
ment with special reference to Glasgow’, Ec.HR, XVIII (1965), 599-613. P. J.
Edwards, History of Street Improvements, 1855-97 (1898).
69
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

parties had a much clearer and more detailed picture, usually of a small
component part of each scheme, but they were acting as servants
executing a policy already decided upon; and it is clear, from the
few records of Land Purchase committees which have survived, that
they were working under extreme pressure, with advisory powers
which were limited to practical details.31
To a certain extent the railway managers themselves were not
entirely free agents. Their policies concerning railway construction,
fares and services could not be chosen purely at will. Certain general
demand forces at work in the mid-nineteenth century played an obvious
part in inclining the railway companies towards a major reconstruction
of the central urban area. The high costs of unloading and trans-ship­
ment compared with the low marginal costs of operation can be seen
working persistently towards an urban railway system with central,
linked sites. The steady increase in volume of short-distance passenger
traffic likewise increased the competitive pressure upon railway com­
panies to secure more central sites.
There were also strong public demands for local expenditure on
enlarged central accommodation. Manchester ‘had been almost in­
sulted by the way in which the inhabitants had been treated by the
railway companies’; and by their failure to provide an inch more space,
the Manchester Guardian reported in I860.32 In Liverpool the complaint
in 1856 was that ‘Goods are still tumbled about from railway to cart,
from cart to quay, exposed to dirt, rain and pillage. . . . Passengers still
depend on the crowded and tedious omnibus.. .. Why have public men
turned away, apparently startled, from schemes affording complete
internal communication ?’33 In Glasgow central railway accommodation
was ‘so inadequate and defective as to endanger life and limb’, and
inspired letters from the Town Clerk to the Home Secretary, and the
Board of Trade.34
There were, then, both long-term economic reasons and strong local
pressures for concentrating upon terminal facilities in the sixties. The
railway managers acceded to them, though the total burden of fixed
investment this might finally involve was not carefully considered. By
comparison, there were also strong and persistent public pressures
towards a policy of cheap fares—fares which were not lowered artifi­
cially and temporarily, from expediency, as in the mid-fifties—but were
31 BTHR MSJ 1/1-1/13. Minutes of the Manchester South Junction Lands and
Compensation Committee.
32 Manchester Guardian, 17 February 1860.
33 Transactions of the Liverpool Polytechnic Society (1856) 205, 212. LRL H 680.6
POL.
34 MS correspondence between the Town Clerk, the North British railway company,
the Board of Trade and the Home Secretary, September 1873-October 1876. GRL D
397154.

70
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

lowered as part of a coherent and sustained attempt to increase traffic.

As early as 1844 The Economist had sounded the call it was to repeat,
at intervals, throughout the next two decades.
‘Far be it from us to insinuate that it is the duty of a railway company to
sacrifice its interests and profits for the purpose of inducing a great loco­
motion amongst the people . . . but railway companies have hitherto com­
mitted the common fault, which has been apparent in every pursuit in this
country in its infancy—that of looking chiefly for support to the higher and
wealthy middle classes; whereas experience has proved that in every pursuit,
even in literature, that the policy is most profitable which embraces the wants
and patronage of the great masses of the working population, whose united
incomes are infinitely greater than those of any other class. Some years ago
dealers all flocked towards Bond Street, Piccadilly and the neighbourhood
of wealthy and aristocratic dwellings—splendid hotels were built only in the
precincts of our best squares, or in the wealthiest parts of the city; but in
modem times the united earnings of the operative classes have raised up
perfect palaces for the sale of drapery and groceries, as well as gin and beer,
and the supply of all their other wants, in the leading thoroughfares, through
all the manufacturing parts of the metropolis, and in every manufacturing
town and village throughout the country. Ingenuity and art have been in a
peculiar way, both amongst our manufacturers and dealers, engaged of late
years in ministering to, and catering for, the wants of this new and important
class’ . . . ‘The time we have no doubt will come when railway companies
will discover this new secret in trade, and, when they do, we feel assured their
practice of it will prove peculiarly successful.’35
The ‘ready money of the million’ was the formula for success held
out to the railway managers by The Economist. In an article entitled
‘Why do Railways succeed mechanically and fail commercially?’,
eleven years later, The Economist was still repeating its message. ‘Rail­
ways cannot succeed commercially by studying the interests of a small
class. They must carry the great multitude and the commodities they
use.’36 By 1865, tired of the deaf ear the companies had turned to its
advice, The Economist had concluded, ‘The Government, if they owned
the railways, might give the working classes their share in the benefits
of quick locomotion, though they will never get it from others.’37
A really cheap fare policy might possibly, as some claimed, have been
comparable in effect to customs reform or postal reform; but the
pressures for it, unlike those for expanded terminal facilities, were not
heeded.38 Yet, viewing the huge, indivisible and permanent capital

35 The Economist, 20 July 1844, 1011.

36 Ibid. 22 September 1855, 1038.
37 Ibid. 7 January 1865, 2.
38 H.C. 1867, XXXVUT, Report, p. CVII, comments on evidence by Rowland Hill.
Hill had expressed the same views more than twenty years earlier, Railway Reform
(1844), 97. MRL, Political Tracts, P 3411.
71
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

expenditure involved by the wholesale intrusion into city centres, one

cannot help wondering, whether even the goal of railway profits might
not have been better served by a tacit agreement to place terminals in
areas not quite so central and to concentrate upon a marked and
progressive reduction of overall fares and transport charges.

3. The organisation and control of urban projects

To understand further why the railway companies assumed their
expensive and self-appointed task of remoulding the city centres in the
eighteen sixties, it is necessary to examine the organisation of urban
railway building, the changes in railway financing, and the rise of the
contractor and the consultant or independent railway engineer. They
represented a new constructional industry and a new professional vested
interest which had grown up, step by step with the growth of the railway
system itself, in the eighteen thirties and forties.
The scale and specialised techniques of railway building had rapidly
ensured that, though there was still a small place for local firms in the
execution of railway works, the great constructor, handling large
numbers of men and great quantities of equipment, soon came to take
the greater share of contract work.39 Thomas Brassey, Morton Peto
and Edward Betts, Lucas and Waring Brothers, Charles Fox, James
Falshaw, John Kelk and others emerged as the leading entrepreneurs in
a field where energy and the willingness to take risks were at an unusual
premium. They were a small body of men, often acting in combination
with each other—their names can be seen in changing associations on
the Printed Specifications and Tenders—and had begun to hold quarterly
meetings as early as 1839. By 1848 Herapath's Railway Magazine was
complaining of the lack of competition in tendering, and the growing
practice of tendering for the whole line.40 The contractors had also
begun, even in the 1840’s, to accept payment for their work, not in
cash, but in shares or in mortgage bonds; thus, as it were, volunteering
their own working capital and their credit towards railway promotion.
All the elements for a powerful lobby, whose prime interest lay in
works of demolition and construction, had assembled by the mid­
forties. Not merely were the contractors an able and closely knit group,
whose increasingly large capitals were committed to railway promotion,
but regiments of solicitors, counsel, and land and law agents, all stood
to gain from the promotion of further schemes; and, like the contrac-
99 Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies (1965), 51-63.
40 Railway Times, 6 April 1839, 295; Herapath's Railway Magazine, 4 November
1848, 1161. Both references, and examples of payment by mortgage bond are from
Harold Pollins, ‘Railway Contractors and the Finance of Railway Development in
Britain’, JTH, III (1957), 46.

72
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

tors, they were able to direct very large sums, of their own and of their
clients’ money, into whatever promising project could be launched.
Many, like William Burchell, John Lingard, or John Fleming, were not
merely large subscribers but sat on the Board as directors of the
companies.41 These men had nothing to gain from cheap fares for a
lower social class, except where opportunities for adroit land specula­
tion presented themselves. On the other hand, a great deal of lucrative
employment could stem from a well contested Parliamentary Bill with
a complex network of urban properties on the schedule. ‘There were,’
a contemporary wrote of the Brighton line, ‘about twenty counsel
engaged, headed by six King’s Serjeants and King’s Counsel; there
was a regiment of twenty eminent solicitors, each flanked by a brigade
of parliamentary agents and a whole army of surveyors and engineers.’42
The legal expenses for this bill came to £100,000; and, in fact, if one
works out the legal charges, not merely at the Parliamentary stage but
also (and this is sometimes left out of consideration) at the land
requisition and purchase stage, the legal profession’s income from the
immense capital outlay on railways may have come to between five and
seven per cent of the total.43
The engineers and surveyors added to the strength of the railway
promotion lobby. They did not have large permanent staffs, labour
forces and expensive capital equipment to keep fully employed, like
the contractors, nor did they have sums to advance to originate new
projects comparable to those in the hands of contractors and solicitors,
but their careers were even more directly and personally engaged. Some
of them received enormous fees, like John Fowler, who received over
£300,000 for two urban projects (the Metropolitan and the District
lines). ‘Taking it any way you like,’ Edward Watkin wrote to him,
when he was called in to put the Metropolitan’s affairs on a sound
financial footing,*... time, speciality, risk, quantity, value or all combined,
you have set an example of charges which seems to me to have
largely aided in the demoralisation of professional men of all sorts
who have lived upon the suffering shareholders for the past ten
years.’44
41 These were solicitors who actually sat on the Boards of the Metropolitan, Man­
chester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, and Edinburgh and Glasgow railways respec­
tively, and also handled their legal affairs. On other occasions, though not invited to
join the Board, solicitors handling land purchase were large shareholders, and their
names can be found in the Subscription Contracts.
42 Railway Reform (1844), 68. MRL, Political Tracts, P 3411.
43 Law charges and Parliamentary expenses 1825-50 came to 5.1% of total
expenditure, or £5,940,000 (See Appendix 1.) Other conveyance and law charges
were concealed under the heading of Land and Property, and are occasionally
specified. At a reasonable minimum these further charges came to £1,250,000 or
just over 1 % of total expenditure in 1850 for the 26 companies examined.
44 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 94.
d* 73
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

There was no danger that this group of professional men would lack
a voice in Parliament. The ‘Railway interest’ was variously estimated
at different times to number between 50 and 150 M.P.s.45 Some had
already become directors before they moved into public life; others
had become M.P.s first and received the invitations to the railway
boardroom afterwards. ‘We have friends in the House who are willing
to join us,’ was the argument the Chairman of the L. & N.W. company
used for increasing the number of directors from eighteen to twenty-
four.46 Altogether they formed a very powerful group whose interests
were best served, not by internal changes of policy on fares, but by new
construction. A contemporary commented as early as 1846 upon the
way the elements of this group had already come together. ‘Many
of the railway companies would be better satisfied to have no
more termini in the metropolis, provided all others could be kept
out. I do not know that this applies generally, neither do I think
it would be the same with surveyors and lawyers, engineers and
architects; they would wish very much to have these stations carried
out.’47
After 1850, during the cautious years which followed the collapse
of railway share prices in 1847, the influence of the contractors increased
still further. The general public showed a marked reluctance to invest
again on the same scale in the risk-bearing Ordinary shares, which
carried voting control, but instead inclined strongly towards Debenture
and Preference stocks, shares which carried a safer, fixed yield. By the
end of the sixties Ordinary shares made up less than half the total
capital of all railway companies; fifty-seven per cent was in Loans,
Guaranteed and Preference stock and Debentures.48 This was sympto­
matic of the new financial situation in which railway companies found
themselves in the 1850’s and 1860’s; a situation which created an unusual
opportunity for the contractor. ‘For most companies after 1850,’
writes Harold Pollins, ‘it was singularly difficult to raise capital. It is

45 P. S. Bagwell, ‘The Railway Interest: its Organisation and Influence’, JTH, VII
(1965), 65-86, gives a table derived from W. O. Aydelotte showing, annually, the
number of members of both houses holding railway directorships, reaching its peak
of 215 in 1867. On the other hand, members might also have other interests, and in
the mid-1860’s 436 members with landed and 545 with industrial, mercantile and
financial interests could be counted. J. A. Thomas, The House of Commons, 1832­
1901, A Study of its economic and functional character (Cardiff, 1939), 4-7.
46 Reasons in favour of a Direct Line of Railroad from London to Manchester (1846),
15.
47 H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.600.
48 H.C., 1872, XIII, Appendix N, p.88. The preferential issues, on which money
could often be raised even by companies paying little or no dividend upon their
ordinary shares, totalled 7% Guaranteed, 23% Preference, 10% Debenture stocks,
and 17% loans at this time.

74
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

difficult to find examples of new companies obtaining their funds

entirely from the public.’49
As Pollins points out, the railway companies of the late fifties and
early sixties had to compete for investment funds with domestic
industry, to which limited liability was being extended, and with foreign
railway schemes. ‘You will find that capital is going out to India, and
all over the world seeking for employment in railways’, the Chairman
of the L. & N.W. complained in 1863, ‘What is the state of things in
England ? There is not one of the great companies in this country who
can raise sixpence without preference or guaranteed shares. There are
no proprietors willing to come forward to make a railway. They are
made by contractors, engineers, and speculators, who live on the fears
of the companies.’50
Their principal fear in the 1860’s was that of being left out in the
cold with inferior access and facilities at the great cities where the
busiest lines terminated. Consequently the same pattern is repeated in
each. In Manchester and Birmingham existing large companies executed
large extensions. In Liverpool, Glasgow and London the schemes were
originated by the contractors and engineers themselves, usually with
the assistance of finance companies. ‘Certain “Finance Companies”,
were formed’, the Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords
asserted in 1864, ‘for the avowed purpose of providing the capital which
would enable contractors to carry out their schemes’ . . . ‘Last year all
the schemes which were brought before Parliament by Bills more or
less looked to these finance companies for assistance.’51
T. C. Barker’s and Harold Pollins’s researches have shown specific
links between Edward Betts and the promotion of the West End and
Crystal Palace Railway (in which he was the largest shareholder);
Charles Fox, Morton Peto and Edward Betts and the London, Chatham
and Dover Railway; John Kelk and the Metropolitan extensions to
Moorgate and Farringdon Street; Peto, Betts, Kelk and Waring
Brothers and the Metropolitan District line.52 To these can be added
the combined activities of the consulting engineers and contractors at
other terminals, John Fowler and John Kelk at Victoria; John Fowler,
49 Harold Pollins, JTH, III (1957), 44.
50 Ibid. 44.
51 Ibid. 106. Other finance houses already well established also lent heavily to
contractors. The most notable example is the house of Overend, Gurney and Co.
which crashed in May 1866, and brought down the firm of Peto and Betts. Joseph
Firbank, another contractor, who was building the South London line just after the
Overend, Gurney collapse, continued to accept payment in stock which fell for a
time to 38% of its face value—a gesture of confidence greatly appreciated by
Samuel Laing, the line’s sponsor. F. McDermott, The Life and Work of Joseph
Firbank (1887), 41-2.
62 Harold Pollins, JTH, III (1957), 48. T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit.
126, 151, 142.
75
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Brassey, Peto, Betts, Kelk and Waring Brothers at Glasgow, St.

Enoch; John Fowler and Waring Brothers at Liverpool, Central.53
With each terminus the procedure adopted was the same; a nominally
independent company was floated, with a huge and valuable urban
site and a few miles of track, which drew a substantial amount of its
capital from those directly concerned with the construction. In some
other cases, as with John Hawkshaw, Samuel Smiles and the South
Eastern Railway Company at Charing Cross and Cannon Street, the
schemes clearly formed part of a large parent company’s plans from
their inception.54 Even here, however, they owed something to the
persuasiveness of the consulting engineer, and the contractor’s willing­
ness to accept shares for payment, and fell into a different category
from the straightforward company-promoted St. Pancras or Liverpool
Street schemes. It may well be, as Pollins suggests, that ‘not only did the
contractors build new lines but they probably stimulated older compan­
ies to build in order to protect their territories ... to take up new schemes
for self-preservation, as well as for meeting the demand of traffic.’55
In other cases contractors and solicitors were not merely the origina­
tors of the terminal schemes, but went beyond the bounds of what
might be termed bona fide speculations by specialised investors, and
crossed into the territory of fraud. Both the St. Enoch, Glasgow, and
the Central, Liverpool, fell into this category.
The St. Enoch station, together with the seven miles of urban branch
lines, cost the City of Glasgow Union Railway Company some
£2,000,000. The raising of such a sum taxed the contractors’ ingenuity
to the utmost and led to accusations of financial irregularity.
The Union’s Subscription Contract had undoubtedly been spurious
and in exposing it the Caledonian company’s counsel revealed that
there were important influences bearing upon policy of which the
public were unaware. The Union engineer James Ferrie Blair was quest­
ioned intensively about who was actually ‘to provide the sinews of war’.
Mr. Mundell (counsel for the Caledonian Railway Company): ‘Who was to
pay you then if Parliament was not to grant this Bill ?’
Mr. Blair: ‘Well I have never thought of that matter.’
Mr. Mundell: ‘That is one of the very first things that I should think of
myself and I should have thought you would have been equally provident.’56
The full story, extracted item by item, was that Blair, after conducting
63 According to Mark Fladgate, solicitor to the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway
company, Kelk was a shareholder to the extent of £100,000. BTHR PYB 1/107,
21 March 1860, S.C. on London, Brighton, and South Coast and Vic. Stn. and
Pim. Rly. companies. See infra for Fowler at Glasgow, St. Enoch and Liverpool,
Central.
64 Edwin Course, London Railways (1962), 45-54.
55 Harold Pollins, JTH, III, (1957), 45.
56 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 13 May, pp. 260-6.

76
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

‘independent surveys’ and receiving encouragement but no promise of

capital from certain quarters, had been introduced by his friend and
fellow-engineer John Fowler to Sir Morton Peto. Peto, Thomas Brassey
and others, offered to put up the necessary capital to get the venture
under way, some £400,000, on condition that they were made con­
tractors for the scheme with a guaranteed 10 per cent profit on their
work; and an extraordinary contract to this effect was produced by
order of the Commons’ Committee.57 The other subscribers of capital
were the Glasgow and South-Western and Edinburgh-Glasgow railway
companies subscribing corporately and not in the individual names of
their directors. Only £47,000, about 6 per cent of the total, was to be
raised from the public as ‘new capital’.
The Commons’ Committee, confronted by these facts, decided that
‘the mode in which it was proposed to raise the capital for this Bill was
not such as ought to allow the Bill to be passed.’58 After a week’s
adjournment, however, the Union Company was able to come forward
with what appeared a more satisfactory subscription contract and the
bill was proved.59
In Liverpool, John Fowler again, this time in conjunction with the
engineer Walter Brydone, with the solicitor John Towers Smith, and
the contractors Waring Brothers, laid out a series of short lines to give
urban access from the south to the centre of Liverpool: the Garston
and Liverpool, the Liverpool Central Station and Railway, and the
Birkenhead and Liverpool lines. This series of acts, obtained between
1861 and 1865, gave a new route, obviously tailor-made for sale to
the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway; and in due course
the schemes were taken over by that company, on the special condition
that the same engineers, solicitors and contractors were retained.60 The
nominal directors of the original terminal company, Mr. Birkett,
Mr. Reeves and Colonel Parke, at first represented to be substantial
local shareholders, turned out not to have invested a penny of their
own money in the scheme.61
Mr. Aspinall, counsel for the L. & N.W. whose long and profitable
monopoly of the Liverpool traffic was being brought to an end, went
to some lengths to bring out the curious nature of the arrangement.
He insisted that a Speaker's Warrant be issued to compel Colonel
Parke to attend. He lived, not at Liverpool, but High Wycombe, and,
when he finally appeared, confessed that the enterprise had, in fact, been
67 See App. 2.
68 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 26 May, p. 1.
69 Ibid. 1 June, p. 1.
60 G. Dow, Great Central (1962), II, 132.
61 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1865,15 May, QQ.1-55, S.C. on Birkenhead and Liverpool
Railway. The solicitors and engineer operated ‘in exactly the same mode in respect
to the Liverpool Central Station Railway’, Q.297.
77
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

proposed to him by the solicitor for the Bill, J. T. Smith. Where had the
money he invested come from ? Mr. Smith lent it to him ‘having previ­
ously obtained it elsewhere.’ ‘Is this it’, asked Mr. Aspinall sarcastically,
when J. T. Smith had been called, ‘that you, being solicitor for the
directors, have lent the money to yourself as solicitor for the borrowers,
upon the understanding that you as solicitor to the lenders are to look
after it and see that it does not get into the control of the borrowers ?’62
Colonel Parke and the others were, in fact, men of straw, employed
by the solicitors for the Bill, and lent money raised upon the contractors’,
solicitors’ and engineers’ credit. To add to the piquancy of the situation
the Plan and Section and Books of Reference reveal that one hundred
and seventy of the properties now purchased for the central site had
already been bought up earlier by Thomas Brassey.63
It is clear, in fact, that the promotion of urban schemes, though
partly a response to traffic demands, was also given a particular
impetus by contractors, engineers and solicitors, all directly interested
parties, and likely to profit from the stirring up of the larger established
companies’ dormant rivalries and anxieties. Indeed the process did not
escape the notice of contemporaries, though the law of libel compelled
them to keep to generalities. The Economist wrote in 1854, as these
schemes gathered momentum, ‘The engineers have a common interest
with the lawyers; they work together, and there has grown up between
them a well-organised system of co-operation, rendered more efficient
by the wealth and influence which both have each year accumulated.
To promote their ends, influential solicitors place their nominees on
the board of directors, and engineers of lines as shareholders propose
extensions which they will have to execute. With these two contractors,
now men of vast wealth, co-operate, and by their united influence lines
are fostered into being which it is known from the beginning will not
pay.’64 Again, in January 1865, ‘We have now made ninety-nine
hundredths of the railways we ought to make but still the “engineers’ and
lawyers’ railway projects” go on.’65 By 1872, when Captain Tyler, of
the Board of Trade, presented his report to the Joint Select Committee
on Railway Companies Amalgamations, it seemed a matter for impartial
historical record that the major companies ‘damaged themselves, not
62Ibid. QQ.83, 111, 126.
63 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1861-2, Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway
(Liverpool Central Station Railway). Thomas Brassey was acting as a trustee under
Joseph Locke’s will. He and Locke had been close friends and rented, at one time,
a joint shooting in Dumfriesshire. Arthur Helps, Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey,
1805-1870 (1872), 294.
64 The Economist, 21 October 1854, 1148.
65 Ibid. 14 January 1865, 36. The Economist later estimated that two-thirds of the
capital authorised in the years 1864-6 was for ‘contractors’ lines’, Ibid. 9 March
1867, 31, and H. Pollins, loc. cit. 103.
78
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

only by direct expenditure before Parliament, and for extensions,

branches and block lines, but also by too eagerly grasping at quasi­
independent lines, constructed for the purpose by ingenious pro­
moters.’66 Indeed, but for the forty two warrants of abandonment
which were granted after the general panic of 1865, there would have
been even more plausible urban extensions looking for a permanent
owner.
4. The effects of construction
The commercial performance of railway companies is a complex
product of many factors, and it would be naive to expect the annual
tables of dividends in Bradshaw’s Shareholder’s Guide to yield a direct
reflection of the heavy burdens put upon railways by their large urban
land purchases in the 1840’s and 1860’s.67 The fluctuating market
values of stocks, the numerous exchanges, conversions and issues of
scrip would ensure that any percentage dividend series which was not
repeatedly corrected and qualified would be an unreal guide.68 A direct
correlation between urban railway investment and dividends cannot
be shown statistically.
Nevertheless the huge sums involved, particularly in the 1860’s,
cannot easily be set aside; £2,000,000 for one scheme at Glasgow,
£1,000,000 at Liverpool, £4,000,000 for the four miles of extensions at
Charing Cross and Cannon Street, £2,000,000 at Liverpool Street.69
Each of these sums represents between and of the entire annual
national income in the mid-sixties; or translated into modern terms,
they were equivalent investment efforts to raising between £40,000,000
and £160,000,000 for each project.70
Moreover, it is conspicuous that those companies which plunged
most deeply into urban terminal schemes were also amongst the least
successful from the shareholders’ point of view. The Great Eastern and
the London, Chatham and Dover were brought to Chancery; the
South Eastern railway company’s dividend performance for the rest of
the century after its Charing Cross scheme was disappointing.71 The
66 H.C., 1872, XIII, Appendix N, p. 92.
67 Bradshaw's Shareholders' Guide, published 1853-62, merged into the Railway
Manual, Shareholders' Guide and Official Directory after 1863.
68 Michael Robbins, The Railway Age (1962), 114.
69 The references for these estimates may be found infra in the Case Histories.
70 B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (1962),
367. Phyllis Deane, ‘Contemporary estimates of the National Income in the second
half of the nineteenth century’, Ec.HR, IX (1956-7), 451-61.
71 C. F. Dendy Marshall, A History of the Southern Railway (1963), II, 342-3. The
L.C. & D. railway company was unable to pay its creditors, stated the six-monthly
report, because of the unexpected delays and cost of the Metropolitan extension
and the City and Victoria Station works. For the L.B. and S.C. see Bradshaw’s
Railway Manual etc. (1889) 91-2.
79
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Metropolitan Railway, which had been held up as the shining example

of a profitable urban line, only managed to pay its 5 % dividends by
skilful management of surplus lands; and the District only paid 2 % to
2%%.72 By comparison, the London General Omnibus Company’s
horse-drawn vehicles earned a steady 10 % to 12^% for their proprietors.
The contrast is so marked as to lead T. C. Barker, in A History of
London Transport, to speculate, ‘It is tempting to argue that the railways
bestowed the largest social benefit upon London by enabling it to grow
outwards, yet derived the smallest economic reward.’73 Excessive
investment in urban works is one of the factors which explain this
disparity in dividend earning capacity.
In the North, the railway company which played the most active
part in carving out new termini for itself in Manchester and Liverpool—
the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire—paid such poor dividends
that the shareholders ironically suggested that the company’s initials
stood for Money, Sunk and Lost. Even the 3 % which it achieved once
or twice in the 188O’s vanished when the company decided upon the
grandiose scheme of another new urban terminal, in London (at
Marylebone in the nineties). The ‘Great Central’ railway (as the M.S.
& L. was now officially named) never paid any dividends at all on its
Ordinary shares; ‘Gone Completely’ was the nickname given by the
shareholders.74
There remain the major railway companies, the L. & N.W., the
G.W. and the Midland, all returning dividends of five to six per cent
regularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the face of it
very satisfactory results, but in each case the General Managers felt
that an excessive amount of their total capital had been expended upon
terminals. ‘I asked our engineer to try and make a calculation of what
the cost of the stations and sidings on the Great Western was,’ James
Grierson, General Manager of the G.W. testified in 1867. He found
that of the £45,000,000 capital, £6,500,000 had been spent on the
terminals and sidings. William Cawkwell, General Manager of the
L. & N.W. estimated that out of his company’s capital of £44,000,000,
£8,000,000 had been spent on stations, the greater part of it before
1849 when sites were cheaper. James Allport, of the Midland, reported
‘as nearly as we can get it, out of a total capital of £20,900,000 we have
spent on our stations £4,250,000.’75 He later corrected his statement,
72 From 1863-8 the Metropolitan railway was able to pay 7 % on its ordinary shares,
and its financial success was, in fact, one of the proximate causes of the 1863 railway
boom. Then its dividends fell dramatically. The London General Omnibus Com­
pany reached its high dividends in the 1880’s. T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins,
op. cit. 151, 159, 175, 252.
73 Ibid. 272. ..
74 Jack Simmons, op. cit. 29. Michael Robbins, op. cit. 114.
75 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, QQ.13495, 11562-8, 13724-31.
80
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

saying that he had left out the new work on the London approaches
(St. Pancras and Somers Town) for which another three or four million
should be added. Tn our case one fifth of our capital has been spent on
terminals’.—‘You have probably not expended much more upon
stations than other companies have in proportion to the wants of your
line ?—‘No’. If expressed as a levy, in round figures, it would amount
to about 2s 3d per ton at each end, or 4s 6d per journey. ‘I mention those
figures’ Allport added ‘to show the injustice that would be committed
upon railway companies if they were prohibited from making a charge
for terminal expenses.’76
On average the three largest companies had expended 17|% of their
capital upon their terminals and sidings. If reproduced by other com­
panies, this would mean that something like £85—£90 millions had
been expended on urban facilities out of the total of £500 millions of
national railway capital invested. ‘The interest on the cost of these
premises’, John Hawkshaw pleaded in his evidence, ‘is surely a legiti­
mate terminal charge.’77
Here, then, was a possible solution to the heavy financial burden the
railway companies’ urban land acquisition had laid upon even the
largest of them. It could hardly be met by increasing the general level
of fares, many of which were limited by statute and were already far
too high in the opinion of many traders, businessmen and railway
reformers; but a supplementary charge could be made for terminal
facilities. ‘The terminal expense not only includes the labour that is
employed in loading and unloading’, James Allport claimed in 1872,
‘but the necessary adjuncts to enable that loading and unloading to be
done. You must have, for instance, a shed and land; you must have
lights, and you must pay taxes and gas, and, I think, a fair interest upon
the outlay upon the station; and I think that all those items should be
taken into account in fixing what the terminals should be.’78 During
the 1860’s and 1870’s the major railway companies, operating through
agreed Clearing House ‘terminal charges’, attempted in this way to
pass off onto the public a supplement, over and above their rate per
mile, to recoup the heavy expenditure on urban stations and yards.
In a sense they were perfectly justified; at any rate, in part of their
claim. For the railway companies had always differed from canals in
operating not merely as toll companies, charging so much per mile
for the use of their permanent way; but, unlike the canal companies,
they had become, almost immediately, the sole carriers over their own

™ Ibid. QQ.l 3728-9, 13725.

” Ibid. Q.14470. U.K. paid-up railway capital in 1867 was £502,262,887. H.C.
Sessional Papers, 1890, LXV, p. 680. For Great Britain alone it was £464,900,000.
B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, op. cit. 225.
78 H.C., 1872, XIII, Q.4430. My Italics.
81
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

routes.79 In most towns they arranged collection, but even when goods
were carted independently to their termini for shipment, the reception,
storage and loading was in company hands. What this meant in
practical terms can be seen from a comparison of two of the Great
Western railway’s termini at Birmingham: Snow Hill, an exclusively
passenger station, with receipts (in 1902) of £162,400 and a staff of
193 employees; and Hockley Goods terminus, with receipts of £225,670
and a staff of 1,000.80 At the passenger stations the customers, so to
speak, loaded and unloaded themselves, and the argument for a
surcharge was weak. Cornelius Eborall, General Manager of the South
Eastern railway company was, not surprisingly, one of those who felt,
in 1867, that a terminal charge should be made even for passengers;
but the Secretary of the Railway Clearing House made it clear, in 1872,
that the general consensus of opinion was to disallow terminal charges
on passenger traffic.81 However the terminal freight supplements were
‘blanket charges’, not published or defined beforehand, and used for
general railway purposes after collection. So long as the money to pay
for the urban sites came in from somewhere, the exact source of the
levy was immaterial.
In raising again the distinction between tolls and carriage, and in
making an unspecified addition for ‘terminal charges’, the railway
companies aroused suspicion and ill-will concerning preferential rates
and their carriage monopoly, and laid themselves open to endless
litigation. Actions were brought, in turn, before the Railway Com­
missioners, the Court of Queen’s Bench and the House of Lords,
against the Midland, the M.S. & L., the L. & N.W., the G.N., the G.E.,
the Lancashire and Yorkshire, the London, Chatham and Dover, the
London, Brighton and South Coast railways.82 Decisions in these cases
did little to clarify and a great deal to complicate the issue.
At first, as in J. & F. Howard v. the Midland Railway Company the
ruling was given that ‘station expenses do not form an element of
definite extra charge’; and although there was general agreement that
‘a reasonable charge should be made for accommodation offered and
services rendered’ the Royal Commission of 1867 commented unfavour­
ably upon the interpretation set upon this by railway companies, ‘as
authorising them to make additional charges for the expense of construct­

” W. Hodges, Law of Railways (1888), I, 440, 543^4. Canal companies were not
allowed to enter into working and traffic agreements or act as carriers until 1845.
Correspondence between the Board of Trade and T. Grahame Esq. (1852), 5-6 B M
8235 c. 42.
60 BTHR GW 4/281 pp. 13, 14.
61 H.C. 1867, XXXVIII, Q.16, 136 (Eborall). H.C., 1872, XIII..QQ.5564-5 (P. W.
Dawson, Secy, to Clearing House).
82 H.L., 1884-5, XII, 555-7.

82
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

ing sidings as well as of working them.’83 In the cases of Gidlow v

the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company and Berry v the London,
Chatham and Dover Railway Company further attempts to clarify
terms also led to decisions against the railway companies. In the Gidlow
case it was ruled that giving the use of premises was not the same
thing as performing a service, and the power to charge for a service
did not include the power ‘to demand a sum in the nature of rent or
interest upon the outlay for structures.’84 In the Berry case, Counsel
for the L.C. & D. pleaded that the L.C. & D. (Metropolitan Extensions)
Act of 1861 ‘was passed on the supposition that the Company had such
a power to charge for station expenses as they claim to have; for
otherwise the large outlay involved would not, they say, have been
undertaken.’85 In support, J. S. Forbes, the General Manager of the
L.C. & D., produced one of the earliest detailed break-downs of terminal
costing. The Blackfriars Goods station (at which the excessive charge
complained of had taken place) had cost £600,000, of which £475,000
was spent on the part appropriated to goods traffic. Wages, mainten­
ance, lighting and rates came to £25,388—this part of the cost was
conceded—but a sum almost as large, £23,759, was claimed as interest
on the capital outlay. The total of £49,147 was divided by the tonnage
in and out (213,211 tons), giving a justifiable surcharge of 4 shillings
and 7-32 pence per ton. Judgment was given against the L.C. & D.86
In the course of this lawsuit the further question arose as to what
service charge was allowable for different classes of goods and merchan­
dise. In the Berry case it was hops, in Gidlow’s coal, in others straw,
cement and builders’ materials. Surely different service charges should
be allowable for different classes of goods? And so a further round
began of complex litigation before the law courts, and attempts at
classification in the Clearing House.
Finally the whole legal position regarding terminal charges, built up
by precedent in the 187O’s, was thrown back into the melting pot, in
1885, by the most notorious of all the decisions on this subject, that of
Hall & Co. v. the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Using a
clause which occurs in the Acts of every other railway company in the
Kingdom, the L.B. & S.C. railway claimed for station accommodation
and the use of sidings, as well as for ‘weighing, checking, clerkage,
watching and labelling.’87 The Railway Commissioners had held all
these to be incidental to conveyance; ‘in no part of this clause is it

83 W. M. Acworth, The Railways and the Traders (1891), 304.

84H.L., 1884-5, XII. 568.
85 Ibid. 568.
86 Ibid. 567.
87 The Economist, 11 July 1885, 839. The clause was section 80 of 16 and 17 Vic.
c. 218.
83
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

possible to find any sanction for charging for general station accommo­
dation—or for the value of the station itself.’88 Mr. Justice Wills, in the
Court of Queen’s Bench, decided that ‘to give a man a roof over his
head is as much performing him a service as giving him a dinner’, and
reversed the decision.89 ‘We can only hope’ wrote The Economist,
‘that an appeal may be possible, and that the Railway Commissioners
interpreted the law more truly than the judges.’90
The issue of ‘terminal charges’ was also aired for twenty years before
the general public, particularly by the Liverpool traders and Chamber
of Commerce, and in Parliament, before the Royal Commission of
1867 and the Select Committees of 1872, 1881 and 1882. At the end of
this protracted and extremely bitter controversy, although terminal
charges were still legal, and still imperfectly defined, the important
concession was gained that terminal charges should be fixed and
published.91
One might wonder why the railway companies objected so strongly
to the public knowing before they paid what part of the charge was
mileage rate and what proportion the terminal charge. There were
three main reasons. First was the sheer problem of accounting. ‘I have
no means of judging how far the Clearing House terminal charges may
be taken as representing the actual cost and the interest of capital
involved at stations,’ G. P. Bidder, a director of the Great Eastern
admitted in 1867. James Allport took the same line in his evidence to
the Joint Select Committee in 1872. ‘You do not make an arithmetical
calculation, so much for carriage and so much for terminal?—Never.
As I understand, you have no actual register or record of how any of
those charges are divided into terminal charges and other charges?—
No.’ ‘It could be done, but it would cause an immense amount of
calculation’, Allport objected. ‘It would involve calculation at every
station in the kingdom, and those terminals would vary from time to
time. . . . Perhaps you have bought land originally at £1,000 an acre;
you increase your station at a cost, perhaps, of £2,000 or £3,000 an
acre, and that alters the cost of the terminals.’92
88 H.L., 1884-5, XII, 571.
89 W. M. Acworth, The Railways and the Traders (1891), 308-9.
90 The Economist, 4 July, 1885, 813. The Court of Appeal, however, had no juris­
diction against this judgment and Hall’s case came to establish an important
precedent to which railway companies could appeal to support charges for station
accommodation, the use of sidings, weighing, checking etc. W. Hodges, op. cit. I,
562.
91 By the Regulation of Railways Act, 1868,31 and 2, Vic. c. 119, section 17, and the
Regulation of Railways Act, 1873, 36 and 7 Vic. c. 48, sections 14 and 15, companies
were compelled to keep rate-books at all stations and mineral sidings, and on
application by interested parties the Railway and Canal Commissioners could
require a statement distinguishing conveyance and terminal charges.
92 H.C., 1867,XXXVIII, Q.17177(Bidder). H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.4416-35 (Allport).
84
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

The sort of difficulty to which the publication of detailed figures

would lead can be seen in the trial costings which George Findlay,
General Manager of the L. & N.W., submitted to the Select Committee
of 1881, separating his company’s service charges from its interest on
capital expenditure:—
London Manchester Birmingham Liverpool
Cost per ton of
working goods 2sll-08d Is 8-47d Is 5d Is 7-7d
Interest on stations
at 4% 4s 3d 2s 4d Is 9d 2s 3d
Nearly 60 % of the total consisted of what amounted to a rent charge
on the expensively acquired urban terminals.93 If this were made public,
and the exact amount of mileage and terminal charges attached to
each individual station, there would be grave implications. As W. M.
Acworth, spokesman of the railway interest, wrote in The Railways and
the Traders, 1891, such specific location of charges ‘would render it
impossible to bring in bricks or carry out street refuse over railways
which have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds per mile.’94
In other words, if the real direct costs incurred by urban railway
building were worked out properly and attached to the specific lines
and stations concerned, bulky, low-value goods would virtually be
excluded from many stations in the major Victorian cities. The interest,
for example, on the Huskisson goods station, built on the dockside at
Liverpool at a cost of £712,527 by the Cheshire Lines Committee,
would come to 3s 1 Old on every ton which entered. Tn any town above
50,000 or 60,000 inhabitants’ Charles Scotter, Goods Manager of the
M.S. & L. asserted, ‘the terminals allowed by the Clearing House are
totally inadequate to cover the actual expense involved.’95
Finally, as Allport explained, the statement of separate terminal
charges for different stations within one town would have the serious
objection to it that ‘you would have all the goods sent by the traders to
that station where the rate was lowest.’96 Faced with the prospect of
paying real direct costs many of the dealers would choose to consign
their goods to an outlying station (say Edgehill, instead of Huskisson at
Liverpool) and to arrange cartage.
When they came to count the cost, then, the companies themselves
were disturbed at the amounts they had bid to gain central access to
Britain’s major cities, and made every attempt to pass the charge on
to the public by a concealed levy. But the fact remains that the pro­
93H.C., 1881, XIII, 682. Table submitted to illustrate Q.14117.
94 W. M. Acworth, op. cit. 32.
95 H.C., 1881, Xm, QQ.14951-3.
9S H.C., 1872, XIII, Q.4424.
85
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

portionate capitals which they, compared with other land users, had
been able to deploy in the 1840’s and 1860’s, and the exact timing and
nature of their intrusion into the growing cities, enabled them to
establish title to urban land on a scale not paralleled even by the
wealthiest industrial or commercial users. By a unique blend of private
enterprise and statutory powers they were given licence to engross thou­
sands of properties into their hands in the central areas of the major
British cities during a critical period of their growth. These property
titles constitute the most formidable of urban obstacles. They are not
movable, except by expensive and devious procedures, and city growth
tends to be carried out, even today, piecemeal, by renewal or functional
rearrangement within the lines dictated by the underlying pattern of
property titles.
5. Operational policy
The implications for the Victorian city of the railway company policies
discussed under the last three headings were fairly well-defined. The
decision to concentrate upon territorial competition for accommoda­
tion, and the changed methods of financing and promoting urban
schemes, invisibly affected the scale, quantity, and even choice of site,
of railway building operations in most mid-Victorian cities. When the
bill was presented for the expensive purchase of five to nine per cent
of central land, the railway companies reacted by levying ‘terminal
charges’, and adopting a much less light-hearted approach towards
urban land acquisition. From the mid-sixties onwards most schemes
were completions or extensions of sites already chosen; and between
1870 and the end of the century far more interest was shown than had
been evident in the previous thirty years in the more efficient working
and control of traffic. Though the telegraph had been available from the
1840’s, it was not until 1875 that it was interlocked with the operation
of signals,—significantly by the L.C. & D. railway at Brixton junction
in south London.97 Between 1870 and 1900 more than one site doubled,
or even trebled, its passenger handling capacity with only a 40%
extension of territory.98
This more economical use of space by the railway companies is one
operational change in the later nineteenth century which has obvious
connotations for the changing land-use patterns of the growing cities.
It is much more difficult to pin-point equally narrowly any other aspects
of railway operational policy which had specifically urban repercussions.
Yet perhaps of even greater influence was the policy adopted by railway
97 Michael Robbins, op. cit. 101.
98 Clapham Junction, for example, where 225 trains per day had been handled on
a 15 acre site in 1857 was coping with 724 on a 21 acre site thirty years later. F.
McDermott, op. cit. 132.
86
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

companies concerning passenger fares and the development of new

suburban services. Upon the fares policy depended the numbers and
the social class of those who travelled regularly, and upon the distri­
bution of cheap and frequent services depended, to a certain extent,
the direction of growth in the outer suburbs.
The typical changes in the social composition of the suburbs and of
the inner zones, and the part railways may be considered to have played
as a separate factor in the topographical extension of Britain’s major
cities, are discussed elsewhere. In this chapter we are concerned
primarily to view the matter through the eyes of the railway managers.
What was their attitude towards cheap fares and the extension of
suburban travel? Was the tidal movement of people in and out of the
city centres, which became such a prominent feature of late Victorian
city life, viewed -with enthusiasm ?
Captain H. W. Tyler, one of the Board of Trade’s inspectors, looking
back in retrospect over forty years of railway operation in 1872,
expressed reservations on the subject. ‘The oft-repeated dictum that the
real interests of the public and of the railway companies are identical
is only true to a limited extent. It is quite true that by improving and
cheapening facilities for intercourse and conveyance the companies
frequently increase their business; but a maximum of profit at the most
paying rates and fares is or ought in the interests of their shareholders
to be their chief aim. . . . The object of company management is within
certain limits and under certain circumstances to keep the charges at the
figures which yield the highest dividends.’99 If any dictum did apply,
it was not the one alleging identity of interest between the public and
the companies but, as Tyler suggested later in his report, the dictum
that the object of company management had been ‘to obtain a maximum
of profit out of a minimum of services.’100
The creation of substantial new traffic by the lowering of fares,
whether carried out as a steady and coherent policy, or as a measure of
competitive expediency, could cause a reduction of dividends. Railways
did not operate, like textiles or iron works, in such a way that they
benefited from economies of scale as they increased their output. They
were selling a service which tended to be used most unevenly by seasons
and by times of day; beyond a certain point larger traffic spelt a
diminishing, rather than an increasing utilisation of their total plant
and staff, and an increase in their working expenses and in the adminis­
trative tasks of organisation.
If only the new traffic created were constant and sustained, and were
evenly spread over their network, and arrived at the prepared points
in the hoped-for amounts, then something like the economies of a
89 H.C., 1872, XIII, Appendix N„ p. 94.
100 Ibid. p. 96.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

production line in a factory would have been possible. In that case the
railway companies’ reluctance to expand traffic permanently by drastic
price cuts would not have been so pronounced. Demand, however,
had shown itself to be a very inconstant and capricious factor. It was not
that the companies grossly underestimated the capacity of lower fares
to generate additional traffic; they had already had unpleasant ex­
perience of what this might mean during the price wars of the 185O’s.
Apart from overstraining terminal facilities, price reductions on par­
ticular trains tended to drain traffic from other parts of the system; they
gave rise to acute problems in assembling the rolling stock needed for
the enlarged trains in the right places at the right times; and they
detracted from both the service and the takings on ordinary trains.
These were the practical objections raised by railway managers, and
the only effective answer they could see to the difficulties was the
excursion train. This, particularly if it were assembled, carried a good
load, waited till evening, and returned the same day, could make
available to the public startling reductions of fares, and still show a
profit comparable to the satisfactory levels, achieved far more easily
and regularly, on the ordinary traffic. Even so, it was open to two
fundamental objections. In the first place it was even more intensely
intermittent and irregular than ordinary passenger demand, although
this itself was highly seasonal, as may be seen from the accompanying
graph.101 The Great Western railway, for example, ran a large number
of excursions, but though the response at Whitsuntide and Easter was
excellent, ‘towards the close of the season our trains ran comparatively
empty.’102
‘Why is that ?’ Lord Stanley asked James Grierson, Traffic Manager
of the G.W.,—‘Because you cannot induce the working classes to
travel above a certain extent. They will spend a certain amount of
money in pleasure, but they have little or no occasion to travel on
business; and they spend their money generally at certain fixed times—
at Whitsuntide or Easter, or other holidays throughout the year. If we
charged them very much less than the ordinary excursion fare it would
scarcely induce them to travel more frequently. ... I do not mean to
say that they would travel at only two periods of the year. All railway
companies give them excursion trains throughout the whole season;
but as a rule, we find that the excursion trains towards the end of the
season hardly pay.’103
101 Founded on H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Appendix CD., p.225. Total receipts from
passengers varied seasonably between February and August (it will be observed)
in the ratio of 180:390. Some individual termini showed even greater fluctuations.
Appendix CF, p.229 gives the passengers booking out of Paddington, which show a
sevenfold increase between February and the first week in June. ’•
102 Ibid. Q.13293.
103 Ibid. QQ.13294-5.

88
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

The other objection, which applied not merely to excursion trains but
even to attaching third class carriages to ordinary trains, was voiced
particularly by the companies serving the northern cities. James Smithells,
Traffic Manager of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway summed up
the railway managers’ attitude in 1866 in his reply to the question
‘Would it not be advantage to the public to attach third-class carriages
to all trains ?’ ‘I should scarcely call it an advantage. Our district is full
of men who have risen by their own industry and energy, but their
economy is such, although they occupy a respectable position in life,
that if third-class carriages were put on with every train they would
avail themselves of them. I think that many persons who take advantage
89
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

of third-class trains ought not to do it, and it would be a boon to the

public in that respect.’ ‘When you say they ought not to take advantage
of the third-class trains, is it not a mere matter of choice with a man
whether he will submit to rougher company and more imperfect
accommodation ?—Yes; but still we think that when a man has amassed
a fortune it is natural to expect that he would travel either second or
first class.’104 A similar note, part indignation and anxiety, part humbug,
was struck by other managers. Six county families with their servants
had come up on the excursion trains in 1862; a Glasgow Baillie, more
mindful of his pocket than his status, made a regular practice of travel­
ling third class; the improvement of second-class carriages was ‘a sheer
gift’ to those who had previously been prepared to travel first.105
Complaints of this sort were symptomatic of the railway companies’
preoccupation with ‘the most paying rates and fares.’ These were not
to be found on the worn, dusty, draughty, bare, wooden trucks of the
third-class, ‘in winter an ice-refrigerator, in summer an oven of baked
varnish’, but in the padded saloon coaches of the first-class, with their
‘sandwich boxes, wine flasks, fur rugs, scotch shawls and languid
Corinthian passengers.’106 The third-class trains had to be run, of
course, under Gladstone’s Act of 1844; and tax concessions allowed on
fares below Id per mile offered additional inducements. Yet the basic
proposition put forward by William Galt remained unchallenged: ‘If
we carry 100 passengers at the highest paying price the railway will pay
5 %; if we carry 200 passengers at a much lower rate it will be 4| %;
if we carry 300 passengers at a still greater reduction in fares it will pay
3i%.’107 Between 1850 and 1870, there was a marked increase in the
numbers of all passengers, and particularly of third-class passengers;
the numbers carried per year and the gross receipts in each class went up
from:—
1st class. 7-1 million (£1-8 million) to 27-0 mill. (£3-3 mill).
2nd class. 22-8 million (£2-4 million) to 66-7 mill. (£4-3 mill).
3rd class. 28-5 million (£1-6 million) to 194-8 mill. (£6-1 mill)
The increase in the proportionate share of the third-class, the increase
in total volumes, and the relative cheapening of first-class fares, stand
out from these figures.108 What is also apparent, however, is that to
increase receipts by £1-5 millions it was necessary to carry 20 million
more first-class passengers: to increase receipts by £4-5 millions in the
third-class category 166 million extra passengers had to be carried.
Admittedly the costs of working first-class services were higher, but not
lax Ibid. Q.12996-7.
105 Ibid. QQ.13298, 12879.
106 John Hollinghead, Odd Journeys In and Out of London, (I860), 66.
107 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.8509.
108 H.C., 1872, XIII, Appendix M, p. 85.

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 BAILWAY PROUTS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

in the same proportions; and the short average distance and critical
volumes of the third-class traffic presented problems which did not
occur with the first-class services.109 This is one of the basic reasons
why there was no response in the middle of the nineteenth century to
Charles Pearson’s suggestion of a commuter’s suburb for ‘the superior
order of the mechanical poor’, or James Hole’s ‘model villages to
relieve the crowded seats of population’; and why, in the later nine­
teenth century, the provision of cheap suburban services was incomplete
and laggardly.110
Other reasons were given at the time, to excuse the railway companies’
reluctance to take The Economist's advice and ‘carry the multitude and
the commodities they use.’ The working classes had not time to travel,
Daniel Gooch, of the G.W. alleged, with some justification.111 The
offering of low fares was ‘an inducement for a great many people to
take advantage of them and take long journeys which they can badly
afford to do,’ in William Cawkwell’s opinion, ‘the labouring classes
spend a great deal of money in that way sometimes which would be better
spent at home.’112 Cawkwell’s concern for the domestic expenditure of
the mid-Victorian working class echoes the Duke of Wellington’s
anxiety that the railways might act ‘as a premium to the lower orders to
go uselessly wandering about the country.’
The Gooch-Cawkwell arguments, that the working classes had not
the time and could not properly afford the money to travel extensively,
and that therefore no regular provision in the form of low fares need
be made, obviously lost their force in the last quarter of the century.
In the 1870’s hours of work fell from the feverish levels of early Vic­
torian times. ‘A fifty-four hour week was as typical of the fourth
quarter of the nineteenth century’, wrote Clapham, ‘as the sixty-three
hour week was of the first and second.’113 The Bank Holidays Act of
1871 acted as a relief valve for the urban population, and brought new
annual peaks of popular traffic to the railway. The Saturday afternoon
off, considered by visitors from abroad so remarkable as to be dubbed
‘la semaine anglaise', dates from the same period; and most of the foot­
ball clubs and many music halls originated during the new leisure of
the 1870’s and 1880’s.114 Real wages also rose by a third in the last
quarter of the century from standards of living which were already

109 The L. & N.W. found that, even in 1871, 47% of its net profits were achieved
on the 1st class services, although this fell to 8% by 1888. George Findlay, op. cit.
254.
110 James Hole, The Homes of the Working Class (1866), 63.
111 James Hole, National Railways (1893), 151.
112 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.11619.
113 J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (1932), II, 449.
114 J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman's Holiday: a Social History (1947), 141-170.
91
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

beginning for most people to show less precarious margins above

subsistence.115
Under the circumstances railway passenger travel continued to rise;
rather more than doubling between 1870 and 1890, whereas it had
trebled between 1850 and 1870. Moreover the third-class carriages and
service were at last upgraded, and the gross receipts from this source
trebled, to £18.2 million, whilst the receipts for first-class actually
declined (particularly in the 188O’s) from £3.3 to £2.6 million.116 It is
noticeable, however, that the increase in receipts from third-class fares
kept pace with the increase in numbers. In a period when most prices
were falling markedly, there were no substantial reductions in railway
fares. The patterns of demand still remained highly seasonal, and linked
with the spending of leisure, rather than with cheap and regular daily
travel to and from work.
Between 1870 and 1890 the national increase in passenger journeys
only raised the annual average from 14 to 24 journeys per head per
annum. Even if all these journeys are assumed to be work journeys
(which certainly was not the case), and are concentrated upon the head
of each household, the figure still comes to only 60 to 100 journeys per
year, or one return trip per week. In the London area the average was
somewhat higher, but even if we take the detailed figures for those
arriving by local trains for 1901 handed in by the L.C.C.’s Statistical
Officer, they only come to 36-8 journeys per head per year, or a return
trip every four or five days, if concentrated upon the head of the
household.117
Annual takings for season tickets trebled, to £2 million, and many
companies, by 1890, showed signs of overcoming their reluctance to
issue season tickets in the third-class category; but the sums involved,
at typical season-ticket rates, only represent perhaps 100,000 to 150,000
regular commuters spread through the whole country. The long-term
contract tickets the companies were prepared to offer, if used for a
return journey every day, were in some cases actually cheaper than
workmen’s daily tickets; but the necessity for advance, lump sum,
payment ensured that these commuters were confined to the middle­
classes.
In spite of the impressive total numbers of passengers conveyed per
115 G. H. Wood, ‘Real Wages and the Standard of Comfort since 1850’, Journal of
the Royal Statistical Society, LXXII (1909), Table 2.
116 The improvement in third class standards was very slow. Charles E. Lee, Pas­
senger Class Distinctions (1946), 68. Receipts 1870-90 from James Hole, National
Railways (1893), 149.
117 Population of Great Britain/passengers carried annually; 1870 26,072,000/
322,200,000, 1890 33,029,000/796,300,000. B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, op. cit.
8, 225-6. The estimate of 36*8 journeys per head per year is from H.C., 1905 (Cd
2597), 8, 26.

92
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

annum, railway travel remained too expensive to be part of the daily

life of the urban working class, even in the late 1890’s. There were
some exceptions to this rule. In the services to the north-eastern and
some of the southern suburbs of London the railways can be seen
developing a unique urban role of moving the working class from their
homes to their daily work; but even here the provision of services was
reluctant, and a survey carried out in 1897 by the L.C.C. suggested
that only half the possible cheap-fare demand was satisfied.118 On the
southern routes 74 % of the passenger travel was still on ordinary, not
on cheap-fare tickets at the end of the century; on the northern routes
the percentage was nearly 80, on the western 65, and even on the
eastern 54.119
Railway services for cheap daily travel were also provided, but on a
still more limited scale, in the four major provincial cities. In the Glasgow
area the daily traffic flows differed radically from those in Liverpool,
Manchester, Birmingham and London, i.e. they flowed outwards
from the crowded central zones of the city to work destinations down­
river, or to Newton, Coatbridge, Paisley and Hamilton, reversing flow
back into Glasgow in the evenings. The Caledonian railway was most
active in the provision of cheap services, running 130 trains, with eight
thousand passengers paying between twopence and sevenpence per day.
The North British railway company put on workmen’s services to the
special station at Singer’s of Clydebank, and carried a further three
thousand per day at cheap rates to Coatbridge, Airdrie and Dumbarton.
The Glasgow and South Western company also offered concessionary
early morning fares for services to Govan, Springburn, Neilston, and to
Renfrew and Paisley; the two latter services, at 2d return for eight to
ten miles, offering the nearest approach outside London to the Great
Eastern railway company’s charges.120
In Liverpool, in the 1890’s, the numbers of workmen who travelled
regularly on cheap tickets was exceedingly small, less than five hundred
a day on the L. & N.W. On the Lancashire and Yorkshire line, although
the traffic into Liverpool Exchange station was heavy, it was all at full
fare, ‘ordinary trains being ample for all requirements’. Marsh Lane
and Kirkdale were the only local stations from which workmen’s
tickets (at 2-}d or 3d) were issued in significant numbers, but even here
the daily tickets were measured in dozens rather than hundreds; and
for the entire Liverpool and West Lancashire district the L. & Y.
railway company issued only 400,000 cheap tickets in the year 1898,
or about six or seven hundred passengers per day. The Cheshire Lines
Committee, the third major railway serving Liverpool, added only a
118 H. J. Dyos, JTH, I (1953), 12.
119 H.C., 1906, XLI, App. 6, p. 170.
120 H.C., 1900 (187), 305-8, 321-31, 309.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

further three hundred cheap-ticket travellers per day; and at Id per

mile return, its fares were not outstandingly low, even on the special
tickets.121
In Birmingham the L. & N.W. carried approximately a thousand
cheap-tickets holders per day, the Midland under a hundred, and the
Great Western a further four hundred per day, although Great Western
policy was directed rather to the development of contract tickets for
the middle class.122 In Manchester, L. & N.W. traffic, which was not so
much suburban as inter-urban in nature, brought in some two thousand
five hundred passengers a day on cheap, early morning tickets, from
Bolton, Macclesfield, Stockport and Rochdale. The Lancashire and
Yorkshire railway brought in three thousand three hundred a day, on
l|d to 4d tickets, from Miles Platting, Crumpsail, Pendleton, Heaton
Park and Failsworth; the Great Central two thousand from the Gorton
and Oldham line, the Midland under a hundred a day from Stockport
at a single fare for the double journey.123
Even the largest provincial workmen’s traffic at the end of the
century however, at Manchester or Glasgow, is unlikely to have greatly
exceeded fifteen to twenty thousand per day: a relatively small number
for cities with populations between three-quarters of a million and a
million, and not enough to ease substantially the residential problems
in the decaying inner zones during the period up to the Great War.
Cheap travel for the poorer classes in city and suburbs remained an
opportunity lost to horse-drawn omnibuses and tramcars. The shooting­
out of a working-class suburb served by rail remained a curiosity in the
provinces, and was not as common as might reasonably have been
expected even in the Metropolis.
To this extent the effect of the railway companies’ policy was a
negative one; the pressure of population in the inner regions of the
compact Victorian city was not relieved. Clerks and tradesmen moved
out of town, and commuted daily by train in numbers which were
relatively small in all cities except London, where a case can, perhaps,
be made out for the precocious development of ‘railway suburbs’. But
even there two passengers travelled by horse-tram or omnibus for every
one who used urban railways; although the effect of the early morning
arrivals was magnified to spectacular proportions by the rush-hour
bottlenecks at stations like London Bridge or Liverpool Street. The
great bulk of those engaged in casual and day labour in the markets,
the docks, in small workshops, or street trading, still lived within
walking distance of their work, and, if transport were required, used the
121 Ibid. 181 (L. & N.W.), 52 (L. & Y.), 113,117, (Marsh Lane and Kirkdale), 123
(the 400,000 tickets), 6-8 (C.L.C.). •.
122 Ibid. 181 (L. & N.W.), 247 (Midland), 45 (G.W.).
123 Ibid. 181 (L. & N.W.), 55-97 (L. & Y.) 20 (G.C.), 248 (Midland).
94
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

cheap-fare tram far more commonly than the cheap-fare train ticket.124
With their free passes, railwaymen themselves were the most footloose
of the working class, showing a predilection for the extreme outer
suburbs which excited Charles Booth’s attention in his Survey.125
Otherwise life in the outer ‘railway’ suburbs was for the relatively
well-to-do; or, paradoxically, for the unemployable flotsam of urban
life who had no work-journeys to consider.
For most of the inhabitants of the major Victorian cities the railway
journey was a rarity; the daily journey to work quite outside their
experience. ‘It is only the man whose position is assured’, Charles
Booth wrote, in the 1890’s, ‘who can treat railway or tram fares as a
regular item of his daily budget.’126 In London itself at the turn of the
century there cannot have been, on the most generous estimate, more
than 250,000 commuters by rail out of a population touching six and a
half million.
Once again, justifications for the fares policy were found, though the
ground had to be shifted, in the closing decades of the century. The
most persuasive, perhaps, were the arguments advanced by W. M.
Acworth. Cheap fares, he wrote in the Quarterly Review of 1892,
would go in part to subsidise employers as a rate in aid of wages. ‘An
American artisan considers that his wages should be sufficient to cover
the cost of everything that is implied in decent living.’127 Why should a
British artisan be encouraged to expect a disguised subsidy in the form
of non-profit making services by commercial railway companies?
Cheap fares would also go in part (and here Acworth raised a large
question, discussed elsewhere) to yield an additional rent to suburban
landlords, in whose profits the railway company would have no share.
The railway managers themselves, though they applauded such
rationalisations of their complaints, and even quoted them verbatim,
were chiefly concerned with the practical, day-to-day, difficulties of
operation which cheap or workmen’s fares would cause at the urban
termini and their approaches. The doubling of urban tracks and tunnels
would add to the heavy terminal expenses of which they had been
complaining since the sixties. The Great Northern railway, for example,

124 H.C., 1905, XXX, 570. 611 million journeys per annum were made by tram and
omnibus (of which 341 million were by tram) compared with 236 million journeys
by local train services.
125 ‘Nor is the system of free passes or reduced fares an unimportant item in the net
advantages, enabling the men to avail themselves of the cheaper rents obtainable
in the outer circle. This they have not been slow to do, no less than 81of the men
living in the outer ring of the metropolis.’ Charles Booth, op. cit. IX (1892)’, 349.
126 Charles Booth, op. cit. I (1892), 263.
127 Quoted in James Hole, National Railways (1893), 175. Hole’s own reply was
‘The question cannot wait for the conversion of the capitalist to proper views on
wages’.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

was obliged to spend over £1,000,000 upon suburban widening, in­

cluding the tripling of the Copenhagen tunnel bottleneck just outside
their station at King’s Cross, in the attempt to rid themselves of what
their historian C. H. Grinling called ‘the suburban incubus’.128 Grinling
also entered the lists on this issue in 1903 with the publication of
‘British Railways as Business Enterprises’. ‘Far be it from me to argue’,
he wrote, ‘that the working class should not be given all possible
facilities to live in the suburbs, but these facilities ought not to be
expected by law from commercial companies to their own loss. This is
brigandage in the form of legislation.’129
The London, Brighton and South Coast railway, to take one more
example, had spent £2,000,000 on widening at Victoria station and
objected to the swamping of their new facilities by extra trains run under
the Cheap Trains Act. ‘It will turn Victoria into an Elysium for workmen
and a Hades for the rest of the community’, William Forbes, the
General Manager, complained.130
Forbes was one of the few General Managers prepared to condescend
to details about the profit margins on his different services; Birt of the
Great Eastern, for example, merely stated they were so nicely adjusted
as to ‘about pay the cost, as nearly as possible.’131 The L.B. & S.C.
railway was carrying, by 1904, some 8-7 million cheap ticket passengers
—about 15,000 a day—on trains yielding receipts of 3s l|d per ton mile.
Ordinary traffic yielded 5s 4$d per ton mile, and the average running
expenses were 3s 6|d; so, for what it is worth, Forbes claimed his cheap
services, to bring in artisans and salesmen from New Cross, Honor Oak,
Brockley and Bermondsey, were run at a direct loss.132 Whether or not
the figures can be accepted as accurate, there can be no doubt about
Forbes’ anxiety not to have his profitable traffic, to Holmswood,
Ockley and other stops, twenty miles out in Surrey, choked off by the
suburban workmen’s trains. ‘If we are supposed to put on another
twenty or so workmen’s trains between 8 and 9 a.m., we simply should
not be able to accommodate anyone living 20 miles down the line.’133
It is clear, without multiplying examples, that workmen’s traffic
caused a large number of practical difficulties. It frequently required
double running (i.e. journeys with the train empty in one direction),
particularly for the very early morning service. Loading was also
extremely irregular, since everyone wished to catch the last train to
128 C. H. Grinling, The History of the Great Northern Railway, 1845-1902 (1903)
300-2, 354-6, 376.
129 C. H. Grinling, ‘British Railways as Business Enterprises’, British Industries
(1903, ed. W. J. Ashley), 163.
130 H.C., 1904 (305) VII, QQ.898-9, 907.
131 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10223. ••
132 H.C., 1904 (305) VII, QQ.860-70.
133 Ibid. Q.901.

96
 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

work and the first back. The result was that instead of running a
series of 600 passenger trains, on which a profit could be shown, the
last trains in and the first out were overloaded by up to 100%, and the
other trains made their scheduled journeys half empty.134
Perhaps the most frequently voiced objections, however, concerned
the passengers themselves, objections which were not always consistent.
On the one hand, reviving earlier complaints, it was objected that
people who had no right to use the trains took advantage of the cheap
fares. Clerks and salesmen who, supposedly, could afford to pay more,
used some of the lines, particularly in south London; on the north­
eastern routes some of the trains carried (it was claimed) up to 75%
of shopkeepers coming in at 6 a.m. to Covent Garden and other
markets.135 The hours which were originally supposed to ensure against
the intrusion of those whom the cheap services were not intended to
serve were obviously not enough. The Deputy General Manager of one
railway company reported indignantly seeing a party of revellers in
full evening dress using the early morning train. Yet there were only
two prosecutions in twenty years for travelling on a workman’s ticket
without being an ‘artisan, mechanic and daily labourer male or female’;
though informal methods of discouragement were occasionally used.136
The complexities of the English class system ensured that variable
charges based upon social status would be unworkable. How could the
railway companies possibly carry in their workmen’s trains, as was at
one time suggested, ‘apprentices, shop and warehouse assistants,
builders’ foremen, barmaids, barmen, cabdrivers, charwomen, checkers,
corn-samplers, commissionaires, coachmen, costermongers, errandboys,
lift boys, postmen, pageboys, poulterers, signwriters, sorters & etc.’,
whilst refusing ‘clerks, collectors, typists, copyists, draughtsmen,
recruiting sergeants, canvassers and telephone agents’? So the trains
remained open to all willing to travel at that hour and under those
conditions.137
The second vein of complaint concerned those undoubtedly bona fide
members of the working class who did use the service. Their clothes
were dirty, ‘and without saying anything in the least degree offensive
to the men, the condition in which they are after a day’s work at
bricklaying, or other work, is such that it disturbs the coats, at all
events, if it does not ruffle the tempers of other passengers.’138 The ‘other
134 H.C., 1905 (270) VIII, QQ.130-56. H.C., 1904 (305), VII, QQ. 422-43.
135 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.10102, 10178-80; H.C., 1894 (C7542), 8-9, on the
evidence of ‘an intelligent fellow sent by Mr. Birt’. They returned by ordinary fare
trains back to the suburbs after 9 a.m.
138 H.C., 1904 (305) VII, QQ. 18, 65. The L.C. & D. carried out the prosecutions,
the S.E. was known for its brusque methods of discouragement.
137 H.C., 1905 (270) VIII, Draft Report, p. XVIII.
138 H.C., 1894 (C 7542), 6.
E 97
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

passengers’, about whom Henry Oakley, of the Great Northern, was

expressing concern, were the better paying ticket holders who en­
countered the workmen on their way back, either in the train or on the
platform. ‘Of an afternoon when our city trains are going out between
5 and 6 o’clock’, explained William Birt of the Great Eastern, ‘they run
out of the suburban side of the station at the rate of sixteen in the
hour filled with well-to-do city men and their wives and daughters;
and it is not an agreeable thing for them to hobnob with these working
men, excellent men perhaps in their walk of life, but the language which
they naturally use is very offensive to most people. Again, they have a
rough, boisterous way about them; it is difficult perhaps to say that it
is wrong; it is natural with them, but still it is very annoying indeed to
a very large section of our passengers.’139
Apart from using language the workmen spat on the floors, smoked
offensive pipes, cooked herrings in the waiting rooms if they were left
open, cut off the leather window straps and stole them, and, if they
arrived too early for work, hung about the station killing time, ‘with
evil consequences’ for some of the young female workers.140 They had
a way of ‘taking a train over’ even if it was not full, and some of the
trains on the Tilbury or Great Eastern lines, were so crowded that, as a
witness told the members of the Select Committee on Workmens
Train, ‘you would have my utmost sympathy if you tried to travel down
by one of their trains this evening. You would have an experience that
would astound you.’141 They also took advantage of the ensuing rush,
getting on and off the trains, to evade payment, or even (the ‘final
insult’ complained the Caledonian railway company’s General Manager)
handed in tram tickets.142
The railway companies’ experience of cheap travel, when it came, was
not a pleasant one, as may be judged from the managers’ remarks. But
perhaps they could have overcome their disapproval if the fares had
been enough to show a profit.143 The expensive terminal provisions,
together with the operational difficulties already mentioned, made it
difficult to cater for cheap travellers. Myles Fenton, General Manager
of the South Eastern railway company, expressed this view very strongly

139 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10207.

140 H.C. 1905 (270) VIII, QQ.76-8; 1884-5, XXX, Q.10279; 1905 (270), Report,
p. XVII.
141BTHR MT2/57 (Workmen’sTrains Reports 1883-1905), p.ll; H.C., 1904 (305)
VII, Q.769.
142 H.C., 1905 (270) VIII, Q.188.
143 Their profits on the morning journey were marginal, but may have been higher
on the return journey. H.C., 1906, XLI, Appendix 77, p. 761. The point was that the
profits did not come easily. ‘The working men in the East end-look at a halfpenny
before they spend it. A halfpenny a day to them is a consideration.’ H.C., 1894
(C 7542), p .24 (Birt).

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 RAILWAY PROFITS AND THE VICTORIAN CITY

to the Board of Trade and the L.C.C. in June 1893. The South Eastern’s
stations (at Cannon Street and Charing Cross) had been built at a
cost of over £4,000,000. ‘These are circumstances which ought to be
carefully considered when you are fixing what is the value and what is
the worth of the accommodation that you get for workmen.’144 Other
companies also agreed that very low fares were ruled out by high
terminal costs, and either did not allow them (like the North Eastern
Railway Company) or did so under duress (like the Great Eastern).
‘The Great Eastern might just as well have thrown their £2 million of
money into the Thames,’ the L.C.C. were told, ‘because they cannot
under the present state of things hope to get a penny return on it.’145
One possible way out, which the Great Eastern directors had
‘seriously under consideration’ was to reserve the expensive inner
stations for those who paid enough to meet their real costs, and to
‘turn the workmen’s trains out of the main line onto some cattlepen
siding at Bishopsgate’, where a large platform would be set aside,
particularly for the return journey.146 To entertain this suggestion was,
surely, to admit that the central sites which had been acquired were too
expensive for the traffic which Victorian cities most needed in the last
decades of the century.147
The same impasse reached by 1900 over the provision of cheap
urban housing for the working class, was also reached at the same time
over the provision of mass railway travel for the working class; and in
each case the principle of subsidy was foreshadowed in the years before
the Great War. To the Victorian railway manager such a principle
could not be contemplated. ‘We have the two sides of the question to
consider,’ said Myles Fenton, ‘not only the poor workmen, but the
poor shareholder as well.’148
144 Ibid. p. 24 (Fenton).
145 H.C., 1905 (270) VHI, Q.289 (N.E.); 1894 (C 7542), p. 15 (G.E.).
146 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.10210-2, 10365-70.
147 ‘You do not keep the trains in London until the evening ?—The land upon which
our Liverpool Street station stands cost a million and a quarter of money; so that
you will see that land can never be provided in the City of London for the standing
of trains.’ H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10231.
148 H.C., 1894 (C 7542), p. 16.

99
 IV
Municipal authority and the railway
companies

1. The machinery for railway regulation

The Metropolitan area provided examples of the indirect effects of urban
railway building which were as extreme as any in Victorian Britain: the
benefits were of unusual importance for a town which had already
reached such huge proportions by 1830; the costs were rendered more
formidable because of the number and concentration of railway schemes
in the metropolis.
Although its problems may have been unusual, however, London
was the seat of government, and fell under the surveillance of the
supreme legislative body. Three Royal Commissions and several Select
and Joint Select Committees of both Houses analysed the problems of
Metropolitan railways in careful detail, and their Reports (to the extent
to which they were adopted by Parliament) had immediate and un­
questioned force. The large issues involved were not left to the control
of the Corporation of London, or the various statutory and parochial
bodies. If they had been, the railway map of the central London area
would undoubtedly have been very different from the one familiar to
us today. Not until the establishment of the more effective government
of the London County Council in the 1880’s would local authorities
in the London area have been able to meet the great railway companies
on equal terms.
None of the major provincial cities was treated in a similar manner.
In the period from 1830 to 1900 not one Select or Joint Select Com­
mittee sat to consider their problems, and only one Royal Commission,
that on Railway Communication in Glasgow, in 1846.1 Otherwise the
development of provincial Victorian railways was left almost entirely
to the piecemeal procedures of parliamentary Private Bill Committees,
before which the only municipal corporation, of the Four cities selected
1 H.L., 1847, XL, Report, pp. 361-6.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

for study, with locus standi to appear was the Corporation of Glasgow.
This was one of the special privileges of Royal Burghs under Scottish
law. ‘Supposing Glasgow were not in Scotland, then they would not
have the right of appearing’, Mr. Venables, Q.C., counsel for the
Caledonian railway argued, deviously, in 1873. ‘Railway companies
understand railway traffic and railway access, and all the conditions of
this question infinitely better than the corporations. Nor has it ever
been, as far as I know, claimed by any corporation in this kingdom
that it should dictate these matters to us. When the railways came into
Liverpool the stations and the lines there were arranged by the various
companies; the corporation appearing for the protection of the streets
and of any property which it might have which was affected by them.
With regard to the railways that have been made into London, no
public or municipal body has affected to dictate where they should
come.’2
Municipal corporations, in other words, were not bodies empowered
to tell the railway companies how and where access routes and termini
were to be sited; nor were they qualified to suggest what fares should be
charged or which routes should be chosen for developing traffic. They
had only the same rights to appear as other property owners, when
municipal property or streets were affected.
As the complex network of municipally-owned water, gas and sewage
pipes began to spread further along the beds of the urban thoroughfares
with each decade, the municipalities tended to be brought in on an
increasing scale. By trial and error the corporations learned to protect
their specific interests until, by the mid-sixties, it was only necessary
to instruct that ‘the usual clauses for the protection of the corporation
be added.’3 However, there is a marked difference between taking action
with such a limited and defensive scope and appearing, by right, as
official spokesmen of the wider public interest; and the English muni­
cipal corporations were at no time invested with such a right.
Nor, indeed, is it likely, even if they had had the right that they
2 The summing-up speeches by counsel—often more illuminating, and certainly
more concise than the Evidence—have not been preserved, unfortunately, amongst
the official Parliamentary records. They may occasionally be found, however,
amongst local collections, solicitors’ papers, and Select Committee proceedings
deposited by the companies concerned. This speech is in BTHR PYB 1/579, 27 May
1873, pp. 5-6.
3 Many examples of these routine considerations could be quoted from each of the
five cities. The Liverpool Borough Engineer was the only one (as far as written
records go) to inform his council of the practical points he looked for in a Railway
Bill. (1) No street closures. (2) Bridges to be provided for projected streets. (3) Foot­
paths not to be included in Limits of Deviation. (4) Parapets by railway to be high
enough. (5) Stations to be set back 10 ft. (6) No level crossings. (7) Lighting of bridges.
(8) Tunnels not to affect thoroughfares. (9) New sewers. (10) Corporation to be
re-imbursed for altering street levels. LRL, Corporation Minutes, 1865-6, p. 664.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

would, in the first decades of railway building, have been able to afford
the time or the money to scrutinise railway bills, or the legal and
technical officers to carry out the burden of additional work any
attempt to control railways would have involved. The records of the
municipal corporations in the early railway age show a preoccupation,
first with administrative and procedural matters, next with the pressing
problems of policing and sanitation. Accommodation, the building of
the borough court house, jail, and town hall, the methods of appoint­
ment of officers, salaries and fees, the procedure between council,
committees and subcommittees, the admission of strangers to meetings,
the inspection of markets, slaughterhouses and nuisances, the report of
the Watch committee, the disposal of sewage, and, later, the problems
of housing and water supply: these were the day-to-day concerns of the
municipal authorities, and they kept the corporations’ time and
energies fully extended without the voluntary addition of gratuitous
new duties.4
At first, it must be remembered, the municipal corporations estab­
lished by the Municipal Corporations Reform Act of 1835, did not
directly have many powers conferred upon them. They provided,
rather, the nuclei of effective local governing bodies, and could apply
for the transfer of the powers of ad hoc local commissions to them;
they could also, with one eye on the expense, apply for new powers.5
Nor could they even claim, with electorates limited, in the 183O’s, to
between five and ten thousand ratepayers, or 2 % to 5 % of their total
populations, that they enjoyed a popular mandate.6
It took several decades for their powers and franchises to mature,
and this was the very period of the first waves of railway incursions
upon their cities. Only in the railway boom of the sixties were the
provincial municipal corporations powerful enough to defeat or deter
the railway projectors. Before that their limited powers, their pre­
occupation with pressing administrative and sanitary problems, to­
gether with the possibilities for ‘influence’, ensured that the railway
companies could safely ignore or manipulate municipal action. So, for

4 MRL, Index to Minutes of Council, 23 October 1838-31 October 1900; Council

Proceedings, 1838-42, 1842-4. LRL, Liverpool Council Books, XVH, XVIII.
5 K. B. Smellie, A Hundred Years of English Government (1937), 130. E. P. Hen­
nock, ‘Finance and Politics in Urban Local Government in England, 1835-1900’,
The Historical Journal, VI (1963), 214-7. B. Keith Lucas, ‘Some influences affecting
the development of Sanitary Legislation in England’, Ec.HR., VI (1953-4), 295.
Municipal Parliamentary Population
Electorate Electorate
Birmingham (1838) 5,025 7,309 180,000
Liverpool (1835) 5,838 11,283 185,000
Manchester (1838) 9,118 11,185 200,000
Sheena Simon, A Century of City Government 1838-1938 (1938) 429.
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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

the first decades of the railway age, the only curbs to railway enterprise
in the provinces were not local, but were imposed by the central govern­
ment through its Select Committee procedure and (for one brief but
noteworthy session in 1845) through the specially formed Railway
Department of the Board of Trade.
The Select Committees suffered from three disadvantages which
considerably reduced in practice their theoretically absolute powers.
First, they dealt specifically and piecemeal with individual projects
which had been put before them by railway promoters: they could
reject the preamble to the draft bill, turning down the scheme in
principle; they could insist on clauses being added or changed. How­
ever, they could not themselves take any initiative in suggesting an
alternative, or (if two schemes were being considered) a compromise.
All they could do was to send the promoters back to think again.
Second, the committees of both Houses were made up of members who
were ‘interested’, in both senses of the word. It seemed most natural
that, when lengthy and often boring proceedings required time and
attention, the work should be delegated to members who, even if they
knew little, were at least concerned with the issues discussed. This was
the traditional way the House had organised its business, and, not to
mince words, it was one of the reasons for taking up a political career.
Not until 1858 did the Commons pass the resolution ‘It is contrary to
the usage and derogatory to the dignity of this House that any of its
members should bring forward, promote or advocate in this House any
proceedings or measure in which he may have acted or been concerned
for or in consideration of any pecuniary fee or reward.’ Even this
resolution, partly instigated by the growth of the Parliamentary railway
interest, left a good deal of scope for influence in a more general sense.
For although a Commons’ rule that Members should not vote on
questions in which they had a direct pecuniary interest had been in
operation, according to Erskine May, from as early as 1811, it was
established in 1859 that interested Members could still continue to
propose motions and amendments on any question, so that the practical
effect of the 1858 resolution was greatly diminished.7 It was still
possible for an M.P.’s speech to be described in the 1880’s as ‘the cry

7 H.C., 1863, VIK, Report, P.XII. ‘The Committees of the two Houses to which
they would be submitted would possess no power of making changes of importance
in the schemes which they were asked to sanction, but would only have the choice
of passing or rejecting them’. Even if a Select Committee scheme were proposed,
the further problem of finance would arise. ‘It is difficult to get parties to believe in
schemes which are laid down by a Committee’. Ibid. Q.1109 (Hawkshaw).
For the Commons’ resolution of 1858 see Commons’ Journal, vol. 113, 247-8,
361. For the Commons’ action, 1811 and 1859 see Erskine May, Treatise on the
law, privileges, proceedings and usage ofParliament (17th ed., 1964), 435-40.
103
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

of the distressed railway director’.8 In Committee the railway directors

sat at both sides of the table; the Railway Surcharges Committee, for
example, included amongst its nine members, seven directors connected
with thirty five companies, according to Samuel Laing.9 On the floor
and in the lobbies of both houses there were many members, par­
ticularly before the electoral reforms of 1867 and 1884, whose known
‘constituency’ was one or other of the larger railway companies. It was
even ironically suggested that the new era in Parliament should be
marked by discontinuing formal civilian attire and ‘the new force
suitably organised, with their proper uniforms, ticketed and labelled
in an appropriate fashion.’10
The third main disadvantage of the Select Committee procedure, and
one which Parliament constantly sought to put right, was its ‘amateur’
quality. Although the same names recur, and some members earned a
reputation as chairmen of railway committees, the personnel shifted and
changed constantly. No continuity of approach, no building up of
experience was possible. This was the defect which, more than any other,
enraged The Economist:
‘The more this subject is investigated, the more it will be found that the
defects of the system and the huge abuses to which private interests are
exposed, originate in the expensiveness and unfitness of the tribunal to which
such business is referred. Could the imagination create anything worse? Five
gentlemen are chosen who have been elected to the House of Commons for
reasons altogether different from any that can possibly be suggested as con­
nected with the duties of a Committee upon a private bill:—one, perhaps,
because he is in favour of the ballot; another, because he agrees with Mr.
Spooner about Maynooth; a third, because he favours the Birmingham
passion for paper money; a fourth, because, having just returned from India
or Australia, with his pocket full of gold, he was willing to pay for a hot
contest; and a fifth is put in the chair, because he is a respectable, though very
slow, if not stupid country gentleman, of whom all you can say is, that he is
far above doing any wrong, if he knows it:—and then, perhaps, the Com­
mittee is what is called “fairly appointed” from both sides of the House—that
is, half Tory and half Liberal, in other words, composed of members who, as
a matter of practice, if not of principle, are apt to be found consistently
opposed to each other, no matter what the subject. These five gentlemen find
themselves placed round a horse-shoe table; for the first time in their lives
called upon to examine witnesses, to weigh evidence, to hear of curves and
inclines, and to listen to technical language as intelligible to them as Chinese,
and to suffer under the excruciating agony of counsel trained for years in the
8 BTHR LNW 4/150. The cry of distress was from Col. Mellor, M.P. for Radcliffe,
who represented the Metropolitan railway company.
8 Samuel Laing, ‘Our Railway System’, Fortnightly Review (April 1886), quoted
in James Hole, National Railways (1893), 61. •.
10 Reasons in Favour of a Direct Line of Railroad from London to Manchester
(1846), 15.
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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

art of puzzling and mystifying committees so composed. There are no such

helpless victims in the world as these five men. What between astute inquiries,
witnesses, and sharp legal advocates, who apply argument, threat, persuasion,
and cajolery with the utmost skill, what chance has such a Committee? And
yet it is to the decisions of this tribunal, with “the room cleared”, made in
private, and though after discussions, yet with no reasons given, that the
gravest questions are finally decided affecting the interests of thousands. How
contrary is this to all English notions of determining contested rights and
dealing with property.’11
One outstanding attempt to avoid this amateurishness, and to subject
regional groups of railway schemes to a body of professional men who
would not be ‘helpless victims’, occurred in 1844, with the formation of
the short-lived Railway Department of the Board of Trade.12 Springing
from a recommendation of the Select Committee on Railways, Fifth
Report, in 1844, and from an initiative by Gladstone, the department or
board consisted of an enlarged staff of Board of Trade officers; Captains
O’Brien and Coddington, Major-General Pasley, Samuel Laing and
G. R. Porter, all treated as colleagues and equals, and allowed a vote
under the chairmanship of Lord Dalhousie.13 The following session,
1845, brought before them a record number of bills, part of the cres­
cendo of legislation leading to ‘railway mania’, and there exists a
remarkable volume in which all the competing schemes for each district
in 1845 are held under close and professional scrutiny.14 The main
principles upon which they based their examination of schemes and of
proposed amalgamations were, in their own words, ‘to secure the best
permanent lines of railway communication for the Country at large
and for the wants of the District’, to ensure that no ‘inferior or un­
necessarily circuitous routes’ were constructed, and to prevent ‘several
capitals being expended performing the business which could have been
equally well, or perhaps even better, performed by one.’15
The reports of 1845 were remarkable for their clarity, wide grasp and
thoroughness, but were discontinued after only one session, and the
department disbanded, putting an end at once to any attempt at
bureaucratic supervision over provincial railway schemes. The experi­
ment was abruptly terminated for two main reasons. The Railway
Department gave the main parties a hearing, but not in open court,
and published their decisions before they published their reasons. Since
a favourable report might possibly send up railway company shares by,
in one estimation, £20 per share, there was immediately a clamour by
11 The Economist, 17 July, 1858, 783.
12 Henry Parris, Government and the Railways (1965), 61-102.
13 H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.7297-300 (T. H. Farrer).
"H.L., 1845, XXXIX.
15 Ibid. 33-4. They advertised the five criteria by which lines would be judged in
The Economist, 30 November 1844, 1478.
E* 105
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

disappointed parties.16 'Amongst other things,’ T. H. Farrer, Permanent

Secretary of the Board of Trade said later, in 1872, ‘serious imputations
were made against members of the Board.’17
The other, and more inescapable reason for the short life of the
Railway Department, was that it ran counter to the exclusive and
absolute power of the Commons. In most cases the Board and the
particular Select Committees considering each project agreed, but on
several important bills they did not.18 What was to happen then?
Peel, then Prime Minister, made it clear that the Government intended
the reports only to be advisory and not to encroach in any way upon
Parliamentary power. He then followed up his words by himself voting
in favour of the Select Committee Report on the Oxford, Worcester and
Wolverhampton Bill, which reversed the Railway Department’s
decision. Dalhousie wrote to Peel expressing his mortification at action
which could only ‘overturn the authority ... of the Railway Depart­
ment and throw discredit on the officer who conducts it.’19 Peel wrote a
reply, on 22 June 1845, standing his ground upon the authority of
Parliament, but regretting ‘the unanimous decision of a Committee
which had most zealously discharged its duty, being overruled by
members, few of whom had read a word of the evidence, many of whom
were brought together by dint of private canvass, and were prepared to
vote on other considerations than those of the merits of the questions.’
The whole affair was, in Peel’s words, ‘the results of active canvass by
powerful companies.’20
Dalhousie suggested the Railway Department Reports should be
discontinued; the following month the board was broken up by the
transfer and resignation of Laing, Porter and Pasley, and the reports
from that period were confined, in T. H. Farrer’s words, ‘to points
of much smaller importance.’ For twenty years the reports continued,
so much ‘waste paper’, in Farrer’s opinion, until 1866.21 This was the
end of an experiment which was described as ‘a vigorous attempt to
guide the practice of Parliament’, but which, like the contemporary
Board of Health, ran ahead of its time.22 Nothing of its kind was
attempted again, and the Board of Trade confined itself thereafter to
recommendations on brakes and signals. Occasionally the chairman of
a Select Committee would ask the Board of Trade for technical en-
16 Henry Parris, op. cit. 82.
17 H.C., 1872, XHI, Q.7241.
18 On 23 occasions, out of 245 schemes, the S.C.’s decisions were at variance with
the Board’s reports. H.L., 1845, XXXIX, 19 et. seq. (Return of 18 July).
19 Henry Parris, op. cit. 85.
20 Ibid. 86.
21 H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.7241-5. Farrer’s remark about ‘waste paper’ referred to
the Board’s activities after 1845, and not to its operations August 1844-July 1845.
M Ibid. Q.7241.

106
 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

lightenment upon some point of railway legislation which had come

before him, and this would be ‘willingly given’, either in open committee,
or as atnicus curiae to the chairman behind the backs of the parties
involved.23 When it was suggested, in 1872, that the Board of Trade
might have locus standi on behalf of the public to give evidence in cases
where the public were not otherwise represented, the suggestion was
rejected by the Board of Trade. ‘I doubt very much whether it would be
desirable for a Minister of the Crown to appear in one of those arenas;
it would at once be alleged that he was taking a part with one of two
private interests; it is the most difficult thing in the world to separate
public and private interests in these matters.’24

2. The influence of railway companies upon municipal authorities

In view of the railway interest’s capacity to raise obstacles to effective
action even in Parliament, the extent of their influence over the narrow­
franchise ‘infant’ corporations comes as no surprise. By its nature, of
course, ‘undue influence’ is not amenable to the techniques of the
historian studying surviving written sources. From the evidence which
remains, however, it is reasonable to suggest that it comprised three
different species. First, personal bribery; the buying of an opinion or a
vote by the offer, either of money (usually in the form of shares at par),
or of status and power (usually by directorships, sometimes, as it were,
postdated). Other methods of assuring a favourable opinion were by
the granting of contract work or by generous purchases of property.
Although written evidence of these types of transaction is most difficult
to trace, some examples have survived from each major city, and they may
well have been as widespread as some contemporary writers suggested.
There is a vein of cynicism which runs through private papers on the
subject which was restrained in public utterance by fear of libel action.
The second way in which the railway interest influenced local politics
was probably more important, but even harder to assess; the possi­
bility of bias arising from the overlapping personnel of local corporations
and of the great railway companies. For instance, the list of those who
attended and chaired the shareholders’ protest meetings in 1849 in
Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool to demand the reduction of
local rates on railway property, reads like a council meeting; and,
indeed, the Manchester meeting was actually held in the Council
Chamber.25 There were many who, like James Bancroft, could doff their
23 Ibid. Q.7261-2. 24 Ibid. Q.7263.
25 Public Meeting of Railway Shareholders, (1849), Clarendon Rooms, Liverpool,
16 April 1849, Mr. Bramley-Moore in the chair, the Earl of Sefton present. Rating
of Railways—a Public Meeting at Manchester (1849), Council Chamber, Manchester
19 March 1849, Henry Houldsworth in the chair. Rating of Railways; a Public
Meeting (1849), 8 March 1849, Birmingham, Samuel Thornton, mayor, in the chair.
107
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

aldermanic hats for the railway director’s topper, and speaking within
the council, say they had authority to undertake or guarantee certain
courses of action by their railway company; though few could go as far
as he did in appending his signature to both sides of a document of
agreement, once in his capacity as a railway director and once as an
aiderman.26
It is difficult to know exactly what score to set by this overlapping
of personnel. In one sense it was quite unexceptionable and, indeed,
inevitable that the railway interest should be strongly represented
amongst the civic patriciate. Mayors and aidermen, bailiffs and street
commissioners tended to be chosen from amongst the entrepreneurs in
locally important manufactures and trades, and no one saw any
objection to this practice. Where else would councillors be recruited if
not from the ranks of the locally influential and successful? To admit
railway directors to the council chamber seemed a natural extension of
the usual methods of selection to which the limited municipal franchise
conduced; and it was even arguable that the foreknowledge and inside
experience they brought might benefit the municipality in its corporate
action. One can only judge them, if at all, by their behaviour on those
occasions when their civic and personal interests divided, and such test
cases are recorded below.
The third type of influence was probably the commonest of all, and
was not merely harmless but in many cases beneficial to the public;
the overlapping of corporate interests between the railway companies
and the municipal corporations. This was seen particularly in the
demolition of poorer residential districts, where the railways could
quite sincerely be represented as doing part of the municipality’s job
of slum clearance. In the middle years of the century, in fact, the
‘ventilation’ of the city, by cutting swathes through the foetid and
overcrowded slums, was taken as being a sufficient service in itself.27
Later, as awareness grew of the further internal problems of redistri­
bution and overcrowding which demolition caused, there was increasing
pressure upon the railway companies to rehouse (or cheaply transport)
the dispossessed.28 Yet although the railway companies undoubtedly
used every device to evade responsibility for rehousing, it should be
pointed out that even in Glasgow and London, where the most deter­
mined efforts were made by local authorities to re-accommodate those
26 MRL, Council Proceedings, 1861-3, p. 73.
27 John R. Kellett, Ec.HR, XVH (1964), 362-3.
28 LRL, Corporation Minutes, 1864-5, 7 December 1864, p. 36. ‘The Finance
Committee is instructed to afford every possible facility for the erection of Model
Cottages . . . and also to use their best exertions with the owners of land in the
vicinity of the Boro., and with the Railway Companies having-stations in the town
for the erection of suburban dwellings for the above classes and conveying workmen
by Railway to and from their work at cheap prices.’

108
 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

affected by urban clearances, the task of providing acceptably cheap

central housing defeated both the L.C.C. and the City Improvement
Trust. In Manchester and Liverpool municipal efforts were confined,
in the nineteenth century, to a few token schemes; and in Birmingham
demolition was accompanied by changes of land use rather than by
schemes for municipal rehousing.29
Here, and in such smaller matters as re-aligning streets, bridges and
drainage systems, is one field in which the railway companies could be
said to have bought approval for particular schemes by offering the
corporations a quid pro quo. In like manner, the influence and goodwill
of local statutory bodies could be secured; that of the Mersey Dock
and Harbour Board by offering to run the public telegraph gratis
through the Mersey railway tunnel (at the moment when the Board was
contemplating an overhead wire system of great expense and dubious
practicability); that of the Clyde Trustees by selling to them some spare
ground for making docks at a bargain price.30
Each of these different types of influence can be illustrated. Often
they worked in combination, but there was a tendency for the type
favoured to shift from the more obvious forms of personal bribery to
the corporate solatium in the last third of the century. Perhaps the
clearest way to show the complexity of railway influence at work would
be to take, in turn, examples from each of the major cities chosen for
study.
Manchester, amongst the larger provincial cities, provided a theatre
for the most extravagant and many-sided railway rivalries, and, perhaps
for this reason, furnishes us with one of the best examples of influence
at work. The first substantial bites out of the town, at Liverpool Road,
London Road and Oldham Road stations had all, in fact, preceded the
establishment of a reformed Municipal Corporation; and the extension
across town to join the Liverpool and Manchester to the Manchester
and Leeds railways, and to form a station at Hunt’s Bank, was author­
ised in 1839, in the first year of the municipal corporation’s existence.
The exact stages by which the decision was made concerning the siting
of the link-line and the Hunt’s Bank (Victoria) station are described
29 It is worth underlining the point that the corporations were defeated by the
same rising land values and cumbersome purchase procedures which so much
embarrassed the railway companies. ‘With the amount at its disposal’, wrote Joseph
Chamberlain, ‘the Birmingham Corporation might have dealt with 2 or 3 areas as
large as that selected, if they could have been secured against the exorbitant valua­
tions of arbitrators and juries, and the extravagant expenses allowed in connection
with them.’ Fortnightly Review, new series XXXIV (1883), 772. The Manchester
Officer of Health, commenting upon Chamberlain’s speech, reported in the Man­
chester Guardian, added his own emphatic endorsement. Report, M.O.H. 1884,
MRL 614.0942 M4.
30 HLRO, Min. H.C., 1865,12 May, QQ.143, 225. H.C., 1846 (212) XII, QQ.42-3,
212-35.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

elsewhere; but it may be noted here that the corporation was not
consulted, or expected to express an opinion, at any stage.31
Although the corporation did not, in fact, set up a Parliamentary
Sub-Committee to scrutinise (and, if necessary, oppose) bills affecting
the town until 1863, its General Purposes Committee did receive
advance information about the next major project, the trans-urban
Manchester South Junction railway, in 1846, and were satisfied with the
result of their negotiations.
‘Your Committee deem it only due to the companies concerned to
say that they exhibited every disposition to satisfy your Committee,
and to submit to all reasonable stipulations, and your Committee
anticipate with confidence, that when the railways referred to are
constructed, the inhabitants generally will be satisfied with the mode in
which the works will be carried through the town, and with the addi­
tional facilities for communicating with different parts of the borough
which have been secured.’ Although they were later disappointed by the
outcome, it did seem at the time that the municipal authorities had
secured ‘an equivalent for the disadvantages which almost necessarily
result from the passage of a railway through a town.’32
By the early 1860’s, however, the drawbacks of the M.S.J. viaduct,
and of the joint working at London Road and Victoria stations, were
apparent to the corporation. In February 1860 a public meeting of
protest was called, followed by lengthy and heated correspondence in
the Manchester Guardian. Aiderman Bancroft had proposed, in his
capacity as L. & N.W. director, that London Road station should,
with the corporation’s permission, be advanced to Piccadilly, and took
offence at remarks which the ex-mayor William Neild had made about
the L. & N.W. ‘With regard to the remarks of Aiderman Neild upon
the Board of Directors, he would answer that in point of intelligence,
experience, probity of character and every necessary quality the board
would not fear comparison. There was no love of diplomacy, nor was
there any such spirit of jobbery as that to which Aiderman Neild had
referred.’33
The Town Clerk had also attended the public meeting and received
other representations, which he summarised in a five-page internal
report to the corporation on 28 June 1861. The council took note of
the discontent expressed at the public meeting and expressed their
31 Infra Chap. 6, sec. 3. The first book of Council Proceedings, 1838-42, contains
no mention of railways, and the second, 1842-4, only passing references concerning
established lines. Only in 1845 was the General Purposes Committee ‘empowered,
if they think it desirable, to petition . . . against the proposed North Connection
Railway.’
32 Council Proceedings, 28 January 1846, p. 57. The clauses they, secured were 8 and
9 Vic. c. Ill, sec. 43-63 inclusive.
33 Manchester Guardian, 17 February 1860.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

confidence that the L. & N.W. and the L. & Y. railway companies
would now take action.34 This confidence was based upon an agreement
which had been drawn up between the corporation and L. & N.W. for
the extension of the London Road station, permitting the building
of extensive and enormously wide bridges, to pass a whole stream
of traffic over the streets leading to Piccadilly, and guaranteeing
road alterations at the company’s expense.35 This document was
signed by Aiderman Bancroft on behalf of the L. & N.W. railway
company.
In April of the following year, 1862, the railway companies an­
nounced that, though they had carried out the first part of the scheme
giving extra land around their station, ‘having made a careful estimate
of the expenditure which would be involved in bringing their station
forward to Lees St., they had come to the conclusion that they would
not be justified in incurring the large expenditure required to complete
the scheme’, and had abandoned all idea of applying for Parliamentary
powers.36 The Corporation’s General Purpose Committee intimated
that it was ‘much surprised as well as disappointed.’ The L. & N.W.
offered to pay £5,000 fine for not continuing with the scheme, but the
Committee regarded the agreement as unconditional and stressed their
view in several interviews with representatives of the company. ‘It was’,
they pointed out, ‘in consideration of their obtaining from the railway
companies an undertaking to carry out that great and much-required
improvement (the widening of Piccadilly) that the Corporation agreed
upon such reasonable terms to sanction interference with the streets
on the southern side of Ducie Street.’37 The matter came to a vote on a
motion that the corporation should take counsel’s opinion upon
compelling the companies to adhere to their agreement. The motion
was defeated by 33 votes to 14; a result which can be interpreted either
as a victory for the L. & N.W. interest or, more plausibly, as common­
sense reluctance to engage in litigation with so powerful an opponent.38
At the other station, Victoria, the battle between the two railways
concerned (in this case the L. & N.W. and the Lancashire and York­
shire companies) spread out from the station precincts into the road
approaches, where, standing upon its rights as land owner, the L. & Y.
company resisted all attempts by the L. & N.W. to make a joint
carriageway. The Town Clerk, attempting to mediate, found himself
interviewing on the one hand the L. & N.W.’s representatives, Aiderman

34 Council Proceedings, 3 July 1861, p. 181. Report (dated 28 June) presented.

35 Council Proceedings, 5 February 1862, pp. 70-2. Terms had been agreed in 1861,
were revised on 17 April 1862.
36 Ibid. p. 75.
37 Ibid. pp. 76-7.
38 Ibid. p. 80.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Bancroft and Mr. Tootal, and on the other the L. & Y’s chairman, Mr.
George Wilson, who had been secretary of the Borough Reform
Association during the struggle for the incorporation of the town, had
been offered the post of first treasurer to the newly-formed borough
corporation, and was also an ex-councillor and chairman of the Anti­
Corn Law League.39
‘Bitterly disappointed’ over Victoria, and let down over London
Road, the corporation next turned to the M.S. & L., which was attempt­
ing to secure a new foothold in the city.40 The General Purposes
Committee held interviews with the chairman and engineer of the
M.S. & L. and agreed, in 1865, to the proposal of a new connection
between Manchester and Liverpool, the Old Trafford-Garston line, to
break the ‘divided monopoly’ enjoyed by the L. & N.W. and the L. &
Y.41 What they did not evidently realise was that the Manchester,
Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway company had no intention of stop­
ping in the outskirts of Manchester, but planned a huge railway,
raised for 3 miles on a viaduct, crossing Deansgate, Oxford Street and
Piccadilly on arches, with a new central station, costing between one
and a half and two miffions. This scheme, though it was the obvious
and logical counterpart to the extension of the railway from Garston
into the city centre of Liverpool at the other end of the line, was
deliberately concealed, not merely from the corporation, but from
Parhament. ‘I should be very sorry to say’, Mr. Vernon Harcourt
remarked to the Commons’ Select Committee, ‘that my old friends and
clients, the Sheffield Company, ever intentionally misrepresented to
Parliament the condition of things. We are in days when piecemeal
legislation is not approved of.’ Nevertheless he must take strong
exception to the fact that, after coming forward with a scheme costing
£750,000, which they had represented as complete in itself, in the
previous session, they were now saying another £2,000,000 was neces­
sary. ‘Sir, if that is the way in which Parliament is to be dealt with,
then your control over the expenditure of capital on this matter is
illusory and must be defeated—the whole theory of the estimates, and
the whole theory of the allowance of expenditure by railway companies,
becomes a mockery, a delusion and a snare.’42
The Manchester Town Clerk, Joseph Heron, also testified that at
the time the Corporation had given its ‘hearty support’ to the line from
89 Council Proceedings, 2 March 1864, p. 291. 7 September 1864, pp. 292-4.
Norman McCord, ‘George Wilson: a great Manchester man’, The Manchester
Review, VII (1956), 432.
40 Council Proceedings, 5 April 1865, p. 102.
41 Ibid. 5 April 1865, p.101. Meeting with Watkin and Sacre.
42 BTHR PYB 1/383, 17 May 1866, p. 3. Copy of Commons’JS.C. on M.S. & L.
(Central Station and Lines), Bill, 1866, belonging to J. R. Lingard, solicitor, and
including counsel’s speeches.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

Old Trafford to Liverpool they had not known another station and
viaduct was contemplated; and that the M.S. & L. had deliberately
put down a bill outlining a modest butt-end terminal near Victoria ‘to
mislead the Corporation.’43 As a result, he had gone down with a
corporation delegation to London to see ‘a most important gentleman
connected with the company’, who had offered to meet any financial
demand within reason. Heron had turned the scheme down uncon­
ditionally. ‘Then, I presume, that it is really war to the knife’, the
gentleman (Watkin ?) had concluded. ‘I said “war to the knife, certainly,
if you attempt to go beyond Oxford Street”.’44
When the bill came up for a hearing before the Select Committee in
1866, however, representatives from the corporation attended to give
evidence both for and against it. Mr. Robert Falkner, a Manchester
businessman, asked to comment upon this strange state of affairs let
slip the expression, ‘They are a very squeezable kind of body, there
are some here to give evidence in favour of the Bill.’45 Mr. Denison,
Q.C., counsel for the M.S. & L., pounced upon the phrase, and used
it during his interrogation of Joseph Heron. ‘He said that the Corpora­
tion were a very squeezable kind of body; they are only convertible in
their views, not squeezable, you think?’46 The Town Clerk admitted
that the two gentlemen who had come to speak in favour of the bill,
Councillors John Marshall, an auctioneer, of Hulme Ward, and William
Booth, a warehouseman, represented 75,000 inhabitants, but on the
other hand six councillors who had been approached had stayed away.
‘I am quite sure that if they could have been persuaded to come up
here and give evidence, they would have been, from what I know of the
influence used to bring up the two gentlemen.’47
During the Whitsun recess, which interrupted the Parliamentary
Committee’s sittings, a corporation Committee for General Purposes
and for Urgent and Special Business was hurriedly called in Manchester
at the request of Messrs Marshall and Booth, who had raced back to
move an amendment reversing the corporation’s motion to oppose the
M.S. & L. The amendment was thrown out by 22 votes to 6, the Town
Clerk reported, when the Select Committee resumed its sittings. ‘The
small number dissenting’, Heron remarked, ‘is a matter of some surprise,
I think, to those who know the ramifications of railway companies.’
Mr. Burke, Denison’s junior, did not let the innuendo pass unchallenged.
‘Were any of these gentlemen who voted for it (the resolution to oppose
the M.S. & L.) North Western shareholders?—! really have not the

43 Ibid. QQ.2996-3OO3.
44 Ibid. Q.3OO4.
45 Ibid. Q.329.
46 Ibid. Q.3066.
47 Ibid. QQ.619-54, 3068-9.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

slightest idea. Will you undertake to say that they are not?—No; I
have no knowledge about it.’48
Denison himself concentrated especially, in his summing up, upon
the hostile evidence offered by Messrs. Fowler, Barber and Bancroft.
Mr. Robinson Fowler, a stipendiary magistrate, had given evidence
upon the danger of accidents caused by the sudden transition to dark­
ness and noise in the tunnels formed by the bridges near Victoria
station. ‘Having one nuisance I would do as much as I could to prevent
the second.’ ‘We are pleased,’ Denison remarked sarcastically, ‘that
Mr. Fowler, struck with artistic objection at having to drive under the
bridge at Piccadilly, has been brought up to the less murky atmosphere
of London, where that petition was signed on Derby Day.’49 Mr.
Robert Barber, High Sheriff of Cheshire, who had objected to the
scheme as ‘cutting up the town very much,’ was given similar shrift.
‘You bought land under an idea that the railway would come?—It was
represented to me by an agency that the railway would improve
it.’50 Unfortunately, he had bought the wrong land for the M.S.
& L. scheme, which only planned a through-route raised on a
viaduct.
James Bancroft, no longer an aiderman, had also given evidence
before the Select Committee roundly condemning the scheme. ‘It would
disfigure the only part of Manchester worth notice.’51 Though taciturn
and wary, he was forced by Denison into making some revealing and
damaging admissions: ‘I believe it is the practice of the London and
North Western company to divide their direction into various com­
mittees who look after the interests of various districts?—Yes. Is it
part of your province and speciality to look after the Manchester
district?—Amongst others.’52
In spite of all the weight of evidence against the scheme, the Com­
mons authorised it; and only after the same evidence had been repeated
and expanded in the Lords was the preamble rejected. The M.S. & L.
withdrew, and did not return for six years; and then with a much more
modest scheme (the present Manchester Central) in conjunction with
the Midland and Great Northern railways.53
The rejection of the M.S. & L. bill in 1866 has been described in
some detail because, apart from the scheme’s intrinsic interest—it was
the largest railway scheme ever proposed in Manchester and would

i3 Ibid. QQ.2983, 3370-81.

49 Ibid. Q.3367 (Fowler). 29 May, p. 19 (Denison).
60 Ibid. Q.2549.
61 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1866, 15 May, pp. 167-8, S.C. on M.S. & L. (Central
Station and Lines).
62 BTHR PYB 1/383, QQ.2043-4. *
53 Infra. Chap. 6, sec. 3.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

have greatly altered the central district—the veil of official discretion

which usually covered the informal operations of railway influence was
lifted for a moment. The episode also reveals the not insubstantial
weight given to the opinion of corporate bodies. It was, finally, the
corporation’s determined (if not unanimous) opposition which frus­
trated the scheme. It also reveals the range of personal susceptibility to
influence amongst those concerned with local government. At one
extreme, the town clerk, a professional servant of the corporation,
tried to steer an impartial course through a long and complex series of
events. In the centre, the great local figures, like Henry Houldsworth,
who when put to the test were inclined to recall that the railways were
one of their interests which required, if not an open vote, at least a
discreet absence or abstention. At the other extreme were councillors
Marshall and Booth and Aiderman Bancroft, men whose views were
as predictable as those of the paid advocates who argued the bill before
the Select Committees, and for the same reasons.
In Glasgow, in the same decade, a similar struggle was taking place
over the Union Railway Company bill (1864), which authorised the
first river crossing and central station. Once again, to condense a long
story, the same general features can be discerned. Playing the role of
railway spokesmen, for their different reasons, were the Lord Provosts,
Peter Clouston, James Lumsden and James Campbell. Clouston, an
insurance broker, and Provost from 1861 to 1863, took the unusual
step of appearing as ‘the chief witness’ on behalf of the Union company,
even though the corporation had declared its opposition ‘on all scores’.54
The drift of his argument was that the demolition of the slum Wynds
by the Union company would be of such merit in ‘opening up’ the city,
as to override all other objections.55*This sanitary argument was a
strong one, and may well have been advanced sincerely by Clouston;
but his behaviour nine years later, when he appeared again before a
Select Committee, does little to suggest this. He was by now a director
of the Union Railway Company, and explained their demolition plans
in a manner which was so evasive that the chairman intervened. ‘We
have had that expression several times—“reconstitute” the area—what
is the meaning of it?—The reconstitution, as I understand it, means,
first of all that all these places should be cleared out, and after that the
space should either be used for railway purposes or for building pur­
poses, whichever is most suitable and required.’58 The building would
not include rehousing the large number—six thousand according to the
official return under Standing Order 191, twenty thousand according

54 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 12 May, p. 45, S.C. on Union Railway.

55 Loc. cit. p.33.
5‘BTHR PYB 1/579, 17 May 1873, Q.81.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to unofficial estimates—who had been rooted out by the scheme. ‘I do

not think there is a great desire to make houses for the poor in that
locality very much,’ Peter Clouston observed.57
James Lumsden, Lord Provost from 1866 to 1869, also agreed that
no obligation fell on the railway companies to re-house. ‘There may
be exceptional cases, but I think upon the whole they have been driven
out into healthier parts’; an extraordinary observation from an official
of a corporation which within the next decade was confronted by a
problem of housing densities unequalled in Britain.58 In 1870, upon
leaving the corporation, Lumsden became chairman of the Glasgow
and South Western Railway Company, co-sponsor of the St. Enoch
terminal scheme. Lumsden’s motives and conduct during this period
were subjected to critical examination by Mr. Denison Q.C. ‘Mr.
Lumsden comes here under the garment or garb (I was going to say
under the disguise—but I will not say so) of his three years’ patriotism,
as Provost of Glasgow, to talk of public interests.’59 Yet he had, whilst
he was on the Parliamentary Bills Committee of the Corporation of
Glasgow, suggested a scheme to the Caledonian Company that they
should merge with his own company, the Glasgow and South Western;
a scheme which, whatever its merits to the two companies concerned,
would certainly be ruled to be against the interest of the general public.
‘I asked him whether he did not feel that it was his duty to tell the
Committee of the Town Council, on which he was specially appointed
to look after Parliamentary Bills, something of this curious scheme?
No it was not. Well, of course, he has his own view of duty; but I
thought he was put upon that Commitee for the purpose of looking after
the interests of the City of Glasgow.’ Instead, Denison put it to Lums­
den, ‘You have three years’ patriotism and then you relapse into
railroadism?—Yes.’60
James Campbell, a warehouseman and another ex-provost, gave
evidence criticising the existing goods station arrangements which the
proposed College or High Street terminal would augment. Part of the
proposed scheme involved the removal of the University of Glasgow
from its old site in the High Street to a new West-end location at
Gilmorehill, where the land was owned by the Gilmorehill Land
Company, chairman and chief shareholder the same James Campbell.
Other lands either purchased or affected by the railway schemes

” Ibid. 13 May, 1873, Q.13.

68 Ibid. 14 May, QQ.736-7.
69 Railway Pamphlet, B.M. 8235 bbbl (2), pp. 20-1.
ou Ibid. p. 19. Although Lumsden was made chairman of the G. & S.W. company
in 1870, the year after he retired as Lord Provost, this could,hardly be called a
‘relapse’ since he had already been made a director of the G. & S.W. in 1849.
Memoirs and Portraits of 100 Glasgow Men (Glasgow 1886) II, 183.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

belonged to James Lumsden and Andrew Orr, another ex-provost.61

It is possible, of course, that these men found it easy in their minds
to distinguish always the single-minded and impartial conduct of
municipal objectives from the pursuit of their private interests, or that
they genuinely believed the two coincided, and that what was good for
the Glasgow and South Western Railway Company was good for
Glasgow. Whatever their motivation may have been, their resulting
actions and public statements fitted the railway companies’ intentions
perfectly, and the railway companies were not ungrateful.
The Lord Provosts were not the only influential local people to throw
in their weight with the Union Company. Charles and John Tennant,
Walter MacFarlane, William Stirling, and other local businessmen
were prepared to lend their names, but not their money, and to act as a
‘front’ for the contractors Betts, Brassey, and Peto, who really stood
behind the scheme.62 One can readily appreciate that the prospect of
improved transport facilities, particularly those connected with the
new College Goods station, might in itself be enough to persuade local
businessmen—especially if like the Tennants they were concerned with
the heavy chemical industry—to practise a little harmless deceit on the
public. Less easy to fit into this category was the man whose name
headed the list of promoters, the local M.P., Walter Buchanan. Though
he was named as a director in the prospectus, counsel for the Caledonian
Railway Company alleged he had taken no shares and preferred
another scheme.63 To rebut this the Union company, ten days later, prod­
uced Buchanan to testify to the Select Committee that he had authorised
his name to be used, to give the impression of respectability and local
participation, but only after receiving ‘a guarantee from the promoters
that he should be held harmless if he lent his name for the scheme.’64
A rider should be added to these observations. The picture in
Glasgow was, in fact, a great deal more complicated than this simple
example may suggest. As in Manchester, the Council was the arena
for combat between several companies, all of whom had their spokes­
men in local government; and it, also, went through an internal con­
stitutional crisis, ‘the little Whitsuntide Revolution’, as counsel called
it.’65 This crisis was precipitated by the action of Messrs. Muir and
Craig, who called a public meeting to propose that an alternative North
British railway extension scheme in George Square should be preferred,
61 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 12 May p. 107. Infra Chapter 8, sections 1 and 3
(Lumsden and Orr). Andrew Orr was Provost 1854-7, Chairman of the G. & S.W.
1849-70; Peter Clouston was Provost 1860-3, Chairman 1879-83; James Lumsden
was Provost 1863-6, Chairman 1870-9.
62 Ibid. 12 May, pp. 56-9.
63 Ibid. 13 May, p. 269.
61 Ibid. 23 May, p. 243.
65 Ibid. 23 May, p. 207.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and by Councillor Dreghorn, chairman of the Parliamentary Bills

Committee of the Corporation, which voted by 6 to 3 to disaffirm the
action of the Lord Provost and of the delegation accompanying him
to Westminster, and asked for delay whilst the Caledonian counter­
proposal was considered.66 So the Lord Provost, John Blackie, found
his authority questioned from two sides, by a committee of the corpora­
tion, and by a public meeting, one inspired by the Caledonian, the
other by the North British railway companies; and had to choose to
ignore the former action as unconstitutional, and to ride out the latter.
Blackie himself was possibly the most active and public spirited of
all Glasgow’s nineteenth century Lord Provosts. He had no connections
of any sort with the railway interest, and from his record with the City
Improvement Trust alone, it is clear that he had the general interests of
the inhabitants of central Glasgow very much at heart. Yet he fell
victim to one of the more complicated forms of influence referred to
earlier, and accepted what one might call a ‘corporate bribe’, in the
form of a detailed ten-page safeguard by the Union company to the
corporation, and the purchase from the corporation for £42,000 of
derelict property for which the corporation had just paid £19,675.67
Although, by this deal, Blackie made a double profit for the rate­
payers—the derelict and insanitary houses were removed by the railway
company and twice the amount originally expended was made available
for the purchase of similar slum properties out of the line of railway
advance—it might be argued that, by failing to oppose the preamble
of the Union bill, he compromised over some of the larger issues.
Certainly it was suggested, in so many words, that the corporation had
been ‘bought off by some adventurous gentlemen, strangers, con­
tractors and others.’68
As far as the compromise was concerned it might well have been
felt that some sort of settlement was inevitable sooner or later with one
of the three great companies poised to invade the central district,
unless the corporation was to be kept indefinitely, year after year, to
the expense of scrutinising bills, petitioning Parliament and employing
counsel. Yet, although the St. Enoch station project was a large one,
and although undertakings were given that it would be open to all
comers, in fact the Caledonian rejected all the terms offered for admis­
sion by its entrenched rivals as ‘paying for the whip with which they
meant to scourge us’, and kept up constant pressure for an equally
large station of its own, reduplicating the St. Enoch facilities.69 By
Ibid. 23 May, pp. 10-26, 141-8, 152.
67 Ibid. 23 May, pp. 91-100.
68 Ibid. 12 May, pp. 46-8, BTHR PYB 1/579, 6 May 1873, p/ 5.
69 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1873, 6 May, pp. 63-5, S.C. on Caledonian Railway Glas­
gow Central Station.

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 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

1873, the corporation was reduced to petitioning ‘to be protected from

the great expense they are yearly put to in protecting the interests of
the city against schemes promoted by the different companies in
antagonism to each other, for their own purposes rather than that of
affording and completing that accommodation which the public
interests require.’70
The case of the Union railway station at St. Enoch’s in Glasgow
illustrates the wide variety of weapons in the railway companies’
armoury. Pressure could be applied by the threat of tiresome and
expensive litigation, by ‘corporate bribery’, by the offer of directorships,
of legal and surveying retainers, of contract work, or of shares under
guaranteed terms.
The same influences can be seen at work in Liverpool. Unlike the
other municipal authorities, Liverpool corporation had retained a grip
on the common lands, and was one of the largest landowners in the
borough. As described below in the Case Histories, the railway com­
panies found themselves, from the building of Lime Street station
onwards, concerned with the corporation as a direct vendor; a relation­
ship which helped to smooth over many differences which might
otherwise have arisen. Mr. Richard Earle, agent for the Stanley family,
spoke his mind on the matter when he was approached by the corpora­
tion Finance Committee over the purchase of land for a borough gaol.
He did not feel that he would be performing his duty as agent to the
Earl of Derby if he did not protest at the corporation selling land to the
railway companies with one hand and buying it from the Derby estate
with the other. ‘It certainly was never any intention to sell either to the
county for the Lunatic Asylum, or to the Corporation for the Gaol,
any portion of this land which could be required by the Railways,
because they are obviously better paymasters than either one or the
other.’
‘I merely allude to this to insist that Lord Derby and not the Cor­
poration is entitled to the enhanced price obtainable from the Rail­
ways.’71
The connection over land dealings was even closer than Earle
suggested, for apart from the corporate interest, there were two strong
personal ties of interest between the members of the corporation and
the railways. The first of these went back to the earliest of all urban
railway projects, the abortive Liverpool and Manchester scheme of
1824. On 2 June 1824 the council had instructed Charles Law­
rence, the mayor, to communicate with Mr. Moss, the chairman of the
projected railway. By the beginning of the following year Moss had
demoted himself to Deputy Chairman, and the chair of the Liverpool
70 Ibid. 7 May, p.19.
71 Finance Committee, Vol. 12, p. 464, 27 August 1847.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and Manchester was occupied by Charles Lawrence.72 Later Moss

became chairman of the associated Grand Junction railway, on whose
board sat as director Mr. G. M. Lawrence. G. M. Lawrence was also
chairman of the Finance Committee of the corporation, a division of
loyalty to which the Liverpool Mercury strongly objected.73 Another
member of the Finance Committee, which handled both property sales
and parliamentary bills, was John Shaw Leigh, who became mayor in
1841 and was himself one of the largest landowners in Liverpool,
selling land to the Liverpool and Bury railway to the reputed sum of
£250,000.74
In Birmingham, not to labour the point, the same divided councils
and overlapping of personal and municipal interest can be seen. P. H.
and Frederick Muntz, for example, were general merchants who had
become magistrate and member of parliament respectively for Birming­
ham; both became shareholders, and Frederick a director, in the
Snow Hill station company, and gave evidence extolling the scheme to
the Parliamentary Select Committee.75 Richard Spooner, M.P., who
gave evidence hostile to the Snow Hill project was a director in the
London and Birmingham railway’s New Street scheme; Samuel Beale,
an ex-commissioner and mayor, who also gave hostile evidence, was a
director in the Midland railway, which intended to ‘follow in on the
London and Birmingham lines.’76 Piggott Smith, the Surveyor to the
Birmingham Street Commissioners and later to the corporation, was
offered a lucrative job by the London and Birmingham railway solici­
tors which he felt he should decline in case it might appear to influence
his professional opinion.77 William Matthews, a Birmingham magis­
trate and entrepreneur in the iron and coal trade, who forcefully sup­
ported the Great Western interest, both before the Broad Gauge
Committee of 1845 and before the Snow Hill committee, was paid for
his services by a Deputy-Chairmanship in one G.W. subsidiary and the
award of 300 free shares in another.78
72 James Touzeau, The Rise and Progress ofLiverpool 1551-1835 (Liverpool, 1910),
II, 817-8, 858. A majority of the council itself had also accepted shares at a premium,
T. Baines, A History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool (1852), 609.
73 Liverpool Mercury, 9 January 1846. Earlier the Finance Committee, in addition
to land sales had been given brief to watch over Parliamentary Bills. Council Books,
Vol. 17, p.423, 16 November 1836.
74 J. A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool (1875), II, 47.
75 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 23 June, p. 95, 24 June, pp. 259-66, S.C. on Birming­
ham. Wolverhampton and Dudley Railway.
70 Ibid. 25 June, pp. 302-5; HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 12 June, p. 32-3. S.C. on
London and Birmingham Railway (Birmingham Extension).
77 Ibid. (L. & B. Ext), 11 June, pp. 127-8.
78 Ibid. (B.W. & D.), 24 June, pp. 94-8. For the Broad G^uge Committee see
E. T. MacDermot, History of the Great Western Railway (ed. C. R. Clinker, 1964),
I, 115.

120
 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITY AND THE RAILWAY COMPANIES

‘In gratitude perhaps?’, counsel suggested. ‘I do not call it their gratitude.’

‘Well perhaps it was put in the shape of some reward for benefits to come?
—I do not think they would have ventured to put it in that shape to me.
If so I should have denounced them in the most emphatic terms. I do not
think they would have ventured to do so.’79
Apart from these considerations, he and another local businessman,
who gave favourable evidence, were also tendering to supply material
for part of the projected works; circumstances which, taken in con­
junction, would appear to detract considerably from the impartiality of
his evidence.80

The examples cited above for Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and

Birmingham give a cumulative impression of railway influence in
municipal affairs which cannot be ignored. During the period when
railway companies were most active in transforming the central districts,
up to the mid-1860’s, no corporation could stand undivided and
uninfluenced by the various forms of persuasion available to their
gigantic clients. In the later decades of the century the corporations
began to demonstrate a more independent spirit, to impose more
stringent conditions, and to strike harder bargains with railway com­
panies requiring access, but by this time the basic outlines of urban
railway development had already been sketched in.
In fairness to the great cities involved it should be added that the
instances cited could probably be paralleled in any sizeable town in
Britain. In London, for example, although the corporation’s powers to
interfere with railway plans were limited, both by its own refusal to
extend its administrative boundaries and by the direct interest shown
by Parhament in metropolitan affairs, such schemes as did fall within
the purview of the city corporation provoked a response compounded
of similar elements to those in the provincial cities. London was the
seat of the legal profession, and centre of banking and financial interests,
both of which were closely engaged in railway promotion; and although
the officers of local government continued to be drawn from the
Livery Companies and Gilds, the City Companies themselves, in their
capacity as great landowners, must have been amongst the largest
corporate beneficiaries of the whole railway movement, and cannot
have been totally detached in their selection of policies. They also set
one of the few recorded examples of defiance to a Royal Commission’s
powers of enquiry in nineteenth-century constitutional history, by
refusing to lay their affairs open to public examination in the 1880’s.81
79 Ibid. (B.W. & D.), 24 June, pp. 100-1.
80 Loc. cit. pp. 104-5.
81 H.C., 1884, XXXIX.
121
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Moreover it is clear that a spirit of condemnation is quite irrelevant

to the simple statements of fact made above. Because of the wide
ramifications of railway activity it was probably more difficult to
separate private and public considerations over railway issues than in
any other business field. Yet unless the whole system of amateur,
elective, local government were replaced by professional administra­
tion, the problems to which this gave rise could not have been avoided.
It may give a scrap of comfort to moralists, that the full-time profes­
sional servants of local government, the municipal architects, surveyors
and engineers, the clerks and legal officers were, on the whole, admirably
public spirited and impartial, often in the face of considerable tempta­
tions and pressures.

122
Part Two

Case Histories
 Birmingham

1. The property ownership pattern

It is one of the recurring themes of this book that the underlying
pattern formed by units of land ownership is one of the critical factors
in explaining the routes cut through Victorian cities by the railway
builders, and the choice of site for the termini and yards. One might
legitimately go further to say that the ground plan formed by property
titles can serve as the key to explaining the whole course of development
of certain types of urban area, and the emergence of characteristic
residential and industrial zones in each city. For example, the establish­
ment of successful, high-class residential areas like Belgravia in London,
Kelvinside in Glasgow or Edgbaston in Birmingham depended upon
the ownership of very large units and the pursuance of a policy of
lease or sale under restrictive covenants forbidding the introduction
of non-residential land uses or unduly crowded house building. In
other areas like Saltley in east Birmingham, Somers Town and Camden
Town in north London, or Tradeston in south Glasgow the land­
owners might hold equally large units, but for reasons best known to
themselves, they were prepared to break up their estates and allow
mixed industrial and residential uses.
In other cases, indeed more commonly, the title to urban land was
highly fragmented. Except for public houses and the larger factories,
the owner-occupied property was relatively unusual. More frequently
urban land consisted of houses, yards and gardens which were owned
in groups of eight to twelve by members of the lower-middle class,
retired tradesmen or their widows, or by executors and charitable
trustees. Sometimes they were held, in much larger units of fifty or
more properties, by ex-landed gentry, whose manors had been partially
covered by the extension of building on the periphery of each great
town; sometimes the larger units or groups had been assembled to­
125
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

gether in the space of a decade or two by solicitors, land valuers and

larger builders. In the latter case, although the estates could be run as
bona-fide ventures in residential housing, it would be naive to exclude
the possibility that these owners had an eye to the strategic positioning
of their houses on the fringe or possible route of urban railways. Some
of those who had accumulated, not inherited their land (like John
Chesshire in Birmingham or J. S. Leigh in Liverpool) operated as
agents or land auctioneers, and must have had a very shrewd idea of
the possible windfall increases in capital value timely purchases in
particular areas might bring.1
The size and disposition of this patchwork of urban land titles was
of crucial importance for any great new force impingeing upon land use.
For the railways, in particular, the prospect of dealing with a few
owners offered a simplicity and speed which alone made it possible to
carry through large schemes within reasonable margins of time and
cost. It was well worth paying through the nose to conclude such a
series of deals privately, and to disarm the opposition which every
landowner was entitled to offer by petition and counsel before the
Parliamentary Committees if his purse was large enough and his nerve
cool enough. Reaching a settlement with the larger urban landowners
had the further advantage of avoiding the endless reduplication of legal
and survey charges connected with small cases, the endless delays which
arbitration procedure presented, and the high awards sympathetic
juries tended to give.2
Yet in spite of the importance of a comprehensive knowledge of
property titles as a sound basis for all urban history, no research work
has yet been done to piece together maps of the comparative ownership
patterns in our major cities. No doubt this is partly due to the extreme
difficulty of assembling the necessary information. Property transac­
tions are, after all, a type of confidential business transaction, and often
an extremely profitable one. Even twentieth-century administrators
have been known to lose themselves in the maze of legal and informal
relationships which connect the ground owner, occupier, tenant and
sub-tenant. The task, therefore, cannot be undertaken lightly. Yet
even a tentative and sketchy map is better than none, and might
provide the basis for further, more detailed and accurate work. It is
in this spirit that the ownership maps which follow for Birmingham
and the other cities are presented.

1 Chesshire was a land valuer and auctioneer in Birmingham, owning land, in

conjunction with others, on the route of the Birmingham West Suburban railway,
and also selling railway surplus lands by auction, BRL 427290. For J. S. Leigh see
infra Chap. 7, sec. 1. .
2 For an outline of the compulsory purchase procedure which railway companies
had to follow see App. 3.

126
 BIRMINGHAM

The documents available for constructing a land ownership map for

Birmingham consist of Estate Maps, of varying dates throughout the
nineteenth century, to be found amongst the deposited Collections of
Solicitors’ Papers, Tithe Maps for the Parishes of St. Martin, St.
Thomas and All Saints in 1847, Enclosure Awards for Saltley and

Property ownership and railways in Birmingham.

Washwood districts in east Birmingham, Plans of the Manors of
Duddeston, Netchells, Bordesley, Aston, Saltley and Little Bromwich,
showing field owners, and the invaluable railway companies’ Plans and
Sections and Books of Reference deposited at Westminster and with the
local County Clerk. The material from these sources has been sum­
marised in the map above.3
3 The Birmingham Reference Library has a large number of Plans and Sections
etc. of local interest conveniently assembled under the heading ‘Birmingham Rail­
ways’. An unusually large number of estate family and solicitors’ papers have also
been deposited, including the Lee Crowder, the Jewel, Baillie, the Harward and
Evers, the Gooch, and the Colmore papers, W. Powell and H. M. Cashmore,
Catalogue of the Birmingham Collection (Birmingham, 1918), and its supplement
(1918-31), list miscellaneous topographical material. Pigott Smith’s survey of
property boundaries 1824-5, and the Birmingham Weekly Post, Freeholders’ Map,
6 June 1891 contain further useful information.
127
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

In the central area, that covered roughly by late eighteenth-century

Birmingham, ownership is so fragmented that it is difficult to generalise,
though detailed information on the land acquired by each railway
scheme is available from the Plans and Sections and Books of Reference.
The ‘New Town’, which was developing in western Birmingham (as in
so many other great cities) in the later part of the eighteenth century,
was the first urban area to extend over the lands of really large pro­
prietors—the Colmore family.4 ‘The place was possessed by a tenant
as a farm’, commented the contemporary William Hutton, ‘but Birm­
ingham, a speedy traveller, marched over the premises and covered
them with 1200 houses on building leases.’5 The Colmores held some
66 acres, divided into no fewer than thirty-five estates with values
ranging from £2,000 to £12,000 in the mid-1820’s.6 The largest of these
were the Bell’s Barn and Birmingham Heath estates.7 They, with the
other properties, were held from 1807 to 1837 by the last direct repres­
entative of the family, Miss Caroline Colmore.8 Afterwards they were
administered by her trustees, and then by Frind Cregoe, Esq., a friend
of Miss Colmore, who changed his name by deed-poll to Frind Cregoe
Colmore upon inheriting the estates. The Colmores were by far the
largest central landowners, and it was with them and their agent,
Digby Latimer, that the railway companies and the Corporation
Public Works Committee had to deal. Miss Colmore and Frind
Cregoe were both absentee landlords, non-resident in Birmingham,
leaving their estates in the hands of professional agents, men who, one
may presume, were well capable of weighing the railway companies’
attractive money offers against the possible damage the lines might
cause by severance and dilapidation of the estate properties.
In the event, as will be seen from the map, the major railway com­
panies’ lines to the north-west from New Street and Snow Hill both
discreetly skirted the Colmore’s valuable New Hall estate. The Snow
Hill line ran on a viaduct close to Livery Street through land covered
with low-grade cottage property owned by William Inge and leased to
a group of middlemen (and women); then crossed through only one
block of Colmore property before passing through further properties
belonging to William Inge and to the Reverend Samuel Martin, and

4 M. J. Wise, ‘The changing regional pattern’, Birmingham and its Regional

Setting (British Association, 1950), 175-7, Map Fig. 39.
5 William Hutton, A History of Birmingham (ed. James Guest, Birmingham,
1835), 26.
’Tithe Map and Apportionment of Rent Charges, St. Martin’s Parish, 1847.
Plans of the Colmore Estates, 1788-1920.
7 Plans of Bell’s Barn Estate 1793-1875, Plans of Birmingham Heath Estate
1801-35, BRL 411566.
8 Particulars and valuation of Miss Caroline Colmore’s estate, 1826, BRL 414908.
128
 BIRMINGHAM

into the countryside.9 Digby Latimer did not oppose the railway bill
either by petition or counsel. The New Street line by tunnelling to the
north-west likewise affected only the fringe of the Colmore properties,
and though the name of Digby Latimer is to be found on a number of
the properties listed in the Books of Reference, far larger quantities
of land were supplied to the railway by the Governors of the Free
Grammar School, the Trustees of Lench’s Charity, Sir Thomas Sher­
lock Gooch and two members of the Gough family.10
Indeed from the point of view of the railway companies responsible
not merely for the northern exits but for the southern approaches to
New Street and Snow Hill, Sir Thomas Gooch was by far the most
important landowner in Birmingham, holding some 250 properties, let
out in groups of a dozen or so to non-resident lessees, along the chosen
railway routes.11 Gooch was a substantial squire owning 146 acres of
land on the fringes of Birmingham at the time the railways arrived,
some of it arable and pasture, some already laid out for building or
built upon; and five railway companies had to come to terms with
him and his son Sir Alfred S. Gooch. He was also, like the Colmores,
non-resident and already an elderly man in the 1840’s, dying at his
home at Benacre Hall, in Suffolk, at the age of 85 in 1851. The price
paid for his land was obviously sufficient to disarm opposition, for
when he sent his agent, the Birmingham solicitor Mr. George Whately,
to appear before the New Street Parliamentary Committee, the evidence
submitted was very favourable to the scheme.12
The other principal landowners with whom the railway companies
requiring access to Birmingham had to deal fell into two groups. The
remaining large titled owners, holding ex-manorial lands in the suburbs
of the city, and the Corporate bodies, holding both suburban and
central properties.
The chief of the corporate bodies in Birmingham were Lench’s
Charity, which had moderate sized holdings, and the Free Grammar
9 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Dudley Rail­
way. Properties 140-279 (Inge), 280-9 (Latimer).
10 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, London and Birmingham Railway (Birmingham
Extension). B.Ref., 1846, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway,
Properties 34-8 (Latimer), BRL 317206.
11 250 properties on the routes of the Birmingham Extension railway cited in the
preceding footnote and on the southern approach to Snow Hill. HLRO, P & S,
B.Ref., 1846, Birmingham and Oxford Junction Railway (Birmingham Extension).
Properties 724-920. The land had originally been purchased by a member of the
family who was Bishop of London, but his objection to building had been set aside
in 1766, William Hutton, op. cit. 79.
12 Whately claimed that Gooch owned ‘perhaps one half’ of the land needed.
HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 12 June, p. 16. S.C. on London & Birmingham Railway
(Birmingham Extension). Whately appears again in Railway Times XI (1848),
18 March.
F 129
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

School, which had seen its extensive fields on the outskirts of the old
town rapidly and densely covered with houses.13 From the railway
companies’ point of view these corporate bodies in Birmingham, as
elsewhere, offered attractive market opportunities. Taking, as they
did, an impersonal view of their property and disposing of it in rela­
tively large units, they were infinitely preferable to the small, obstinate
proprietor, armed with arbitration and jury procedures. Although they
often took a highly competitive view of the value of their property,
especially that which chanced to lie in the path of a railway company,
they did not usually put forward the startlingly inflated claims of the
small owner. Moreover in the case of Lench’s Charity and the Free
Grammar School their governing bodies were conscious that some of
the urban lands they owned were far from creditable, or were submerged
in districts which were seedy and disreputable in the extreme. Conse­
quently once their price had been met they were prepared, like the
Reverend Charles Lee, Head of the Free Grammar School, to appear
before the Parliamentary Select Committee and admit that the removal
of these houses would be a great benefit to the town.14
Of even greater importance to the railway companies was the
existence of the second type of corporate body holding central properties
—the canal companies. The first of these in importance was the Birm­
ingham (more correctly the Birmingham and Wolverhampton) Canal
Company, which had secured a perpetual lease on six acres of central
land, just east of Paradise and Navigation Streets, from Sir Thomas
Gooch.15 The Birmingham Canal Company, in fact, owned no less
than 98 acres (53 comprising a reservoir) in the central and north­
western Birmingham district, adding a further cogent reason to that
of suppressing price competition for the railway companies to acquire
an interest in it.16
Advantageous though it was to deal with a handful of large pro­
prietors wherever possible, the properties of the canal companies were
even more of a boon. They did not merely dispose of large amounts of
land, but this was situated in valuable central sites, or commanded
strategic routes into the cities. To schedule them for compulsory
purchase in the Plans and Sections was out of the question, since, like
the railways themselves, they had been given power to acquire their
land by statutory authority, and it was manifestly absurd for Parlia­
ment to take away by compulsion what it had previously sanctioned in
13 A. Musgrove, The History of Tench's Trust, Birmingham, 1525-1925 (Birming­
ham, 1926).
14 Ibid., (L. & B. Ext.), 11 June, p. 85. The Free Grammar School received £39,000
for its property. J. MacMillan, Newspaper Cuttings on Birmingham Railways (n.d.),
BRL 147.31. .
15 At £47 per annum. A Pictorial Guide to Birmingham (1849),159, BM 1303 a 35.
14 Tithe Map, St. Martin’s Parish, 1847.
130
 BIRMINGHAM

the public interest. Ln the early stages, therefore, canal companies were
treated with formal respect before the Select Committee. Their land
was crossed no more than was necessary; deviations and expensive
accommodation works being conceded to disarm opposition.
However, as the railway companies grew in scale and capital, there
was nothing to prevent the outright private purchase of the canals, by
means of share exchange, or the leasing of the canal for a term of years.
Even after the Government, alarmed by the prospect of monopoly,
had forbidden railway companies to acquire any more canals a loop­
hole was still left; canals could be acquired by another canal company,
and that canal company might already be a client of one of the larger
railway companies.17 In Birmingham, it is clear that attempts to prevent
take-over by the railway companies were ineffectual. By 1870 a special
committee of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, set up to study
the subject, had concluded, ‘The Birmingham Canal Company is just
another name for the London and North-western Railway!’18
The foundations of a close financial understanding had been laid in
the earliest years between the Birmingham and Wolverhampton Canal
Company and the Stour Valley Railway, whose line, as it cleared the
built-up area, ran parallel to the canal, and very close to it, for a good
part of its route to the north-west.19 This doubling up of the canal and
railway routes—so frequently repeated in Britain’s industrial zones—
was not primarily caused by technical reasons; though the canals,
with their cautious avoidance of gradients, did choose routes which
George Stephenson felt would often serve as a model to the railways.
But a more important consideration was that of land ownership. This
can be seen in Manchester, London, and Glasgow, where the routes
or the terminal sites of the older transport network became more and
more tempting as the railways’ land hunger grew, and the value of
urban land rose.
In Birmingham the tendency to superimpose railway routes upon
the old canal pattern, and to absorb the central canal warehousing and
wharfage area is equally marked. James Allport, General Manager of
the Midland Railway, was perfectly frank as to his reasons for buying
up the Worcester and Birmingham Canal Company. ‘We propose to
convert the large surplus property which they have in Birmingham for
the purposes of a Goods Station; that is the chief object we have.’20
The Worcester and Birmingham canal also provided a similar south
western exit to that provided in the north-west by the Birmingham and

17 The Leeds and Liverpool canal’s boats, horses and carrying establishment was
bought up (and tolls trebled) in 1851 by the use of this fiction. BM 8235 c 42.
18 Chamber of Commerce Reports, 13 July 1870, p. 9. BRL L62.52.
19 G. Auden, Birmingham. (British Association, 1913), 437.
20 H.C., 1872, XII, Q.640.
131
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Wolverhampton canal; and, as can be seen from the map, the Birming­
ham and West Suburban Railway was constructed along its banks,
following closely every curve, not for technical reasons, but primarily
to avoid the complexity of arbitration procedures with a large number
of owners.21
The last group of proprietors whose disposition influenced the plans
of the railway companies were the ex-manorial suburban squires,
particularly Heneage Legge, Earl Howe, and the representatives of the
Gough and Adderley families—Lord Calthorpe and Lord Norton.
The Goughs had owned extensive lands one and a half miles to the
south and south-west of the centre of Birmingham since 1717, when Sir
Richard Gough bought the manor of Edgbaston, and by the time the
major railways were projected a large and exclusive villa estate had been
established, sufficiently new and remarkable to excite questions from
the Select Committee when Mr. Piggott Smith, surveyor to the Birm­
ingham Commissioners, gave his evidence.22 ‘I believe there is almost
a new town in the lower part of the map called Edgbaston ?—Yes, it is
the residence of the more respectable members of society—the principal
merchants and manufacturers—occupied by villas with several acres,
not densely built upon.’23 This was the way the Goughs intended to
keep it—at a discreet carriage distance; and even after the Birmingham
and West Suburban Railway had secured a route through their estate,
by following the Worcester Canal, the first station out from Birmingham
was at Selly Oak, to the south of their property. Apart from the small
sales of some of the central properties, which they also owned, the only
transaction the Goughs had with the railways was in 1890, to oppose
the Birmingham, Kidderminster and Stoke branch line.
The other group of gentry, owning east Birmingham, formed a very
striking contrast to the Goughs. Heneage Legge and Charles Bowyer
Adderley had been the chief beneficiaries of an Enclosure Award
carried through as late as 1817, which had handed over to them 20 and
30 acres, respectively, in Saltley and Washwood.24 A third large pro­
prietor, Earl Howe, owned land described as ‘small gardens’, just to
the north and south of Curzon Street.25 Soon his lands had disappeared

81 Apart from the Worcester Canal company Thomas Catell was the largest owner.
Birm. W. Suburban Rly, P & S, Session 1871 BRL VI.
22 Allan E. Everitt, ‘Our Neighbourhood ’, Trans. Birin, and Midland Instit.,
Arch section (1880), 2.
23 Ibid. (L. & B. Ext.), 11 June, pp. 121-2. The map referred to was a dubious one
produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and ‘put up in the
Committee room merely to look pretty’. (Ibid. 12 June, p. 26). It is probably the
same reproduced as BRL 369796.
24 BRL Inclosure Award, Saltley and Washwood, 1817.
25Beillie, Knott, Beillie, Map of Birmingham 1824-5 (1828), BRL Jewel, Baillie
collection 116-17.

132
 BIRMINGHAM

entirely beneath the formidable maze of tracks constituting the Vauxhall

and Curzon Street goods stations. The Adderleys’ lands were too
extensive to be swallowed whole, but the conveyance of large tracts
are recorded, between 1838 and 1878, in the Catalogue of the Norton
Papers.2^ When these land sales began the population numbered a mere
400, and most of these had just moved in to find employment at the
railway carriage works; by the time the inevitable Boundary Question
arose (in 1888, in the case of Birmingham and Saltley) the population
had reached over 8,000, ‘a compact district with a growing population,
clearly divided from the borough of Birmingham’, as the Chairman of
the Saltley Local Board pointed out, ‘by the Midland Railway, the
river and the canal.’26 27
By the end of the century in fact, the complaint, ironically enough,
was that, far from improving communications, the invasion of the
Adderley Estates by the railways had cut Saltley off from Birmingham,
both physically, by its sidings, link lines, bridges and cut-offs, and also
practically, as a result of the railway fares and service policy. ‘Neither
of the two railways which serve the district has yet realised the possi­
bilities of a liberal arrangement of trains’ wrote the Birmingham
Daily Mail in 1903. ‘What Saltley needs now to push it along the
path of progress is a more adequate means of vehicular commun­
ication with the city. When the up-to-date electric cars go skimming
across the railway bridge every few minutes out to Washwood
Heath, Saltley will run, so to speak, where it has hitherto been
walking.’28
A more extreme contrast to that of Edgbaston could hardly be
found by the end of the century, as a consequence of the wholesale
intrusion of railway yards and associated trades into east Birmingham.
Of course, the pressures and inducements offered by the land-hungry
railway companies, from the days of the Grand Junction and London
and Birmingham companies onwards, were so great in this area that it
is difficult to see how any estate policy could have retained the ideal
of homogeneous residential zoning. But the result of the uncontrolled
mixing of residential and industrial land uses which resulted was that
housing became merely a means for the small speculative builder to
fill in the interstices between the railway lines. Such new housing as had
been constructed, on the fringe of the Curzon Street cattle market and
goods yard, in the triangle formed between the New Street and Snow
Hill lines and the Duddeston viaduct, was singled out for condemnation

26 BRLLf 70.18.
27 James Adderley, Sixty Years of Saltley Parish (Birmingham, 1911). C. Hough­
ton, A Short History of the Boundary Question (Birmingham, 1888), 6, 10.
28 Birmingham Daily Mail, 1 October 1903.
133
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

by the Artizans’ Dwellings Inquiry of 1884 as being the worst extreme

of jerry-building in Birmingham.29
Lord Norton, once again, was an absentee landlord, living at Ham
House, a deeply religious man, passionately interested in the High
Church controversy of the late nineteenth century. He gave Adderley
Park to the public, the first of a series of benefactions, and generously
endowed a training college; but the twelve-acre park and college shared
the manorial lands with over thirty acres of sidings and approach lines,
with Brown Marshall’s, the Metropolitan Carriage Works, and those
other common features of mixed industrial zoning, a sewage farm and
gas works.30 On his visit to the district, to open the training college,
Lord Norton was moved to utter a public prayer, which his biographer
faithfully records. ‘Oh God,’ said Lord Norton, ‘Bless what we are
doing for Saltley.’31 To which the Midland, and the London and North
Western railway companies no doubt added their amen.

2. Conditions of competition between railway companies

It has already been argued earlier that a knowledge of the competitive
stances adopted by the railway companies concerned with gaining
access to Britain’s major cities can serve as a key to the explanation of
the urban railway network. The site, route and timing of these intru­
sions into the established pattern of land uses cannot be explained
retrospectively by reference to the map. The urban railway networks
do not merely fail to make sense nowadays; they never did make
complete sense, but were products of expediency and compromise.
Shifting and ephemeral rivalries and alliances between companies throw
light upon many of the decisions which seem later to be so immutable;
tactical blocking manoeuvres and acts of commercial pique help to
explain many of the surviving quirks and follies of urban railways.
In Birmingham the case is relatively simple, certainly by comparison
with the other provincial cities or with London: and, indeed, as is
suggested in Section 4 below, the pattern of railway accommodation
which emerged was correspondingly durable and well conceived. The
protagonists were few and the position between them not as fluid as in
the other cities, where the battles between rival companies continued into
the 1870’s and 188O’s.
The two main companies serving Birmingham, the L. & N.W. and
the G.W. had built their redoubts (at New Street and Snow Hill) by
the early 1850’s. The L. & N.W. was Britain’s largest railway amalgama-
” Report of Committee of Inquiry into Artizans' Dwellings, 3 June 1884, pp. 48-52.
Bad ventilation and construction. BRL 155942.
30 The Heart of Industrial England (Birmingham, 1891), 39.
31 W. Childe-Pemberton, The Life of Lord Norton (1909), 132.
134
 BIRMINGHAM

tion, whose strength arose from the spinal trunk route its constituent
companies had pioneered between the four largest English cities.32 The
Liverpool and Manchester railway, between the two cities of those
names; the Grand Junction, running from the point half-way between
the Liverpool-Manchester axis (at Newton-le-Willows) to Birmingham;
and the London to Birmingham railway: these were the three companies
which joined together in 1846 to form the L. & N.W. amalgamation,
and to them Birmingham represented a vital point half way up the
spine. The Great Western was the second largest railway company in
Britain, also branching out from London, but in the only other main
direction for trunk routes, towards Bristol and the West Country.3334
The whole posture of the G.W. and the L. & N.W. towards each other
was one of independence and suspicion, flaring up, at the points where
they converged, to one of open hostility; an attitude which, in fact, can
still be seen reflected in the pages of their standard histories. To E. T.
MacDermot, historian of the G.W. Railway, Captain Huish, General
Manager of the L. & N.W. appears as a model of vindictiveness and
duplicity; a coldly calculating villain who might, one feels, have been
drawn, complete with his name, from Victorian melodrama. To W. L.
Steel, historian of the L. & N.W., Huish was ‘one of the most able of
railway administrators and diplomatists who ever lived.’31
The only major working arrangement over urban railways ever
suggested between the G.W. and L. & N.W. companies was the short­
lived scheme for sharing Euston station.35 Usually they found
themselves on opposite sides of the table at the Parliamentary Select
Committees, or waiting in turn in the anterooms of Corporation
chambers. Over no issue was their rivalry more vehement than over the
Broad Gauge question, and after this had apparently been decided in
favour of the narrow gauge companies in 1846 it came as an unpleasant
shock to find, with the passing of the Birmingham and Oxford Junction
Bill, that the break in gauge was not to be made at Bristol or Gloucester
32 In addition to the three major companies there were 15 smaller companies
which had been absorbed at the time of the L. & N.W.’s formation in 1846. The
genealogy is traced in a table in G. Ottley, A Bibliography of British Railway History
(1965), App. Illb, and the history of the component companies traced in entries
on pp. 377-94. The best history of the L. & N.W. is W. L. Steel, The History of the
London and North Western Railway (1914).
33 Ottley, op. cit. App. Illa (genealogy), pp. 358-70 (bibliography). Standard
history E. T. MacDermot, History of the Great Western Railway (1927, 31); for the
period 1833-63 C. R. Clinker has produced a revised ed. of MacDermot.
34 W. L. Steel, op. cit. 179. E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. passim-, ‘politely menacing,
a display of bad temper, questionable action, bullying, spiteful attempt, unscrupu­
lous efforts, a reputation for finding pretexts to avoid agreements which had become
inconvenient.’ On Huish’s retirement MacDermot relents sufficiently to describe
him as ‘the old warrior’.
85 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. (ed. C. R. Clinker, 1964), I, 22-4.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

but at Birmingham.36 Not that the Great Western broad gauge express
route to London was able to hold out a very serious threat to the more
direct L. & N.W. route; but the Great Western commanded a consider­
able area of its own, and the mere possibility of price and traffic
competition was enough to curb any inclinations the L. & N.W.
might have had to exercise arbitrary monopoly powers.37 Witnesses
before the Snow Hill Select Committee stressed the need for a second
completely independent access to Birmingham. ‘The London and
Birmingham Company have not the confidence of the commercial
people at Birmingham . . . they are the worst managers for the public
in England but not for themselves, they are too selfish.’38 A business­
men’s memorial, asking for night trains, which had been sponsored by
Mr. Chance, the local entrepreneur in glass making, was ignored until
the Bill for the G.W.’s satellite, the Birmingham and Oxford Junction
railway, was passed; then hurried provisions were made and the fares
reduced by 30%, even before competition materialised.39
The third major company serving Birmingham, the Midland railway,
adopted a policy of friendly affiance with the L. & N.W.40 Indeed
since it depended upon the L. & N.W. for access, both in east Birming­
ham and later, in the 1870’s, for a share of central access at the rebuilt
New Street station, it could hardly do otherwise. On the other hand,
when the Midland Railway Company fell under the energetic guidance
of James Allport, although the entente was maintained in Birmingham,
his abolition of the second class, improvement of third-class accom­
modation and all-round reduction of fares in 1875 gave English railways
their most important competitive jolt since the short-lived wildcat price
battle of the early 1850’s. The Midland’s role in Birmingham, therefore,
was that of the joker in the pack, upsetting the game of routine compe­
tition to which the L. & N.W. and G.W. had settled down by the late
1860’s.
All this, as will be seen by comparison with other major cities,
led to a provision of service, accommodation and fares which followed
demand reasonably sensitively, and with a time-lag which was un­
exceptionable. There was anxiety about the rate-fixing for iron and
other goods in the Midland region, but little or no dissatisfaction with
the central passenger and goods service for Birmingham.41 Indeed, the
Corporation went so far, in July 1866, as to describe Birmingham as
38 Ibid. I, 126-8.
37 Ibid. I, 230.
38 HLRO, Min., (B.W. & D.), 23 June, pp. 17-23, 25 June, p. 254.
38 Ibid. 24 June, pp. 252-4.
40 Ottley, op. cit. App. IIIc (genealogy), pp. 410-2 (bibliography). Standard
histories F. S. Williams, The Midland Railway, its Rise and. Progress (1876-88),
E. G. Barnes, The Rise of the Midland Railway, 1844-1874 (1966).
41 S. Timmins, The Resources, Products and Industries of Birmingham (1866), 74.
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 BIRMINGHAM

‘first class station on the L. & N.W., the G.W. and the Midland
railways.’42 Admittedly this expression of opinion was intended not
so much to congratulate the companies as to strengthen the Corpora­
tion’s argument against the establishment of a District Will office at
Lichfield; but it stands in marked contrast to the official complaints
made in the same decade in Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The
chief complaints that were made by the Corporation and contemporary
press in the later years of Victoria’s reign were, in fact, concerned with
a much more general failure of the railway companies, not confined
to Birmingham: their reluctance to provide comprehensive and cheap
suburban facilities in anticipation of demand.

3. The development of railway facilities: a chronological sketch

The fortunate balance of forces which prevailed in Birmingham was
not established until 1851; up to that time the situation was extremely
fluid and unstable. On the map the railway facilities of the late thirties
and early forties show a deceptive simplicity; there was only one station
site at Curzon Street, a terminal driven like a broad wedge into the
outskirts of east Birmingham. To this eastern terminal site came not
merely the south-eastern approach lines from London, and the north­
eastern lines from Derby—following obvious and direct routes—but
also the north-western approach lines from Crewe, and the south­
western lines from Gloucester; the last two approach routes curving
round in complete half circles to make this eastern entry. The Birming­
ham and Gloucester, and Birmingham and Derby lines (which later
merged into the Midland railway) were both allowed, under running
powers secured in their Bills, to run into the London and Birmingham’s
passenger station at Curzon Street. In the cause of independence,
however, the Birmingham and Derby Railway Company opened a
separate low-level station built upon low-lying ground a little further
out, at Lawley Street, from which each carriage had to be lifted on to
the London and Birmingham tracks.43 The Grand Junction Railway
(from Crewe) also built its own stations, first a temporary one at
Vauxhall; then, when the twenty-eight arch Lawley Street viaduct had
been built, it opened its own separate station facing Curzon Street.44
So there were really four separate stations all blanketed under one
name, involving complications in levels and running arrangements
which caused no little confusion in the minds both of the Parliamentary
Committee and of the directors of the newly formed Midland Railway
42 BRL, Council Proceedings, 1 July 1866, p. 223.
43 C. E. Stretton, The Railways of Birmingham (1897), 10 February 1842. HLRO,
Min., (L. & B. Ext.), 12 June, pp. 56-61.
44 W. L. Steel, op. cit. 90-1.
F* 137
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Company.45 Soon afterwards a fourth company, the Manchester and

Birmingham, was also granted running powers, although in fact it
came no nearer Birmingham than Crewe, whence it followed the Grand
Junction’s rails to the Curzon Street terminus.
By the mid-1840’s, therefore, there were three pressing reasons why
the existing facilities should be by-passed and radical new accommoda­
tion provided. The first, which has already been mentioned, was the
large number of companies jamming themselves into the city’s only
point of access. To a certain extent this difficulty might have been
eliminated by amalgamation. The sharing of stations sometimes led
to the creation of such groups. But the formation of these alliances
was not as inevitable as retrospective histories make it appear. In
Birmingham, for example, in the year before the L. & N.W. merger,
relations between the Grand Junction and London and Birmingham
companies were extremely strained, and an amalgamation was even
discussed for a time between the Grand Junction and the Great Western
Railway; which would not merely have brought the Great Western
into Curzon Street, but also have led to the building of broad gauge
lines to Liverpool and Manchester.46
The second reason was simply that the traffic itself had expanded
beyond the capacity of Curzon Street, even under unified control. The
point was underlined by counsel’s questioning of a city magistrate,
Mr. Charles Shaw, before the Parliamentary Committee on Snow Hill
station.
Mr. Shaw: ‘Fifteen years has created a great change in the wants and
requirements of the town. We were very well satisfied then if we could get a
railway brought into the town at all.’
Chairman: ‘At that time I believe it was invariably the practice for most
railways to stop outside the town ?—It was.’
‘That was done in almost every town in England?—Yes, and more
especially in the town of Liverpool.’
Mr. Richards (counsel for the bill): ‘Are you aware that the business of
railways has been so much increased beyond what was expected that the
space which was formerly deemed sufficient for a station in a populous town
has since been found to be quite insufficient ?—Yes, there is no doubt of that.
The people at Birmingham now have more work than they know what to do
with in their present station.’47
The third reason for by-passing Curzon Street, and it was this which
helped to persuade members of the Select Committee to sanction the
railways’ encroachment, armed with powers of compulsory purchase,

45 HLRO, Min., L. & B. Ext., 12 June, pp. 39,70. Samuel Beale, ex-mayor, was the
Midland director whose notions were corrected by Robert Stephenson.
46 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. I, 127.
47 HLRO, Min., (B.W. & D.), 25 June, pp. 237-43.

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upon central properties, was the inconvenience of the existing road

approaches within the town itself.48 The streets were narrow and
incorrectly aligned to handle the increasing cab and omnibus traffic
to and from the station. Since the omnibuses, which had started
operating in Birmingham in 1834, were conveying 30,000 people per
week across the town by 1846, congestion was rapidly building up in
the central business district.49 Moreover, to reach the Bull Ring, High
Street or New Street from the railway station either meant a lengthy
drive round two sides of a triangle, or a difficult journey through tiny
back streets and alleys, which were often blocked.50 The whole ap­
proach was not worthy of a major city, and the Birmingham Com­
missioners, in fact, had carefully considered the idea of cutting a fine
new approach to Curzon Street at their own expense. The route, which
is shown in a map prepared by Charles Edge in 1838, would have cut
diagonally across existing streets and houses from the junction of High
and New Streets to the entrance of the London and Birmingham Railway
at Canal Street; a route, in fact, parallel and slightly to the north of the
railway route later adopted to New Street station.51 Mr. Daniel Malins,
the High Bailiff of the Borough, and Mr. Pigott Smith, Surveyor to the
Birmingham Commissioners, both gave evidence to Parliament on the
new and commodious street which had been in contemplation by the
Street Commissioners to improve railway access to the town.52
They do not say what happened to the scheme, but it is reasonable
to guess that it was shelved when the Commissioners realised the
immense cost and complication of a half mile cut through urban
property. There was also a good deal of opposition from interested
property owners on the route, witnessed by the interesting pamphlet
Observations on the Projected Improvements of the Town in reference
to the Railways.53 The best retail grocery in town would be annihilated,
the Court of Requests would have to be rebuilt, an important whole­
sale establishment destroyed, and many of the smaller publicans, all
mentioned affectionately by name, would suffer by the change. Yet the
distance to the station would still remain too great and the large flow
of street traffic generated would ruin the amenity of the neighbourhood.
‘Commonsense,’ the anonymous pamphleteer makes these points as he
conducts the reader on an imaginary stroll down the new boulevard
48 Ibid. 24 June, p. 316.
49 Ibid. 25 June, p. 223.
50 Apart from the cab-fare of Is, E. C. & W. Osborne, Grand Junction Railway
Guide (1838). Later in the nineteenth century Curzon Street was used for meat, fish,
fruit and vegetables, and for excursion trains during the busiest part of the year.
51 Charles Edge, Plan of an Intended New Street, (1838), BRL 260988, cf. HLRO,
P & S (L. & B. Ext.), 1846.
52 HLRO, Min., (L. & B. Ext.), 11 June, pp. 6-7, 142.
53 ‘Commonsense’, op. cit. (Birmingham, 1838), BRL 72264.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

(pointing out en route the damage and severance caused) by pretending

that the reader has begun to flag after a hundred yards or two. ‘I hope
you are not tired. Keep up your spirits my dear sir. We will sit and rest
ourselves a little while on the steps of St. Martin’s Churchyard and
watch (in mental anticipation) the different vehicles as they pass us
from the Railways.’ On this occasion, at any rate, sentiment and
economics coincided, and the railway boulevard remained a plan only.
However, the need to provide more central access had been freely
admitted by the mid-1840’s, when funds on a sufficiently large scale
to tackle the problem became available. Yet the question still remained
open as to where the site or sites should be, and which of the companies
uneasily sharing the Curzon Street group of stations should be allowed
priority to exploit the new route and premises. It was of vital impor­
tance to the main protagonists involved to secure independent access
of their own and, if possible, to subvert rival schemes; and they were
prepared to go to any lengths to achieve this.
As far as the selection of sites was concerned there was little to
choose between the two proposals. The proposed Navigation Street
(later called New Street) station was within a hundred yards of Birm­
ingham’s best hotel, the Royal; it was near the Post Office, banks,
professional quarters, old coach offices and within a few paces of the
principal markets.54 The Parliamentary Select Committee, quite
reasonably, was convinced by the evidence of Mr. Daniel Malins, the
High Bailiff, and Mr. James James, late Mayor and Chairman of the
Paving and Parliamentary Committee appointed by the Commissioners.
‘The line adopts the best possible route to avoid injury to property . . .
I do not think you could have a station more centrally situated without
destroying very valuable property. It is the most convenient, with the
least interruption of the property of the town.’55
Still another important point in its favour was that the property
which it did erase was ‘a collection of streets and houses that it would
be advantageous to Birmingham altogether to get rid of, both physically
and morally.’56 There was no objection to stopping up the Froggeries,
Peck Lane and Little Colmore Street, which were all either cul-de-sacs
or alleys along which it was not wise to venture, packed with brothels
and thieves’ nests, breeding grounds for typhoid, cholera and crime.
J. T. Bunce, historian of Birmingham Corporation, recalled in a news­
paper article in 1899 the grim scene sixty years earlier at the Froggeries,
and at the Inkleys and the Gullett, adjacent areas which were forbidden
ground to a middle-class boy, and contrasted it with the bright and

64 HLRO, Min., (L. & B. Ext.), 11 June, pp. 9-16. •,

55 Ibid. 11 June, pp. 38, 52.
56 Ibid. 11 June, p. 18.

140
 BIRMINGHAM

amusing scene of the open third-class trucks and stage-coach shaped

first-class carriages arriving at Vauxhall.57
The performance of this public service, the removal of seven acres
of the slums ‘just behind the principal and best streets’, exempted the
bold New Street scheme from criticism, but cost the London and
Birmingham railway £350,000, for an extension of seven-eighths of a
mile. Trustees for Lench’s Charity and the Free Grammar School, and
Sir T. S. Gooch, had large unified holdings on the approach route, but
the station site itself was covered with small property units; and the
expense which fragmented ownership involved was increased by the
multiple tenancies, up to 22 occupants per property.58
Theoretically, of course, the owners could simply evict their tenants,
but in practice the railway companies had to move very carefully. A
legal case surviving amongst the Lee, Crowder papers shows why
caution was necessary. In the case of Charles Burkinshaw versus the
Birmingham and Oxford Junction Railway Company, the plaintiff owned
three dwelling houses and shops on the route chosen for the southern
approach to Snow Hill, and instructed his solicitors, Lee, Pinson and
Bent to settle for no less than £4,500. On 26 January 1847, the agent
for the railway company, Mr. Hornblower, alarmed by the possibility
of the work being held up, called and told three tenants, Messrs.
Rogers, Waring and Carter, that they must get out by March. Two left
at once, one claiming the refund of large sums laid out in repairs; the
third stayed but ‘paid no rent after the Railway interference.’ Judgment
and costs of £141 were obtained.59 To avoid the expense and delay
of such litigation a simpler procedure was to offer a premium for
persuading each tenant to leave voluntarily. However, though expensive
in the short run, the London and Birmingham’s action in choosing the
New Street site turned out to be extremely judicious and far-sighted.
For apart from the merits of the site itself, there remained, to the
south-west, a further seven or eight acres of scandalously dilapidated
housing which constituted a natural area for expansion when the L. &
N.W. and Midland railways were ready to take their next bite out of
the central district.
The merits of the Snow Hill site were argued equally forcefully.
Snow Hill was higher in the town and more conveniently placed for the
manufactories and warehouses in the north of the central Birmingham
district. Several witnesses gave evidence testifying to the projected
station’s easy access to the warehouses which the small hardware

57 Birmingham Weekly Post, 25 March 1899.

58 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref. (L. & B. Ext.), 1846. Also includes the estimate of costs
by Robert Stephenson and William Barker.
59 BRL, Lee, Crowder papers, 241. The small sums of 2s 6d or a guinea com­
pensation sometimes quoted were for ‘weekly tenants’.
141
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

dealer or manufacturer would visit. In addition Snow Hill was wider

than the widest part of New Street, which at its narrowest point was
only 13 yards wide, and had recently required the stationing of two
policemen to prevent accidents.60
For their part counsel representing the L. & N.W. Railway did
their best to sabotage the bill. Under re-examination one of the favour­
able witnesses, Mr. Samuel Thornley, had to admit that he was selling
property to one of the companies planning to build the Snow Hill
station; another, the Birmingham magistrate Mr. William Matthews,
that he had received a gift of shares in an associated railway company
and had been allowed to tender for the works.61 Perhaps the most
damaging evidence of all was the opinion expressed by the L. & N.W.
engineer, Robert Stephenson, that Snow Hill and New Street were
incompatible; an opinion which took some erasing from the minds of
the Committee.62 Once their minds had been set at rest upon this point,
however, objections to Snow Hill were removed and both central sites
were sanctioned in August 1846.63
The question of sites was settled, but the issue of control and opera­
tion was still a matter for contention. The already delicate relationship
between the railways sharing the east Birmingham terminals was further
complicated by the appearance of four new companies, all with claims
to the new central stations. For the next five years Birmingham was the
scene of a struggle for control as obstructive and turbulent as those
enacted over longer periods in the other major cities. The situation can
briefly be summarised as follows. At Snow Hill Parliamentary author­
isation had been given to a newly formed company, the Birmingham,
Wolverhampton and Dudley Railway, to build a line from the north­
west to the Snow Hill site, and to another recently formed company,
the Birmingham and Oxford Junction Railway, to build a line from the
south-east. At Snow Hill both shared equal and overlapping rights, so
the obvious step, proposed at the first general meeting of each company,
was for the two railways to amalgamate, and then to sell or lease their
amalgamated lines to the Great Western railway company. These
resolutions were carried, and a deputation from both companies met
the Great Western directors, who agreed to buy the two undertakings
on the basis of an offer of £30 5s Od for each £20 share, a very handsome
profit to show in so short a time on the combined capitals of £1,700,000.64
However, this was not the end of the matter, for George Carr Glyn,

60 HLRO, Min. (B.W. & D.), 24 June, pp. 240-3, 25 June, pp. 221, 269.
61 Ibid. 25 June, p. 281 (Thornley). He owned a printing office, bakehouse, ware­
house, eight houses and shops, and leased others in the area.
62 Ibid. 23 June, pp. 77, 79, 90. .
63 9 & 10 Vic., 315 and 359. ’
64 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. I, 129.

142
 BIRMINGHAM

the Chairman of the newly formed L. & N.W. Railway Company,

with his fellow directors, and the General Manager, Captain Huish, set
about buying up the Birmingham and Oxford Junction shares to obtain
a controlling interest in the company, repudiate the deal with the
Great Western, and deny it access to Birmingham. By offering large
premiums they were able to secure 80% of the shares, divide them into
lots of ten—the minimum size for a vote—and distribute them amongst
the directors, solicitors, clerks and even the engineers and porters of the
L. & N.W. These new shareholders arrived at Curzon Street station
by special train from Euston on 13 March 1847, attended the
Extraordinary General Meeting and elected six new directors from their
own ranks. The old directors, having taken counsel, refused to retire,
and remained in de facto control whilst the argument was taken to
Chancery, and by special petition, to the House of Lords. The following
January the last appeals were thrown out by the Lord Chancellor, and
the two companies permitted to carry out their agreements with the
Great Western Railway.65 One tangible monument of this struggle was
left behind, however, in the form of Duddeston Viaduct, an urban branch
50 chains in length, carried on 58 brick arches, which the Great Western
railway company was compelled to build in accordance with a clause
inserted in the Birmingham and Oxford Junction bill. It could hardly
be called a branch line, since no rails were ever laid and no connection
made at the Northern end; yet it was a small price to pay for securing
a central station at Snow Hill.66
The other two new companies which appeared on the scene had
the power to run into New Street station. One, the Birmingham,
Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway, was obviously a speculative
terminal company, floated in the same spirit as the Birmingham,
Wolverhampton and Dudley, and the Birmingham and Oxford Junction
railways. Like them it intended to sell at a premium the authority to
traverse Birmingham’s suburbs which Parliament had granted. The
second company, the Shrewsbury and Birmingham, was somewhat
grandiloquently named for a line which only ran from Shrewsbury to
the outskirts of Wolverhampton, where its act allowed running powers
over the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway.
When the Shrewsbury company signed a traffic agreement with Charles
Saunders, the General Manager of the Great Western, however, and
proposed to exercise its running powers into New Street station, the
small company assumed a tactical importance out of proportion to its
size.
Ibid. I, 130-3.
66 Ibid. I, 140, G. A. Sekon, ‘Birmingham’s never-used railway viaduct’, Railway
and Travel Monthly (March 1920). C. E. Stretton, The Railways of Birmingham
(1897), idem. A History of the L. & N.W. Railway (Leeds, 1902).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Once the Board of Trade inspectors had reported the line to be satis­
factory the Shrewsbury company announced it would run a train into
New Street on 1 December 1851. Since the Stour Valley railway’s lines
finished at the northern entrance to the station, the L. & N.W., which
had built the southern approaches and the station itself, determined
to resist the use of their terminal by an ally of the Great Western.67
Stern written exchanges having failed, they sent an engine, driven by the
Stour Valley’s engineer, Mr. Baker, and loaded with solicitors and
officials, to intercept and check the Birmingham and Shrewsbury’s
inaugural train. The Birmingham crowds and local newspaper reporters
enjoyed a field day as the Shrewsbury train approached, with its whistle
sounding shrilly, and attempted to push the L. & N.W. engine back­
wards into the station.68 The symbolic nature of the encounter did not
escape the Wolverhampton Herald reporter. ‘The two engines standing
opposite each other in the closest proximity with the steam power of
their gigantic bodies issuing from the various safety valves in volumi­
nous quantities with a hissing noise presented an exciting spectacle,
representing the antagonism of their respective proprietors.’69
The attempt to force an entry by steam power failed and the directors
and solicitors adjourned to the magistrate’s court at the Town Hall,
from which the argument proceeded to the Board of Trade, and finally
the Court of Chancery. It was three years before toll arrangements
were agreed under which the Birmingham and Shrewsbury’s trains were
allowed to enter New Street.
This was the fitting climax to the battle between the L. & N.W. and
G.W. railways, however. Once each had established clear rights to its
own station the tacit apportionment of their shares of Birmingham’s
traffic soon followed, together with an uneasy agreement on equal
rates and traffic divisions in 1857.70 The later expansion of station
accommodation fitted into this pattern.

4. Summary and general considerations

In many respects Birmingham provides a text-book model for the
impact of railways upon a great city. Its termini are central and provide
underground through-transport beneath the city centre. The cross-town
link railways, which caused such expense to shareholders and dis-

87 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. I, 188-93.

88 4,000 to 5,000 people watched the scene. J. F. Nicol, the secretary of the Shrews­
bury company, was on the train’s footplate. A second line of L. & N.W. defence
was to take up the track behind their locomotive. C. E. Stretton, The Birmingham,
Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway (1886).
89 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. I, 194.
70 Ibid. I, 219.

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 BIRMINGHAM

satisfaction to travellers in other cities in the 1860’s and 1870’s, were

not necessary in Birmingham because large and early decisions were
taken. Birmingham also emerged with the nearest approach in any of
the major cities to a single Grand Central Station, when New Street
was enlarged to fifteen acres in the early 1880’s.71
Moreover, with certain exceptions which will be noted, the decisions
on the siting and routes of Birmingham’s railways and termini in the
mid-nineteenth century seem to have been taken, by the various
interests concerned, in a manner which was not merely timely and
rational, but was also peculiarly single-minded. Birmingham is free
of the huge number of confusing alternatives which one finds canvassed
in the local press of most of the other cities, and submitted, at great
expense, to Parliamentary Select Committees.
It would be possible, for example, if one assembled evidence from
the Plans and Sections and Books of Reference submitted to Parliament
in support of those schemes which fell through, to draw up a hypo­
thetical picture of urban railways which would have been substantially
different in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, and virtually un­
recognisable in London. Not so with Birmingham, where the path of
railway construction is not littered with second-thoughts and might-
have-beens. The only substantial scheme which was proposed but fell
through was for a central station at Broad Street, mid-way between
those actually built and to the west of them; and the reason why this
scheme aborted was simply that in 1831 it was too grandiose and
premature. As Mr. Charles Shaw, one of the projectors, explained,
‘That was always a favourite scheme of mine as being more central,
but railway profits had not then developed themselves and this would
have cost more capital than we dare undertake to raise.’72
The only considerable after-thought, or later modification of the
urban railway pattern in Birmingham, was in the opening of a further
small depot at Moor Street, at the end of the century. This addition was
not compelled either by the failure of existing working arrangements
between companies, or because of the conspicuous overloading of
existing facilities. It came into being largely because the disposal of a
substantial central area covered by the old Police Station and
Public Offices presented an unusual opportunity in the urban land
market, which a small company, the Birmingham, North Warwick­

71 By Additional Powers Bills, in 1881 and ’82, the Midland railway company
took in 756 further properties. Vyse’s trustees and Thomas Catell’s executors held
parcels of up to 50, but mostly ownership was fragmented. The chief point of
significance was that, at this relatively late date, the railway companies had learned
to purchase in advance. At least 90 properties had been brought up beforehand, in
three main blocks, by the Midland company. BRL, P & S, Midland Railway, 1881-2.
72 HLRO, Min. (B.W. & D.), 25 June, pp. 233, 245, 249.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

shire and Stratford upon Avon Railway, was launched to exploit.73

For the rest, Birmingham’s facilities retained substantially the form
in which they had been delineated by the late 1840’s. Goods yards and
sidings were considerably enlarged, tracks and tunnels broadened, and
both New Street and Snow Hill stations extensively rebuilt, but there
was no need to erase or re-draw the essential outlines laid down as early
as 1846. Even the increment of suburban traffic, associated with the
opening of the Harborne, Birmingham and Henley in Arden, and
Birmingham West Suburban railways, in the 1860’s and 1870’s, was
contained within the original framework without great difficulty, by
the construction of link lines. Apart from the Moor Street terminal
station which, as just mentioned, was opened in the last decade of the
century ‘to cope with the growing short distance traffic’, the only other
station envisaged was that of the Birmingham and West Suburban
Railway at Granville Street (or Old Wharf) immediately to the west
of New Street Station; and since this small company was, from the
start, proposed as a toll railway, it is difficult to avoid the belief that
it was established, like so many other small urban lines, with the express
intention of attracting a wealthy patron from the larger companies.74
Certainly this was the course events took. Within six years the West
Suburban’s parliamentary authorisation to purchase the lands of the
Worcester Canal Company (which formed their approach route), had
been acquired by the Midland Railway, and a new tunnel projected
from the Old Wharf at Suffolk Street, to join the main line tunnel to
the north-west of New Street Station. This measure, together with the
doubling of New Street Station’s size, enabled the only other projected
central terminal to be eliminated and another new line to be woven
into the pattern established earlier.75
In no other major city was so simple and definitive a plan laid down
so early; and yet the accommodation provided was sufficiently flexible
to stand until the end of the century with only minor modifications.
It presents an altogether unusual picture amongst the major Victorian
cities.
Why should Birmingham have experienced relatively little difficulty
in coming to terms with the railways ? Any explanation of this pheno­
menon would need to take into account four major factors. In the first
place, the provision of railway facilities in any city can only be explained
78 Apart from the Mayor, Aidermen and Citizens, Lench’s Charity, Thomas
Catell’s Trustees, King Edward VI’s School, Sir Alfred Gooch and the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners were the principal owners. BRL, B.Ref., B.N.W. & S. upon A. Rail­
way, 1893. The G.W. absorbed it in 1908. Great Western Railway Magazine, May/
June 1916.
74 R. P. Mears, ‘Snow Hill Station’, G.W.R. Magazine, August 1911.
76 BRL, P & S, B.Ref., B.W. Suburban Railway, (Sessions 1871, 1873), Midland
Railway New Works (Session 1876).

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 BIRMINGHAM

by examining the relative conditions of competition prevailing at the

time between those companies which originated the urban railway
schemes. In Birmingham‘s case the postures of the rival companies
engaged were such as to produce a working compromise at a very early
stage, as explained above in Section 2. Secondly, such a durable plan
might survive because it was well conceived and rational, and contained
within itself, partly by design, partly by accident, the potentiality for
continuous growth and evolution matching that of the city. To a
certain extent this was the case, as Section 3 above attempts to explain
and illustrate. Thirdly, the comparative absence of difficulties in
Birmingham might be due to favourable physical and geographical
factors, which made railway access unusually simple. And, indeed, the
conformation of the central Birmingham area is such that the Snow
Hill lines could approach the terminus on a viaduct and leave it through
a tunnel without encountering any gradients which were insuperable,
even in the early days of steam power. The New Street lines also run
through tunnels into a species of natural bowl, or amphitheatre; so
that both the two main railways take their course naturally under­
ground through the city centre in the best approved modern manner.76
Moreover these underground cross-urban routes were selected as early
as 1846, so that the exorbitantly expensive task of taking the steam
railways underground, encountered later in the century in Liverpool
and London, did not present itself in Birmingham.
Finally one must consider the possibility which exists, in theory at
any rate, that the urban railway pattern might owe its longevity and
stability to a relatively slow local growth in trade, industry and popula­
tion, and to retarded traffic demands in the area it served. This, clearly,
was not true of Birmingham and the Midland industrial zone except
in the following special sense. The region centred on Birmingham
undoubtedly enjoyed a rate of growth which was both firmly based,
and sustained without flagging into the twentieth century, because it
was admirably diversified. The security which industrial diversification
gave to the region was one of the boasts of the Birmingham merchant.
‘Look here,’ one said to John Pendleton in 1896, ‘if the shipping trade
isn’t good, Liverpool’s all awry; if there’s a dispute in the cotton trade,
Manchester suffers keenly; but nothing upsets us. You see, we’ve all
sorts of trades, from guns to pens and buttons.’77 These varied products
of the small craft workshops, which were still typical of Birmingham in
1900, formed a compact and valuable merchandise traffic little subject
to seasonal fluctuation, and relatively immune to the cyclical depressions
of the last quarter of the century. The raw materials and finished
76 August Losch, The Economics of Location (Yale, 1954), 443.
77 John Pendleton, Our Railways: their Origin, Development, Incident and Romance
(1896), I, 240.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

products of local and regional industry were enough to occupy the

great goods yards at Curzon and Lawley Streets fully, but they did not
pose as acute a traffic problem as those encountered in northern cities,
which dealt with a highly irregular traffic in relatively bulky raw
materials and finished goods, and which also had to cater for the prob­
lems of warehousing and trans-shipment which maritime commerce
involved. Large though the Birmingham goods yards were, they occupied
at the end of the century only about two-thirds of the space which had
to be made available elsewhere; some 390 acres, as opposed to between
590 and 680 acres at Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester.78 Birming­
ham did not have the problems of a terminal and trans-shipment point,
but was able to choose which items of the through traffic would termi­
nate in the city’s yards, and which would be channelled to the four
hundred or so private industrial sidings which existed in the Birming­
ham, Darlaston, Tipton region.79 As a manufacturer of valuable and
imperishable small wares Birmingham did not have a warehousing
problem comparable to that of Manchester. Nor did Birmingham
experience the acute problems which irregular daily traffic brought to a
trading city like Liverpool, where 60% of each day’s railway goods
traffic arrived between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.80 In the evidence on Terminal
Charges in the 1860’s and 1870’s, the problem towns most often quoted
were Liverpool and London; the former as an example of the miles of
wasteful sidings which had to be provided to meet an irregular peak
traffic, the latter because the extraordinary land values prevailing made
any sort of central goods accommodation extremely expensive. Birm­
ingham does not receive a single mention in the lengthy evidence put
forward by Cawkwell, Grierson and Allport on behalf of their com­
panies, the L. & N.W., the G.W., and the Midland, presumably because
its problems were considered relatively tractable.
This characteristic feature in the city’s economic base may help to
explain the relative ease with which the growing goods traffic was
accommodated without undue consumption of urban space or intrusion
into the central district, but it does not explain why there was no
counterpart in Birmingham to the expensive and belated reorganisation
of suburban passenger accommodation in late nineteenth-century
London.
The main explanation of this is to be sought in the policies of the
railway companies. For reasons discussed elsewhere the three major
companies possessing access to Birmingham failed to exploit the
potentialities of the region for mass suburban travel. Instead they cut
78 Infra Ch. 10, sec. 2.
78 P. L. Clark, Studies in the Railway Geography of the Birmingham Region (Birm­
ingham B.A. thesis, 1951), 54.
80 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.12954.

148
 BIRMINGHAM

the traffic to suit the system by means of a high fares policy, by their
reluctance to issue third class season tickets, and by their point-blank
refusal to put on Workmens’ Trains. Their existing passenger facilities,
therefore, were sufficient, with a little stretching, to serve the restricted
function deliberately chosen for them.81 The attempt to capture local
residential traffic, typified by the G.W. Railway’s ‘Homes for All in
Rural Birmingham’ campaign, in the years before the Great War, was
left too late, and restricted in its appeal to the middle classes. As a
consequence many of the small branch stations opened in the period
between 1890 and 1914 had only a short life before closure in the 1920’s
and 1930’s. The problem of the urban commuter was not solved by the
railway network in Birmingham, but by other means.
Railway services in the four other great cities shared this shortcoming
to differing degrees. Birmingham’s increase in passenger traffic was not
of a lesser order than theirs, yet it was handled by the simple extension
of existing facilities over a seventy year period, in a way which was not
paralleled elsewhere. None of the other major cities studied was able
to secure so large and so central a site for a through-railway terminal,
at such an early date and reasonable cost, or operate it with so little
friction between companies afterwards. In Birmingham there was an
equipoise in the competitive interests, combined with peculiarly favour­
able features in the land-ownership and land use pattern in the central
district, which made it possible not merely to secure at New Street an
unequalled site, but to expand it progressively, and with public approval,
into one of the largest passenger stations in Britain.
81 Infra Ch. 11, sec. 3.

149
 VI
Manchester

1. The property ownership pattern

Manchester is particularly fortunate in possessing an outstanding
series of maps and estate plans. The reason may partly be the accident of
their survival; but it is also possible that as one of the most extraordinary
towns in late eighteenth-century Europe—the first fully-developed
example of the new type of town associated with the Industrial Revo­
lution—Manchester received unusually close attention and study.
Certainly Laurent, the continental map-maker, considered it worth his
time to pay an extended visit to record the city. Excellent though his
map is, however, it is surpassed by the detailed cartography of William
Green: and indeed, a whole series of maps of unusual quality, by local
map-makers like Richard Thornton, Joseph Adshead and Richard
Bastow, extends through the nineteenth century.1
From these maps, and from estate plans, it is possible to piece
together a picture of Manchester during the railway age, broken into
highly fragmented units of ownership in the central area, but ringed by
a dozen or so large estates, which lay in the route of the city’s outward
expansion, and of its railway approaches. The evidence, which is
represented in the diagrammatic map opposite, does not include those
great landlords like Sir Humphrey and Sir Thomas de Trafford or the
Earl of Stamford, whose holdings, though extensive, were situated a
little further from the centre. Nor does it include the large suburban
holdings of families familiar in Manchester’s history, the Chethams,
XC. Laurent, Topographical Plan of Manchester and Salford (1793), W. Green,
Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794). Though early, both show the property
boundaries and ‘allotments of Land proposed to be built on’ in great detail. R.
Thornton, Bonck's and Co.’s Plan of Manchester and Salford and their environs (1832),
J. Adshead, Twenty-four Illustrated Maps of the Township of-Manchester (1851).
The still more remarkable map by Bastow (1881) was not published, but prepared
for the Corporation’s internal use. See infra Chap. 11, sec. 1.
150
 MANCHESTER

the Assheton-Bennetts or the Andrews.2 Indeed the coverage chosen

cannot do justice to the true size of the Mosley, Derby and Egerton/
Bridgewater holdings, which extended far off to the east, north and
south-west.

The Earl of Derby, in fact, owned 68,000 acres of land with annual
rents of £160,000 in the early 1880’s, apart from 900 acres of land
leased for building purposes, on which the annual value was not
returned, and was the greatest landowner in Lancashire.3 It was with
him that the Manchester and Leeds railway company had to negotiate
concerning the route for the first major through-station; and the
perseverance with which the extension across north Manchester
recommended by Thomas Gooch, the Manchester and Leeds company’s
consulting engineer, was carried through, in spite of the deliberate
policy of temporising pursued by the other partner to the linkage, and
in spite of two well supported alternative schemes, was partly due to
the speed and simplicity of the property transactions involved. The
2 A History of the County of Lancashire, IV (V.C.H., 1911) 237-337.
3 J. Bateman, Great Landowners of Great Britain (1883), 127.
151
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

whole extension line from the earlier terminus at Oldham Road lay
on property owned by the Earl of Derby, whose name recurs two
hundred and fifty times in the Books of Reference. Somewhat ironically,
in view of the Stanley family’s later pronouncements upon the subject
of slums and railway demolition, the properties swept away were
‘cottages with outbuildings’ and ‘cellar dwellings’ of the meanest quality.4
Robert Slatter, and later Richard Earle, Lord Derby’s agents, became
adept at dealing with railway companies, which were now placed at the
head of the list of clients for the Stanley family’s extensive urban lands.
The principal customers for Derby’s lands were the London and
North Western and the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway companies;
the most important area for the land dealings was north Liverpool.
However, the Derby Papers, at the Lancashire County Records Office,
also reveal close contact between Henry Booth, Secretary of the L. &
N.W., and the Earl’s agents in north Manchester and in Salford.5 Co­
operation is requested by the secretary of the railway company in
removing small cottagers who are interrupting operations in Salford.6
The possibility of combining street frontages of cheaper residential
accommodation with sale of the land behind them for sidings is pointed
out. Constant assurances are given that ‘railway companies always
pay a good price for what they buy.’7 Perhaps the tone of the transac­
tions may be caught in a short extract from Henry Booth’s letter to
Richard Earle in 1847 concerning land at Ordsall Lane, in Salford.
‘We have no right, and do not wish to criticise the price which you
name for the land in question at Orsal Lane (sic) but we do look at
the large sum we should have to pay for a plot of ground on which to
put aside some empty wagons. Our Board do not meet on Tuesdays
but I will venture to give 16s per yard for the whole plot; and if you
take into consideration the large proportion of backland for any ord­
inary purpose of sale—a kind of Terra incognita. When you have built
a row of cottages in front, I trust you will consider the arrangement I
now propose as fair to both sides.’8 For his part the Earl of Derby left
his agents in no doubt that although they could stand off to bring the
railway companies to advantageous terms, they should not allow their
reservations on particular points to be mistaken for root and branch
opposition to the schemes proposed. ‘I do not wish, if we can avoid it,’
he wrote to Earle, ‘to get into a Parliamentary conflict with so powerful
a body as the North Western company.’9 Such mutual respect enabled

4 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1839, Manchester and Leeds Railway.

5 LRO DDK 683/1/1 et seq.
* Loc. cit. 683/1/4.
7 Loc. cit. 683/1/24.
8 Loc. cit. 683/1/25. ’
9 Loc. cit. 683/1/28.
152
 MANCHESTER

the speedy transaction of business, and may partly explain the success
with which the Victoria station approaches were carried half-way
across Manchester whilst the companies based at Liverpool Road and
London Road stations were still debating the route a link line should
take.
This impression is strengthened by two other features of the land
ownership pattern in Manchester. First, the site to which the Man­
chester and Leeds company was able to advance so expeditiously
through Derby’s lands was itself also owned by one landlord, the Earl
of Ducie (No. 4 on sketch map).10 He had already indicated in the
mid-1820’s his willingness to develop his estates on the east bank of
the Irwell, immediately north of the Collegiate Church (later Cathedral),
by laying it out in building lots, and attempting to improve its poor
road communications.11 Naturally the railway company had to pay
generously for the site of their station at Hunt’s Bank (Victoria), and
the price they offered took into account the embryonic development
value of Ducie’s estate. But in return for this the Manchester and Leeds
railway company gained the inestimable advantage of negotiating with
two landlords only for the greater part of their route; with the added
bonus thrown in, when later extensions to the station became necessary,
that there was plenty of spare land adjacent to their terminus still left
in Lord Ducie’s hands, and that they would, therefore, only have
Ducie’s agent to deal with for further land acquisitions.
The second feature is the contrast between land dealings on the
northern link route, and the south junction line. The Manchester South
Junction Lands and Compensation Committee’s minutes show the
laborious bargaining required to cope with the land on the route of
their trans-urban viaduct. Two solicitors were appointed to work full
time on the project, one to the east and one to the west of the small
Oxford Road station, and were kept under such pressure that the health
of the older partner broke down.12 Apart from this, Mr. Baker (the
engineer-in-chief) his four assistants, and the individual members of
the committee, were given unusual powers to negotiate directly with
proprietors.13 Yet, in spite of this, the works took seven years to
complete; and although, in 1842, the two schemes had been canvassed
as rival and contemporary projects, the Hunt’s Bank extension opened
on 1 January 1844, the Manchester South Junction not until 1
April 1849.14
10 J. Bateman, op. cit. 140; HLRO, P & S, (M. & L. Ext.), 1839.
11 Plan ofLand in Strangeways belonging to Lord Ducie to be sold in lots for building
upon (1823), MRL. John Reilly, History of Manchester (Manchester, 1865), 346.
12BTHR MSJ 1/13.
13BTHR MSJ 1/1.
14 ‘A History of Manchester Railways’, Manchester City News, Notes and Queries
Supplement (1881-2), 16, 23.
153
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The two most influential proprietors with whom the M.S.J. Lands
committee had to negotiate were Sir Thomas de Trafford and Lord
Francis Egerton. Though awkward about accommodation works, de
Trafford was content to allow the scheme to go through unopposed.
Egerton, because of his family connections with the Bridgewater canal,
showed greater reluctance, and was only persuaded to support the
scheme by the offer of a large number of shares in the company. Since
the M.S.J. company was a shadow company, with shares owned by
the two railway companies effecting the junction, Egerton was thereby
placed in an unusually favoured position, as the only member of the
public allowed to hold direct shares.15 After this inducement had been
offered he agreed to take charge of the Bill in Parliament.
The other major proprietors along the southern route were the Croft
Dickenson family, who had bought Garrat Hall and estate from Roger
Aytoun, after he had squandered his patrimony; and Sir Booth Gore,
who owned an estate on the south bank of the River Medlock, at
Chorlton Hall.16 Sir Booth Gore did not take kindly to the idea of a
viaduct railway severing his estate from the centre of Manchester.
Unlike Lord Ducie, whose intentions to develop his land at Hunt’s
Bank had got no further than a few market gardens and two dye works,
Sir Booth Gore had laid out his estate with a Grosvenor Street, Gros­
venor Square, Russell and Bedford and Clarendon Streets. Admittedly
the buildings which had been erected by 1846 did not live up to the
aristocratic promise of the street names, but the area might have
shared more readily in the appreciation of central land values if the
Manchester South Junction viaduct had not interrupted communica­
tions with the central district, and drawn a wall of ramshackle housing,
mills, and timber yards, between Gore’s lands and the central district.17
The railways produced an even more immediate and dilapidating
effect upon Manchester’s new West End, laid out by Mr. Henry Ather­
ton, and afterwards by his widow Mrs. Ann Atherton and Miss
Eleanora Byrom (see sketch map). There, a mere four hundred yards
to the west of Deansgate, an estate was laid out with covenants against
manufactures or trades, ‘in an eligible situation . . . with proper streets
and approaches.’ ‘It is obvious,’ they petitioned, ‘that the inconvenience
and danger which will of necessity arise from the passing of locomotive
engines, in addition to the great and offensive nuisance attending the
use of them, and more particularly where many of the engines are
collected together at the depot, will not only cause great alarm to the
inhabitants, but will also materially injure, if not wholly destroy their
comforts, and actually compel them to desert their residences. The
15 He later re-sold them to the M.S. & L., ibid. 23. .
16 V.C.H., op. cit. IV, 253.
17 J. Adshead, op. cit. Sheets 4-8.

154
 Manchester
building of houses of the description of those already erected must
necessarily be stopped; and if other inferior houses are built, they
must alter the whole character of the neighbourhood, and materially
injure the value of those already erected.’18
The tone of Atherton and Byrom’s petition was no doubt influenced
by the extreme novelty of railways at the time—it dates back to the
abortive Liverpool and Manchester Bill of 1825—but the cutting of the
Liverpool Road terminus through their estate eleven years later did
produce precisely the effects they had forecast. It is difficult, of course,
to imagine high-class residential housing surviving for any length of
time against the encroachments likely on an estate with such a central
location; but it was by no means uncommon for buildings which had
been laid out spaciously for expensive housing to convert admirably to
professional and business uses, and form a natural annexe for the
central business district. Instead, the establishment of the Liverpool Road
terminus, and the cushion of mean housing which surrounded it, tended
to provide a westward barrier to the expansion of the business district.
To the east of the city centre the principal estates were held by the
Mosley family, Sir Henry Houghton, Lord Ducie and various trustees,
of which the most important were Manchester Church and the Gram­
mar School. As already mentioned, the London Road terminus in east
Manchester was cut with little trouble, entering Manchester from a
direction in which very little building had been carried out in 1836,
when the bill was authorised. Rapid building of a speculative nature
followed, mostly over the lands of small owners or lessees, like Thomas
Tipping, whose proprietorships have been handed down to an un­
distinguished immortality in the current street names.19 A larger parcel
of land in Ancoats remained in the hands of the Mosley family until
the late 1860’s, when the Midland railway company negotiated with
them to buy an extensive area adjacent to Ancoats Hall for their goods
terminus. Thereafter, although describing themselves as the Mosleys
of Ancoats and Rolleston, they ceased residence, and their sombre
mansion was used for business offices by the Midland railway company.20
Apart from the individual landowners and trustees mentioned,
several canal companies also commanded important approach routes
and central sites; but although the same considerations applied as
those mentioned in Birmingham’s case, the influence of the previous
locations selected by canal companies was of a lesser importance.

18 Case of Mrs. Ann Atherton and Miss Eleanora Byrom, petitioners against the Bill
(1825), MRL.
19 Tipping owned fields, in 1794, to the south and east of the future London Road
terminus. W. Green, op. cit. The Mosley’s estates are shown in Hillkirk, Map of the
Estates of the Mosley family 1805-8, MRL ff 912.4273.
10 James Croston, County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire (1887), 341, 345.
155
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Nevertheless, the large basins and extensive storage yards for timber,
flagstones and coal, shown so clearly on Adshead’s map of 1851,
persuaded the railway companies to acquire the Rochdale, Ashton and
finally the Bridgewater canals.
The Ashton canal, of little importance apart from its useful site,
was leased in perpetuity by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire
railway company in 1858 for a sum of £12,363 per annum?1 For the
larger premises of the Rochdale canal the M.S. & L. had to share a
joint twenty-one year lease with the Lancashire and Yorkshire and the
L. & N.W. railway companies.22 The Rochdale canal also possessed a
junction canal which ran across Manchester to connect with Bridge­
water’s canal; though since it was largely built over, its value as a
cleared route was negligible. However, there were occasional loading
and storage points where the canal ceased to be subterranean, and it
was, in fact, one of these basins which the M.S. & L. railway company
chose for its projected Central station of 1866 (No. 5 on sketch map).
The only through-route of any significance taken over from the canals
was the suburban branch of the Manchester South Junction company’s
line, which followed the banks of the Bridgewater canal to Altrincham;
though subsequent services in mid-century were not designed to en­
courage the flow of large commuter traffic along that route.

The general impression gained from a study of the land-ownership

patterns in Manchester, and their influence upon the railway companies’
land acquisitions is, once more, that large unified holdings afforded an
opportunity for expeditious and convenient building operations in
which legal charges and delays could be kept down to a minimum.
This factor was particularly important in the early stages of a scheme’s
inception. Tn such a neighbourhood as Manchester,’ James Hayward,
a Parliamentary agent, told Sir James Graham, ‘the moment you get
up a scheme there are half a dozen others started of the same description
and it becomes quite a scramble. ... In that scramble would there not
be a competition of ingenuity and intellect?—Certainly.’23 In such a
delicate and competitive situation, where speed of operation was at a
premium, the goodwill of larger landowners, or the good fortune to
select a route with the minimum number of claimants, was enough to
swing the balance in favour of one scheme rather than another. Similar
considerations also applied, though with diminished force, even after
the routes and sites had been chosen, though by this stage circumstances
were often quite outside the railway companies’ control. As they
21 H.C., 1872, XIII, App. I, pp. 236-7.
22 Ibid. 21 years from 1 September 1855.
23 H. C., 1836, XXI, QQ.641-2.

156
 MANCHESTER

committed themselves to choices of site, so the companies reduced

their future room to manoeuvre in the course of bargaining.
To take two contrasted examples: extensions to the Oldham Road
station (No. 2 on sketch map) planned by John Hawkshaw in 1845
could count upon dealings with only two proprietors for the whole
range of housing scheduled for purchase. Mary and Sarah Taylor
owned, as direct proprietors (without intervening lessees), a hundred
cottages, houses, rag shops, smiths’, coopers’ and wheelwrights’
workshops; even a public house and police lock-up.24 By comparison,
when Hawkshaw planned extensions to the Victoria station, sixteen
years later, in 1861, the position was very different. His line (fore­
shadowing the secessionist Exchange station) was constructed across
the Salford side of the Irwell, through the gap shown in the diagram­
matic map between Lord Ducie’s, and Lord Derby’s, the Reverend
John Clowes’ and others’ property further west. Its purpose was
deliberately to reduplicate the L. & N.W. line and give the Lancashire
and Yorkshire railway a technical advantage in the increasingly bitter
struggle between themselves and the L. & N.W. at Victoria station.
This rivalry was no secret to members of the public; indeed they had
been the principal sufferers from it and had complained openly. When
Hawkshaw came to construct his 940-yard viaduct, therefore, he found
his path barred by fragmented multiple ownership. Yet, only a little
time before, most of the land had belonged to Lord Ducie and the
Reverend John Clowes (whose families had held the land earlier, when
it was devoted to agricultural or market garden uses). Although there
can be no clear proof in the matter, it is difficult to avoid drawing the
inference that many of the resident lessees who seized the opportunity
to purchase their holdings, and many of the completely new buyers
who arrived in the district, had an eye to railway extensions from the
station on the other side of the river. It is certainly noticeable amongst
the holders of land on this route, and on the site of the future Exchange
station, that there was an unusual proportion of solicitors and trustees
under wills, holding blocks of ten or twenty dwellings; and Captain
J. W. Fox and Sarah Holland, though they might possibly have been
intending merely to provide a nest-egg for retirement by purchasing a
group of thirty houses for rent, may also have been directed to this
particular, rather unpromising, residential area by a process of choice
which was more venturesome or better informed than usual.25
Of course the landowners, though placed in an extremely strong

24 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, Manchester and Leeds Railway (Station Exten­
sions). Pt. 2. The property was described in Committee as ‘the disgraceful and
dilapidated land belonging to the late Henry Taylor.’Min., H.C., 1846,29 June, p. 14.
25 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1861, Lancs and Yorks Railway (New line from Salford
to Victoria Station).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

position by the Parliamentary Private Bill and the Lands Clauses

procedure (as explained elsewhere), had to be careful not to overplay
their hand. On the whole trustees, under wills, and for charitable or
corporate bodies, were reasonable clients to the railway companies,
and were content with a generous return to investment, counting it a
success if they obtained, over a decade or two of investment, a sum
equal to twice or three times the property’s value for non-railway uses.
In view of the steady and general rise of values in and around all the
major cities this was perhaps a reasonable return.26 The railway com­
panies encountered far more rapacious claims from the small owner,
who was quite capable of asking twenty times the railway company’s
valuation.
It is difficult to apply similar standards of measurement to the larger
hereditary landowners, for several reasons. The landowners’ parcels of
land were frequently so large, and had either been held in the family
for so long, had been acquired gratis under Enclosure Bill procedures,
or had been purchased under such vastly different circumstances—how
does one assess the £9,000 paid for the Hall and forty three acres of
Hulme manor in 1764?—that it is difficult to say whether the enormous
sums which were paid over to the great landlords should be viewed as
reasonable returns on investment, or as aristocratic extortion.27
One thing which can be said with reasonable assurance, however, is
that the rule not to overplay one’s hand applied even to them. Lord
Derby’s caution in this particular has already been noted. Mr. Wilbra­
ham Egerton, of Tatton Park, another very large landowner, provides
an excellent example of the type of proprietor who, although in an
extremely strong position initially, over-reached himself; not by seeking
to strike too hard a bargain financially, but by intervening publicly to
influence decisions which were essentially political in nature. Egerton
abandoned the guise of neutrality which those vendors of land who were
most successful usually maintained, no matter how much they might
privately favour particular schemes, and declared overtly his root and
branch opposition to one of two rival schemes.
The schemes were both similar in general conception; attempts, in
1835, to provide a direct southern route from Manchester to replace
26 H. Baker, ‘On the Growth of the Commercial Centre of Manchester, Move­
ment of Population, and Pressure of Habitation 1861-71’, Trans. Manch. Stat. Soc.
(1868-72) 93-4, gives thirty to forty per cent as an average increase in values per
decade. The prices per sq. yd. of central business district land in Piccadilly or John
Dalton, Cross or King Streets rather more than doubled per decade.
27 Herbert Clegg, ‘The Third Duke of Bridgewater’s canal works in Manchester’,
Trans of Lancs, and Chesh. Antiq. Soc. LXV (1955), 96-7. MRL, Plan of Estates in
Holm Moss side and Charlton Row belonging to George Lloyd (1760), Plan of Land in
Township of Hulme to be sold in Lots for building upon by Thomas Hill (1836), show
the formation and break up of Lloyd’s large estate.

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the roundabout Grand Junction route. The Manchester and Cheshire

Junction scheme, sponsored by the wealthy Manchester merchants
Robert Barbour, John Brooks, Joshua Westhead, Thomas Ashton,
John Chippendale, and others, was the less ambitious of the two
schemes, planning to cross over easy country to Crewe.28 There the
engineer Rastrick planned to join the Grand Junction, after cutting
fifteen miles off the journey from the south, at the expense of building
only thirty miles of track. The Manchester South Union scheme, with
George Stephenson for engineer, planned a much more elaborate and
difficult route cutting out the Grand Junction line altogether.29 Both
schemes required to pass through Wilbraham Egerton’s land, and he
frankly espoused the cause of the South Union, in a most open and
partisan manner.
His opposition was not without its effect, for the Manchester and
Cheshire Junction, which was the more obvious and less controversial
scheme, was rejected as a result of his counsel’s vigorous opposition;
but on the other hand, the South Union Bill was also thrown out, and
the two schemes were merged with a third, the Manchester and Birm­
ingham Direct, the following year (1836). The compromise line (in­
cluding the remarkable trans-urban viaduct a hundred and ten feet
high at Stockport) was then put in hand, and a site cleared at Man­
chester. The more ambitious southern tail to the scheme was abandoned
during the 1837 depression. But over the next eight years, at intervals,
traces of the original (South Union) idea of a more direct line through
the Midlands can be detected in route choice, and in the engineering
and boardroom personnel, of the Stafford and Rugby railway company
and the Trent Valley railway company.30
Wilbraham Egerton’s opposition to the Manchester and Cheshire
Junction Bill has been referred to in some detail because it brought
into the open an important point of principle concerning the relation­
ship between landowners and railway companies which has a far wider
application than the context of suburban Manchester in which it
originates. It was one thing for a proprietor to hold out for generous
compensation from any and all comers; quite another to take it upon
himself to decide between the merits of rival schemes. This was a point
seized upon eloquently by Mr. Serjeant Merewether in his summing-up
speech before the Lords’ Committee:
‘If Mr. Egerton came before your Lordships to protect the residence of
himself upon the estate he had received from his ancestors, and begging you
28 £488,900 out of the total of £654,000 initial capital was subscribed by (282)
Manchester men, MRL F 625 M7.
29 ‘A History of Manchester Railways’, Manchester City News (1881-2) 7.
30 Ibid. 8-21. Henry Tootal of the M.S.U. was on the Board of both later com­
panies.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

not to let parties interfere with his residence, he would be in a strong position
before your Lordships.
‘My learned friend, Mr. Wrangham, who appeared for Mr. Egerton, has
relieved me of all possibility of doubt or difficulty upon this part of the case.
For my learned friend came forward and avowed, openly and distinctly,
“It is not so much Mr. Egerton’s private rights I am considering, but Mr.
Egerton has pledged himself to the people of Stockport to support the other
line that will go through that place”.
‘I state this thus distinctly, because I combat it as an objection not com­
petent for a landed proprietor to take—I say he has not a legitimate right to
urge such a ground before your Lordships, because it is nothing more or less
than making an individual whose property happens to be interposed in the
way of a great work of this description, the arbitrator upon this matter, and
taking away from the Legislature the power of deciding upon it.’31
Although, in fact, successful in dragging down for one session a
railway scheme which crossed his land, Egerton gained little credit or
profit from the action. He finally had to accept a compromise line
which differed substantially from the one for which he had originally
expressed a preference, and his land was tied up, his attention engaged,
and considerable legal expenses incurred over the following decade.
Perhaps it was this type of episode which James Croston had partly
in mind when he referred, in his County Families of Lancashire and
Cheshire (1887), to the Egerton family as ‘seldom profiting by the
varying vicissitudes which enabled many of its neighbours to enrich
themselves.’3233

2. Conditions of competition between railway companies

In no city was the competition for railway access more bitter and
protracted than in Manchester. The numbers of companies involved
reached nine—a figure exceeded only in London; and the quarrels over
right of way and site facilities were carried on with unremitting vehe­
mence, not for fifteen or twenty years, as in Birmingham, but for half a
century. The outcome of this highly competitive and long-sustained
struggle can be seen in the proliferation of stations and the complexity
of sharing arrangements.
To condense the story in as brief a compass as possible: the prota­
gonists, in order of appearance, were the Liverpool and Manchester,
the Grand Junction, the London and Birmingham railways, which
operated (the two latter under toll charges) from Liverpool Road
station (No. 1 on map); the Manchester and Leeds, which operated

31 MRL, Tracts on Railways, 385 81 Ml, contains Merewether’s speech to the

Lords’ S.C., 22 July 1836. Quotation is from pp. 9-10.
33 James Croston, op. cit. 216.

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from Oldham Road, and later from Hunt’s Bank (or Victoria) station
(Nos. 2 and 4 on map); the Manchester and Bolton, which, after
operating from a temporary station at New Bailey Street in Salford,
joined with the Manchester and Leeds to use Victoria; the Manchester
and Birmingham railway, which built the Store Street (or London
Road) station (No. 3 on map), together with the Sheffield, Ashton-
under-Lyne and Manchester railway, which ran, on payment of a toll,
into the Manchester and Birmingham terminus; and the later arrivals
on the scene, the Midland, and the Great Northern railways, whose
foothold was never very strong, but who joined with the Sheffield and
Manchester railway to form a consortium, the Cheshire Lines Com­
mittee, to build the Central station (No. 6 on map).33 To complicate
matters further, not merely were the station names changed, from Store
Street, to London Road, to Piccadilly, etc., but the companies changed
their names, from the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester
railway, to the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, to the Great
Central, etc., and they also formed changing groups and alliances.
‘These things are constantly shifting,’ stated Seymour Clarke in 1860,
‘like moves on a chessboard.’3334 It is perhaps significant that Clarke
was giving evidence to a Select Committee on problems raised by
station-sharing in London, which had naturally turned to London
Road station, Manchester, as a conspicuous example of what to
avoid.
The most important permanent grouping of companies to emerge in
Manchester was the amalgamation, in 1846, of the three companies
operating from Liverpool Road, into the London and North Western
railway company, and (here was where the principal friction originated)
the absorption of the Manchester and Birmingham railway into the
L. & N.W. company. This gave the L. & N.W. control of both Liverpool
Road and London Road stations, and provided a renewed incentive
to press on with the difficult Manchester South Junction viaduct
scheme. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway company,
which, because of the engineering difficulties and unexpected expenses
of its line, had been glad to share the Manchester and Birmingham
station at London Road on any terms, now found itself sharing instead
33 This section is largely based upon primary official sources, but also draws upon
the standard railway histories by Steel, Dow, Grinling and Williams, and on the
anonymous but detailed and authentic account in the Manchester City News (1881—
2) already cited. M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, ‘Railway Development in Man­
chester’, Railway Magazine, 103 (1957); 613-20, 720-6, 764-9 provides a painstaking
collation of material of local relevance from the Railway Journals, and there is also
a well-illustrated survey based on secondary sources by J. A. Patmore, ‘The Railway
Network of the Manchester Conurbation’, Transactions and Papers, Instit. of Brit.
Geog., 34 (1964), 159-73.
34 BTHR PYB 1/107, p. 151.
G 161
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

with the newly-formed L. & N.W.35 This confronted the M.S. & L.
with a situation very different from the one it had originally envisaged.
Relations between the two companies ‘ceased to be the good things
they had been’; and the L. & N.W. used its control of staffing to put
every possible pressure upon its small but determined rival.36 Signs
were painted out, notices torn down, members of the public misdirected,
or even taken into custody for using the wrong platforms or tickets,
timber trains were left in front of the M.S. & L. expresses, ticket clerks
forcibly ejected through the booking office windows, a pitched battle
took place for physical possession of a shed claimed as their property
by the M.S. & L.37 In the late 185O’s London Road, Manchester,
provided an extreme example of the ill-feeling, litigation and public
inconvenience station-sharing at its worst could involve.
Scenes which were similar in kind, if not degree, also characterised
the shared station in north central Manchester. Here again, the emer­
gence of the powerful L. & N.W. amalgamation presented to the
company with whom they shared new conditions charged with possi­
bilities for friction. Since, at the Hunt’s Bank (Victoria) station, shared
facilities were combined with through-working, disharmony between
the companies might easily lead to danger as well as inconvenience. The
Town Clerk in a report to the Corporation in 1861 spoke of ‘not only
frequent delay, but constant and serious danger to the lives and limbs
of passengers’; and, a few years later, Edward Watkin expressed the
opinion that ‘Victoria station, Manchester, is the most dangerous
station in England for passengers.’38
The Manchester and Leeds railway company, by whose initiative
the Hunt’s Bank site had been secured, and the Victoria station built,
had faced the Liverpool and Manchester company on terms of near
equality in the years between 1839 and 1842, when the agreement to
share had originally been made. Indeed—if one can for a moment
completely erase the knowledge of what was to happen between 1842
and 1847—nothing could have seemed more reasonable and beneficial
at the time than an amalgamation between the Manchester and Leeds
and the Liverpool and Manchester companies. After both had been
enlarged by amalgamation with other companies, however, the possi­

35 During the difficulties with the Woodhead Tunnel ‘the Manchester and Sheffield
line people would have been prepared to give away their holdings to escape liability
for further calls’. Manchester City News (1881-2), 15. They agreed to pay interest
charges and a toll per passenger.
38 BTHR PYB 1/107, p. 151.
37 George Dow, The First Railway between Manchester and Sheffield (1945), 41.
Idem, Great Central, 1 (1959), 187-91. •.
38 Council Proceedings, 1859-61, p. 181; HLRO, Min., H.C., 1866, 9 May, pp. 24-5,
S.C. on M.S. & L. (Central Station and Lines).

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 MANCHESTER

bility of unified control at Victoria receded indefinitely. At one stage,

in 1871, amalgamation was, in fact, discussed between the large L. &
N.W. and the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway companies; but the
discussions were abandoned as politically unrealistic, in face of the
strong protest which such a near-monopoly provoked. It was possible,
of course, to conclude traffic-sharing agreements privately between two
companies without seeking an Amalgamation Bill in Parliament; but,
as already pointed out elsewhere, the drawing up of traffic-sharing and
joint purse agreements often tended to intensify and focus rivalry upon
facilities and accommodation.
For four decades, therefore, the leading decisions on the siting,
enlargement and working of Manchester’s railway termini were
coloured, in the north by the rivalry between the L. & N.W. and
Lancashire and Yorkshire companies, in the south by the M.S. & L.
railway company’s attempts to free itself from the severe limitations
which station-sharing with a large and hostile company imposed. The
later arrivals on the scene can be fitted into this competitive framework.
The Midland and the Great Northern both gained access as allies of
the M.S. & L. railway company, called in to redress the balance against
the L. & N.W. In 1861 the Midland secured running powers into the
M.S. & L.’s portion of London Road station, worsening the congestion
there. The arrangement was one of convenience, as part of ‘Mr. All­
port’s plan to break out to the coast’; and although it was cemented
by a committee (Cheshire Lines Committee) set up to handle various
joint projects for the break out to the coast further west, it remained as
uncertain as most alliances between autonomous companies.39 In 1875,
although still allies and co-members of the Cheshire Lines Committee,
the M.S. & L. gave the Midland three years’ notice to leave the London
Road premises.40
A more permanent acquisition by the Midland company, however,
was at Ancoats, where authorisation was obtained in 1865 to build a
substantial goods depot (No. 6a on sketch map). The Corporation at
first lodged a petition against the project, but withdrew it after generous
terms had been proposed at a meeting between the Mayor, Town Clerk
and Surveyor, and Allport, Hutchinson and Crossley.41
The Great Northern railway company was the third member of the
C.L.C., and it was in this capacity that it gained access to Manchester;
first as joint contributor to the Central station (sanctioned 1872,
opened 1880), then as the last substantial depot builder, constructing a
large goods station adjacent to the Central, in the 1890’s.42
39 Manchester City News (1881-2), 28.
49 G. Dow, Great Central, II (1962), 139.
41 Council Proceedings, 1863-5, pp. 98-9, 5 April 1865.
42 J. A. Patmore, loc. cit. 170.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

3. The development of railway facilities: a chronological sketch

Only the earliest termini escaped the influence of the intense and
protracted rivalry described above. Naturally the Liverpool Road
station (No. 1 on sketch map) was free of such influences, since it
constituted the eastern terminus of the unique Liverpool and Man­
chester railway, the pioneer of all major inter-city lines. The considera­
tions which received most weight in determining the size and location
of this early terminus were mostly operational, or connected with land
ownership patterns. The need to prove the technical and commercial
feasibility of rail transport in the shortest possible time led, at both
ends of the line, to skimping over terminal facilities. A temporary
station with makeshift accommodation, particularly for warehousing
and storage, and for locomotive repair and servicing, was pressed into
use. It was not quite as badly situated as the early Liverpool terminal,
in George Stephenson’s opinion, but in the other respects just men­
tioned, it was even more inadequate.43
Land lay near to hand for station extensions. A dye works, which
had stood on the Byrom/Atherton property between Water Street and
the river Irwell, was secured as the site for an improved passenger
station by the company’s surveyor John Dixon, and the erection of a
commodious arrival station announced in the company’s six-monthly
report for June, 1836. On the Salford side of the Irwell, in the Bridge­
water and Booth Gore lands, a five-acre field, and other miscellaneous
parcels of land, were added, for the supplementary purposes—repair,
storage, marshalling—which had been underestimated.44 At this early
stage the securing of land was easy, although relatively high prices
immediately marked the railway’s arrival in the land market. Yet the
land was still undeveloped, or even open agricultural land; and though
the selling price appreciated greatly, the sums involved constituted no
burden upon the changed use to which the land was now converted. The
Lands Clauses Act, ordering and consolidating purchase procedures
had not yet been passed, and land acquisition followed experimental
and rule-of-thumb methods. A director of the company, for example,
bought land, in anticipation of future plans, from Miss Byrom for 8d
per square yard, and sold it to his company for 10s per square yard;
and his exploit was openly reported to a Parliamentary Committee.45
Such overt speculation would later have been frowned upon.
George Stephenson’s second terminus, for the Manchester and Leeds
43 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1837, 17 March, pp. 27-8, S.C. on Manchester and Leeds
Railway. Stephenson, of course, was the engineer to both the Leeds and Manchester
and the Manchester and Liverpool lines.
44 Loc. cit. pp. 31-4. Six-monthly Report, Liverpool and Manchester Railway,
27 July 1836.
46 HLRO, Min., (M. & L.), 17 March, p. 36.

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 MANCHESTER

line at Oldham Road (No. 2) on sketch map) was also sanctioned in

1836 in the same pragmatic spirit. The Parliamentary Plans and Sections
themselves were missing when the Select Committee began its enquiry.
They had been drawn up unsatisfactorily, it was explained, and the
plan drawings had been observed not to correspond to the sectional
side-view drawings.46 Nevertheless, even without this evidence, which
would have later been considered essential for any legislation, the Bill
was heard and approved, with virtually no discussion of the terminal.47
Such lax procedures and faulty presentation would later have caused
any railway Bill to be thrown out on Standing Orders, before reaching
the Committee stage.
A relaxed and liberal spirit also attended J. U. Rastrick’s and
Charles Vignoles’ proposals for a south-eastern approach at Store
Street (No. 3 on sketch map). Rastrick, the Engineer for the Manchester
and Cheshire Junction (later Manchester and Birmingham) railway
company, gave evidence, framed in the most general terms, concerning
the convenience of the site, its accessibility to the hotels, business places
and canals, and its superiority to the projected rival (Manchester
South Union) station at Oxford Road.48 Letters from the Liverpool and
Manchester company offering a junction with their new Water Street
(Liverpool Road) station, from the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and
Manchester company offering to share the Store Street site, and from
the Manchester and Leeds company offering a viaduct or tunnel link
from Oldham Road station, were all freely mentioned and laid before
the Committee in July 1836, in a manner which seems almost ingenuous,
and in marked contrast to the guarded, or even misleading, information
on their future prospects and intentions which the Manchester-based
companies circulated twenty years later.49
The land to be acquired presented no financial or procedural ob­
stacles. John Lowe and John Ashworth, the company’s surveyors and
valuers, listed the landowners, and the estimated sums for purchase; a
mere £54,000, £49,000-worth of it belonging to landowners who had
given their assent, and £38,000 covering both the cost of the old inn
and market at London Road and the land purchase for 13 miles of the
approach to the city, ‘liberally and fully’.50 The supplementary Bill
brought forward in the following year, to provide additional space at
London Road for the Sheffield company, was also characterised by
similar ease and cheapness of access.51

16 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1836, 4 March, pp. 1-3.

47 Ibid. 2 May, pp. 57-60, 171 et seq.
48 H.L., 1836, XXXIII, 18 July, pp. 321-2.
49 Loc. cit. pp. 323-6.
60 Ibid. 20 July, p. 423, 21 July, p. 438.
51 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1837, 18 April, p. 35 (Vignoles).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Yet already, even in the late 183O’s, the fierce competition, which
was to dominate railway history in Manchester, was beginning to
manifest itself in the rival link-line proposals described below; and for
the next four decades hardly a scheme was put forward which did not
play some part in the ‘chessboard moves’ of which the Great Northern
railway company’s manager had spoken. Most urgent and persistent
of the impulses given to urban railway construction in Manchester,
and most far-reaching in its effects, was the struggle between the
Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway company and the
L. & N.W. amalgamation.
The M.S. & L.’s perseverance in seeking improved station facilities
in the 1850’s and 1860’s was enhanced and sustained by several factors.
Although relatively small, compared with the L. & N.W., the M.S. & L.
had as chairman Edward Watkin, a man of unusual tenacity and drive.
Their search for independent stations was also encouraged by the
sponsorship and credit the great contractors were prepared to extend—
even to the point of promoting their own station company to take the
M.S. & L. into Liverpool. Moreover, as the strategy of the M.S. & L.’s
territorial plans unfolded, the room for compromise and manoeuvre
disappeared. The M.S. & L. was the most important company (except­
ing only the Great Western) to rely upon east-west traffic. It invested
heavily at Grimsby and Hull, and by its running arrangements with
the Midland and Great Eastern, had 2,000 rail miles converging from
the east on Manchester. In the west it had gained access to Liverpool,
and only a gap of twenty-five miles prevented completion of an east to
west coast railway.52 The M.S. & L. company, therefore, found itself
in a position where, regardless of the immediate interests of its share­
holders, it was compelled to pursue, at unrealistic cost, a militant and
persistent policy in Manchester.
The L. & N.W. attempted to anticipate the M.S. & L.’s schemes by
proposing, in the early 1860’s, that the approach lines running into
London Road station from Ardwick should be doubled, and the station
itself rebuilt as a ‘side-by-side, rather than a joint station’, to accom­
modate the rival companies more harmoniously. The M.S. & L.
readily agreed to find the half a million needed to carry out this expen­
sive alteration.53 But if the L. & N.W. had hoped to frustrate the M.S.
& L.’s future intentions, or reduce them in scale, by committing both
companies to an immediate and heavy expenditure, the tactic misfired.
The M.S. & L., in addition to finding the money for this extensive
alteration, agitated for the doubling of the M.S.J. viaduct, and for the
82 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1865, 30 June, pp. 15-17 (Watkin), S.C. on M.S. & L.
Railway Extensions.
83 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1866, 9 May, pp. 19-23 (Watkin), S.C. on M.S. & L.
Central Station and Lines.

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 MANCHESTER

building of a further, large, straight-through station. ‘The other thing

which I particularly want to lay stress upon which we want,’ Watkin
stated, ‘is to abolish the system of having butt-end stations.’54 Cawk-
well and Moon, the General Manager and Chairman of the L. & N.W.
company, were prepared to make concessions, even, reluctantly, upon
the doubling of the M.S.J. line; but Watkin still persisted with his
ambitious trans-urban viaduct and Central station project, using every
subterfuge and form of pressure to overcome opposition.55
The argument against the M.S. & L. Central station project was
extremely thoroughly presented by no fewer than six Q.C.’s, led by
Mr. Vernon Harcourt, whose own conduct of the case may be judged
from his summing up on 18 May 1866. Reference had been made to
the fact that he himself had, in previous years, been retained to advocate
railway schemes by the very company he was now opposing. It was true,
he admitted, that the M.S. & L. company was amongst his oldest and
most valued clients.
‘My only satisfaction is that, if, in the evidence I have been able to lay
before you, or by any observation I have been able to address to you, I
should have in any way contributed to the defeat of this favourite scheme
of theirs, I should have rendered them far greater services as an opponent
than ever I have been able to render them when acting on their side.’66
Despite this ingenious peroration, the Commons’ Select Committee
approved the Bill; but in the Lords’ Committee a month later, although
the evidence presented was similar, the atmosphere had changed. Mr.
Denison, Q.C., counsel for the M.S. & L., wound up their case half­
heartedly, as if he already knew the outcome of the Committee’s
recommendations; and his faltering presentation was still further
weakened, in his closing sentences, by a request for a year’s suspension
of the scheme so that it could be brought forward again in modified
form.57 It is not difficult to speculate as to what those modifications
would have been. Further discussions would have taken place with the
Town Clerk and Council, together with further efforts to influence
voting indirectly. After these further discussions had taken place a
curtailed version of the M.S. & L. Central scheme might have been
submitted in the following session.
The land available for the proposed station site, although immensely
expensive, did present the last, rapidly-fading opportunity for a large
scale intrusion into the central business district. The approach from
the west, between the Manchester South Junction railway and the
Rochdale canal, ran mostly through small parcels of cottages with
54 Loc. cit. p.29.
55 Ibid. 17 May, p. 37 (Cawkwell).
68 BTHR PYB 1/383, 18 May, p. 10.
57 BTHR PYB 1/384, 16 July, p. 34.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

yards and outbuildings, owned in groups of seven or eight by individual

proprietors, quite a few of them trustees under wills, and through fifty
or so cottages, coalyards, sheds and wharves owned by the Rochdale
canal. £163,800 was the estimated cost of land purchase; an approxi­
mately equal amount, £162,350, was to be expended on the railway, of
which £135,000 was upon the If mile viaduct. This section, Railway
No. 1, would have taken the M.S. & L. to its chosen site between Ox­
ford, David, Portland and Hunt streets.58 There the Rochdale canal
basin (under lease to the M.S. & L.) and a forge and timber yard
belonging to David Bellhouse’s Trustees formed the nucleus of a
potential site. John Collier Harter, owner of forty shops, houses and
pubs, and the Manchester Real Property Company, owners of a shooting
gallery, a circus ground (let to Sangers’) and some shops, were also
willing to sell, and, indeed, presently expecting offers from business
users for their small enclave. The fifth and last owner of ground for
the potential station site was a corporate body, the Booth Charities.
They did not reply to the railway company’s invitation to treat for the
sale of their property.
The estimated cost of these central properties, ripe as they were
for re-development, was an intimidating £617,000. to which a further
£150,000 would have to be added for the station building itself and
£14 000 for the f mile of viaduct and rails. Altogether, with 10% for
contingencies, nearly £800,000.59 The two miles of trans-urban viaduct,
which was to leave the north-eastern end of this straight-through
station and curve across over Piccadilly to join the Midland line near
Ancoats goods station, was scheduled at a further £445,000; only a
tenth of which sum was to be expended on the railway, the rest on
constructing the viaduct and on land purchase, including a hundred
and twenty further properties from the Booth Charities.60 There can
be little doubt that these estimates would, in practice, have been ex­
ceeded; and no doubt whatsoever that the return, under Standing
Order 191, of 1275 people of the labouring classes to be evicted, was a
gross understatement. As an urban railway it stood, amongst Victorian
projects, second only to the great operations at Charing Cross and
Cannon Street, Liverpool Street and St. Pancras.
Apart from the objections raised to it on public and municipal
grounds (already described elsewhere), a further extremely damaging
objection to the scheme had, in fact, been directed against the putative
ability of such a small company to carry out so ambitious a scheme.
Mr. Hope Scott, Q.C., summing up for the L. & N.W., against the Bill
58 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1866, M.S. & L. Central Station and Lines. Pt. 2, Rail­
way No. 1, Estimate by Sacre. •.
59 Loc. cit. Railway No. 2.
60 Loc. cit. Railway No. 3.
168
 MANCHESTER

before the Lords' Committee, had spoken of ‘a vicious practice of poor

companies or no companies coming to Parliament for powers relying
on the speculative chance of other companies having the money to
execute the works.’61 Mr. Vernon Harcourt spoke in similar vein
before the Commons’ Committee. Had the Midland or Great Northern
companies, whose shares stood at, or above, par, come forward and
associated themselves with such a scheme, Harcourt argued, it would
at least have had a semblance of plausibility. Instead, the company
taking the initiative in this large urban scheme was the M.S. & L.,
whose shares stood at 60. ‘If Mr. Watkin can get a million and a half
in the City of London he is a more fortunate man than most of us.’
The shadowy moral support offered by the Midland was brushed aside.
‘The Midland is too old a monkey to put their fingers into schemes of
this description—and therefore if the M.S. & L. company will raise
two million pounds of money towards it, they are very willing to send
Mr. Allport here to give evidence in favour of the scheme, but they
take care Mr. Allport shall not have authority to pledge them in
spending one single sixpence in favour of it.’62
The obvious remedy to these criticisms was to draw back for a few
years, ask Charles Sacre to devise a more modest scheme, and call upon
the Midland and the Great Northern companies to associate themselves
openly and unequivocally as allies in the new project. The compromise
Central station, sanctioned in 1872, and also designed by Charles
Sacre, but this time for the Cheshire Lines Committee, was no more
than a logical sequel to the struggle just described.
It was very much less ambitious, however, and very much better
prepared. Approaching from the west along a route parallel to the
M.S.J., through Sir Humphrey de Trafford’s and the Devisees of the
late Duke of Bridgewater’s lands, it turned northwards soon after
crossing Deansgate. There was evidence of advance purchase of pro­
perty; eleven cottages and a twine warehouse, to the east of Deansgate,
already being in the hands of Edward Ross, agent to the C.L.C.
Two substantial landowners provided the approach route from
Deansgate to Great Bridgewater Street: Sir George Philips, who owned
a site given over to fringe industrial uses—a sawmill and yard, a packing
case maker’s shop, a lime and cement store, drysaltery, oil and paint
warehouses; Mrs. Isabella Bowers, a clergyman’s widow, owned the
remaining parcel of a hundred and sixty properties, mostly cottages
and dwelling houses, leased out in groups of six—and it is observable
that the C.L.C. had already take up the lease on some of these batches—
together with various shops, beerhouses and four Temperance Halls.
Although the approach was simple, the two hundred degraded dwellings,
61 BHTR PYB 1/384, 16 July, p. 1.
62 BTHR PYB 1/383, 17 May, pp. 9-10.
G* 169
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

cellars and yards which covered the Windmill Street site itself were
owned by eight landlords, usually administering their properties
directly without the intermediacy of lessees. The total estimated
expenditure for land came to £278,000—little more than a quarter of
the earlier scheme’s land costs—with a further £100,000 for the station,
£90,000 for the viaduct and £10,000 for the permanent way.63
Since the friction between the L. & N.W. and the M.S. & L. railway
companies began in 1846, and Central station was not fully opened to
traffic until 1880, a whole generation passed in the quest for a stable
definition of spheres of influence; and during this period both the plan­
ning of routes and termini and the working arrangements in south
Manchester were dominated by the competitive postures taken up by
the companies concerned.
A similar, and equally protracted struggle, this time between the
L. & N.W. and the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway companies,
affected the northern termini in Manchester from 1842 to 1884. The
Hunt’s Bank (Victoria) station had, from its very inception, been
unpopular with the Liverpool and Manchester railway company. No
one could deny the urgent need to form some linkage, in the early
1840’s, between the three quite separate stations at Liverpool, Oldham
and London roads (Nos. 1, 2 and 3 on sketch map). From the Liverpool
and Manchester railway company’s point of view, however, it would
have been very much better to form the linkage by lines between
Oldham Road and London Road, and between London Road and
Liverpool Road stations. In this way the Manchester and Leeds (later
Lancashire and Yorkshire) company would be diverted inconveniently
around the east of Manchester, instead of gaining a well placed new
station, and direct trunk route access to the Liverpool traffic. The fact
that the projected Oldham Road to London Road fink would have
necessitated a 1,160 yard tunnel, the trans-shipment of goods by crane
between the stations to be built at two levels at London Road, and
would be virtually useless to the Manchester and Leeds company as a
through route, either to the south, or (when the South Viaduct scheme
was completed) to the west, gave the tunnel project positive merit in
the eyes of the Liverpool and Manchester directors.64
Naturally Henry Houldsworth and the board of the Manchester and
Leeds company could not be expected to concur with these views, and
they pressed forward energetically with a counter-scheme of their own—
the Hunt’s Bank station and link-line. They were assisted, as already
explained, by favourable land ownership features, and pursued their
project with the utmost determination. If the Liverpool and Manchester
” HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1872, C.L.C., Manchester Central, Railway No. 1.
Properties nos. 60-98 (Philips), 100-260 (Bowers).
01 Manchester City News (1881-2), 14.
170
 MANCHESTER

company should refuse to meet them at Hunt’s Bank, they threatened,

then an alliance would be formed with the Old River company, the
Irwell/Mersey navigation would be enlarged and improved, and goods
for Liverpool trans-shipped to the wharves and barges at Hunt’s Bank.65
It must remain a matter of some doubt as to whether the Manchester
and Leeds company would ever have carried out its plans for this
extraordinary composite traffic, by rail and canal, but the threat was
enough to achieve the required result.66 The long-delayed link line,
one mile long, on arches through Salford, from the entrance to Liver­
pool Road station to Hunt’s Bank (Nos. 1 and 4 on sketch map) was
put in hand by the Liverpool and Manchester in May 1842.
Victoria station, Hunt’s Bank, opened on 1 January 1844, though
for a time the largest in the kingdom, provided a theatre for unseemly
and bitter arguments between the rival companies sharing the site.
Enlarging the facilities in 1864 eased some of the problems which arose,
but only at the cost of raising further acrimonious debate on the
division of costs and of rights to use the newly created space. ‘A little
more concession and a little more friendly conference between the two
companies’, the L. & N.W. traffic superintendent wrote later, ‘could
have produced—so I have often thought—a far more successful joint
station.’67 Instead, after almost forty years of ill-feeling, the principle
of sharing was abandoned, and Exchange station (No. 7 on sketch
map) was built by the L. & N.W. in the 1880’s as an annexe, adjacent
to Victoria station.

4. Summary and general considerations

The sustained competition in Manchester was a measure of the par­
ticular importance of the new medium of transport to a great textile
city placed, as Leon Faucher put it, in 1844, ‘like a diligent spider ... in
the centre of the web.’ The distances which separated Manchester from
the specialised manufacturing villages and towns which surrounded her
were not too short for effective and profitable railway service, nor so
great that the linkage became cumbersome and expensive. A pair of
circles drawn at intervals of ten and thirty miles from Manchester
would include most of the satellite manufacturing and processing
centres, ‘formerly villages, but now towns, which serve as outposts to
the great centre of industry.’

65 Six-Monthly Report, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 26 January 1842.

MRL Miscellaneous Tracts P2896.
66 Special Meeting of the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company, 23 December
1841, MRL 625 M12. The holders of (it was claimed) | of the stock agreed to tran­
ship to barges.
67 George P. Neele, Railway Reminiscences (1904), 296.
171
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

‘The Leeds railway’, Fancher’s description continued, ‘connects

Manchester with Oldham, which contains 60,000 inhabitants; also with
Bury, Rochdale and Halifax, each of which numbers from 24,000 to
26,000 souls; the Bolton railway connects it with Bolton, Preston and
Chorley, which together have more than a hundred factories and
114,000 inhabitants. On the Sheffield line a few minutes suffice to reach
the establishments of Stalybridge, Ashton, Dukinfield and Hyde,
peopled by more than 80,000 inhabitants; the Birmingham line in­
corporates with it, so to speak, the 50,000 inhabitants of Stockport;
and that of Liverpool connects it with Wigan and Warrington. Thus
we have 15 or 16 sets of industry forming this great constellation. . . .
Execution is almost as quick as thought.’68
Railways effectively created in Lancashire, even within two decades,
a system of cities which was dominated operationally by Manchester.
Faucher, the percipient foreign visitor, may have left us the best early
description of the system’s function, but his analysis is amply supported
by contemporary evidence of the most varied nature—Board of Trade
reports, Guide Books, Railway Prospectuses. The Preston Chronicle
described rapturously the extraordinary speed with which the thirty-mile
Preston linkage worked as early as 1839. Brokers despatched the cotton
yarn from Manchester at 3 a.m., arriving (the newspaper stated precisely)
at 9.08 a.m., being converted to cloth by 11.30 a.m., sent back as shirting
material on the 4.20 p.m. train, arriving at 7 p.m. and being put on sale
the next morning—‘the very millenium of railway velocity.’69 The
broadside Reasons in Favour of a Direct Line of Railroad from London
to MANCHESTER (1846) spoke of Manchester’s special claim to
speedy rail communication since ‘the productions of its looms and
mills form indisputably the largest and most important branch of our
national industry’, and also stressed the unexpected importance to
industry itself of the rapid flow of passenger traffic, small masters, and
salesmen by train, causing ‘changes in all departments of trade far
beyond the contemplation and conception of those who originated
these schemes.’70
Such arguments, though used with special reference to Manchester,
could be asserted to have wide and general application to all five of the
cities chosen for study. But there were differences of degree; and
Manchester found itself in a position which was in some respects
unusual. Neither Liverpool, Glasgow nor London employed its rail
linkages in quite the same way—virtually as production lines in a
system of industrially inter-related cities; although to say this is not to
argue that the indirect benefits the former cities received from mineral,
68 Leon Faucher, Manchester in 1844 (1844), 15. *•
69 Manchester as it is (Manchester, 1839), 171.
70 Reasons in favour etc. (1846), 1-5.

172
 MANCHESTER

foodstuff and commercial connections were of a lesser order of impor­

tance.
Birmingham was more akin to Manchester in the functional role it
fulfilled for a hinterland of smaller manufacturing towns; but its staple
manufactures were neither so perishable, so bulky to store, nor so
subject to the whims of season and fashion. In Manchester, the Board
of Trade reported, the effect of the railways had been to break down,
even by 1845, the old system of manufacturing and of forwarding large
quantities of goods ‘in anticipation of the probable demand of particular
seasons and markets.’ Instead there was a considerable saving of capital
tied up in stocks, and a reduction to reasonable physical compass of
the urban space demanded by the warehousing associated with an
annual output of a million yards of material and a hundred and forty
million lb. of twist and yarn. Also, and equally important, there was a
reduction in ‘the risk of fluctuation and loss arising from miscalcula­
tions as to the probable nature and extent of demand in distant markets.
Even with a view to following the fluctuations of trade and fashion in
foreign markets, it often becomes exceedingly important to hasten, by
even a day, the execution of an order.’71
The dependence of Manchester upon a ring of specialised towns
admirably situated for a fixed route transport system to operate most
efficiently, and the peculiar force, in Manchester’s staple industry, of
the inventory factors mentioned in the Board of Trade report, help to
explain why the city became an arena for sharp contest between so
many railway companies. They also help to explain the Corporation’s
attitude towards the railway companies.
At first the Corporation could not have been more complaisant. Its
Improvement Committee reported, on 22 September 1845, that the
land required to improve the approach to London Road station had
been purchased and laid to the street, adding, almost gratefully, ‘The
Manchester and Birmingham Railway company have agreed to pay
half the cost of this improvement.’ The Corporation, of course, paid
the other half.72 At the other end of the town a mere intimation from
the Engineer of the Manchester and Leeds railway company, on 21
June 1846, that the land bounded by the Irk might be required for
railway purposes, and requesting the re-direction of an intended new
road, was enough to cause the Corporation to ‘examine the locality
and alter the plans’; and subsequently to arrange to sweep away the
old Apple market, and straighten or eliminate several small streets, to
secure a more commodious approach to the station.73 The Committee
for General Purposes, having considered a letter from the Lancashire
71 H.L., 1845, XXXIX, 235-41.
72 Council Proceedings, 1844—6, p. 203.
73 Ibid. 21 January 1846, pp. 41-2.
173
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and Yorkshire railway company on 1 December 1847 recommended

that all clocks under the control of the Corporation, and that of the
church wardens, should be adjusted by the necessary nine minutes, to
conform with railway time; a symbolic act of homage by a mercantile
and industrial community to the new masters of its traffic.74
By the end of the following decade the Corporation’s courtship of
the railway companies was over. The Corporation itself had been split,
and unscrupulously manipulated, and the poor amenities, together with
the ‘insufficient and unnecessarily expensive’ services had led to ‘a sense
of bitter disappointment.’75 Thereafter, the Corporation adopted a far
more suspicious and legalistic attitude towards the private companies
providing the city’s rail transport—as its dealings with the C.L.C. and
Great Northern railway companies in the later nineteenth century
testify.76
The declension of the Corporation’s willingness to co-operate freely,
and to make concessions to encourage railway enterprise in Manchester,
was paralleled by a similar deterioration in the general public’s view
of rail services. By the late 1850’s, complaints about the existing services,
and suggestions as to likely sites for new and improved stations, had
become a regular pastime of the Manchester Guardian's correspon­
dence columns: a new terminus should be sited at Stevenson Square,
or at Granby Row Fields, or at Charles Street and Brook Street, or
between Oxford Road and Garrat Road; alternatively (it was suggested)
there was no real need for any further building, ‘by a little cordial co­
operation on the part of the two companies whose trains come into
London Road station all the difficulties of deficient accommodation
might be removed . . . Ardwick could become the second Camden
Town.’77
Some of the letters written during the ‘pick a station’ correspondence
were obviously inspired either by the railway or landed interests con­
cerned, but some reflected a genuine concern on the part of disinterested
citizens and tradespeople that Manchester should be better served than
it was in the melee of excessive competition.
74 Council Proceedings, 1846-8, 1 December 1847.
76 Council Proceedings, 1863-5, 5 April 1865, p. 102.
76 Council Proceedings, 1874-5, 3 March 1875, p. 203; 1897-8, 5 January 1898,
pp. 402-5.
77 Manchester Guardian, 20, 27 February, 4 March 1860.

174
 VII
Liverpool

1. The property ownership pattern

Like most large provincial cities Liverpool at the beginning of the
nineteenth century had a central district honeycombed with individual
property titles, usually to relatively small parcels of land, established
by enterprising commoners during the period of rapid commercial
growth in the late eighteenth century. The names of these individual
proprietors and lessees can be compared on Charles Eyes’ detailed
Plan of the Town and Township of Liverpool (1796), and Jonathan
Bennison’s Plan of the Town and Port of Liverpool (1835 and 1841).
Such ownership of urban sites was either a symptom or a cause of
acceptance into one of the social ‘sets’, in the days of the closed muni­
cipal franchise. ‘All tradesmen and shopkeepers, and everything retail,
were carefully excluded’ wrote a contemporary. Patronage lay in the
hands of ‘the fashionable set, the wealthy and commercial set and the
Corporation set’—the Hollingsheads, Drinkwaters, Harpers, Cases,
Aspinalls, Clarkes and Branckers—and the association between free­
hold and franchise closed the circle of ownership and of political and
social status.1
The surrounding outer townships, or suburban areas, of Everton,
Kirkdale, West Derby and Toxteth, however, formed a ring of large
estates, which were retained in even fewer hands than usual. Essentially
there were only three great landowners: the Stanley and Molyneux
families, Earls of Derby and of Sefton respectively, who had long­
standing territorial connections with the Tower and the Castle of
Liverpool; and the Corporation of Liverpool which had succeeded,
to an unusual degree amongst the corporations of the five major cities,
in retaining land in common ownership, and in acquiring large addi­
tional areas by purchase.2
1 James Aspinall, Liverpool by an Old Stager (Liverpool, 1852). BM 10359 aa 78.
2 George Chandler, Liverpool (1957). Henry T. Hough, ‘The Liverpool Corporate
Estate’, Town Planning Review, XXI (1950), 237-52.
175
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Property ownership and railways in Liverpool.

The oldest portions, fifty acres in Saltonsmoor, in north Liverpool,

had largely been alienated by the early nineteenth century; but, more
than making up for this, the Corporation acquired, during the seven­
teenth century, a 1,000 years’ lease on waste lands south of the Pool.
In 1777 the Council also purchased the reversion of this lease for
£2,250; an extraordinary municipal bargain, which gave them full
possession of all the lands south of the Pool, including the whole
central area of Lime Street, William Brown Street and London Road,
as far east as Crown Street, and as far south as Parhament Street.3
This area is indicated on the sketch map above as a solid block,
but there were in fact quite large gaps, particularly just north
of centre, where land had been disposed of for private development, or
for a cemetery, an asylum, a workhouse, and other sombre functions
of the early nineteenth-century city. Nevertheless the Corporation
retained possession of an unexampled proportion of the central lands
into which building was extending most rapidly in the late eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century.
Beyond it, to the north, the greater part of the parish of Kirkdale
was owned by the Earl of Derby, or by his agents and solicitors,
John Leigh and John Shaw Leigh. The Leighs also held land strate­
gically placed by the entrance to the Edgehill tunnel, in the Lovat,
3 Henry T. Hough, loc. cit. 240-2.
176
 LIVERPOOL

Troughton, Cardwell Street districts.4 Richard Earle, another of

Derby’s agents also owned land in this area; and he and the Leighs
accumulated considerable fortunes both as rentiers of residential
cottage property, and from sales to the railway companies. Part of their
land acquisitions had sprung from their connection with the Derby
family, but large areas of John Leigh’s estates were the result of
speculation on credit. He was noted as an extensive and tireless pur­
chaser of land, far beyond his resources. J. A. Picton, himself a land
valuer later in the nineteenth century, commented upon the, as it
seemed, excessive land purchases in north and east Liverpool to which
John Leigh committed himself.5 Although at times hard pressed by the
interest burden upon his loan he continued with his purchases; the
Golden Lion at the top of Dale Street (later sold to the Royal Bank),
the Old Hall and Sandhills estates.6 The latter estate he converted
immediately from pasture to brickfields—a common practice in rapidly
growing cities at the turn of the eighteenth century—and lowered their
level by seven or eight feet. These routine procedures for developing
land on the fringe of a city were revolutionised by the arrival of the
railways in north Liverpool in the 1840’s. Land which had been bought
at £200 or £300 per acre now sold at £2 or £3 per square yard. As
J. A. Picton reflected, ‘That he had a keen foresight beyond most of
his contemporaries into the coming greatness of Liverpool there can
be no doubt, but the actuality far exceeded his most sanguine anticipa­
tions. The railway demands formed an element altogether outside of
his calculations, however shrewd.’7
His son, John Shaw Leigh, who became mayor of Liverpool in 1841,
reaped the benefit of the opportune investment John Leigh had carried
out. A portion of the northern estate was sold to the Liverpool, Orm-
skirk and Preston railway company for a reputed £250,000 in 1846.8
Apart from this direct gain, the railway approach converted what had
been market gardens, brickyards or cottage properties into valuable
sites for warehousing, further sidings, and for conveniently situated
and easily rented houses; and, according to J. A. Picton, ‘enhanced
materially the value of the other portions which have since come into
the market for commercial purposes, extensions of the railways and
general use, opening a mine of wealth to the fortunate proprietor.’
John Shaw Leigh, in fact, was one of the first landlords to sweep away
the erratic system of leasing property by ‘lives’ and years, which had
4 Jonathan Bennison, Plan of the Town and Port ofLiverpool (1835). This map shows
property boundaries on the outskirts of Liverpool; the 1841 edition merely shows the
central portion.
6 J. A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool, (1873), II, 190.
6 Liverpool Mercury, 11 January 1866. Daily Post and Mercury, 21 December 1910.
7 J. A. Picton, op. cit. II, 54.
8 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 30 June, p. 7, S.C. on Liverpool and Bury Railway.
177
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

obtained in Liverpool, and to standardise seventy-five year leases; a

measure also adopted by the Marquis of Salisbury, the Earls of Derby
and Sefton, and the Corporation.89 In 1843, Leigh had the old mansion
at Sandhills taken down, and Victoria and Sandhills roads cut through
the area; on the remaining portion, though somewhat intersected by
the cutting of main roads and railway lines, the Errington, Grundy,
Holmes Street areas were laid out.10
Similarly to the east, near the Edgehill railway terminus, the site was
bordered by another John Shaw Leigh property; the seventy-five or so
houses known as Spekefield Cottages.11 The Leighs, in fact, carried a
flair for the timely and well-sited purchases of property to a remarkably
high degree. And although, no doubt, their dealings with the railway
companies on behalf of the great landowners they represented gave
them both an unusual measure of inside information and a degree of
monopoly control as vendors of land, the skill with which they made
capital from these assets in the early railway age is unusual. The Duke
of Norfolk’s agent, Michael Ellis, and the Duke of Bridgewater’s,
James Loch, were also able to turn their stewardships to advantage; a
railway directorship in one case, a seat in Parliament in the other.12
Yet it would be difficult to find agents whose land speculation equalled
the scope and opportunism of the Leighs.
The ability of their agents, Robert Slatter, John Leigh and Richard
Earle, and the sheer breadth of acreage belonging to the Stanleys in
Liverpool’s environs, brought the Earls of Derby recurrent increments
of wealth over the half century after the railways’ arrival. The Stanleys
of Knowsley, who had merely been prosperous provincial aristocrats,
qualified, by 1865, for inclusion in Sanford and Townsend’s The Great
Governing Families of England. ‘The growth of Liverpool and the cotton
trade has poured wealth into their coffers’, the authors comment; and
without in any way minimising the importance of their growing
agricultural rent roll, or their increasing income from urban residential
property, it is worth underlining the large part in their fortunes which
land-sales to railway companies played.13 They were of particular
significance in that, without making sizeable inroads into the total
estates, they allowed vast occasional lump sums to be on call, and
thereby went some way towards solving the problems of liquidity which
8 A System for the Better Management and Improvement of Landed Estates (Liver­
pool, 1844), 8.
10 J. A. Picton, op. cit. II, 467.
11 J. A. Picton, op. cit. (1875 ed.) II, 441.
12 BTHR PYB 1/90, Commons’ S.C. on M.S. & L. and G.N. Railways, 1858,
13 April. David Spring, The English Landed Estate in the Nineteenth Century, its
Administration (1963), 89-94. *.
13 J. L. Sanford and Meredith Townsend, The Great Governing Families of England
(Edinburgh, 1865) I, 111. .

178
 LIVERPOOL

often harassed even the greatest landed families. For although their
annual rent rolls were very impressive, quite frequently marriage
settlements, family portions and annuities, debt charges, and the
overheads of maintaining several large households in appropriate
style, ran away with the greater part of the day-to-day revenues.14
Against this background the opportunity to realise appreciable sums
tor mere chips of the estate—parcels measured not in acres but in square
yards—was especially welcome.
Unfortunately the Derby Papers which survive, at Knowsley and the
Lancashire County Record Office, do not give a full picture of the
increments from land sales to railway companies. Most of the very
substantial earlier sales in the 1840’s are missing, but even if one looks
only at the smaller sales for ‘widenings’ and ‘easements’ of existing
termini and approach lines, for the later period 1864-1892, the Derbys’
recorded conveyances total £483,408.15 Their dealings brought them
into contact with the London and North Western, the Lancashire and
Yorkshire, the Midland, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire
railway companies and the Cheshire Lines Committee, in addition to
several smaller concerns such as the Liverpool and Bury, and the
Preston and Wyre railway companies. This list is probably incomplete,
and refers only to the Kirkdale, Walton and Bootle districts, nor
within the dates specified does it include the purchase price of the
Regent Road goods station; so the £483,408 is clearly an understate­
ment, even of the partial coverage afforded by the records.
Some idea of the general order of magnitude by which the value of
their estates appreciated when the railways entered the land market
may perhaps be glimpsed by comparing the prices Robert Slatter
received on the Derby’s behalf in the late 1820’s, which ran to 9d or Is
per square yard for township properties, to the 40s or 50s per square
yard received for comparable properties a half century later.16 Land
sales were only the most direct and obvious way in which the railway’s
arrival could be turned to account by the owners of urban property.
The substantial enhancement in capital value of the other advanta­
geously sited, perhaps adjacent, property which was retained frequently
formed another major consideration; and there were still further
incidental benefits, the nature of which is revealed in the correspondence
between another great Liverpool landowning family and their agents.
The family was that of Molyneux, Earls of Sefton, and the estate—
14 Rent rolls of £43,000 and £163,000 for Sefton and Derby in the 188O’s, excluding
‘building land in and close to Liverpool’, or ‘leased for building’. J. Bateman, Great
Landowners of Great Britain (1883), 127, 401.
15 Stuart A. Moore, A Calendar of the Muniments of the Earl of Derby (1894). The
references are too lengthy to list, but mostly occur amongst the Deeds and Con­
veyances calendared as Nos. 650-63, 674-6, 691—4.
16 LRO Derby 683/1/1.
179
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

which forms the subject of an interesting correspondence worth

pausing to study in detail—was their park at Croxteth, situated to the
north-east of Liverpool (a little too far out to be shown on the sketch
map) on the route fiercely contested in 1845/6.
The steward, R. Ledger, was the first to draw the Earl of Sefton’s
attention to the matter in a letter of 12 October 1844. ‘If your Lordship
has had the Liverpool papers of this week you will see in the present
mania for Railways that, in addition to the one from Preston to Liver­
pool via Ormskirk, another is started to be called the Bolton, Wigan
and Liverpool, which . . . proposes to pass through the Township of
Bootle, Walton, Knowsley and consequently very proximate to Crox­
teth----- An advertisement states that all the shares are allotted in the
Liverpool and Preston line.’17 This was the beginning of a complicated
three-cornered rivalry between the two companies mentioned by
Ledger, and a third, the Liverpool and Bury railway company; a
contest which soon surpassed the steward’s experience and competence.
He was left dealing with tithes, rent arrears and potato blight, whilst
the task of advising his master on railway affairs passed into other more
capable hands. In particular C. P. Grenfell now came forward as the
Earl’s adviser and negotiator with the Liverpool, Bolton and Wigan
railway company. ‘I have told the Director and their Lawyer,’ he wrote
to the Earl of Sefton on 7 January 1845, ‘that I consider it arranged
that you are to have the option of demanding at Par 200 shares in the
railway at any time within twelve months of the passing of the Act,’
and such an agreement had been drawn up by solicitors. ‘The advantage
of this arrangement’, he went on to explain, ‘will be that without any
advance of funds you can insist upon the profit upon 200 shares
whenever you please, and I have no hesitation in saying that I believe
you would put £40,000 in your pocket at the very least.’18
The Earl of Sefton obviously agreed to this proposal, for Grenfell’s
letters to him take on a more familiar and urgent tone. On 13 January
1845 a letter instructs him in the basic advantages of ‘our Project’ (as
the scheme is now called) ‘which is the only safety valve for the public
against the combination of the Liverpool and Manchester and the
Water, now wholly monopolised by Egerton, and secures to the County
a North Entrance to Liverpool which is much wanted.’ ‘Put your
shoulder to the wheel, combine with Brook and Willis,’ urges a letter
of 18 January, ‘You cannot lose and may gain very largely.’ Later
letters urge Sefton to play a more active part in the promotion of the
railway. The arguments he is to use are rehearsed again, and no fewer
than eight ‘lines we are interested in’ are set down for his information.
‘There’s a pretty list . . . Our own stands on its own merits but the
17 LRO Molyneux Papers DDM 6/123.
19 Ibid. DDM 6/1. •

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 LIVERPOOL

development of its success will be much aided by the other fine

schemes.’1819 He is exhorted to use his utmost influence in and out of
Parliament. ‘Our opponents,’ writes Grenfell ‘are powerful and active
. . . We must exert all our energies to induce members of Parliament to
attend and give us support on the 2nd Reading of the Bill. That will be
the true war, and that sly fellow Locke, as Lord Francis and the Duke
of Sutherland’s agent, will do his utmost to throw it out.’ Sefton should
write at once to his influential friends, ‘and let me know who they are,
that I may whip them up against the day of struggle.’ If Sefton uses his
influence and the line succeeds, ‘I have no doubt whatever that before
12 months are over you will clear your Belgrave Square house and some­
thing to spare.’ ‘I think you might insist upon having a director or two
or your own,’ he adds, ‘if you think of retaining a large interest in the
concern.’20 Possible objections to the Liverpool, Bolton and Wigan
railway from the Earl of Derby were overcome. ‘I saw Stanley yesterday
with our Wigan friends. His objections were all or nearly so removed
as to his Bootle property, and Stewart (presumably one of the partners
from Messrs. Foster and Stewart, the solicitors employed by the
Molyneux family) is with him now to explain further.’
The turning point came on 24 February 1845, when the Railway
Department of the Board of Trade reported in favour of the scheme.
‘Never was such astonishment than that produced upon the conflicting
Parties by the decision of the Board of Trade,’ wrote Grenfell jubilantly.
‘We have done it so quietly that everybody was astonished.’ Tn both
your interests and my own,’ he concluded, ‘I have become a director ...
The best is you do not advance a shilling ... I have had to stump up
£2,000.’21 This correspondence, which could no doubt be paralleled by
similar exchanges between other great landowners and their agents,
illustrates both the considerable advantages to railway companies of
the active support of landowners during projects’ formative phases,
and the not inconsiderable benefits, apart from land sales, which accrued
to the landowners from railway company promotion.
In fact, to conclude the narrative of this particular incident, the
Earl of Sefton stood to make yet further gains from other changes in the
fortunes of the competing companies. In spite of the jubilant tone of
Grenfell’s final letter, the issue was not settled by the Board of Trade’s
decision. The Liverpool, Ormskirk and Preston line (which had bought
J. S. Leigh’s land), and the Liverpool and Bury company, still pressed
for the reading of their bills in the following session; and Ledger, the
steward, reported Grenfell’s disappointment with a certain lugubrious
18 Ibid. DDM 6/8.
20 Ibid. DDM 6/5 and 6.
21 Ibid. DDM 6/9 and 10. The Board of Trade Report mentioned is in H.L., 1845,
XXXIX, 240-1.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

satisfaction in a letter on 4 April 1845, to inform the Earl of Sefton

that a Mr. Heron, Secretary to the Liverpool, Bolton and Wigan railway
company, had visited him with a petition in favour of the line ‘and was
desirous that your Lordship’s tenants on the line should sign it, as, he
states, Mr. Grenfell promised they should do, and I gave him such
authority, as I have to that effect.’22
The two rival railway bills came up before Select Committee in
June and August of the following year, 1846, and as the dates drew
nearer they became both more anxious to compromise with each other
and to reach an accommodation with Sefton. The Liverpool, Ormskirk
and Preston company’s solicitor, Joshua Lloyd, opened a correspon­
dence in June, 1846, ‘to commence with your Lordship as a landowner
and ask whether there are any arrangements which you would wish
considered and concluded so that the Company may have your Lord­
ship’s assent to the measure.’ Instructions by Sefton to Eden and
Stanistreet, solicitors, to oppose the Liverpool, Ormskirk and Preston
Bill brought a frantic reply from Lloyd. ‘I have received a note from
Messrs. Eden and Stanistreet stating that they are instructed to oppose
the Bill in its future progress, and I am perhaps taking a liberty in
addressing your Lordship after the receipt of their note, but my first
communication was made and your Lordship’s reply received before I
had heard from Messrs. Eden and Stanistreet. If your Lordship will
please direct those gentlemen to negotiate an arrangement I can say
that my clients are prepared to meet the question most liberally.’23 The
date of Lloyd’s letter was 3 July 1846, and on 7 August the Liverpool,
Ormskirk and Preston Bill was due to go before the House of Lords’
Committee. Evidently the settlement was sufficiently liberal, for three
days later Lloyd wrote that he was coming to Liverpool and regarded
the matter as settled. A sum was deposited at Sefton’s account in
Heywood’s Bank, London, and in due course, when the rival lines had
merged into the East Lancashire railway company, the agreement was
confirmed.24
The critical balance and timing of Parliamentary Bills clearly played
an important part in dictating the terms of this settlement. From the
railway company’s point of view one more opponent, especially if he
were represented by able counsel, might have tipped the scales; with
the result that all the sums already expended on surveys and legal
expenses might be wasted, and the scheme irrevocably miscarry. To
contemplate returning, with renewed expenses, in the following session
would have deterred even a large company, with revenues flowing in
from the routes it had already opened to traffic. It would clearly have
22 LRO Molyneux Papers DDM 6/126. ••
33 Ibid. DDM 6/314 and 5. .
24 Ibid. DDM 6/316-9.

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 LIVERPOOL

been fatal to a small company, like the Liverpool, Ormskirk and Pres­
ton, which had no rails laid, only existed on paper, and drew its most
likely prospect of profit, or recoupment of the money already invested,
from its promotional value. If the Bill failed, it was not merely the scale
of future business that was at stake, but the whole corporate existence
of the railway company.
The panic which prompted Lloyd’s extraordinary letter in July
1846, virtually offering Sefton a blank cheque, must also be considered,
not merely against the background of the imminent Lords’ Committee,
but also the more general alarm of ‘railway mania’. Railway share
prices had already dipped in October 1845, even for the large companies;
and July 1846 was the last peak before the disastrous two-year slide
which brought even Great Western or Midland £100 share quotations
down from 150 to 80 in the exchanges.25 Under the circumstances a
strategically placed and influential landowner could hardly fail to
command settlement on his own terms; and it should not escape notice
that this settlement in 1846 was made with companies which were rivals
to the one in which Sefton and Grenfell had been concerned the year
before. Whichever company succeeded, tribute was forthcoming to
landowners upon whose estates the railways were, in Lloyd’s words,
‘unavoidably thrown’. Few rural landowners commanded tracts of
land so enormous that they could not be skirted if necessary. But in the
outskirts of Britain’s great cities the landowner was presented with
unusual economic opportunities, as the route choices narrowed in
focus, and as land which had been given a predicative ‘development
value’ by the presence of occasional houses, or extant plans for building,
came under discussion.

On a smaller scale the same opportunities also presented themselves

to the lesser urban landowners; and though, by their nature, the cases
tended to be less well documented, some detailed examples in this
category are cited elsewhere.26 Beneficiaries of this smaller sort included
Colonel Plumbe-Tempest, some of whose properties are indicated on
the sketch map, and whose name also appears in the Books of Reference
for the Exchange station line.27
Most of the medium-sized property holders, however, lay out of the
general route of railway approaches, and were only affected marginally.
35 C. N. Ward Perkins, ‘The Commercial Crisis of 1847’, Readings in the Business
Cycles and National Income (ed. A. H. Hansen and R. V. Clemence, 1953), 19.
26 Infra, Ch. 8, sec. 1, and John R. Kellett, ‘Urban and Transport History from
Legal Records: An Example from Glasgow Solicitors’ Papers’, JTH, VI (1964),
222-40.
27 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, Liverpool and Bury Railway (Plan for extension
to Tithebarn Street and Liverpool Docks).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The considerable urban estates of Robert Durning and Thomas Moly­

neux fell into this category; as did those of the Reverend H. Tatlock, a
clergyman rentier with unusually large holdings, not merely in the area
of present-day Tatlock Street, but also further east, in the area shown
on the sketch map.
The owners who lay directly on the routes of the Exchange and
Central approach lines (Nos. 3 and 4 on sketch map) were mostly land­
owners with more modest holdings. Frequently resident themselves,
they held title to relatively small batches of properties—a minimum of
two, and a maximum of seventeen.28 Some idea of their leverage over
the railway companies can be gained from solicitors’ papers surviving
for the Cheshire Lines Committee’s operations in 1870. A sample of
these suggests that the amounts awarded by jury trial or arbitration
procedure came to between two and three times the amount offered by
the C.L.C.’s solicitors. For half-a-dozen cases selected at random
£5,680 was the amount offered, £13,310 the amount awarded; sums
which approximate to the amounts offered and awarded elsewhere in
the same decade. Of course the original offers made by the railway
company for these smaller properties on their route were intended
partly as bargaining figures; and there was evidently a tendency—at
least in the eyes of the arbitrators—for the smaller encroachments upon
property to be accorded a derisory sum in compensation. Alexander
Matheson, a portion of whose property was scheduled under the C.L.C.
Liverpool Central Station Acts of 1864 and 1866 was offered a mere
£50, claimed £1,869, and was awarded £710; James Jeffery was offered
£10, claimed £1,036, and was awarded £600; John Jackson and
Zacharias Sillar, who had been offered £100 each, were awarded £2,900
and £3,300.29
The larger claims were treated more carefully, however, and were
subjected to independent valuation by up to six experienced valuers.
The estimates they gave, though sometimes discreetly toned down by the
railway company, bore a relationship to accepted values which could
be made to stand up in court. A margin of 30-50% over the stated
offers was contemplated, but the actual awards, which came to a half,
or two-thirds of the asking price, were usually between 100% and 200%
above valuation.
The inflation of values which arose for the small properties through
which the railway companies sometimes had to plough to reach the
central district in the 1860’s can, perhaps, best be illustrated by taking
one specific example in detail. Thus, for instance, a stable and two small
buildings off Ranelagh Street in Liverpool, with a rental of £114 per
28 Ibid, and HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1862, M.S. & L. Railway. (Liverpool Central
Station Railway).
29 LRO Deeds QDD, December 1869-November 1870.

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 LIVERPOOL

annum, were valued in 1867 by J. A. Picton on behalf of the Cheshire

Lines Committee at £5 per square yard, or £2,320. When £80 had been
added for old materials and 10% for forced sale, the total recommended
came to £2,640. It was ‘a good place for workshops but not well
adapted to general business’ he declared; and the proposal to erect a
showroom there was absurd. James Holme, another reputable valuer,
took a lower view of the property. Even at 20 years’ purchase it would
only raise, after deduction for necessary repairs, £2,184. Moving half
way between that figure and the more generous estimate of £5 per square
yard which Picton had suggested, and adding 10% for forced sale,
gave a total of £2,477. Two other, less well-known valuers recommended
similar offers.30 The owner claimed £14 per square yard or £7,145: to
put it in James Holme’s terms, ‘60 years’ purchase’; a sum difficult to
justify upon any reasonable grounds.31
The course of arbitration, and the size of the final award corresponded
quite closely to the typical pattern suggested above. The award was
£5,800, or about two-thirds of the asking price, twice the valuation,
and representing nearly £12 per square yard.32 A rather unusual note
was struck, however, by the exchange of letters between the spokesmen
of the railway company and of the late owner, Mrs. Fairclough,
commenting upon the case publicly in the pages of the Daily Courier.
This correspondence helps to throw light upon how it could come
about that reputable professional valuers employed by both parties
were prepared to stand up in court and make firm valuations which
conflicted so violently. Nearly always there was some point of inter­
pretation and opinion which could be seized upon, usually connected
with the potential or development value of the site in question. There
was no need to read more into this than a genuine disagreement of
opinion, combined perhaps with a legitimate determination to get the
best for one’s client. It was most unworthy, one of the pseudonymous
correspondents wrote indignantly, to make of this an occasion for
ascribing lack of professional competence to those who ‘viewed the
property ... in justice to their employers.’
In the Fairclough case the point of disagreement was whether her
premises should be valued as old houses on a side street, or as a site
‘forming a valuable adjunct to Ranelagh Street’, ideally placed for
potential extensions by shopkeepers. ‘Such practical men as Messrs.
Picton, Holme and Co. are not slow to discover the fact that the mere
taking down of a party wall, or the opening up of a wide arch or door­
way in a wall, very frequently develops in an astounding manner the
value of land near a main thoroughfare for business purposes. Why,
30 Daily Post, 5 September 1867. LRL.
31 Daily Courier, 25 September 1867.
32 Daily Courier, 17 October 1867. LRL Town Clerk’s Newscuttings, II, 176.
185
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

then, it may be asked, did they purposely shut their eyes to the fact
that this land was precisely in this position ?’33
The arbiters took the view in this case, as in most of the others,
that it was no more than reasonable to expect the railway companies
to pay a sum in anticipation of the possible development value of a site
which was being handed over reluctantly. This development value,
moreover, could be influenced even by something as easily accomplished
as the taking down of a party wall. In fact the railway companies were
asked to pay, not for what the property was currently worth, but for
what it might be worth in ten years’ time under favourable circum­
stances. If a sympathetic local jury were empanelled the award might
be still more generous. The result of the tendency to over-value smaller
properties, illustrated in the example just quoted, together with the
delays and legal complications of dealing with a multiplicity of small
parcels of land, was the same in Liverpool as in Birmingham or Man­
chester. Railway companies were inclined, still more strongly, to
choose, for preference, areas where they could deal with one large
proprietor.
Apart from J. S. Leigh and the Sefton and Derby families, the only
other proprietor on a similar scale was the Corporation; and two of
the large central terminals were located upon the inexpensive sites which
the Corporation made available. That at Lime Street (No. 2 on map)
was built very early (in 1832), and upon largely open ground used as a
cattle market.34 One might, therefore, expect it to avoid heavy costs for
these reasons; but even the extensive additions made by Joseph Locke
to George Stephenson’s original station, in 1847, allowed only £70,000
in its estimates for the 263 adjacent properties scheduled, all of which
belonged to the Mayor and Burgesses.35
The Central Station (No. 4 on map) planned by the Manchester,
Sheffield and Lincolnshire Company, and executed by the Cheshire
Lines Committee (in a similar manner to that already described for
Manchester Central), was also influenced in its site location by the
presence of a substantial block of Corporation property. On the
original site, at the corner of Bold Street and Ranelagh Street, the
Corporation owned sixty houses and shops, and the Rotunda gym­
nasium.36 A disreputable arcade, a ‘mart for second hand furniture and
resort for improper characters’, made up the remaining space for the
33 Daily Courier, 28 September 1867. LRL Town Clerk’s Newscuttings, II, 160-1.
34 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1832, Liverpool and Manchester Railway (Branch from
West Derby to Lime Street).
35 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1847, L. & N.W. Railway (Lime Street Station).
36 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1862, M.S. & L. Railway (Liverpool Central Station
Railway). Corporation properties form the triangle just north of,the line’s termina­
tion at Ranelagh Street. The row of houses along the track itself, and in Cropper
Street belonged to Thomas Brassey (q.v.).

186
 LIVERPOOL

Liverpool Central Station, 1862.

M.S. & L.’s first purchases, scheduled in 1862.37 Later additions, by

the C.L.C., relied upon a further block of fifty Corporation properties
at Cropper Street, scheduled in November 1871, and upon eighty more
miscellaneous properties—bricklayers’ yards, stables, shops, houses
and outbuildings—also belonging to the Corporation, and scheduled
in November 1873.38
The railway companies’ reliance upon the Corporation, and upon
Derby and Sefton, for substantial units of land was all the more
pronounced because of the relative absence of charities and private
corporate bodies upon the railway routes in Liverpool. At no time in
their dealings were the railway companies able to acquire large blocks
from a hospital, an almshouse, a well endowed Grammar School or
College, a City Guild or Company, or a board of charitable trustees.
In Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London, such corporate
bodies were an important source of land for railway schemes.
Similarly, there was no counterpart in Liverpool to the important
role in landownership patterns played in all four of the other cities by
canal companies. In Liverpool the principal canals gained access to the
Mersey upstream, and their wharfage mingled with the riverside dock
installations. A notable exception to this rule was the Leeds and Liver­
pool canal, which (as the sketch map shows) had been devised by
Brindley to make a direct and easy approach from the north to within
half-a-mile of the central area. This route was, in fact, George Stephen-
37 J. A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool (1873 cdn.), II, 231.
38 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1872, C.L.C., and 1874, C.L.C. (North Liverpool
Extension to Ranelagh St.).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

son’s first choice for the line of the Liverpool and Manchester railway
in 1824, before the Earl of Derby had come to accept railways.39 It was
also the route chosen, in 1846, by the competing schemes searching for
a northern entrance to Liverpool. Yet although their extensive opera­
tions in north Liverpool caused the C.L.C., the L. & N.W., and the
Lancashire and Yorkshire railway companies, to bridge and traverse
the Leeds and Liverpool canal repeatedly, and to schedule, or purchase
by agreement, a good part of its bankside space, the canal was not directly
used as a route for a main line approach, nor was the terminal basin
filled in for a station. Part of the western basins, between the Exchange
Station line and Howard Street (see sketch map), was taken over by
the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway for extra goods space. But in the
Plumbe-Tempest lands at Tithebarn Street, the L. & Y. already had a
terminal site which brought passengers three or four hundred yards
nearer the central business district. So the main basins of the canal,
off Vauxhall Road and Leeds Street, remained undisturbed. Indeed,
although the Lancashire and Yorkshire and the L. & N.W. railway
companies took steps to secure joint control over this important route,
by acquiring an annual lease, the Leeds and Liverpool continued to
operate as a canal, conveying 2,100,000 tons of goods in 1868; a mere
100,000 tons decline on the traffic figures of thirty years earlier.40

2. Conditions of competition between railway companies

From the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, on 17
September 1830, until the middle of the 1870’s, railway traffic in Liver­
pool experienced conditions of competition quite unlike those in any
of Britain’s four other major cities. Whereas a lively contest to extend
facilities, and to open new and independent routes of access, took place
during the late 1830’s and mid-1840’s in the other cities, Liverpool was
subject to a regime of virtual monopoly.
For sixteen years Liverpool’s traffic remained entirely in the control
of the Liverpool and Manchester railway company, and that of its
partner, the Grand Junction. Although seven years junior, the Grand
Junction route was longer (from Warrington to Birmingham), the
company was more heavily capitalised, and its commercial performance
was equally successful. After an initial struggle with Birmingham
promoters its management fell into the hands of the Liverpool party,
and both in the board-room and in share-holding there was a close
identity of interest between the two concerns. Operationally the Grand
Junction relied upon the toll-route over the Liverpool and Manchester’s
rails for access to Liverpool, and felt sufficiently confident to establish
39 T. Baines, Liverpool in 1859 (1859), 70-1
40 H.C., 1872, XIII, App. T.

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 LIVERPOOL

its first locomotive works at Edge Hill, on land which could only be
reached by the toll-route. It was also rumoured that many of the older
company’s major shareholders had transferred their interests to the
Grand Junction after granting it a cheap toll rate.4142
In effect, therefore, the two companies were one, long before their
formal amalgamation in July 1845. The only attempt to infringe their
monopoly produced by the 1837 railway boom was a plan, not very
seriously intended, to run ferry-boats from Liverpool to Chester, to
link with the services of the newly promoted Chester and Crewe railway
company, whose Bill passed through Parliament on 30 June, 1837.
This threat was easily countered by the Grand Junction’s purchase of
the small Chester and Crewe company before it came into operation.
Even the railway boom of 1846, which produced an embarrassment
of schemes in London and Glasgow, and finely-balanced projects of
genuinely competitive authorship in Manchester and Birmingham, only
gave rise to a faint echo of railway mania in Liverpool. The northern
approaches to the city were the scene of a fierce, but short-lived, contest
between a number of small promotional companies, the Liverpool,
Ormskirk and Preston, the Liverpool and Bury, and the Liverpool,
Bolton and Wigan railway companies, to whose fortunes reference has
already been made in the preceding section. All these client companies
were absorbed within five years, by larger partners in a complicated
series of amalgamations. The Liverpool, Ormskirk and Preston first
negotiated with John Shaw Leigh for the necessary land for its ap­
proaches to a station near the Borough Gaol, at Great Howard Street.
These powers were taken over by the Liverpool and Bury railway
company, which also secured Parliamentary permission to extend the
line to Tithebarn Street. The Liverpool and Bury company was then
absorbed, in 1846, by the Manchester and Leeds railway company;
itself a partner to the merger known as the Lancashire and Yorkshire
railway company in the following year. To add to the complication,
two lesser companies also gained access to the new northern station
(No. 3 on map); one, the East Lancashire, with equal powers, and the
consequent friction which station-sharing on these terms usually
involved; the other, the small Liverpool, Crosby and Southport com­
pany, enjoying only running powers under payment of toll charges.43
At the end of all this, however, although an important, independently
owned, and well situated new station had been added to the Liverpool
townscape, conditions of competition had hardly changed at all. The
Lancashire and Yorkshire company operating from Exchange Station,
41 M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, ‘Railway Development in Liverpool’, Railway
Magazine, 105 (1959), 78.
42 Ibid. 79.
43 Ibid. 82-4.
189
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and the London and North Western group of companies, operating

from Lime Street, were unequally matched in Liverpool, and performed
services which were complementary rather than competitive. Until the
goods stations at North Docks and Sandhills were opened the L. & Y.
had no goods facilities to compete with the L. & N.W.’s stations in the
central dock area, at Wapping and at Waterloo (at the western ends
of the two tunnels shown on the sketch map). Nor was the main direc­
tion of the flow of goods and of passengers competitive. Though it was
possible to travel from Manchester to Liverpool over the L. & Y.’s
tracks, the route was devious, and took an hour and a half to the one
hour of the L. & N.W.’s direct route. For passengers and for goods
the L. & N.W. continued to dominate the main national traffic and
trunk routes.
An analysis of the traffic in and out of Liverpool carried by the L. &
N.W., prepared by their Goods Manager, Braithwaite Poole, in 1851,
shows that far and away the greater proportion went to, or was received
from Manchester—125,000 tons in the year. Birmingham and the
Staffordshire district accounted for 26,000 and 30,000 tons each;
Sheffield and London 29,000 and 27,000 tons per year. Cotton (88,000
tons), Packed Goods (96,000 tons), Bales and Cases (73,000 tons), Raw
Materials (45,000 tons), Grain (41,000 tons), Timber (39,000 tons), Iron
(32,000 tons) and Hardware (18,000 tons), were the principal items in the
two-way traffic. Coal was conspicuous by its absence.41*44 The coal fields to
the east and north of Liverpool were largely catered for by the tributary
railways which ran into the Lancashire and Yorkshire system. These
collieries, together with the West Riding urban centres, and the smaller
Lancashire manufacturing towns, formed the main originating points
of the L. & Y. traffic.
To both systems Liverpool was a terminus. However, since their
routes were oriented to the north-east, and to the east and south-east
respectively, dealings between the two were not as competitive as in
other theatres. By 1852, in fact, the Select Committee of the House of
Commons’ 4th Report had singled out the companies serving Liverpool
for particular comment: ‘The Liverpool and Manchester, the Lanca­
shire and Yorkshire railway via Bolton, Bury and Wigan, the East
Lancashire railway, the Bridgewater canal and the Old River Trust all
have a common understanding.’45 Indeed the first and principal business
of the Chamber of Commerce, founded in Liverpool in 1851, was to
commence agitation upon this very question. Both as the first President
of the Chamber of Commerce, and later as M.P., T. B. Horsfall urged
41 T. Baines, History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool (1852), 828.
45 Reference to H.C., 1852-3 (310) XXXVIII, quoted, significantly, by the Special
Committee on Railway Amalgamation set up by Liverpool Corporation. LRL,
Corporation Minutes, 1871-2, p. 667.

190
 LIVERPOOL

better and more competitive services: ‘The carriage question is one of

the most vital and important on which our attention has been engaged;
and while we do not disguise the nature and magnitude of the opposition
. . . we shall continue our most zealous exertions to secure success.’46
The situation was rendered all the more serious for Liverpool and
profitable for the L. & N.W. company by the fact that much of the
traffic took the form of transit trade, was growing very rapidly, and by
the 1850’s appeared to many to be constricted both by the scale of
charges and the inadequate facilities provided. Debate on the subject
became so heated at one of the meetings of the Liverpool Polytechnic
Society in 1853 that the discussion had to be cut short to allow tempers
to cool. Braithwaite Poole, after speaking of the growth of railway
traffic, had alluded to the lack of facilities at the docksides, and the
congestion caused by the 4,000 carts occupying waterfront space.47 To
this Bramley-Moore, Chairman of the Dock Committee, replied in
caustic terms. Liverpool was the father of the railway, its Corporation
had contributed liberally towards the facade of Lime Street station,
but every shipowner and broker had a right to complain of the facilities
provided by the railway companies: ‘And if the London and North
Western railway company, of which Mr. Poole is head of the goods
department, will carry goods from Manchester to Liverpool at the
same mileage rate as they charge from Manchester to London, they
will afford practical proof of their desire to increase and enlarge the
commercial facilities of Liverpool.’48 Called upon to reply, Braithwaite
Poole, rather indiscreetly, brought the L. & N.W.’s profits into the
discussion. Taking into account the terminal expenses his company
cleared only three times as much, he revealed, on goods going from
Manchester to London as from Manchester to Liverpool. Braithwaite
Poole was, diplomatically, absent from the next meeting, a month later,
in February 1853; much to the disappointment of Bramley-Moore,
whose ‘chief object was to listen to Mr. Braithwaite Poole who was to
floor him altogether.’49 The following month, in March, Braithwaite
Poole attended for the discussion of another paper on the same subject,
but made it clear that when he expressed his views he did so ‘as a rate­
payer’, and not as Traffic Manager of the L. & N.W. railway company.
No further public revelations of the L. & N.W.’s thinking on profit
margins and terminal facilities were forthcoming.
The monopoly which had seemed irksome in the 1850’s seemed
intolerable by the following decade. Although there were signs that a
new spirit would presently be introduced, as the Manchester, Sheffield
46 W. A. Gibson Martin, A Century of Liverpool's Commerce (1950), 15.
47 Transactions of the Liverpool Polytechnic Society, 31 January 1853, 29-30.
48 Ibid. 32.
49 Ibid. 28 February 1853, 38.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and Lincolnshire company’s planned invasion drew near, all that had
actually happened in the late 185O’s, despite bitter complaints, had been
that the shared monopoly had been slightly tightened by the merger
of the Lancashire and Yorkshire and East Lancashire railway com­
panies in 1859. In addition to this, the further growth of imports placed
a growing strain upon such facilities as the L. & N.W. continued to
provide. Imports of corn increased by 50 % in the first six years of the
1860’s, to become Liverpool’s largest single item. John Patterson, the
Liverpool Corn Dealers’ spokesman, gave copious evidence to a Royal
Commission of 1867, upon the restrictions felt by Liverpool merchants.50
‘The injury which such excessive charges inflict is not confined to any
one branch of trade,’ Henry Grainger, of the Liverpool Chamber of
Commerce added, ‘but is felt with peculiar severity by all who deal in
goods of which the value is small in proportion to the weight.’ ‘The
extra charges are so imposed,’ he continued, ‘as to force the traffic out
of its natural channels, and enable the Companies to offer a bounty to
divert it into the channels through which it would not otherwise flow.
The fact is that the traffic to and from Liverpool frequently overtaxes
the means provided for its accommodation, and the Companies, instead
of affording increased traffic, endeavour to divert the traffic by exacting
excessive rates.'51
Early in the 1870’s the whole matter came to a head with the rumour
of an Amalgamation Bill, to combine the Lancashire and Yorkshire
and the London and North Western railway companies. This would
have made Liverpool unique amongst great cities in being served by
only one company. A special committee of the Town Council was set
up to examine the proposed merger in 1871; and on 26 January 1872,
its chairman, W. B. Forwood, laid a detailed forty page Report before
the Council. By manipulating terminal charges, and using the leeway
which the very liberal maximum rates granted by their statutes allowed,
railway companies were free, the Report concluded, to ‘turn the stream
of traffic over such portions of their system as they may elect.’ By this
means ‘the Directors would control the trade of large and important
districts through which the lines pass, and would be able to further or
retard the prosperity of any particular district or town on their system,
to the injury or advantage of others, as the interests of their shareholders
would seem to indicate.’52 In August 1872 W. B. Forwood appeared
before a Parliamentary Joint Select Committee, to give evidence in the
same vein on the railway rates and provisions—‘a grievance for up­
wards of twenty years.’53
50 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.222 and App. C.
61 Ibid. App. K. My italics. ..
62 LRL, Corporation Minutes, 1871-2, p. 700.
53 H.C., 1872, XIII, Q.974.

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 LIVERPOOL

Although the grievance over rates was not entirely removed, accom­
modation and facilities in Liverpool did get their largest competitive
jolt since 1830, when the Brunswick, Central Station, and Huskisson
Goods terminal schemes were carried through, by gradual stages,
between 1864 and 1880. Once again, as in Manchester, the initiator of
change was the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway com­
pany under Edward Watkin, with assistance from the Great Northern
railway company, and later still from the Midland company; the three
operating after 1866 through the agency of the jointly controlled
Cheshire Lines Committee. Although these were companies prepared
to spend heavily to establish themselves in Liverpool as their western
terminal, and to introduce the nearest approach to competitive services
between major companies which Liverpool had experienced, the pro­
cess of forcing an entry into a great city where rivals were already well
entrenched was an extremely costly and slow process. The problems
encountered in acquiring the land for new station sites are described
in Section 3, infra, but here it might be relevant to trace briefly the
stages by which independent access routes were secured.
In 1861 a small line, four miles in length, was authorised from
Garston, south of Liverpool, to a station at Parliament Street (some
half-way along the tunnel section leading to No. 4 on the sketch map).54
In the event, Walter Mar Brydone’s more modest approach was adopted,
to run to Brunswick passenger and goods station, whence an omnibus
service ran to the city centre. Brydone was engineer to the Great
Northern railway, which had previously relied entirely upon what
Watkin called ‘an unhappy alliance’ with the L. & N.W. to gain access
to Liverpool.55 Indeed, for a time, although they now had an indepen­
dent terminal, the Great Northern and the M.S. & L. still relied upon
running powers over the London and North Western rails from
Manchester to the southern end of their short line at Garston. Then,
in July, 1865, the M S & L.’s Liverpool Extension Act was obtained,
and the building commenced of a twenty-four mile link between
Manchester and Garston, to allow for the development of traffic in a
manner not possible whilst the L. & N.W. controlled the permanent
way, and to provide a third independent route between Liverpool and
Manchester.
Naturally the scheme was opposed vigorously by the L. & N.W.
and the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway companies. James Smithells,
the L. & Y.’s Traffic Manager, protested, ‘If the district between
Liverpool and Manchester were filled with lines it would not remove
the difficulty we now suffer at Liverpool as regards stations.’ ‘Is the
64 At Garston the site of an old tide-mill had been used as a station. J. A. Picton,
op. cit. (1875 edn.) II, 463.
56 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1865, 30 June, p. 14, M.S. & L. (Railway Extensions).

H 193
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

difficulty of the Liverpool traffic a station difficulty or a difficulty

occasioned through the want of line ?—It is entirely a station difficulty.’56
The Lancashire and Yorkshire, however, experienced some difficulty
in arguing consistently here, since they and the L. & N.W. had already
opposed, in the previous session, the projected extension of the Garston/
Brunswick line through to the new Central Station, at Ranelagh Street
(No. 4 on map); and a mere catalogue of their own proposed spending
upon extensions of space at Exchange, Great Howard Street, Sandhills,
and Bootle goods and timber sidings, though impressive, was not enough
to convince the Select Committee that the station space they intended
to make available would be adequate.57 Edward Watkin’s arguments
carried more authority. Trade in Liverpool should not, in his opinion,
be judged by the current levels to which the American Civil War, and
consequent ‘cotton famine’ had reduced it. ‘It is almost an axiom in
Liverpool that the trade doubles itself every fifteen years.. .. When this
war is fairly over more facilities will be desperately needed.’58
The completion of the new Liverpool to Manchester route, and the
cutting of the expensive Central Station took a long time. It was not
until 1874 that the first C.L.C. expresses were put into service; sixteen
per day, and with cushioned seats, even in the third-class compartments.
In 1876 hourly expresses covered the 34 miles from Manchester in
45 minutes, and the second and third-class return tickets were reduced
from 6s 9d to 6s, and from 5s 3d to 4s 6d, to the Manchester Guardian's
satisfaction. The L. & N.W. and the L. & Y. responded by bringing
down both their times and their prices to meet those of the C.L.C.59
Unfortunately, although the 1870’s saw a new spirit of competition
in passenger services, the arrival of the C.L.C. did not make the
difference which had been hoped for in the carriage of goods. Indeed,
when they took into account the heavy expenses of their Huskisson
goods station in north Liverpool, and the further expense of building a
loop fine around the eastern fringe of Liverpool to gain access to
Huskisson, the C.L.C. had even more cause than their entrenched rivals
to cling to supplementary terminal charges. Huskisson goods station
was not opened until 1880, the Central Station until 1874, and the
expensive and belated character of their intrusion, together with the
quasi-monopolistic nature of the situation in which they now found
themselves as newcomers, appear to have made the C.L.C. willing, as
far as goods traffic was concerned, to accept the L. & N.W.’s lead on
charges and facilities. When further complaints and representations
58 Ibid. 1 July, p. 283.
57 Ibid. 1 July, pp. 278-82, 284-92 (Smithells); 3 July, pp. 274-7 (Cawkwell).
58 Ibid. 30 June, pp. 25-6.
59 R. P. Griffiths, The Cheshire Line Railway (1947), 8-9.- The expresses left
Manchester from a temporary station behind the Free Trade Hall until Manchester
Central station was fully opened in 1880.

194
 LIVERPOOL

from steamship owners, the corn, timber, sugar and cotton merchants’
associations, the dock board, and City Council reached their height, in
March 1881, at the special meeting called between the Liverpool
merchants and the railway companies, it was noteworthy that, although
the Chairmen of the Midland, the M.S. & L. and Great Northern rail­
way companies were all present, all remarks were directed to Richard
Moon of the L. & N.W. and he replied on behalf of all the railway
companies.60
Forwood, now Mayor, spoke at length and eloquently, upon the
subject of terminal charges, railway ports and the general effect of the
railway monopoly upon Liverpool as a great entrepot. ‘While we
prosper, we do not prosper to the full extent we have a right to expect,
and it is the action of the Railway Companies which deprives us of that
benefit. ... You hold in your hands the very arteries through which the
life blood of the city pulsates, and just as in proportion as your grip is
tightened or relaxed, so will our trade diminish, remain stagnant, or
grow with great and abundant activity.’61 In the course of the 187O’s,
Forwood continued, Liverpool’s share of the total British grain trade
had fallen from 28 % to 21 %, partly because of preferential rates given
by the railway companies to parts where they themselves owned docks:
Fleetwood, Barrow, Holyhead, Goole, Garston and Avonmouth. The
burden of heavy terminal charges was not excused, as the railway
managers alleged, by the vast cost of their stations in Liverpool. ‘I
would remind you,’ Forwood pointed out, ‘that the Legislature has
always said that the cost of stations was an incident of carriage and not
a terminal expense; and terminal expenses have been limited over and
over again in Acts of Parliament to the mere labour of loading and
unloading the waggons and covering the same.’62
Moon rejected all these arguments, pointing once more to the rail­
way companies’ need to recoup their heavy investment, and the impossi­
bility of making concessions without running into protest from all other
towns in the fares table. Possibly, he concluded, the House of Commons’
Committee which was due to consider the question shortly, might take
a different view; a sop which provoked the sharp reply from Forwood
that the Commons’ Committee would have had a greater amount of
confidence attached to it if it had not been so largely composed of
Railway Directors.63 LIVERPOOL SNUBBED, ran the headline in
the March 1881 editions of the Liverpool Liberal Review, a penny
weekly. ‘The deputation have come home sadder and wiser men.’ Their

60 Railway Rates and Railway Administration as affecting the Trade of Liverpool

(Liverpool, 1881).
61 Ibid. 13-14.
63 Ibid. 9.
63 Ibid. 32, 39.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

visit ‘in the hope of finding the Railway Ogre in a propitious mood’
had been a waste of money.64 The newspaper was also dissatisfied with
the performance put up a little later, before the Commons’ Select
Committee in June 1881, by Forwood, John Williamson and E. K.
Muspratt. ‘What then is the reason that with so strong a case Liverpool
has made so poor a show before the Railway Charges Select Commit­
tee ?’, the Liberal Review asked. ‘Is it that the railway interest itself is
so strong in the Dock Board, City Council, and other public bodies
that, by working the oracles the secrets of which are so well known to
our local social aristocracy, the local committee entrusted with the
matter has been induced greatly to drop it?’65
Such personal charges seem unfair, taking into account the compre­
hensive and forceful nature of Forwood’s evidence; and they are in any
case irrelevant. Far more was required than arguments or personal
influence to move the railway companies from their chosen policy. A
more effective lever was the threat to use alternative means of transport;
and it is ironical that, just as carts had been used in pre-railway days
to break the canal monopoly, so in 1881 large carters began to offer to
undercut the railways by 25 % for horse-drawn loads with a guaranteed
minimum of 1,000 tons or more per week, and to give comparable
delivery times, for the complete journey, with trans-shipments, from
Liverpool dockside to Manchester warehouse.66
However, although such an offer showed enterprise on the part of
individual local carters, it was not practicable on a sufficiently large
scale to disturb the railway managers. But the projected Ship Canal,
in spite of all its initial difficulties, produced an immediate change of
mood far more effectively than Forwood’s representations. In October
1885, charges for leading classes of freight were reduced by 10%, and
terminal charges were modified. ‘These important changes,’ wrote The
Economist, ‘are regarded as an answer to the projected Manchester
Ship Canal, and if so the difference between competition rates and the
monopoly rates which usually exist is very distinctly shown. . . . But—
the great policy of the railways has been to concede nothing except when
practically forced to do so.’67

3. The development of railway facilities; a chronological sketch

In Liverpool, as in Manchester, the earliest terminals, both for pas­
sengers and goods, were those associated with the pioneer Lvierpool
M Liberal Review, 12 March 1881.
65 Ibid. 4 June 1881.
™ Railway Rates etc. (1881), 7. The hypothetical rate offered' was 8/- per ton,
as against 11/6d by rail.
67 The Economist, 31 October 1885, 1321.

196
 LIVERPOOL

and Manchester railway. In both cities the facilities required were

grossly underestimated, but the extension of accommodation was
further complicated at Liverpool by technical difficulties arising from
the direct eastern approach which had been forced upon George Stephen­
son. Taken in conjunction with the geographical characteristics of east
Liverpool, and the small reserves of power initially possessed by the
early locomotives, the result was a strange and inconvenient series of
tunnels, stationary engines and rope or cable linkages. Even the short
run from Edge Hill to the first passenger station at Crown Street (No. 1
on map), was worked by ropes, as was the longer run to the goods
sidings alongside the Mersey at Wapping.
The meagre and disorganised facilities at Crown Street, and its
distance from the city centre led to immediate complaints. Angry
correspondents writing to the Liverpool Mercury spoke of the ‘sea of
mud and filth in Crown Street, from Oxford Street to the Railway
Station’, and of the ‘posse of individuals calling themselves porters,
obnoxious in their eagerness to possess the luggage.’68 The railway
company itself laid on a service of short-stagecoaches to take first-class
passengers to Dale Street, where the company’s offices, and nine of the
principal hotels, were situated; but the delay and expense of this ter­
minal service gave cause for dissatisfaction within the first year.69 ‘The
experience of twelve months’, the Chairman, Charles Lawrence, re­
ported on 28 September 1831, ‘has exhibited the inconvenience and
very serious disadvantages of the Railway for Passengers terminating a
mile and a half from the centre of business. The delay of 30 minutes
in accomplishing the first mile and a half of the journey, and the
necessity of resorting to the very imperfect and expensive accommoda­
tion of the Omnibuses, have proved the extreme importance of bringing
the Railway Carriages to the centre of the Town.’70
This was the first emergence of the principle which was to guide
other railway companies’ urban policies, here and elsewhere, as they
prospered. According to the Liverpool and Manchester Directors’
calculations the capital charge of constructing a further cable-operated
tunnel from Edge Hill to a new site at Lime Street would cost no more
to service per year than the omnibuses; i.e. the interest on the £100,000
estimated cost of making the tunnel was set against the £4,000 or
£5,000 per year which the omnibus service under contract was costing.
Later estimates, laid officially before Parliament in 1832, gave the cost
of the tunnel and Lime Street site as £135,000, and this was handsomely
exceeded 71 But one could still say that such calculations of the relative
68 Liverpool Mercury, 8 and 17 January 1834.
«’ M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, ‘Railway Development in Liverpool’, Railway
Magazine 105 (1959), 77. The Stranger's Pocket Guide to Liverpool (Liverpool, 1842)
70 Six-monthly Report, 28 September 1831.
71 Six-monthly Report, 27 July 1836.
197
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

costs of omnibus feeder services and railway extensions made good

sense in the 1830’s; although this was hardly true in the 1840’s or
1860’s, when so many of the extension lines into the central districts
of Britain’s cities were executed.
Lawrence had been ‘happy to add that the project is approved by the
Mayor and Common Council’; and the Minutes of the Corporation
Finance Committee, together with the Plans and Books of Reference of
the 1832 Bill, tell the rest of the story.72 The Corporation owned nearly
all the 250 properties scheduled, mostly cottages, shops and stables on
lease (120 of them to one landlord, Benjamin Branfield); a smithy, a
joiner’s yard, store yards for timber and coal, the usual ‘rope-walk’
which open spaces in maritime cities attracted, and a cattle-market,
occupied the actual site designated for the terminus itself. Apart from
a few sharp words exchanged between the Corporation’s Finance
Committee and the Liverpool and Manchester company’s solicitors,
Messrs. Clay and Swift, in February 1832, when the railway company
attempted to escape from the condition that the station ‘be appro­
priated to passengers only’, the construction of Liverpool’s second
major station went ahead smoothly and rapidly. One or two complaints,
of a trivial nature, found their way into the pages of the Liverpool
Mercury from the inhabitants of the smarter area around Abercromby
Square when the blasting started; ‘the glassware on the table and the
furniture throughout the room was most sensibly affected’, and the
residents would ‘look for redress to the authors of this annoyance if
there is anything like equity in English law.’73 A letter, a week later
from the company, apologised for the ‘temporary inconvenience’. By
1836, passengers were ‘gliding through the lurid and spectral glare’ of
the tunnel to Lime Street; descending by gravity, and being hauled back
by rope and stationary engine.74 And this, until the years of railway
mania, in the 1840’s, remained the sum total of Liverpool’s railway
provision for passenger trains.
There were rumours that the northern approach line originally
projected by Stephenson was to be revived; and a lively correspondence
on the subject took place as early as September 1833. To some con­
tributors the projected link seemed to be ‘fooling away the capital of
the country’, the projector to be ‘a hungry engineer in want of a job
who thinks Lancashire people have lost their wits.’ ‘I do not recollect
any project’, wrote one correspondent, ‘which seemed to hold out so
meagre a prospect of remuneration . . . and I know something of the

72 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1832, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, LRL Finance
Committee 7 September 1831, p. 158, 24 February 1832, p. 222, 2March 1832, p. 229.
73 Liverpool Mercury, 21 February 1834.
74 The Stranger's Pocket Guide (Liverpool, 1842).

198
 LIVERPOOL

cost of these undertakings.’75 To others it seemed that north Liverpool,

with its brickyards and dilapidated cottages, interspersed with ‘dis­
agreeable manufactories, chemical works, oil mills, soda manufac­
tories, charcoal works and etc. with their chimneys and corresponding
effluvia’ was a neighbourhood which admitted of great improvement.76
‘Owners of land at the north end of the town,’ wrote ‘Investigator’,
‘may readily subscribe for 20, 50 or 100 shares each, not with the view
of the benefit they may derive from the undertaking as a railway, but
from a shrewd calculation of the advantages that may result from an
increase in the value of their property in land and houses by its forma­
tion.’77 It was worth dropping 20% on 50 shares, ‘Investigator’ pointed
out, if it encouraged a project which enabled one to clear £3,000 or
£4.000 on property sales. However, the project remained no more than
a rumour for twelve years; though it is interesting to see how early and
accurately future developments were forecast. The pages of the Liver­
pool Mercury also predicted, in 1833, a communication between the
north and south ends of the town via the dock quays—a project which
recurred in various forms throughout the next half century—and
predicted, in 1834, a station at Ranelagh Street on the site of Mayor
Staniforth’s mansion—the location adopted by the C.L.C. thirty years
later.78
In 1845 the group of promotional schemes which were later to
merge into the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway company, in the way
already described earlier, began to cut their approaches from the north.
The Corporation was not directly affected by this new move. Its
Finance Committee directed the Surveyor, on 8 August 1845, to give
facilities for the Liverpool and Bury company to inspect land and
property, but only a mere four hundred pounds-worth of property was
made over as a result of the inspection.79 The northern companies
relied far more upon the Earls of Sefton’s and of Derby’s, Sir Thomas
Hesketh’s and Lord Skelmersdale’s lands on the initial run-in, and
upon those of John Shaw Leigh in the more immediate station ap­
proaches.80 The site itself, covering the ground where Plumbe, Lumber
and Brixteth Streets met Tithebam Street, was mostly occupied by
poor quality cottages and dwelling houses, together with a couple of
pubs. The largest parcel, of 45 properties, was owned by Colonel John
Plumbe-Tempest, and Trustees owned a further 20, but mostly the
ownership was extremely fragmented; twenty-five proprietors having

75 Liverpool Mercury, 27 September 1833, 19 December 1834.

76 Ibid. 15 August 1834.
77 Ibid. 19 August 1834.
78 Ibid. 6 June 1834. J. A. Picton, op. cit. (1875) II, 205-6.
79 LRL Finance Committee Minutes, 8 August 1845, p. 139, 30 April, 1847, p. 414.
80 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1846, 7 August, pp. 29-41.
199
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

title to the remaining 175 houses and pieces of land scheduled. The half-
mile approach route on a viaduct likewise passed through scores of
tightly-packed slum houses, mostly owned in batches of half a dozen,
frequently by women. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that
James Thomson’s estimate for the extension line from Great Howard
Street to Tithebam Street came to £297,000 for half a mile.81
The Corporation kept watch on these developments, although its
Parliamentary Sub-Committee only reported verbally, and no separate
book was kept for their reflections until 1866.82 However, it was much
more closely affected, as proprietor, by the L. & N.W. extensions
carried out at Lime Street and at Wapping stations, in 1845-8; and by
their construction of a new tunnel down to a more northerly goods
terminus (the Waterloo station), which was situated very close to the
northern companies’ projected Great Howard Street station, but
between it and the dockside.83 In all these sites the Corporation had an
interest. At Waterloo 18,000 square yards were made over to the L. &
N.W. for £82,071, something like £4 10s Od per square yard; whilst to
replace the Borough Gaol—which was scheduled for demolition—the
Finance Committee was instructed to buy replacement land further
out, in Walton, at £225 per acre, or Is per square yard.84 At Lime Street,
Joseph Locke’s extensions to the station likewise fell on adjacent land
owned wholly by the Mayor and Burgesses; over 260 small properties
being transferred to the L. & N.W. railway company.
By the early 1850’s therefore the situation in Liverpool was one
which a contemporary described, not unfairly, as ‘an entangled web’.
The railway facilities so far provided were all terminal, or ‘butt-end’ in
character. There was no through station, nor any cross-town com­
munication. ‘We now vainly regret,’ said John Grantham in his paper
to the Liverpool Polytechnic Society in 1856, ‘that some master mind
had not been employed, with a cooler judgment and a more impartial
hand’; shortcomings which he now proposed to remedy with a compre­
hensive and interesting plan of his own.85 The managers of the major
railway companies, however, chose to treat Mr. Grantham’s paper as a
contribution in similar vein to the one he had read to the Polytechnic
Society in 1844 on ‘Land Sailing Machines’.86 And there was, indeed,
81 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, Liverpool and Bury Railway. The Gt. Howard
St. station, originally intended for the terminus, was reclassified to goods.
82 LRL Finance Committee Minutes, 3 January 1845, p. 34, 2 May 1845, p.88,
2 January 1846, p. 206.
83 LRL Council Books, 29 October 1845, p. 43. The site may be seen on the sketch
map.
84 LRL Finance Committee Minutes, 27 August 1847, p. 464.
85 J. Grantham, ‘Railways within the Borough of Liverpool’,, Trans, of Liv. Poly
Soc. (1856), 204.
86 Ibid. (1844), 38.

200
 LIVERPOOL

something of the visionary and crank about Grantham’s Central

Station and High-Level through-communication; though one might
well have said the same thing about Charles Pearson’s similar proposals
in London. Whereas Pearson’s scheme was realised, in modified form,
in the late 185O’s and early 1860’s, Grantham’s remained a curiosity;
unless one ascribes to it the inspiration for the small-scale elevated
railway opened in Liverpool in 1893.87
In the 1860’s the chief interest in the development of Liverpool’s
urban railways lay in the gradual approach of independent companies
from the south. At the time Grantham wrote, 1856, they were already
visible ‘wending their way into the town . . . but unwilling even to enter
the suburbs, and terminating about 5 miles from the exchange—the
directors probably waiting the turn of events to enable them to complete
their work, not a little deterred from their undertaking by uncertainty
as to the best way of entering the town, and the enormous expenses it
will involve.’88 The companies concerned, the Great Northern and the
Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway companies, were indeed
concerned with the tactics and (as well they might be) with the expense
of making a new breach in the built-up area, but they were not deterred.
Stimulated, in the ways described elsewhere, by the intervention of
John Fowler and Waring Bros., and by the formation of the C.L.C.
alliance, the original plan for a modest station at Brunswick Dock and
connecting omnibus service to James Street, was replaced, even before
the Brunswick station was opened in 1864, by a far more ambitious
scheme to drive a mile and a half nearer the city centre.89
The first version of the Liverpool Central Station and Railway
scheme was submitted as early as the 1861-2 session by W. M. Brydone,
with an estimated expenditure of £400,000. In 1864 the plan and esti­
mate were revised by Brydone and Fowler, an Act secured, and work
begun upon the tunnel and new terminal at Ranelagh Street.90 As
already mentioned, the site itself was owned partly by the Corporation,
partly by Thomas Brassey; but on the approach route over 460 parcels
of property were affected, including 135 houses officially designated as
‘occupied by the labouring classes’ under Standing Order 191.91 Almost
all of these were owned in small batches; and one can well understand
James Allport’s exasperation when he came to report the final cost in
1874: ‘in round figures, £6,000,000’ for the whole Central Station
project.92

87 C. E. Box, The Liverpool Overhead Railway 1893-1956 (1959), 15.

88 J. Grantham, loc. cit. 206.
89 M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, loc. cit. 198.
90 27 and 8 Vic., c. 215; 29 and 30 Vic., c. 294; 30 and 31 Vic., c. 207.
91 HLRO, Demolition Statement, 1864, Liverpool Central Station Railway.
92 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1874, 28 April, pp. 3-4.
H* 201
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Even so, the link between north and south, which Grantham had
urged, had not been achieved. Several bills were deposited in the 1870’s
with the further object in view of getting through Liverpool. ‘I think
Mr. Fowler has had one or two schemes, and other engineers have
projected schemes, and the West Lancashire Company have been twice
to Parliament.’93 The C.L.C. had been prepared to share the £1,500,000
or so of additional expenses to be incurred for a subterranean through-
route by the West Lancashire company, but the Commons’ committee,
dissatisfied both with the effect further tunnelling might have in the
central districts, and with the shaky finances of the West Lancashire
company, threw the Bill out in 1872.94 Since the C.L.C. had already
bought extensive lands for a new goods station in north Liverpool at
Huskisson, the only alternative presented when the through-railway
finally miscarried was to begin construction of a peripheral scheme, the
North Liverpool Extension railway, in 1874.95
There were, in fact, further objections to tunnelling for main-line
trains through city centres, apart from those of expense and public
inconvenience. Although the approach to the C.L.C. Central Station
at Ranelagh Street (No. 4 on map) had been made with steam working
in mind, and designed in short, ventilated sections, the result was only
a marginal improvement on the cable working still used, until 1870 at
Lime Street, 1895 and 1896 on the Waterloo and Wapping goods
tunnels.96 Obviously ventilation was even more critical on the under­
ground steam sections intended for passenger traffic. And, indeed, the
Mersey Railway Company’s plan to make itself an attractive promo­
tional line for C.L.C. purchase, by forming an underground linkage
between the new C.L.C. Central Station and Birkenhead, succumbed
to these technical difficulties. To cope with the smoke produced by
locomotives toiling up gradients of 1 in 27 the company installed huge
steam-driven fans which, in the words of M. D. Greville and G. O.
Holt, ‘not only expelled the fumes but absorbed the profits of the
undertaking.’97

4. Summary and general considerations

It will be clear from what has already been said under other headings
that Liverpool was, to an unusual extent amongst Britain’s major
cities, held in the monopolistic, or quasi-monopolistic, grip of a few
large railway companies. The question still remains as to why such a
93 Loc. cit. p. 13.
94 R. P. Griffiths, op. cit. 12.
95 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1874, 29 April, pp. 5-9 (Underdown).*.
96 M. D. Greville and G. O. Holt, loc. cit. 268-69
97 Ibid. 270.

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 LIVERPOOL

wealthy and successful maritime city, handling almost half of Britain's

exports by the mid-nineteenth century, should fail to secure better and
more competitive railway provisions. Partly it was due to accidents in
the timing and promotion of schemes: the firm hold established in the
first fifteen years by the alliance between the Grand Junction and
Liverpool and Manchester railway companies; the unequal and com­
plementary nature of the Lancashire and Yorkshire company's services;
and the belated and expensive nature of the C.L.C.’s intrusion in the
186O’s and 1870’s. One might almost say that the moment the projected
alliance between the Great Western railway company and the Grand
Junction railway company fell through, in 1846, and the broad-gauge
Great Western was banished to the Birkenhead side of the Mersey, the
chances of keen competition were reduced.
Another ground of explanation would be concerned with the par­
ticular position Liverpool occupied in the railway network. Its traffic
tended to be terminal in nature. As Wilfred Smith has already stressed,
Liverpool was mainly a trans-shipment point from land to sea, and not
primarily a link in land communications; and this discontinuity may
help to explain the relative absence of trunk route rivalries.98 There is,
however, a third reason for Liverpool’s failure to escape from the
trammels of monopoly; less obvious but no less important than those
already mentioned. Liverpool’s prosperity at the beginning of the nine­
teenth century already depended to a marked degree upon the successful
establishment of one form of monopoly—its docks—and to maintain a
closed dock policy whilst throwing the interior rail linkage open to
wholesale competition was to pull in two different directions. The
railway monopoly was, in a sense, no more than a reflection of the
restrictive dock policies which were pursued, certainly until 1857, and
arguably until the 1880’s.
The Mayor, W. B. Forwood, summed up Liverpool’s position at
the railway rates meeting, on 8 March 1881, in the following words.
‘We are not a manufacturing town, or a town having any mineral resources.
Our prosperity is entirely dependent upon our close proximity to the great
manufacturing centres of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Shrop­
shire.
‘Liverpool is simply a vast entrepot, depending for her prosperity entirely
upon her facilities and the cheapness of her communication with the in­
terior.’99
Such a prosperity may, in fact, be far more firmly based than appears
at first glance; but there is little doubt that to contemporaries there
seemed to be something circumstantial and insecure about so rapid a
98 W. Smith, Merseyside: A Scientific Survey (British Assoc., 1953), 189. J. A.
Patmore, ‘The Railway Network of Merseyside’, Transactions and Papers, Instit.
of Brit. Geog., 29 (1961), 231 et seq.
99 Railway Rates etc. (1881), 5-6.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

growth unsupported by directly productive industry. Fewer than five

per cent of Liverpool’s population in mid-century were engaged in
industry, and this was reflected in the city’s social structure.100 Instead
of a lower class composed of factory workers, and a civic governing
group drawn from the ranks of the manufacturers (as in the industrial
towns), the working class in Liverpool consisted largely of seamen or
of unskilled and casually employed dock labourers, and the wealthy
civic elite consisted primarily of merchants. Something of this singular
character was echoed in the old jibe about ‘Manchester men and
Liverpool gentlemen’, or in the counter-jibes of Manchester’s popular
songs of the 1820’s, alluding to the parasitical nature of employment
in Liverpool.101 At a different level it can be heard again in the opinions
of serious writers on Liverpool’s history, like Thomas Baines.
There can, at all events, be no doubt that contemporary citizens
watched Liverpool’s privileges with jealous eyes. In 1839 when Poulett
Thompson’s Bill to extend the privilege of Bonded Warehouses to
inland towns was put forward, the proposed change caused an imme­
diate and nervous reaction from the Liverpool Association of Land
and Warehouse owners; and the matter came up for earnest discussion
in the Council on 3 and 8 July.102 Whether or not valid grounds for
them existed, there were fears that Liverpool might, under a regime
of Free Trade and open docks, become no more than an outport for
Manchester. The arrival of the railways presented the mercantile
community with the same spectre in still more alarming form.
There is evidence for this in the attitudes expressed over two railway
schemes which would have completely changed the conditions of
competition in the 1850’s. The first, which remained merely a subject
for discussion, was John Grantham’s Strand Street project of 1856;
the second, which was formally presented to Parliament and approved
by them, was J. M. Rendel’s £400,000 plan for the development of
rival docks on the Birkenhead side of the Mersey, with direct railway
access. Both met with severe criticism and the Rendel scheme with
determined opposition, for the same reason—that they appeared to
reduce the local benefits deriving from warehousing and trans-shipment,
by drastically improving railway access from the interior directly to the
Mersey.
Grantham’s plan was for a high-level station, to be situated near the
Customs House at Strand Street, which would both give an internal
through-route for goods and passengers, combined with direct access to
the docks, waterside tracks, and direct loading by steam cranes.103 Such a
100 T. Baines, Liverpool in 1859 (1859), 4-6.
101 George Chandler, op. cit. 353.
102 LRL Council Books, 3 and 8 July 1839, pp. 212-4.
103 Originally it was intended as a dock railway, but later grew to a proposed
main-line station. J. Grantham, Trans, ofLiv. Poly. Soc. (1853), 28-9, (1856), 209-11.
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 LIVERPOOL

system, he argued, was not impracticable; and in this he received support

from an unexpected quarter. Samuel Holme, the Mayor, who was present,
had noted something of the kind working at Cardiff, and commented,
‘It is certainly a matter of surprise, that when steam is employed in
making clogs and cutting nails, it should not be employed in working
the Liverpool docks.’ Further, more outspoken, support came from
Alderman Bennett, and from the L. & N.W. Goods Manager, Braith­
waite Poole. Poole spoke very critically of the current inadequacy of
the dockside rail or tram-way system, ‘suitable merely for earth
moving’, and compared it with the more efficient systems operating at
Hull, Dundee and Gloucester. Progress was most rapid, he asserted,
when the dock estates were united with the railways. Aiderman Bennett
made explicit the implied corollary, ‘Let the railway be made and both
docks and warehouses be made subservient to it.’ ‘How many great
points had been missed’, he added, ‘through the want of unity amongst
the railway companies, and through the unwillingness of the Dock
Committee to work in concert with them?’ Since Grantham’s plan
had first been published, he added, ‘How many buildings have been
erected solely for the purpose of preventing that plan being carried out?’
In particular (as Grantham specified during the discussion) the Dock
Committee’s projected warehouses at Princes’ Dock ‘would have
stopped the railway as effectively as if a pyramid had been placed
there.’104
These radical views did not pass unchallenged. J. B. Smith, a member
of the Dock Committee, flatly stated that in his opinion the town was
not prepared for a high level railway; Bramley-Moore, the ex-Chairman
of the Dock Committee, attacked the L. & N.W.’s own record. But it
fell to James Newlands, the Borough Engineer, and Councillor James
Holme, to make the most damaging criticisms of the scheme. Taking
six ships at random, Holme showed that their cargoes required division
amongst seventy-five different consignees; one vessel alone, the Mary
Cannon had a mixed cargo to be divided on arrival between nineteen
consignees. Grantham answered this objection by arguing that a hun­
dred and fifty railway trucks could remove the cargo of the Mary
Cannon, and at the same time provide convenient units for sorting
out consignments. He had no reply, however, to the other objection to
his scheme: that it ‘is only suitable for the traffic from the docks to the
interior of the country and vice versa, and is not suitable to Liverpool.
It has nothing to do with Liverpool and is, in fact, a Manchester rail­
way.’105
The same views were given a public airing again, during the final
crisis in the Dock Committee’s affairs, in 1856-7, which culminated in
104 Ibid. 10 March 1856, 212-6.
105 Ibid. 14 March 1853, 40 et. seq. 28 February 1853, 37.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the dissolution of the direct link between the Corporation of Liverpool

and the Dock Estate. At the height of this crisis, Parliament and the
country were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of a combination
between the Town Clerk of Manchester and the Great Western railway
company to promote a Bill to break Liverpool’s exclusive control over
its own docks.106
There were two principal objections to the monopoly control which
Liverpool had managed to retain over the docks in the Mersey. The
scale upon which dues were levied was criticised as a tax upon imported
raw materials and exported goods; and further resentment was caused
by the fact that out of these dock dues, an annual payment averaging
£120,000, known as the Town Dues, was made to the Corporation of
Liverpool, and used by them to lighten the incidence of local rates.
‘Robber barons’ was the epithet Harriet Martineau used to describe
the Liverpool Corporation.107
Since the Great Western railway company was excluded from Liver­
pool by the actions of its rivals, and the City of Manchester was paying
a good portion of Liverpool’s dock dues, they formed natural allies in
the task of monopoly-breaking.108 And although—as counsel for the
Corporation of Liverpool argued—there was no precedent in statute
law for the transfer of property from the hands of a body which had
not been charged with specific mismanagement, this is precisely what
was authorised by the Mersey Conservancy and Docks Act of 1857.
The old Town Dues were commuted to a lump sum of £1,500,000
payable to the Corporation of Liverpool, and a new Mersey Docks
and Harbour Board set up, with the obligation to take over management
of the docks on both sides of the river, and to complete J. M. Rendel’s
scheme for direct rail access at Birkenhead; ‘in appearance,’ wrote
Brian D. White, ‘a triumph of outside interests over Liverpool as a
whole.’109 In fact the course events took, as White recounts, were to
reveal that it was a constitutional triumph only. The dock dues were
not substantially reduced, nor was the scheme for rail access carried
out on anything like the scale contemplated.
The dock users, and the railway companies serving Liverpool, found
answers to the problem over the next generation in their separate ways.
The answer to monopoly dock dues, as to monopoly railway charges,
was the unique Manchester Ship Canal; and it is noteworthy that the
106 ‘In the heat of that memorable conflict all that Manchester appeared to thirst
for was the humiliation of Liverpool’, Daily Post, 12 August 1867.
107 There is an interesting short account in B. D. White, A History of the Cor­
poration of Liverpool, 1835-1914 (1951), 71-4.
108 The Corporation of Manchester: an Historical Record (Manchester, 1894),
9-11. ‘Liverpool Corporation desire to lessen the local charges or.rates of Liverpool
at the expense of the Dock Estate’.
109 B. D. White, op. cit. 78-9.

206
 LIVERPOOL

capital and impulse for this scheme came entirely from Manchester.110
The Liverpool docks were effectively by-passed, or exposed to compe­
tition. The railway companies serving Liverpool turned increasingly
to the development of their own ports, where the installations, though
more modest, were their own creations, and gave the direct access
which Rendel’s and Grantham’s schemes had promised, but failed to
achieve. Liverpool remained unchallenged as the largest West Coast
port, but her proportion of the United Kingdom trade declined from
the 45% achieved in 1857. The smaller harbours, to which some of
Liverpool’s trade was siphoned off by the railway companies, had
inferior positions compared with the Mersey, and their facilities were
often exiguous, hardly more than marine equivalents of a railway
goods station. These drawbacks were offset, however, by the gains
which came from direct control of the docks’ operation and scale of
charges, and from the absence of established and wealthy mercantile
patriciates with strong local interests.
110 A. Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade (Manchester 1956),
II, 165-6, 184.

207
 vin
Glasgow

1. The property ownership pattern

The original patterns of landownership in Glasgow, as in London, were
substantially laid down during the Reformation. At that time many of
the ‘rentallers’, who had managed ecclesiastical lands in Glasgow,
became their feuars, or permanent owners. Some of these families had
acted as rentallers for a long time before 1560—a reputed two hundred
years in the case of the Andersons of Stobcross—but after they secured
full title to their suburban estates the way was opened to wider enter­
prise, in which overseas trade, land ownership and civic office were
inextricably combined. The Andersons, the Bells of Cowcaddens, and
the Campbells of Blythswood interchanged the office of provost
amongst themselves twenty-two times in the second half of the seven­
teenth century.1 And they, together with Walter Gibson (another
member of a family of ex-rentallers turned provosts), the clients to
whom portions of their estates were sold, and the merchants, newly rich
in overseas trade, came to form a system of social ‘sets’ which bears
more than a passing resemblance to that in Liverpool. Matthew
Crawfurd, Robert Bogle, Alexander Oswald, John Orr of Barrowfield all
bought ex-rentallers’ land; and the Wills and Sederunt Books of Bogle,
Ingram and Carrick show the typical pattern of their holdings—a few
ships, or shares in ships, a share in one of the early banking companies,
in a printfield or an overseas plantation, some urban tenements, and a
landed estate.2
The emergence of these prosperous merchants and rentiers, in the
late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, provided the most
1 Regality Club (Glasgow, 1893), 109-11. (1912), 187-8, GRL B475256.
2 GRL, Bogle Papers, Nos. 13 and 86. Baillie’s Institution Library, The Sederunt
Book of Archibald Ingram's Trustees. J. O. Mitchell, Old Glasgow Essays (Glasgow,
1905), 164 et. seq.

208
 GLASGOW

characteristic feature in the pattern of Glasgow’s landownership, and

the names of Bell, Crawfurd, Oswald and Campbell of Blythswood, can
still be seen on the sketch map at the time the railways arrived. There
was no exact equivalent to landed aristocracy or gentry, of the type
common in the major English cities, except perhaps in the persons of the
Maxwell family. They had been very considerable landowners south of
the river for many years (a Sir George Maxwell had allegedly been

Property ownership and railways in Glasgow.

bewitched in 1677); and by the early nineteenth century their holdings
had been increased by the purchase of the Town Moor.3
Sir John Maxwell, and Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, adopted an
attitude similar to that of Lord Calthorpe in Birmingham, whose estate
their own in some ways resembled. Parts of it, at any rate, were laid out
in parkland and studded with villas; some three hundred by the end of
the century, constituting the nucleus of the prosperous inner suburbs of
west Pollokshields.4 Sir John Maxwell opposed the Glasgow, Paisley,
Kilmarnock and Ayr and the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock railway
companies’ plan for a joint station in 1837 (No. 1 on sketch map). One
acre of his land was to be taken for the Cook Street depot, and his
3 Andrew McCallum, Pollokshaws, Village and Burgh (Paisley, 1925), 17.
4 George Martin, Map of the City of Glasgow (1842), shows the original site for
villa development, just east of the name ‘Maxwell’ on the sketch map. The actual
development was south of the G.P.G. railway line. John Bartholomew, Map of
Glasgow (P.O. Directory, 1897-8).
209
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

estate traversed; but the estate itself was at such an early stage of
development that only a map of the ‘intended improvement’ could be
offered as evidence. ‘There is nothing of the kind on it at the moment,
the G.P.K. & A.’s valuers were able to claim; and Maxwell was neither
able to prevent the railway, nor to obtain a particularly high price for
his land.5 The severance produced by the railway was somewhat
reduced in extent, but made still more concentrated in effect, by John
Miller’s selection of a route close to the Ardrossan canal (see sketch
map). Maxwell’s counsel was equally unsuccessful a few years later
when the Glasgow Harbour scheme, to provide access to the river, was
projected northwards through his land. Once more the plans were
produced of streets ‘laid out ready to be made’; and once more the
rejoinder was made ‘they are invisible yet.’6 Thomas Binnie, the builder
and valuer, testified to the good quality of the houses which had already
been built, but the Select Committee took the view that this was a
matter which could better be met by compensation than by rejecting the
whole scheme. However, the Maxwells did not lose absolutely by the
arrival of the railways, for when the small Glasgow, Barrhead and
Neilston Direct railway was formed, Sir John Maxwell was sufficiently
pre-disposed by what he had experienced, to join the company, alter the
avenue to Pollock House, and specify that trains should pass ‘by or
through or near Pollokshaws’.7 The Barrhead and Neilston railway was
too small to survive for long, but in 1849 the shareholders’ problems
were solved when the Caledonian railway company took it over, by
means of a 999 year lease at a guaranteed 3| % to %. Twenty years
later, when the Caledonian put forward its Central station scheme their
counsel was able to announce, ‘We have agreed with Sir William
Stirling Maxwell . . . and I think we are exceedingly fortunate, going
through this valuable property, where the property added to the
engineering costs more than a million of money, that we have no
opponent.’8
With the exception only of the Campbells of Blythswood, most of
the other large personal owners of land came to an arrangement sooner
or later with the railway companies, withdrew opposition, and took their
compensation; or they even, like the Maxwells, chose the opportunity
to invest and, in course of bargaining, to specify that certain accommo­
dation works, or provisions of intermediate stations should be made on
their land if they should require it in the future. J. G. Oswald, the pro­
prietor of Scotstoun (see sketch map) was one of these. He was himself
resident at Menton in France for most of the time, and his rental was
5 H.L., 1837, III, 30 June, p. 149, 4 July, p. 207.
8 H.C., 1846 (267) XII, Q.1136. ..
7 Andrew McCallum, op. cit. 173-4.
8 BTHR PYB 1/579, 6 May, p. 18.

210
 GLASGOW

drawn from the thirteen tenants who farmed his 930 acre estate; but he
had declared the intention of breaking the entail upon his land and
feuing it for building purposes.9 Consequently the argument between
himself and the North British railway company in the 1860’s and 1870’s
dwelt upon the provision of accommodation works and a station as
much as upon the question of compensation. What would happen to
the projected roads on his estate which the N.B. line would cross? Was
the railway company prepared to build bridges for non-existent roads ?
Mr. Oswald would not merely require this, but (his solicitors made
clear) he would require a station to be built at a point of his choosing,
‘traffic or no traffic’, to develop his estate. Although not prepared to
commit itself to indefinite accommodation works and bridges, the
railway company offered to undertake to open a station in the Jordan­
hill area when twenty-five feus had been completed; but when Oswald
turned down even this offer, the line was cut through his land, and
argument left to the solicitors.1011
Amongst the other landowners, varying shades of enthusiasm for the
railways can be observed. In general, the most eager to assent, or to
subscribe, were those whose land was least likely, for various reasons, to
suffer from the effects of intersection or deterioration: perhaps because
it was further out of town, where the railways had more room for
manoeuvre, and could skirt estates if need arose; perhaps because it was
off the main route, or even more centrally situated than the terminal
itself; or because it was already industrial in character, and therefore
with little to lose in the way of amenity and much to gain from linkages.
Examples of all these attitudes can be found amongst Glasgow property
owners.
It is noticeable, in the first place, that landowners who were further
out, and could be avoided more easily if they were unreasonable, tended
to assent more readily and to bargain less closely over the price. Indeed
the Books of Reference for the early lines record, in M.S., favourable
extracts from the owners’ letters. Similarly, those whose estates lay off
the routes either adopted a neutral attitude, like James and Alexander
Dennistoun or James Hozier (see sketch map), or gave their active
support as investors, like Dugald Bannatyne of the Glasgow Building
Company, or John Fleming of Clairmont.
Examples of the type of landowner more concerned with industrial
than residential development are provided by the Houldsworth and
Dixon estates (see sketch map). Henry Houldsworth’s concerns lay

9 Regality Club (1893), 95.

10 G.U. Collection Solicitors’ Papers, Box 2, Glasgow, Yoker and Dalmuir Rail­
way.
11 HLRO, B.Ref., 1837, Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway. ‘I welcome anything
which will give greater facility in feuing.’
211
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

chiefly with cotton mills, and with the Anderston Foundry, but he also
held villa land at Cranstonhill; and William Dixon was primarily a
colliery owner and ironmaster, but also a substantial landowner south
of the river.12 During the early stages of railway building, in the 183O’s
and 1840’s, until others took up the railway interest, industrialists of
this type lent their capital and assistance even more wholeheartedly than
their fellow landowners—the speculative builders, solicitors and
rentiers. Even Dugald Bannatyne—though he invested personally, and
his legal firm A. & D. J. Bannatyne handled more railway business than
any in Scotland—could not quite equal the record of William Dixon,
who contributed to the projected Glasgow, Airdrie and Monklands
Junction railway, was the sole proprietor of the small Pollok and Govan
line, and was the originator and the largest shareholder in the Clydes­
dale Junction railway.13 Possibly Dixon’s view of a railway’s function
might be criticised as rather narrow in conception. Like most indus­
trialists he thought of the railways in terms of minerals, raw materials,
heavy manufactured goods—indeed, virtually as an extension of his
colliery and ironworks. However, there could be no doubt concerning
the energy and effectiveness of his part in promoting railway building.
Although small, his two small lines were incorporated into a larger
network by the Caledonian railway company, which bought them up for
a 6% annuity on an assumed capital of £450,000.14 A generous price,
not uninfluenced by the land sales Dixon also made to the Caledonian
company in connection with their South Side station (No. 4 on sketch
map.)15
Amongst the landowners whose attitude towards the railways was
less enthusiastic, may be counted the Lauries, William McLean and
Moses Stevens, W. S. S. Crawfurd, Mrs. Graham Gilbert and the
Campbells of Blythswood (see sketch map). David and James Laurie
had laid out, between 1800 and 1830, an estate of high social preten­
sions between the two bridges, south of the river; and the effect of
railway encroachments upon the area has been discussed in some detail
elsewhere.16 After James Laurie’s death, his nine heirs and successors
were even less capable than he had been of repelling the railways and
maintaining the intended elegance of Abbotsford Place.17 Similarly at
Heatheryhall, Clydeville, Cessnock Bank, Mavis Bank, Green Bank
and Plantation (‘villas’ on sketch map), south of the river, the new
docks, and the General Terminus railways company’s yards and coaling
12 Memoirs and Portraits of 100 Glasgow Men (Glasgow, 1886) I, 166.
13 Ibid. I, 26, 105.
14 H.L., 1847, XL, 26 April, p. 123.
15 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 7 July, p. 155, S.C. on Caledonian Railway.
16 Infra Ch. 10, sec. 1, and John R. Kellett, ‘Property Speculators and the Building
of Glasgow’, Scot. Jour, of Pol. Econ., VIII (1961), 211-32.
17 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1864, Union Railway, Railway No. 1.
212
 GLASGOW

quay, produced a striking change of character. In the 1820’s the area

had been described as ‘snug’ by contemporaries; ‘Mavisbank, Green­
bank, Plantation, the very names seem to breathe a spirit of retired
quiet.’18 Such a spirit proved very fragile in the railway age, and the only
remedy for these smaller proprietors was, like Laurie’s successors, to
make the most they could out of the financial compensation.
North of the river the entailed estate of W. S. S. Crawfurd lay in the
path of the Buchanan Street and Queen Street termini (Nos. 3 and 2 on
sketch map). At first his dealings showed a certain ineptness or ingen­
uousness. The Glasgow and Garnkirk railway company, for example,
was able to buy 16 acres from him for a mere £807 in 1836; and the
Edinburgh and Glasgow railway company only paid £3,000 for his
Colston and Broomhill lands.19 His estate spread along the southern
bank of the Forth-Clyde canal, with a smaller extension to the north of
it. It mostly comprised arable land, Broomhill Nursery and other market
gardens, a coal depot and a few houses. There were no covenants
restricting land use, and, indeed, the area was already taking on an
industrial character at the time of George Martin’s map (1842).20 One
might well have expected a person on whose land soda and chemical
works were being built to welcome railway linkages; but Crawfurd’s
name does not appear on the Subscription Contract of the Edinburgh
and Glasgow company (1837, No. 2 on sketch map), though it does
appear in the Lists of Dissents from landowners.21 It may well be that
Crawfurd, and his factor Gilbert Kennedy, intended to develop the
property for residential uses and wished to keep the railways out. This
is the impression one gathers from the Private Act of Parliament which
Crawfurd obtained in 1842, to enable him to apply funds from the
entailed estate to lay it out for feuing, and to purchase further parcels
‘to enable Mr. Crawfurd to continue his plans of feuing and to make
other improvements for the benefit of the estate.’22 It might also be
possible—and this hypothesis is complementary rather than alternative
to the one just put forward—that Crawfurd’s feuing plans were intended
to establish a new platform for the selling price of his lands.
Mrs. Graham Gilbert (see map), whose lands lay to the west, also
adopted procedures to enhance the price commanded by her land near
the North British railway company’s goods terminal at Stobcross.
18 Owned by Messrs. Blair, Hamilton and McLean. Memoirs and Portraits etc.
(1886) I, 35.
19 ‘The Milton Estate of William Crawfurd’, GRL, Lanarkshire Topographical
Collections, V, 8-9.
"George Martin, Map of the City of Glasgow (1842). S. G. Checkland, ‘The
British Industrial City as History: the Glasgow Case’, Urban Studies I (1964), 46.
21 HLRO, B.Ref., Books of Dissent, Subscription Contract, 1837, Edinburgh and
Glasgow Railway.
22 5 & 6 Vic. c. 36,
213
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Since the complete set of solicitor’s records have survived for this line
it is possible to trace in unusual local detail the course of litigation, and
the issues raised. Mrs. Gilbert, though married, held land in her own
right, which she had inherited under strict entail from her uncle. Her
plan to assure what she considered the full value of her land was com­
plicated and timed to the last hour.
The land itself was, indeed, of great intrinsic value, two miles only
from the Exchange and f mile from Finnieston, where the built-up area
stopped. It commanded the very entrance to the large site secured by
the N.B. railway company for their riverside terminus and marshalling
yard. Between these Stobcross/Overnewton lands already bought by
the N.B. railway company and the Kelvin lay Mrs. Gilbert’s two
decaying mansion houses, Yorkhill and Thornbank, with a 75 acre
estate attached. She elected to by-pass the arbitration procedures laid
down and to call a Jury Trial to settle her claim.23
There were several strings to her bow. First, the land was laid out in
a series of elegant crescents and streets, none existing, except on paper
and as imaginary lines crossing her rambling property. Secondly, it was
contended by her agents, her land, if not devoted to these purposes,
would undoubtedly receive very profitable employment before long for
an extension of the dock facilities already projected or commenced at
Stobcross.
The ‘elegant estate’ argument, in this unrestricted and increasingly
industrial riverside area, was not taken very seriously by either side;
but carefully-drawn plans of the streets and houses were submitted and
are preserved amongst the solicitor’s papers. Counsel for the N.B. rail­
way company contemptuously swept aside arguments based on this
plea. ‘As to the noise of the engines, the locality is one so surrounded by
Shipbuilding Yards, Boiler Works and Manufactories of every descrip­
tion, producing incessant noise, that any injury arising from this cause
will be hardly perceptible.’ ‘The Railway is no doubt visible from the
ground; but in a locality of that kind, in place of being an injury, it will
be a benefit, by shutting out the view of the ship-building yards.’ The
second plea, that docks would soon be formed, was opposed with more
careful and detailed evidence led by the N.B. railway company. Quoting
the reports, adducing the personal testimony of Mr. Reith, the General
Manager of the Clyde Trust, and producing voluminous figures for the
growth of maritime traffic, they attempted to show that it would take
30 years before Mrs. Gilbert’s lands were urgently required for dock
facilities; and, even then, 14-20s per square yard would be the utmost
she could realise.
23 The four paragraphs which follow are based upon the solicitors’ Briefs, Memor­
anda for Witnesses, Valuations and Reports and Statements dnd Claims for the
Yorkhill Jury Trial. G.U. Coll. Sol. Papers, and John R. Kellett, JTH, VI (1964),
234-5.
214
 GLASGOW

However, Mrs. Gilbert outmanoeuvred the N.B. railway company

by a third plea, which they themselves admitted, ‘is most ingeniously
framed.’ She began negotiations with the Clyde Trustees late in 1865, a
year after the railway plans had been authorised. In October 1865 her
agent visited the railway company’s solicitors to find out what line was
intended and persuaded their surveyor to mark it in pencil on an
ordnance map. On 6 and 18 December 1865 and on 3 January 1866 (the
very day the notice of compulsory purchase was served) she signed
missives with the Clyde Trustees selling her river-front property at
25s per square yard, together with ‘the whole land to the South of
whatever line the Railway Company may adopt up to the most Northern
limits of deviation shown on the Parliamentary Plans.’ She then argued
that these missives of sale ‘fix conclusively the value to the claimant of
the whole land up to the most Northern limits of deviation.’ The Clyde
Trustees themselves expressed dismay at the turn affairs had taken.
They had not intended, they said, either to commit themselves to a
purchase of indefinite size or to establish a precedent the N.B. railway
company should follow.
The railway company attempted to argue that the price was ‘an
advantage which might have accrued to her if the company had chosen
to deviate northwards; but if they did not choose the Claimant has not
been deprived of anything to which she has a right’, but Mrs. Gilbert
was awarded £42,791 for the 9,500 square yards required and adjacent
deterioration, nearly three times the railway company’s offer.
The Campbells of Blythswood, who owned 590 acres of central land,
were the most extensive and successful of all Glasgow’s central land­
owners and the only proprietors sufficiently powerful and well situated
to defeat the railways.24 Their estate, which had been acquired by Colin
Campbell, a nrovost in the seventeenth century, was entailed in 1739;
the entail was broken and Trustees set up in 1792.25 Under Major
Archibald Campbell the feuing of lands had proceeded rapidly until, by
1830, 457 acres had been feued under strict covenants forbidding any
nuisances or industrial uses, and Blythswood was beginning to attract
central business users. This was reflected in extremely high rentals,
£74,000 per annum by 1830.26 Consequently when the Edinburgh,
Glasgow and Leith railway, conceived by Grainger and Miller, pro­
posed to tunnel under Main Street and Blythswood Square to reach a
butt-end terminal at Broomielaw, on the north bank of the river (see
sketch map), the Blythswood Trustees were able to argue successfully

21 Robert Renwick, Extracts from the Records of The Burgh of Glasgow (Glasgow,
1916), VII, 679.
25 Glasgow, Past and Present (Glasgow, 1884), I, 316-20.
26 The Blythswood Trustees against the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leith Railway
(1830), GRL, Miscellaneous Railway Pamphlets, B53157.
215
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

that the whole capital of the railway company was insufficient to com­
pensate for intrusion into such central land. The project was defeated,
not merely because the railway was small, under-capitalised, and
extremely early, but for more lasting reasons. The West of Scotland
Junction terminus, planned in 1846 to link the Edinburgh and Glasgow
and the G.P.K. & A. railways, also intended to tunnel through Blyths-
wood, this time under Wellington Street (see sketch map); and there
could be no doubt that this scheme, with two established companies
behind it, was adequately financed.27 Five acres had even been purchased
in advance of the scheme to reserve an unbuilt space 28 Yet this scheme
also folded up, for reasons discussed below. By the time the Caledonian
railway company reconnoitred the Blythswood Holme station scheme
again, in 1866, the few acres of Campbell land required, the approaches,
compensation, and engineering works, would have cost a total of
£3,000,000; and so the alternative Central station (No 7 on map) was
sketched out by George Cunningham and John Hawkshaw29
The remaining proprietors were corporate bodies; and they per­
formed a larger role in Glasgow, during the period of railway building,
than in any of the other major cities There was one canal company,
the Eglinton-Ardrossan, which was taken over and used (as in Bir­
mingham) for its approach routes and basin 30 Three property co­
partneries had been formed: the Glasgow Building Company, which
dated back to the 1780’s, and played a key role in the building of the
central commercial and administrative district; and two speculative
mid-nineteenth century foundations, the Gilmorehill land company and
the Stobcross proprietors, both of which figured largely in the trans­
actions of the Union and the North British railway companies in the
1860’s The old College, or University of Glasgow, also gave its name,
and its 26 acre site east of the High Street, to the College goods yard in
the 1860’s; the municipal Corporation of Glasgow played a significant
and permissive part in admitting the Union railway company, and in
selling house property to it; and both the Trades House and Hutche­
son’s Hospital made available large acreages of land south of the river
to the Glasgow and South Western and to the Caledonian railway
companies.
Hutcheson’s Hospital, in fact, had played a dominant part in the
emerging landownership patterns of Glasgow during the period of
27 Although John Miller’s estimate of £200,000 was optimistic. HLRO, P & S,
1846, West of Scotland Junction, and Min., H.C., 1846, 20 March, p. 88.
28 W. H. Marwick, Economic Developments in Victorian Scotland (1936), 38.
29 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1873, 6 May, p.43, S.C. on Caledonian Railway (Glasgow
Central Station).
30 44 & 5 Vic. c. 149. GRL B53152 (Grainger and Miller’s Report on Ardrossan
canal railway, 1831), GRL C51395 (Carrick’s Report on Parliamentary Bills
1880-1).

216
 GLASGOW

rapid growth in the half century before the coming of the railways, and
had already disposed of large blocks of its estate by 1830.31 Nevertheless
it still retained enough to be described as ‘the largest proprietor on the
south side of the Clyde’ in 1873. The Hospital’s factor, Andrew Hoggan,
claimed at that time that 100 acres were still left to feu, and the Cale­
donian railway company was able to purchase 40,000 square yards of
this. ‘At a price that you are satisfied with ?’, enquired counsel for the
G. & S.W. ‘Well, I would have liked more’, Mr. Hoggan replied;
but the sum was evidently sufficient to persuade the Hospital to with­
draw its opposition.32 Counsel for the G. & S.W. was not content with
this answer but pressed his enquiry concerning the land price further,
presumably to cast doubt upon the disinterest of the Patrons’ motives
for withdrawing their opposition to the Caledonian Central station Bill.
His cross-examination was interrupted by counsel for the Caledonian
company, who protested in words which substantiate and explain ones’
suspicions regarding the paucity of official estimates on land costs—‘My
friend is not entitled to ask the price that is to be paid for the land,
because it would be manifestly inconvenient that their figures should be
in print. That could affect every compensation that might subsequently
be held under the Bill.’33
The Caledonian railway company also depended for its operations
south of the river, upon the land owned by the Corporation of Glasgow.
During the division of the Barony of Gorbals estate, in 1789, the
Corporation had acquired a large tract at Gushetfaulds, a little too far
out to be immediately attractive for building purposes; and this vacant
land was sold for part of the Caledonian’s South Side station in 1845
(No. 4 on sketch map).34 Some twenty years later, the approaches and
triangle junction for the Glasgow and South Western railway company’s
St. Enoch station (No. 5 on sketch map) also ran through a good deal
of Corporation property; though in this case the property was not part
of the city’s old patrimony, but had been very recently acquired, house
by house, by the City Improvement Trust, as part of its pioneer pro­
gramme of slum clearance.35
The old College, with extensive grounds east of the High Street (see
sketch map), also presented a large and tempting block of land for
railway speculation, and the Principal and Professors were more than
31 John R. Kellett, Scot. Jour, of Pol. Econ., VIII (1961), 213-5. The brothers
Thomas and George Hutcheson who founded the Hospital in the seventeenth century
were ‘writers’ (i.e. solicitors) and sons of a rentaller. Glasgow, Past and Present
(Glasgow, 1884), I, 526.
32 BTHR PYB 1/579, 8 May, QQ.648-51.
33 Ibid. Q.671.
34 Glasgow, Past and Present (Glasgow, 1884), I, 347, 540. Memoirs and Portraits
etc. (Glasgow, 1886), I, 34.
35 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1864, 14 July, p. 17, S.C. on Union Railway.
217
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

anxious to move. By the 1840’s the area around the College had become
appallingly decayed and overcrowded. The evening law classes had been
abandoned because of the nightly pandemonium of screams and
policemen’s rattles, and the inexpediency of bringing young men
through the parade of women of the town in front of the College
entrance.36 The adjacent area, in which the students were to find
lodgings, included the notorious Vennel and Havannah slums, inhabited
by rag dealers, thieves, prostitutes and receivers of stolen goods. The
first scheme to demolish the College and build a station on the site
miscarried in 1846, however, because of the delays and complications
involved in the three-cornered dealings between the College, the
Treasury, and the Glasgow, Airdrie and Monklands Junction railway
company. But in the 1860’s a similar plan was revived by the North
British railway company, as part of the Union scheme (No. 6 on sketch
map), and the University was removed to a more westerly site. At
Gilmorehill a land company had bought a sixty acre estate from
Archibald Bogle in 1845, the year in which the G.A. & M.J. railway
company was floated.37 After that company’s scheme miscarried, pro­
posals were made to spend £20,000 to turn the area into an ornamental
walk and cemetery for people of the higher classes, but essentially the
ground lay idle until 1864, when the Union railway company bought it
to exchange for the old College site on the High Street. Since the land
had appreciated from £12,000 to £82,000 whilst laying vacant for
eighteen years, the Gilmorehill land company had no cause to feel
dissatisfied with the result.38
The Stobcross proprietors (see sketch map) also had cause to con­
gratulate themselves upon their timely speculation. Operating under the
more liberal Scottish law concerning joint-stock companies, they had
raised £58,000, in 1844, to purchase sixty acres from the Trustees under
John Phillip’s will.39 The sale of a mere quarter of the estate to the
North British railway company for their Stobcross goods station, in
1864, was enough to repay all the capital laid out.40
The Trades House (or association of craft gilds) was also a con­
siderable supplier of land to the railway companies; and its finances
benefited from the railways’ effect on the land market both directly and
indirectly. Its title to land originated in a loan of £1,743 raised as a
quarter share towards purchasing the Barony of Gorbals from Sir
Robert Douglas in 1640. In 1789, as already mentioned, the Trades
House, Corporation and Hutcheson’s had decided to divide the land
36 HLRO, Main Papers, 1846, Glasgow College (MacFarlane’s Estate), H.L.,
6 July, pp. 191-3, H.C., 10 August, pp. 43-6.
37 The Old Country Houses of the Glasgow Gentry (Glasgow, 1878). 122-3.
38 HLRO, H.C., 1864, 23 May, pp. 1-10, S.C. on Union Railway.
39 The Old Country Houses etc. (Glasgow, 1878), 244-6.
40 Glasgow, Past and Present (Glasgow, 1884), I, 197, III, 451.
218
 GLASGOW

and take direct possession of it; and some eighty acres fell to the Trades
House south of the river (see sketch map). A modest beginning at the
feuing of steadings facing Bridge Street was made in the early 1790’s,
and by the time the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock, and the G.P.K. &
A. railway companies sought a site for their joint terminus, some 150
steadings had been laid out.41 The feu duties payable on them came to
£2 8s to £5 per steading, and the effect of the railway’s arrival in 1837
was clearly marked. Some 22 properties were demolished for the
approach line, and for the small annexe passenger station at Bridge
Street; and further unfeued ground was set aside for the goods sidings,
sheds and workshops (No. 1 on sketch map). For these portions,
totalling 38,082 square yards, the annual feu was £1,257—or approxi­
mately four times the amount brought in by the land which the Trades
House had laid out for building, although the area covered by the
railway was only a third or a quarter as great.42 ‘The establishment of
railways in the neighbourhood aided most beneficially’, wrote a con­
temporary historian of the Trades House, ‘in promoting the rapid
enhancement of the value of these lands.’43
The members of the Trades House were so delighted with the results
of their land speculation that they decided to invest elsewhere, and
attempted first to settle the principles upon which their investment
should be made. Their discussions are reported unusually fully and
frankly, and they raise important questions which affected the policies
of corporate and charitable bodies in all the major cities.
‘Under this great prosperity, several members of the House met occasionally
in private, without any formal appointment, and talked over the propriety
of purchasing lands, in the neighbourhood of Glasgow, as an investment for
the funds of the House. The view entertained by those gentlemen was, that
the land purchase should be capable of being soon feued, and of thereby
becoming available, in twelve or fifteen years, as a source of increased
revenue. Another view was suggested to them, namely, that the lands pur­
chased should be bought at little more than their agricultural value; conse­
quently, that they should be situated beyond the present feuing district, but
capable of yielding an agricultural rental in the meantime, which would be
sufficient for all the wants of the House. This scheme contemplated the
retention of the lands for a long period, under cultivation, until the expansion
of Glasgow should place them within its buildings, and enable the House to
realise a larger income at a distant time, as was exemplified in the case of the
Gorbals lands, and as was also exemplified in the case of Heriot’s Hospital of
Edinburgh, and in the case of the extensive suburbs in the west end of
London. In those suburbs lands which, at the close of the last century, were
under cultivation at agricultural rents, now yield enormous ground rents,
41 Masons’ Incorporation, Minute Books (1772-1817), 26 November 1790.
42 George Crawford, A Sketch of the Trades House (Glasgow, 1858), 187-97.
“Ibid. 188.
219
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

well secured by the elegant mansions now erected on them. A wealthy

corporation, which never dies, and whose lands need not be sold for distri­
bution among heirs, or burdened for younger children, can alone afford to
take this course.’44
The choice was, simply, to buy at a low price and hold for fifty years,
or to buy at a high price and hold for twelve or fifteen years; and the
latter course was preferred. The first selection of a promising estate
in which to invest the surplus funds was that of Stobcross, but these
lands were bought by a syndicate, ‘at a mere trifle above the price at
which the members of the House had agreed.’ If the Trades House had
been a little quicker, or offered a little more, they would have been able
to repeat on the north bank their highly successful dealing with the
railway companies south of the Clyde. As matters fell out they decided
to bid instead for Dr. Rae Wilson’s villa and grounds at Kelvinbank,
and for the adjacent area of Sandyford (Wilson/McNaughton on
sketch map). At this stage the corporate spirit evident in their private
discussions broke down, and one of the Trades House members,
Archibald McClellan, bought Kelvinbank himself; he also, in associa­
tion with James Smith—who was not even a member of the Trades
House—bought Sandyford. Soon after, they either repented, or ex­
perienced some difficulty in actually raising the £30,000, and the Trades
House took over the purchase, sending out a letter to be read at the
meetings of its component gilds speaking of the ‘fair prospect that the
purchases by the House will promote its future prosperity as the pur­
chase of the Gorbals lands has hitherto promoted the prosperity of the
House and incorporations.’45 The railways, however, were not such
liberal contributors to the Trades House’s prosperity on this occasion.

2. Conditions of competition between railway companies

Glasgow was the theatre for a bitter conflict between three rival rail­
way groups which lasted from the mid-1840’s until the end of the cen­
tury, and was protracted by the even balance between the companies
engaged, which at times produced a perfect deadlock, at other times long
and obstinate arguments. The endless repetition of grievances, and the
taking up of uncompromising positions could not be better illustrated
than during the ten year correspondence which took place after the
Glasgow and South Western railway company had managed to secure
St. Enoch’s station (No. 5 on sketch map) and effectively to exclude its
rival, the Caledonian, from a full share in the growing passenger
traffic. ‘Whoever conducted the correspondence for them,’ Mr. Aspinall
Q.C. said to a Commons’ Select Committee in 1873, ‘did with con-
44 Ibid. 205. ’’
45 Mason’s Incorporation, Minute Books (1817-66), 28 May 1847.
220
 GLASGOW

siderable skill write his letters as though he was wanting hostile answers
and wished to excite that feeling to the greatest possible extent.’46 There
is, indeed, something intransigent and personal about the tone of the
exchanges between J. G. Wood, Secretary to the Union railway com­
pany, and Archibald Gibson, Secretary to the Caledonian railway
company, which may help to explain why accommodation or com­
promise was never seriously considered between the two companies.47
As John Fowler put it, ‘I never remember an occasion in which the
Union company have been in Parliament on which the Caledonian
have not been opposite.’48
If the minor lines, absorbed by amalgamation or leasing, and the
speculative terminal company, the so-called ‘Union Railway’, be set
aside, there were three main protagonists, whose rivalry essentially
sprang from the three trunk routes which they controlled from Glasgow
southwards to the Border. In the west, was the short distance line from
Glasgow to Paisley, Kilmarnock and Ayr, authorised in 1837, to which
an extension through Cumnock and Dumfries to Carlisle was later
added. Its forte was, to an unusual extent, mineral and goods traffic,
differing little from summer to winter; and revenues from these sources
were consistently larger than passenger receipts from all classes. It was
only in the 1870’s that the passenger receipts began to rise really
markedly, quadrupling in seventeen years, whilst the mineral and goods
receipts only doubled. The passenger traffic included a good deal of
seasonal excursion and holiday traffic to the coastal resorts, fifty trains
a day being run during the peak week-ends by the mid-1860’s; but it
also included a good deal of regular, all-the-year-round, short-distance
passenger traffic, as the Dumfries Courier had foreseen when the line
was first projected.49 ‘It is what we call the “far ends” that pay coach
proprietors both as to parcels and passengers, and we suspect the same
rule applies to railways, whether traversed by locomotives or common
wagons. What Dumfriesshire could not do as a principal she may
manage to achieve as a zealous auxiliary.’50 The short-distance traffic,
upon which the G.P.K. & A. railway was based (and that of its successor,
the Glasgow and South Western) was lucrative—the company paid
annual dividends which were regularly over 8 % between 1850 and 1880
—and kept the small passenger terminus at Bridge Street, and the Cook
Street goods depot, fully occupied even from early days. On the other
hand, a perpetual disadvantage of the local and short-stage nature of
46 BTHR PYB 1/579, 13 May, p.6.
47 Some of the correspondence was submitted to the S.C. on Caledonian Railway
(Glasgow Central Station), HLRO, Min., H.C., 1873, 6 May, pp. 77-96.
48 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1872, 6 May, p. 97, S.C. on Glasgow Union Railway
Junction with Glasgow Kilmarnock Joint Line and Caledonian Railway.
49 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 12 May, p. 146.
50 W. Mcllwraith, The Glasgow and South Western Railway (Glasgow, 1880), 10.
221
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the G. & S.W. system was that it lost twenty miles, and one hour, on the
direct Carlisle to Glasgow route compared with its rival, the Caledonian
company; and it was the desire to compensate for this by offering
superior and more central station facilities in Glasgow which predis­
posed its directors to accede so readily to the St. Enoch scheme when
it was put to them by James Ferrie Blair, John Fowler, and Morton
Peto.
The east coast trunk route into Scotland, from Berwick to Edinburgh,
was controlled by the grandiosely named North British company,
floated in 1843; and it was possible to reach Glasgow by the North
British metals, changing at Edinburgh to the Edinburgh and Glasgow
railway company’s lines—though such a devious route would only be
taken by those who had business in both cities. The Edinburgh and
Glasgow company itself was one of the older lines, authorised in 1838,
and was wholly committed to the traffic between the two major cities.
Attempts were made to absorb the Edinburgh and Glasgow into the
Caledonian system, in 1849, 1860, 1861 and 1864, but all failed, for
different reasons; and if they had succeeded the Caledonian would have
been placed in a position of quasi-monopolistic power in Scotland.51
As it turned out, it was the smaller North British line which merged
with the Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1865, and added the College
station (No. 6) to the old Edinburgh and Glasgow company’s terminus
at Queen Street (No. 2 on sketch map).
The central, and shortest, railway from the Border followed the hilly
and difficult Annandale route via Beattock summit to a point approxi­
mately half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Its basic pattern was,
therefore, very similar to that of the Grand Junction railway, which also
was built to provide the vertical shaft of a capital letter T; and the
Caledonian railway was, in fact, conceived by Henry Booth, the
Secretary of the Grand Junction railway company, and by Joseph
Locke, their engineer. It was also financed to a considerable extent by
investors from England; and from London in particular. When the
company’s finances were subjected to serious criticism in 1850, it was a
London committee of shareholders which forced Hope-Johnstone’s
resignation from the chair; and it has been suggested that the name
‘Caledonian’ was partly chosen to conceal the fact that the company was
so largely financed by capital from outside Scotland.52 Although it had
one or two notable West of Scotland directors, like John Houldsworth
of Cranstonhill, or James Lockhart, M.P., it did not enjoy the broad
local basis of support which the G. & S.W. could claim—over 70% of
the latter company’s capital being raised locally, and the company
chaired, in succession, by three Glasgow Lord Provosts. On the other
61 O. S. Nock, The Caledonian Railway (1962), 34, 43.
™Jbid. 16.

222
 GLASGOW

hand, although it may have originated with London capital and

Liverpool ideas, the Caledonian soon became inextricably dependent
upon the network of small local lines in central Scotland.53 After the
failure of its attempted merger with the Edinburgh and Glasgow,
although the Caledonian company continued, for a time, to use its
grant of running powers on the Edinburgh and Glasgow railway to
send its expresses from the south into Queen Street station (No. 2), it
adopted the policy of buying up small companies, ex-mineral lines
(some with 4' 6’ narrow gauge), and using their approach routes to
Glasgow. The Glasgow and Garnkirk, the Monkland and Coltness,
and the Monkland and Kirkintilloch were all bought up, with guaran­
tees of 8% to 10% upon capitals which were generously stated. These
railways, between them, provided the Caledonian with an approach
into Glasgow from the E.N.E.; and the Glasgow and Garnkirk com­
pany also brought with it the invaluable Parliamentary authorisation
of an unopposed station at Buchanan Street (No. 3 on sketch map).54
The Caledonian’s approach to the General Terminus dockside station
and to the Southside goods and passenger terminus (No. 4 on sketch
map), was also secured by equally complex purchases; the Clydesdale
Junction company (from Motherwell to Rutherglen), and thence the
Pollok and Govan company to Southside.55 Both of these companies,
together with the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock, which was also
purchased, in 1847, w'ere given guarantees upon their entire capitals of
5% or 6%—terms which a Caledonian shareholders’ Report of 16
October 1849, described as ‘exorbitant’; and a great deal of the
Caledonian company’s financial difficulty in 1850 can be directly
assigned to these over-generous bargains with small local railway
companies.56
The extensive facilities which it had purchased, however, and its large
traffic and capital, placed the Caledonian railway company in a position
of unchallengable influence in the Glasgow area; and from the time of
its formation, in 1845, the G. & S.W. and the Edinburgh and Glasgow,
or later the G. & S.W. and the North British, formed what counsel for
the Caledonian sarcastically described as ‘a happy family’.57 It was not
a formal alliance, and did not preclude arguments between the G. &
S.W. and the N.B which were bitter enough to take both parties before
the Solicitor General: but in Glasgow, at any rate, there was a tacit
63 G. Robin, ‘With the Caledonian Railway from Hamilton’, The Railway World
(1955), 45-7.
64 H.L., 1847, XL, 124, 363.
55 H.C., 1846 (212) XII, QQ.314-5, 388-400.
56 BTHR (Edinburgh) RAC(S) 1/3. The G.P. & G. also had as engineer Joseph
Locke and as secretary Mark Huish, who later moved to the Grand Junction railway
company.
57 BTHR PYB 1/579, 13 May, Q.26.
223
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

understanding that the two companies would both throw their weight in
the balance against the Caledonian.58 This concerted hostility to the
Caledonian may have been assisted in its earlier stages by the fact that the
North British and the G. & S.W. served different regions and, although
they met at Glasgow, they did not compete there to any marked
degree. Nor was their friendship put to the strain of sharing station
facilities until 1876; although it withstood even this test at St. Enoch’s.
The result of this even balance between the Caledonian company and
its opponents was a competitive struggle for traffic, for urban space, and
for local influence which lasted for sixty years. The operational rivalry
between the three companies extended from the trunk routes across the
Border to the railway-owned steamboat services in the Clyde, and
afforded spectacular, and occasionally dangerous, races—a source of
intermittent benefit to contemporary travellers, and of continuous
delight to railway historians. It was also reflected in urban affairs; and
in Glasgow the siting of termini, the number provided, and the timing
of their construction, can be shown to depend in large measure upon
the precise relations existing between the three companies, and their
relative success in canvassing their schemes.
In 1846, for example, no fewer than three schemes for large terminals
were laid before Parliament, with full preparation and at great expense;
apart from other schemes, as seriously intended perhaps, which were
discussed but not formally presented. Yet not one of these schemes
succeeded; all were defeated by the combined opposition of other par­
ties. The College Goods station scheme (overlaid exactly by No. 6 on
sketch map), although it was generously supported by Colin Dunlop,
John Wilson, J. B. Neilson, William Dixon and Andrew Buchanan (the
largest coalowners and ironmasters in the West of Scotland), was
obviously conceived in far larger terms than a mere mineral line. In fact
the intention was to join the eleven mile railway with some other small
mineral lines, and offer the whole package to the Edinburgh and
Glasgow company, as a terminal company.59 There was no other reason
why a twenty-six acre station site and £400,000 capital should be
proposed for a railway which was only eleven miles long. Surely ‘it is a
little strong’, counsel for the Caledonian railway company suggested,
‘to take so much land at the station for so short a line?’60 The Cale­
donian, suspecting the intentions of the new project, strenuously
opposed it in Committee; although the failure of the Glasgow, Airdrie
and Monklands Junction railway company was due to other factors,
outside the Caledonian’s control.
68 Ibid. 12 May, Q.697.
59 With a guarantee of 4% on its £400,000 capital. HLROt Min., H.C., 1846,
20 May, pp. 90-100, S.C. on Glasgow, Airdrie and Monklands Junction Railway.
69 HLRO, Min., H.L., 7 July, p. 55, S.C. on College of Glasgow.
224
 GLASGOW

The Caledonian company was also in opposition to the second major

scheme for a new urban terminal to be discussed in 1846—the West of
Scotland Junction project, sponsored by the G.P.K. & A. and the
Edinburgh and Glasgow railway companies (T846 dotted square’ in
Blythswood land on sketch map). Their counsel Serjeant Wrangham,
four Q.C’s, Austin, Talbot, Hope and Forsyth, and the counsel for the
Caledonian’s satellites, the General Terminus, the Glasgow, Paisley and
Greenock, and the Glasgow, Barrhead and Neilston Direct railway
companies, were able to lead extremely damaging evidence concerning
the proposed high level tubular steel bridge ‘on the principle about to be
adopted by Mr. Stephenson for crossing the Menai Straits’, and on the
effect of the proposal upon their own system. Added to this was the
opposition by the Blythswood Trustees, the Clyde Navigation Trust,
the Corporation of Glasgow, and the Tidal Harbours Commission. Not
surprisingly, the result was a defeat for a scheme which, in fact, had
many advanced features about it, and which anticipated the cross-town
linkage made, twenty years later, and at vastly increased expense, by the
same companies. The G.P.K. & A. and the Edinburgh and Glasgow
companies did renew the Blythswood scheme for two Parliamentary
sessions, but its rejection in 1846, at a moment when prospects in the
railway investment market were rapidly deteriorating, caused the
scheme’s final and permanent abandonment.61
The same fate overtook the third and biggest proposal put forward
in 1846 by the Caledonian itself. This also involved crossing the river,
though a little further upstream, almost on the site of the later St.
Enoch scheme (T846 dotted square’ near No. 5 on sketch map). The
terminus to be established was fiercely criticised by the G.P.K. & A. and
the Edinburgh and Glasgow companies’ counsel, on a variety of
grounds—disturbance to property, congestion of traffic in the central
streets, interruption of navigation in the river, and failure to effect a
junction between the railway systems north and south of the river.62
Their principal witness was the engineer of their two companies, John
Miller, but A. & D. J. Bannatyne, the solicitors for the G.P.K. & A.,
were prepared to pay expenses for any witnesses hostile to the scheme.63
John Carrick, who in fact favoured a scheme further east where it
would be of greater sanitary and social benefit to carry out demolition,
was brought down to London by Bannatyne’s.64 David Dreghorn, a
61 The Edinburgh and Glasgow railway bought the plot for £75,000 or thereabouts,
and sold it, when their project fell through, to James Scott for £37,000. HLRO, Min.,
(W. of Scotland June. Rly.), H.C., 1846, 26 March, pp. 88, 145-85, and Glasgow
Past and Present (Glasgow, 1884), I, 161.
62 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1846, 7 July, pp. 1-15, 9 July, pp. 196-234, S.C. on Cale­
donian Railway (Dunlop Street Station).
63 Ibid. 7 July, pp. 272-305.
64 Ibid. 7 July, p. 319.
I 225
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Bridge Commissioner and Town Councillor, was also called as witness

to discredit the Caledonian scheme, and even to impugn the motives of
the Clyde Trust and its engineer for supporting it. ‘You believe the
River Trustees are prepared to sacrifice public interest to railway
considerations and that Mr. Walker, their engineer, would lend himself
to that object?’, he was asked, in cross-examination. He repeated that
Walker was a man of high honour, but not sufficiently independent to
give a judgment. ‘I am not prepared to say either that the Trustees are
prepared to sacrifice the public interests or that Mr. Walker would lend
himself to it, but I say that one section of the Trustees are in favour of
the West of Scotland Junction scheme, another section of them, who are
Directors in the Caledonian are using their energies to promote the
present scheme, and probably another section connected with a third
scheme will be seeking to promote that. I say that those are not the men
to say which is the proper place.’65
The net result of this criticism, reported in over a thousand pages of
MS notes, was to cause the rejection of the Caledonian scheme. The
companies involved had shown themselves masters of the art of tactical
opposition, using every means to discredit a scheme one year, putting
forward closely similar schemes themselves the next. The resulting
deadlock in 1846 meant that no one succeeded in effecting a river
crossing or establishing a new central terminus, and major urban
projects were shelved until the 1860’s.
The years of recovery from the aftermath of railway mania, the early
1850’s, proved in the West of Scotland, as in other areas, a period of the
most unrestrained operational competition. Between 1854 and 1855 the
Caledonian launched ‘an attack’ (in the Edinburgh and Glasgow
directors’ words) in central Scotland, running seventeen daily trains
(including eight expresses) at a 3rd class fare of Jonly Is from Glasgow
to Edinburgh, and later reduced the fare still further to 6d. The total
passenger receipts on the E. & G. fell drastically, in the half year ending
January 1855; and although fare reductions on their part brought a
marked increase in the numbers carried in the next six months, the
money receipts fell by a further 25 % and the proportion of working
expenses to receipts rose from 37 % to 50 °/0. ‘Is there any prospect of a
termination to such wasteful proceedings ?’, the Edinburgh and Glasgow
board asked; and the following year a ten-year agreement on a joint
purse was reached with the Caledonian, under the guidance of an
arbiter.66 A similar cut-throat contest on the trunk routes from Carlisle
to Glasgow, between the Caledonian and the G. & S.W., likewise
terminated, at about the same time, in a Traffic Sharing Agreement.67
65 Ibid. 9 July, p. 242. •.
66 BTHR (Edinburgh) RAC(S) 1/73.
67 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 13 May, pp. 30-1, S.C. on Union Railway.
226
 GLASGOW

By the agreement the Caledonian allowed its smaller rival 40% of the
goods and 15% of the passenger receipts out of a joint purse. The
percentage allowed for goods was a reasonable estimate but the pas­
senger figure was not. The G. & S.W.’s route through Nithsdale was
longer than the Caledonian’s, and so, although collecting 15% of the
joint passenger receipts, the G. & S.W. only carried, in fact, 5% of the
passengers.68 William Johnstone, the G. & S.W’s manager, in admitting
the existence of such an agreement to the Commons’ Select Committee
in 1864, added that his company felt a ‘strong moral obligation not to
break the agreement until it expired’ (in 1874).69 This did not preclude
him, however, from using the period of this profitable truce to strengthen
the G. & S.W.’s position, and the new Union Railway terminal scheme
of 1864 was devised to give the G. & S.W. several decided advantages
when the agreement expired.
In fact, the effect of the 10-year and 21-year Agreements was similar
to that noted in other cities—to shift the emphasis in competition from
fares to accommodation and facilities. The proposals of 1846 were
revived, in slightly modified form, and the old battles in Select Com­
mittee fought again, between the Caledonian on one side and its rivals,
the G. & S.W. and the North British, on the other. By the 1860’s,
however, the evidence in favour of some river crossing and link
railway scheme was incontestable, and the Union project was not
allowed to fade away a second time—although the political upheaval it
caused has been noted elsewhere.
A condition promised by the companies which sponsored the Union
station (St. Enoch’s, No. 5 on sketch map), and the revived College
Goods station project (No. 6 on sketch map), was that they would be
‘an open railway for all comers.’70 This undertaking cannot have been
seriously intended, for one of the objects of the scheme had been to gain
competitive advantages in passenger and goods services, and in all types
of traffic: the through traffic would virtually be captured, since no other
cross-town linkage existed; trunk traffic would be attracted by the large
new central station; and there would be gains even in local passenger
traffic, as a result of the increased handling capacity and more central
location. All these would be lost if the Caledonian railway company
were admitted on equal terms; and, in spite of its fierce opposition to
the scheme, the Caledonian immediately applied for running powers, as
soon as the Bill received the Royal Assent.
Although, in view of the ‘open station’ promise, the Caledonian
company could not openly be excluded from St. Enoch’s, conditions
68 Loc. cit. pp. 34-7.
69 Loc. cit. p. 45.
70 H.C.. 1864, XXI, 165 (Board of Trade Reports). HLRO, Min., H.C., 13 May,
p. 216, S.C. on Union Railway.
227
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

could be laid down which were sufficiently onerous to produce the same
effect. One remote and inconvenient platform could be assigned to
them; a toll of 6d per passenger levied (which would effectively price
the Caledonian out of the local traffic); preposterous limitations could
be insisted upon, by which, for example, all Caledonian passengers who
had travelled from further afield than Hamilton should be turned out at
the Southside station, and not allowed to travel in to St. Enoch’s;
it could be specified that a lump sum contribution of £250,000, and an
annual levy of £25,000 must be paid by the Caledonian, in addition to
its passenger tolls, and that, in return, they would be allowed two of the
nine seats on the joint board; the Caledonian could be forbidden to use
the College station at all, yet at the same time required to contribute
towards their rivals’ Parliamentary expenses in securing the Bill.71
When such conditions were laid down it was difficult for the Caledonian
directors not to feel that they were merely being trifled with.
So the St. Enoch station itself became a further pawn in the com­
petition between the three companies. Left to themselves to finance the
project, the G. & S.W. and the North British proceeded very slowly,
dragging out the construction of the St. Enoch station over twelve
years (1864-76).72 The difficulties encountered in clearing away a vast
tract of slum housing—the so-called ‘Wynds’—and the strain placed
upon the contractors who had offered to stand behind the scheme,
suggest further reasons for the delay in building and opening the new
station. Throughout this period the Caledonian kept up the acid cor­
respondence already referred to, and harassed the G. & S.W. and the
North British, by opposing all their supplementary Bills to re-route their
southern approaches, and by putting forward awkward and obstructive
link lines of their own.73 Even before the St. Enoch station was opened
the Caledonian company had returned to the idea of a second inde­
pendent terminus of its own, deliberately reduplicating the facilities at
St. Enoch’s. Tension between the companies was heightened by rum­
ours, in 1872, of possible mergers between the long-distance English
amalgamations and the Scottish companies.
It was against this background that the Caledonian Glasgow Central
Station Bill was put forward in May 1873. At first the Caledonian had
re-examined the Blythswood Holm station project, which had been
71 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.L., 1864, 11 July, pp. 90-6, Min., (Union), H.C.
1864, 13 May, pp. 77-9. Min., (Central), H.C. 1873, 6 May, pp. 96-9.
72 ‘They still have not finished, and will need to spend £2,100,000.’ HLRO, Min.,
(Central), H.C., 1873, 6 May, p.30 (George Cunningham). A Temporary station
was used from 1870-6. ■
73 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1872, 6 May, pp. 80, 112, S.C. on G. Union Rly. Junction
etc. The most obstructive line of all, however, was a proposed, surface link in 1873
from St. Enoch Station to Stobcross (see sketch map), which would permanently
have excluded the Caledonian from central Glasgow.

228
 GLASGOW

originated by its rivals in 1846, but the rise in land values in that area
had now inflated the project’s cost to a prohibitive £3,000,000.71 *74 The
property selected at the alternative Gordon Street site, proposed in
1873 by the Caledonian railway company, was still expensive, but came
as near to constituting an enclave of low values as could reasonably be
expected in such a central district. Instead of offices there were half-a-
dozen ‘photographic galleries’, some vaults and warehouses, and a few
stables and grain stores.75 Working on the opinions of ‘two or three
experienced valuators’—theirs were the estimates which now counted
for most, not the engineers’—the Caledonian estimated that £967,000
would cover the mile and a quarter extension, provided that the street
frontages acquired in the schedule could be re-sold, and only the back
portions used for the station premises.76 Once again, expert counsel was
engaged, Plans and Sections and Demolition Statements submitted,
witnesses brought down to London. One of them was the same John
Carrick (now the City Architect and Master of Works) who had given
evidence twenty-seven years earlier. ‘Why are we, in 1873, enquiring
into station accommodation at Glasgow?’, he asked the Committee.
‘For this reason, that the companies cannot agree—it all comes back to
that. It is the jealousy and mutual distrust which they have of one
another, which has driven the Glasgow Corporation here to oppose
these Bills.’77

3. The development of railway facilities:

a chronological sketch
Since the competitive postures just described were not taken up until
the mid-1840’s, when the Caledonian company came into existence,
the earliest railway schemes in Glasgow—the Bridge Street and Queen
Street termini (1837, Nos. 1 and 2 on sketch map)—were located with
simpler considerations in mind. Prominent amongst those was the
problem of land acquisition. This was not, as later became the case,
because the price of land, and the scope for acquiring space without
extensive demolition of existing buildings, restricted the opportunities
for the exercise of railway enterprise to narrow confines. It was primarily
because the railways were themselves undercapitalised even for the
relatively small scale of their operations, and, as a result, needed to get
their services into operation, and receipts flowing in as soon as possible,
even if this involved the use of temporary and unsatisfactory terminals

71 HLRO, Min., (Central), H.C., 1873, 6 May, p. 43.

75 Ibid. P & S, B.Ref.
76 Ibid. 6 May, p. 107. As an afterthought Cunningham rounded the figure off to
£1,200,000.
77 BTHR PYB 1/579, 27 May, Q.94.
229
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

It was also because, in the 1830’s, there were still no reasonable prece­
dents established upon which the railways could expect to purchase
land; and this continued to be a problem for railway companies in all
the major cities until a corpus of experience in land dealings had been
built up.
The inaccuracy of the early railway companies’ first estimates on
traffic was soon apparent. At the Select Committees, estimates of
existing traffic were produced, on the various routes from Glasgow to
Kilmarnock, Ayr, Paisley, Edinburgh and intermediate points, divided
into various classes—coaches, gigs, vans, carts, steam-packets, and
canal boats. The statistics were based upon the numbers of vehicles
plying per week in 1837, and upon arbitrary loading factors. There was
also, clearly, a great deal of latitude for interpretation, and possibly
for double counting, in the lists of intermediate points from which
traffic originated. However, for what they are worth, these were the
statistics upon which the two earliest large railways to Glasgow attemp­
ted to persuade Parliament to authorise, and shareholders to invest in
their project; and upon which they based their own estimated require­
ments of terminal space, and assessed their own revenue earning
capacity.
The expectations of the Edinburgh and Glasgow company were that
it would be able to count on carrying half as many passengers as the
canal fly boats, and twice as many as the coaches and other road
vehicles. They did not state whether this traffic would be newly gener­
ated, or merely would be drawn away from their competitors.78 The
G.P.K. & A. were more explicit about this point, and also more modest
about their claim. They assumed that they would be able to take away
25 % of the existing traffic from the roads and canals, and to add to that
an equal quantity for newly generated traffic.79 In fact, both companies
underestimated, by a factor of two to three, the power of the railways to
generate new traffic. The figure of 340,000 passengers, expected on
the Edinburgh and Glasgow railway each year, once they had settled
down to steady operation, was achieved within the first six months; and
the G.P.K. & A. also found that its actual traffic was between two and
three times as great as had been expected originally. The further annual
growth which then took place did so from these higher initial levels. It is
worth a short digression to note and illustrate the nature of early
traffic estimates, for such understatements were not peculiar to Glas­
gow. In most large cities the initial calculations of terminal space
requirements in the 183O’s were based upon some rule-of-thumb
calculations of the sort just described.80
78 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1838, 1 June, p. 21. .
79 Prospectus, G.P.K. & A. in W. Mcllwraith, op. cit. 20. ’
80 H.L., 1836, XXXIII, 257. ‘This is the usual principle, to double the passenger
traffic’.
230
 GLASGOW

A similar lack of experience, both on the part of valuers and of

vendors of property, is apparent in the 183O’s, and until the procedures
for land acquisition were systematised, in 1845. Some of the early claims
against the Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the G.P.K. & A. companies
were so ill-founded that it is hard to explain them except upon the basis
of novelty. For instance, the tunnelling to Queen Street (No. 2 on sketch
map) took the Edinburgh and Glasgow railway under the grounds of
the Town Hospital, or Lunatic Asylum, and the claim made on behalf
of the institution was so wild that it might have been prepared by the
inmates rather than the Trustees; £44,000 later reduced to £10,000, and
finally settled for £873.81 The Minute Book of the Edinburgh and
Glasgow railway company’s Committee on Lands and Works gives
other examples, hardly less inflated. The Union Canal claimed £28,200,
of which £25,000 was for damages, for property which the railway
company’s valuers placed at £1,020. And other proprietors, like James
Campbell of Possil (to the north of Glasgow), put in a claim ‘which the
committee have considered not merely exorbitant in itself, but as
offering a precedent to which other parties would appeal in dealing with
the company.’82 Actually Campbell’s claim, for a price based upon 40
years’ purchase, although it shocked the committee, was not too far
removed from the general level of claims to which, in the 1840’s and
thereafter, the railway companies would have to begin to accustom
themselves.
An example of the early type of claim which was more representative
than that submitted by the Lunatic Asylum may be chosen from the
arbitration cases on the pathway of the G.P.K. & A. (No. 1 on sketch
map). The site in question was a Methodist Chapel and its grounds in
Eglinton Street for which the railway company offered £3,000, a sum
which seemed reasonable in view of the Methodist Trustee willingness to
sell it a few years earlier for that precise sum.83 The Trustees in their
Memorial & Claim to the arbiters admitted that ‘the Methodist Society
some years ago had serious thoughts of disposing of their property’.
Now, however, ‘the long delayed deepening of the river and the con­
struction of a more commodious bridge’ had taken place, resulting in a
‘gradually increasing demand for warehouse, counting-house and
dwelling-house accommodation’. The Society’s property, they conclu­
ded, was ‘only now coming to its full value.’81 In other words, even
though they were, no doubt, ‘the gratuitous and disinterested rep­
resentatives of a religious body’ as they claimed, nevertheless they
81 F. S. Williams, Our Iron Roads (1852) 87.
82 BTHR (Edinburgh) EGR, Committee on Lands and Works, Minute Book I,
pp.19, 25.
83 G.U. Coll. Sol. papers. Correspondence between Messrs. A. & D. J. Bannatyne
and the Society of Methodists, October-December 1838.
84 Ibid. Memorial and Claim, 1 February 1839.
231
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

expected a price which was not based upon the original cost of site and
buildings, but upon the development price (or in their words ‘the full
price’) which, they successfully claimed, was more than double the sum
offered by the railway company.85 If this was the attitude of a religious
body, proprietors of commercial and industrial sites and private
owners could be expected to bargain even more obstinately. The result,
in Glasgow, was a steady and rapid rise in the price paid for the urban
land on which the terminal lines and buildings were laid out.
The awakening of urban proprietors to the new value of their lands,
together with the modest traffic expectations and the small resources of
the early railway companies, led to half-hearted and inadequate ter­
minus facilities. These consisted, at Bridge Street, of a minute platform,
a mere outpost for passengers on the river’s south bank, and a goods
depot, at Cook Street, which required expensive cartage to most points
of collection and unloading, and was too remote to allow a direct
approach to the quayside. At Queen Street the station was well situated,
but also too small, and very difficult to enlarge. Yet both companies
found that they had exceeded their estimated costs; of £850,000 for
the Edinburgh and Glasgow, £623,000 for the G.P.K. & A. However,
the surprisingly large number of people with motives for travel, and the
ability to pay, provided the answer to both of the problems characteris­
tic of railway building in the 1830’s. The meagre provisions could be
supplemented, and the rise in the price of land overtaken, if the public
were persuaded, by the railway’s obvious success, to press forward with
investment capital on the required scale.
In the mid-1840’s, therefore, one might well have expected that the
proffering of large funds for railway projects would lead to a series of
comprehensive schemes, to augment the early railway termini at Bridge
Street and Queen Street, and to bring the railways more fully into Glas­
gow. Indeed, but for the competitive factors referred to in the previous
section, this might well have been the case, for there was certainly no
shortage of schemes which were large in conception. Glasgow was
distinguished amongst nineteenth-century cities by being the only one,
apart from London, which required a Royal Commission to analyse the
multiplicity of urban railway projects.86 It seemed, in 1846, that the
centre of the city would be violently transformed by the projects,
clamorous in advocacy, and inconsistent in intention, which the rival
companies were simultaneously canvassing.
All the major passenger station and through-railway schemes put
forward in 1845/6 were frustrated, however, and only two second-string
termini, the Buchanan Street and the Southside stations (1849, Nos. 3
and 4 on sketch map), and the General Terminus scheme (sidings on
85 Ibid. Memorial of Arbiters’ Settlement, 19 November 1839?
80 H.L., 1847, XL, 361-6.

232
 GLASGOW

south side of harbour), survived the decade’s self-destructive com­

petition. Even the Harbour scheme produced its casualties, for there
were three simultaneous projects laid before Parliament, the General
Terminus and Glasgow Harbour Railway (G.T.) the Glasgow Harbour
Grand Junction Railway Terminus (G.J.) and the Glasgow Harbour
and Mineral Railway (G.H.). The difference between them lay in the
cost and position of the site they selected, but even more in the amount
of preparation and support they had secured. The G.H. system, which
proposed to build a dock two miles to the west of Glasgow, would seem
to be least likely to interrupt the general trade of the harbour; but it
was further downstream, which would itself add the crucial two or
three pence per ton to the charge, apart from the fact that ships bunker­
ing would need a steam tug.87
There was less to choose between the other two central schemes;
indeed, they overlapped for 900 feet of their frontage. The G.J. scheme
was slightly more easterly and so the objections to coaling operations in
the harbour for general trade would apply rather more strongly. But,
on the other hand, the land to be acquired would be available more
cheaply, and provide a larger storage depot.88 All of the schemes came
under the general objections made against the specialised coal trade.
At London, Hull, Liverpool and Bristol, where the trade was general, no
such mineral railways had been authorised; and any collier which
applied to the West India dock, for example, would have been scouted
immediately. In Glasgow, the objection was similar; the dust raised as
coal was hurled down into the vessels, ‘would ruin the Paisley shawls
and muslins, and other general merchandise awaiting export on the
quay.’89 Since coal was also a bulky, low-value trade, there was also an
objection to staiths occupying the ‘most valuable and convenient part
of the quays of the harbour, to the serious injury of the general trade of
the port.’90
It is difficult to escape the feeling that the determining factor in the
rejection of two of these schemes was the attitude of the Clyde trustees,
who withdrew their objections to the laying of rails on their quays by
the G.T. on the morning of 25 March, after a session which had lasted
eight days. Later the same day the preamble of the General Terminus
Scheme was proved. What had happened in the two years since their
resident engineer had condemned joint-stock coaling schemes in
principle was revealed in the course of interrogation by hostile counsel.
Mr. Charles Gray, deputy chairman of the Clyde Navigation Trust, who
had strongly supported the General Terminus scheme, was compelled
87 H.C., 1846 (267) XII, QQ.939^13.
88 Ibid. QQ.1068, 1092-3.
88 Ibid. QQ.31, 976-87.
90 Ibid. Q.1045.
1* 233
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to admit that he had, in fact, become a shareholder in the company, and

that the shares had risen appreciably in value when the Trust’s forth­
coming support for the General Terminus bill was announced. Five
other trustees who held shares were also named.91 Apart from this
personal interest, the Clyde Trust itself stood to benefit, as a corpora­
tion ; for the Terminus Company was in course of selling to them, on
special terms, 37,000 square yards out of the land it had already pur­
chased for their use in excavation and harbour-making.92
Neither the successful Harbour scheme, nor the Buchanan Street or
Southside station—which were all that emerged from ‘railway mania’—
could be argued to serve central railway functions. The General
Terminus was purely for goods and minerals, and both the other
stations handled goods as well as passengers. The Buchanan Street
station was approached by passengers from England via the Gart-
sherrie junction upstream, and they arrived in reverse down a three and
a half mile gradient. The station itself was on the seedier fringes of the
central district.93 The Southside station was still remoter and more
unpopular, ‘a discredit to the city’.9495
Dingily situated, it left passengers
with a mile to travel and the crowded bridges to cross to reach the
business centre. ‘It is like delivering passengers at Birkenhead for
Liverpool’, the Caledonian’s counsel explained.
The belated assault upon the city centre, which resumed in the
1860’s, focused upon the Union railway scheme. Originally this pro­
ject was scheduled to cost £900,000, but this was added to by Supple­
mentary Bills in 1872 (£400,000), 1874 (£250,000) and 1876 (£550,000).96
This total of £2,100,000 put the Union scheme in the same class as the
contemporary Liverpool Street terminus in London, and there were
suggestions in Select Committee that when the final bill was presented
it would greatly exceed even £2,100,000. The Union scheme included
both the College station and that at St. Enoch (Nos. 5 and 6 on sketch
map).
As already mentioned, the twenty-six-acre site of the old College and
grounds had already attracted the interest of railway projectors in 1845,
when the Citizen had remarked, eloquently but somewhat prema­
turely,
‘The proposal to blot out our ancient University and erect a grand railway
terminus in its stead, has a boldness in it that is apt to upset minds of ordinary

91 H.C., 1846 (212) XII, QQ.214-35.

92 Ibid. QQ.42-3.
93 ‘Surrounded by mean streets and tenements’, J. F. Gains, ‘Buchanan Street
Station’, Railway Magazine (1928),1.
94 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.C., 1864, 12 May, p. 51
95 BTHR PYB 1/579, 1 July, p. 1. ■'
96 W. MacAdam, Birth, Growth and Eclipse of the G. & S. W. Railway (Glasgow
1924), 43.
234
 GLASGOW

calibre. It is strikingly characteristic of the irreverent audacity of the railway

system—which skims over every hollow and cuts through every obstacle—
which penetrates or lays open granite mountains with an earthquake’s
power.’
‘Whatever comes in its way will inevitably be crushed and trampled down.
It cares as little for old associations as it does for old houses, and offer what
opposition we will, every year that passes will see iron lines dashed with
remorseless sweep, through the faded handwriting which bygone ages have
left on the earth’s surface.’97

In this particular case, however, it was the railway company which was
trampled underfoot. A separate Bill had had to be obtained to enable
the College to sell its corporate lands, and clauses in this required the
Treasury to approve the new buildings at the proposed site in Wood­
lands (Buchanan on sketch map). The designs for the proposed Univer­
sity, by John Baird, were sent back, after a lengthy delay, with criticisms
by Pugin and Barry, to whom they had been referred.98 For two years
the plans were amended, despatched, discussed by delegations. Finally
the Treasury gave its consent in July 1848, but in August of that year
the railway company repudiated the whole deal because of the delays
and losses. It was successfully sued by the University and went into
liquidation in 1849.99
The University’s grounds, however, were placed on the market again
in the 1860’s and formed the only large single block of property sched­
uled in 1864 for the Union scheme. All the rest was in extremely frag­
mented ownership. South of the river the elevated approach lines from
Southside station, and from Shields Road, passed through bleaching
greens, dwelling houses with back courts containing pig sties and hen
houses, timber yards, sawpits and other low-grade properties.100 North
of the river the line forked, the left-hand branch curving westwards into
a station situated in roughly the same area as the 1846 Caledonian
Dunlop Street (see sketch map); the right-hand branch proceeding to a
junction with the College station, and bridging the main thoroughfares
of Saltmarket and Gallowgate. Both of these branches swept through
densely packed dwelling houses, with backcourts and ashpits, usually
owned singly or in twos and threes, quite often by women, and let out to
tenants on a one year basis.101 Railway No. 6 (as the branch to Stock-
well Street and St. Enoch Square is designated on the Plans and Sections')
ploughed through territory which was low-grade residential in charac-
” Citizen, 1 November 1845. In Lanarkshire Topographical Collections, VI, GRL
51366.
98 Glasgow University Archives, OCB/R 10745.
99 Ibid. OCB/R 10716.
100 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1864, Union Railway. Railways Nos. 1 and 4.
101 55% of the properties scheduled were owned singly, 30% owned in twos,
15% in groups of three or more. Ibid. Railways Nos. 1 and 6.
235
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

ter, but included also a number of spirit houses and stores, warehouses,
cart sheds and a few business premises. Agnes Oswald, who had owned
thirty properties scheduled by the Caledonian in 1846, had died, but her
trustees had infilled her wood, stone, slate and firebrick yards with
dwelling houses. Sir Andrew Orr, an ex-provost and ex-Chairman of
the Glasgow and South Western railway company, was a new owner
who had moved into the district, and his name recurs frequently;
sometimes on his own account as sole owner, sometimes with groups of
trustees, or with other individuals. In this area, and that covered by
Railway No. 7, which took in three hundred properties in an even older
part of the town, the owner-tenant relationships were sometimes of
extraordinary complexity. One corner site at Princes Street, for example,
comprised a group of shops, dwelling houses, a pawn office, a singing
saloon and some cellars, owned by ten people as individuals, together
with three sets of trustees (twenty-three people in all); the whole parcel
was leased to one man, and was occupied by forty tenants.
All this was erased by the demolition operations carried out in the
mid-1860’s, but this incursion into the city was not to be the last. For
reasons already explained, the Caledonian refused to share the St.
Enoch’s station and took on the task of further demolition anew in the
1870’s. George Cunningham’s plan for a large butt-end terminal (No. 7
on sketch map) did not involve such extensive bridging, demolition and
closures as the Union scheme, and, as already mentioned, it used the
high level approach to economise with street frontages, but the scale of
disturbance was still very large. At the station site itself only six of the
owners gave their assent, and over half of the eighty affected took the
trouble to record their dissent. The occupiers, whose names cover some
seventeen pages in the Parliamentary records, felt even more strongly
hostile; only forty-two, out of nearly six hundred, agreeing to the
station scheme.102 The buildings in this area were poor, but their
situation good, according to Thomas Binnie, and a larger proportion of
them were commercial premises, occupied by their lessees, than had
been the case with the Union scheme, further east.103 This, no doubt,
partly explains the tenacity of their opposition. However, once the
preamble to the Caledonian Bill was proved, on 27 May 1873, the only
remaining opposition could be on clauses, or over compensation.

4. Summary and general considerations

The outcome of the decisions recorded above was unsatisfactory on
many counts. The city was served by means of a series of make-shift
102 HLRO, Books of Assent and Dissent (Owners), 1873, Caledonian Railway
(Glasgow Central Station). Ibid. (Occupiers).
103 HLRO, Min., (Central) H.C., 1873, 12 May, p. 62.

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 GLASGOW

facilities for a generation (from 1846-76), and the Corporation, land­

owners and private citizens kept in a state of suspense, or of unfulfilled
expectation. Nor did the projects which were abandoned fail because
they outran potential traffic needs, or because of some flaw or weakness
in their conception. Glasgow provides an excellent example of a city
with an urban history which is littered with schemes which, although
technically feasible and adequately backed, miscarried as a result of
opposition which was essentially tactical in origin. London in the 1840’s
provides a similar example of a city where competitive checks and official
intervention caused the frustration of a large number of imaginative
projects; but in Glasgow the number of survivors was even smaller, and
the delays before replacement schemes were sponsored was even greater.
In view of the extremely important part which was played by the
Royal Commission of 1846 in determining London’s future railway
communications, perhaps it is worth glancing for a moment at the
effect of the other Royal Commission of 1846, which investigated
railway communications in Glasgow.104 The two Commissions were
very different in composition and remit. That in London was composed
of senior administrators, Lords Canning and Dalhousie, John Johnson
(the Lord Mayor of London), J. C. Herries and J. M. F. Smith, and had
wide powers ‘to investigate the various Projects for Establishing
Railway Termini within or in the immediate Vicinity of the Metro­
polis.’105 Its main recommendation was that railways should be ex­
cluded from the central area; and the profound effect of this ruling is
discussed elsewhere. The Royal Commission in Glasgow was, by
comparison, made up of engineers, and chaired by a Captain in the
Corps of Engineers. Its commission was also narrower in scope, to
‘consider and report upon the advantages or otherwise of a Central
Railway Terminus in Glasgow’. Its main practical recommendations—
that the Caledonian railway company’s proposed Dunlop Street
terminus (T846 dotted square’, adjacent to No. 5 on sketch map)
should be preferred, and that the College station project ‘may be made
a very convenient depot for the general safety and arrangement... with
reference to goods’—were dead letters; the Caledonian Bill had already
fallen in Committee before the combined attack of other interested
parties three months before the Royal Commission published its Report,
and the Commission’s approval did nothing to help the ill-starred
College station project.106 Nor was the long-term policy conclusion
which the Commission recommended any more effective. It decided that
plans to form a central station linking railways north and south of the
104 H.L., 1847, XL, 361-6. Although dated October 1846 its publication fell in the
sessional year 1847.
105 H.C., 1846, XVH, 3.
104 H.L., 1847, XL, 365-6.
237
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Clyde was ‘neither desirable nor practicable’; but the Commission’s

ruling did not perceptibly stem the flow of ambitious projects with this
very end in view, nor inhibit Parliament from sanctioning one of them.
One may take as example of the sturdy indifference to the Royal
Commission shown by railway projectors the long run of life accorded
to G. W. Muir’s ‘Plans for a Glasgow Junction Railway terminus at
Trongate’—a scheme which has not previously been mentioned.107
Since the plan was free-lance—like Charles Pearson’s in London—and
was never formally submitted to Parliament, with Plans and Sections,
Books of Reference, etc., it has not been shown on the sketch map
accompanying this chapter; but it was located immediately north of,
and partly overlapping, the triangle junction later built in connection
with the Union scheme (No. 5 on sketch map). For the same reason,
viz. that it was an unsponsored scheme, Muir’s project was never
directly discussed by a Select Committee; although more than one
indirect reference to it was made during the discussion of Bills for other
projects. The fact that it had not been formally prepared and presented
to Parliament, however, did not prevent the Royal Commission, with
its more flexible procedure, from examining Muir’s scheme. The
Commissioners did not object to its southern approach route, but took
exception to the bridging of three main thoroughfares which its nor­
thern exit would involve. The alleged public merit of a scheme which
would remove part of the Wynds, and put the area to ‘better employ­
ment as a Railway than producing cholera or typhus’, left the Com­
missioners unmoved. They agreed that the buildings and alleys there
formed ‘a hotbed of disease and crime’, but added, shrewdly, ‘We think
it is by no means certain that the removal of the Wynds, by simply
dispossessing the present occupiers would effect a sanatory (sic)
improvement of the city, as it formed no part of Mr. Muir’s scheme to
provide other or better abodes for them; besides, improvements of this
nature are more properly the business of the authorities and guardians
of the city than of railway companies.’108 The city authorities, however,
were in no position to fulfil that duty in 1846, and indeed it was not
until 1862 that they began to gather the necessary information, 1866
when they secured statutory powers to carry out improvement. George
Muir, however, was undeterred by the Commission’s rejection of his
central terminus scheme, and it was once more canvassed at public
meetings in 1864, and introduced into the evidence being heard by the
Select Committee on the Union railway company’s Bill.109
The Royal Commission in Glasgow then, unlike that in London, left
107 G. W. Muir, ‘A Plan etc.* (1846), Bibliography of Scottish Topography (ed.
A. Mitchell and C. G. Cash, Edinburgh 1917), I, 318. •.
108 H.L., 1847, XL, 362.
109 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.C., 1864, 23 May, p. 157.
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 GLASGOW

little mark on the city’s pattern of rail communications, and failed to

guide or to expedite the provision of additional passenger and goods
facilities. Even the growth of traffic, and of demand pressures, seemed
to have less effect upon the provision of added facilities than might be
expected. The Caledonian railway company’s annual passenger traffic
rose from one million to nearly four millions in the period 1848-64;
and of these, two-thirds were passing through the Glasgow terminals
at Buchanan Street and Southside, the make-shift nature of which has
already been mentioned. The Glasgow and South Western railway
company's traffic doubled between 1848 and 1862, from a total, on their
whole system, of three-quarters of a million passengers per annum, to
one and a half millions; of which, according to a separate count, nearly
half a million were arriving at the tiny Bridge Street station.110 In
addition, a further three quarters of a million arrived via the Joint line,
worked by the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock railway, in conjunction
with the G. & S.W.; all of these passengers disembarking on a platform
only 260 yards long and 20 feet above street level.
The Edinburgh and Glasgow railway company’s traffic over the same
period also increased, from one to two millions, and three-quarters
of these arrived at, or departed from, Queen street.111 This was an
undue number for a station only a little over two acres in size to handle
safely; and safety standards were allowed to decline. J. D. Marwick, the
Town Clerk, conducted a lengthy correspondence with the North British
company, the Home Secretary and the Board of Trade, complaining of
passengers being ‘jostled off the platforms, crushed between piles of
luggage, having to alight in the tunnel and make their way into the
station along a narrow ledge.’ ‘Only two platforms of very limited size
are available for all the passenger traffic.’ Marwick continued, ‘and when
a large train is about to start, or when two or more trains of ordinary
size leave in quick succession, the utmost confusion and danger
prevail.’112 Weiland, the Secretary of the N.B. railway, replied laconically
that the only accidents reported to him appeared to have been caused
‘by want of reasonable care on the part of the passengers themselves.’
The Board of Trade sent their inspector, Captain Tyler, in December
1873, to make a report, and he also wrote that it was impossible to
emphasise too strongly ‘the urgent necessity that exists for removing the
Goods traffic elsewhere’; but their report was ignored by the North
British company, in spite of urgent letters throughout the whole of 1874
from the Town Clerk. The Secretary to the Board of Trade, to whom the

110 BTHR (Edinburgh) RAC(S) 1/3. HLRO, Min., (Union) H.L., 1864, 11 July,
p. 163.
111 Ibid. RAC(S) 1/73.
112 GRL MS. Correspondence D397154, 25 September 1873. The other quotations
in this paragraph are from the same source.
239
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Town Clerk appealed, made his own position clear: ‘Your Corporation
should understand distinctly that the Board of Trade have no power to
make any order upon a railway company.’ The most he could do for
Glasgow, or any other municipal corporation dissatisfied with the rail­
way services it was getting, would be to give a certificate under Sections
11 and 13 of the Regulation of Railways Act, 1873, which would allow
the Corporation to bring the case before the Railway Commissioners.
Even the Home Secretary, Richard Cross, to whom the Town Clerk
also appealed, professed himself to be powerless in the matter.
So the Corporation was no more effective in its complaints than
individual passengers. There was nothing which could be done to compel
the railway companies serving Glasgow to provide facilities which kept
abreast of demand. If they wished to do so, or if they were swayed by
calculations of the prospective cost and opposition any proposal of a
new station would arouse, they could simply allow the transport system
to burst at the seams. Alternatively, the traffic itself could effectually be
tailored to fit the facilities, by the type of fares policy and the frequency
of services adopted.
It is difficult to make a firm generalisation upon this point, for two
reasons. In the first place, there is a distinct shortage of comparable
statistics. What is required, of course, is not the overall passenger
figures for railway companies, but specific passenger counts at the
individual urban termini, or at one given city; and these figures, because
of the technical difficulty of compiling them, only exist fortuitously and
at irregular intervals, rather than in series. Even the Select Committee
documents—which one would have thought might reasonably be
expected to contain compilations and estimates of the passengers
handled, or anticipated, at the urban termini under discussion—only
contain statistical information from time to time. However, reasonably
full estimates, which cross-check between the different companies
originating them, exist for Glasgow in 1863, on the eve of the new cen­
tral terminal plans.113 The whole passenger traffic for the city was then
approximately five millions; and from the further local break-downs of
traffic supplied in 1873 we may deduce that it had doubled in the inter­
vening decade.114

Arrivals and Departures at Glasgow termini, 1863

Caledonian 2,743,000 per annum
(of which) 1,128,000 local traffic from
Greenock
115 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.C., 1864, 12 May, pp. 143-55. Ibid. H.L., 1864,
11 July, pp. 98-106, 112-7, 13 July, pp. 77-90.
111 HLRO, Min., (Central), H.C., 1873, 7 May, pp. 243-5. BTHR PYB 1/579,
16 May, QQ.471-3.
240
 GLASGOW

Glasgow and South Western 779,000 per annum

(of which) 355,000 Joint Line
(G.P.K. & A. and
G.P. & G.) passengers
Edinburgh and Glasgow 1,575,000 per annum

TOTAL 5,097,000

Arrivals and Departures at Glasgow termini, 1873

Caledonian 5,500,000 per annum
(of which) 2,000,000 local traffic from
Greenock
Glasgow and South Western 2,027,000 per annum
(of which) 512,000 Joint Line
879,000 Dunlop Street annexe
for St. Enoch’s.
North British 3,000,000 per annum
(by extrapolation)

TOTAL 10,527,000

The North British company, in fact, did not provide the Select
Committee with any statistics in 1873, and in view of the fact that this
was the year in which their acrimonious correspondence with the Town
Clerk began, perhaps this is not surprising. William Johnstone, the
General Manager of the G. & S.W., submitted figures which were in
themselves misleading; and also, when directly taxed as to the value of
his passenger traffic into Glasgow was compelled to reply, ‘I am afraid
I have no statistics to show the money that we get.’115 He would guess
that it was something in the order of £1,000,000 (obviously including
the longer distance travellers)—an extraordinary admission, one might
think, from the manager of a company which had just undertaken to
invest over £2,000,000 in providing new station facilities; but, as
illustrated elsewhere, this intuitional method of approach to business
decisions was not uncommon.
Some figures were also produced for Goods traffic, but these were
even more fragmentary and unsatisfactory. If, however, one takes the
passenger arrival and departure figures as a guide to the scale and
adequacy of rail-transport provisions in Glasgow, then a second
obstacle to forming a retrospective judgment arises. With what are the
115 Ibid. 16 May, Q.663.
241
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

figures of five, or ten, million passengers per year for Glasgow to be

compared, since they are virtually meaningless standing in isolation?
If they are compared with the most satisfactory available figures for
urban terminal receipts—those for London—certain obvious difficulties
arise, concerned particularly with regional differences in social struc­
ture, income levels, employment patterns, and residential habits and
opportunities. For example, the entire Glasgow passenger traffic in
1863 would only have occupied one-third of London Bridge station’s
capacity.116 Admittedly, London Bridge was a station which specialised
in relatively short-distance journeys, of the kind seen on a much smaller
scale at the Bridge Street terminus in Glasgow; but even the station at
Waterloo handled four million passengers per annum in 1858; and (it
may be supposed) this one London station was handling a number of
passengers similar to the annual turnover at all Glasgow’s termini in
1863. The Fenchurch Street and Shoreditch termini in London, which
also specialised in short-distance traffic, were handling some ten
million passengers between them, even in 1855; but, on the other hand,
the long-distance stations, Euston, Paddington and King’s Cross, only
handled a total of three millions at that date.117
Speculation upon the question of how greatly the rail facilities which
were actually provided in Glasgow may have lagged behind the demand
must inevitably encounter such difficulties as these. How many poten­
tial work-journeys—given the unusual character of the city, mentioned
elsewhere—could the Glasgow region be expected to develop? What
proportion of traffic was long-distance? What would be the local
equivalent to the fares prevailing in the London area, and what social
classes might, potentially, be tapped by railway company offers ? The
shaping of travel patterns in the West of Scotland region was not a
matter which lay entirely within the disposition of the railway com­
panies. Yet, on their cheapest service,—the Joint Line from Greenock,
which offered the only fares to compete (-^d per mile) with those of the
Great Eastern railway company in London—the response was pro­
portionately impressive. When, after the long rivalry between the
companies to whom Glasgow was an arena had finally produced a new
and belated equilibrium in the late 188O’s, the effects of the closing of
Bridge Street and the re-routing of its traffic to the Caledonian Central
Station was as remarkable an example of traffic growth as can easily
be found in any city. In 1880 the Caledonian’s 173 trains per day
carried 4,750,000 passengers to and from the new ‘Central Station’
terminus; a number which was already beginning to approach that from
116 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, A History ofLondon Transport (1963), 139.
H. P. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. HI, Greater
London (ed. D. St. J. Thomas, 1963), 25. Edwin Course, London Railways (1962), 48.
117 H.C., 1854-5, X, App. p. 215, Table II.

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 GLASGOW

all Caledonian termini as recently as 1873. By 1888 and 1897 these

figures had multiplied to 9,250,000 passengers in 300 daily trains, and
15,750,000 passengers in 486 daily trains. The loading factors had also
increased from an average of 78 passengers per train in 1864, to 90 in
1880, and to 105 in 1897.118
These traffic figures from the Caledonian’s new station offered, in the
last decade of the nineteenth century, genuine comparison with those of
individual London termini at the same date; they were greater than the
annual arrivals and departures from Charing Cross or Cannon Street,
and half as large as those at Waterloo or Victoria stations.119 A major
point left for analysis is the relative elasticity of social response in
different regions of Great Britain to the transport services offered; but
this itself might be subjected to historical influences over periods of
three or four decades. In Glasgow there can be little doubt that the
course of events in mid-century encouraged, even more than might
otherwise have been the case, the provision of services which lagged
behind potential demand.

118 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.L. 11 July, pp. 80, 118. O.S. Nock, The Caledonian
Railway (1962), 112.
119 H.C., 1905, XXX, 614-5.

243
 IX
London

1. The property ownership pattern

Introduction
In London the study of land ownership patterns presents many prob­
lems which are essentially those of scale—the area covered by the
buildings and immediate fringes of the cities of London and West­
minster was so large, even in the early nineteenth century; the recorded
history of transactions in central land so long and complex. Yet com­
parisons and contrasts may be drawn between the metropolis and the
great provincial cities.
In London’s environs, as in those of Manchester, Birmingham,
Glasgow and Liverpool, the same remarkable transition from field to
suburb could be observed within a generation. On the other hand, the
process was of longer standing, took place upon a proportionally
larger scale in London than in the other major cities, and the land­
holders tended to be recruited from the wealthiest and most firmly
established families of the day. They were not local aristocrats with
traditions which were essentially agricultural in nature, and who might
have experienced windfall acquisitions of suburban acreage beyond
their means, almost fortuitously, from an Enclosure Bill or the spoils
of local government; but included families who were amongst the
wealthiest in Britain, and who, like the Russells and Grosvenors, had
already had several generations of experience of managing urban
estates by the time the first railway approach routes were cut. Their
ranks were reinforced, not as in the provinces, primarily by speculative
solicitors, builders and land agents, but also by wealthy placemen from
the central government or the legal professions.
A further contrast which might be drawn between the patterns in
London and the great provincial cities stems from the long history of
London’s territorial expansion, and from the resources of the select
families who held title to the land over which expansion took place.
Because of their considerable resources, and the protracted nature of
the demand for building sites, the inner estates tended to remain
244
 LONDON

intact to a surprising extent. There was no tendency for the estates to

be dissolved as they were covered with buildings, In the provinces the
largest central estate holders (with the exceptions which have been
noted) tended to own only a street, or a few valuable but scattered
blocks of property. The difficulties of financing larger central develop­
ments, and the temptations presented by rapidly rising values, ensured
that the landholders least affected by the transformation of their land
from fringe to central, would be the corporate, ecclesiastical, and
charitable bodies—which were often constitutionally incapable of
divesting themselves of their heritages.
The consequence of this, observable to differing extents in the major
provincial cities, was a ‘ring’ effect in the tenurial patterns. Large ex-
manorial tracts of land were held in the immediate environs of the city,
forming an inner suburban ring of large holdings; but as the tide of
building advanced it tended to wash away the larger boundaries. In
London this was far less marked, and the large estates retained their
unity to an unusual extent. Partly, as has been suggested, this may be
explained by the gradual nature of the urban expansion over the
previous two centuries. The development of the Russell estate, for
instance, went back to the early eighteenth century; a time when
Glasgow and Liverpool had populations which had only just reached
five figures. The long history of the Russell estate’s development, in
the years before the urban population explosion, meant that batches
of the twenty-one year Repairing Leases, and even of the longer Build­
ing Leases, had had time to fall in; and the fines on their renewal
formed, in Scott-Thomson’s opinion, ‘a very pleasant capital account
for the Duke of Bedford’.1 Further sums to capitalise the crucial early
stages of urban estate development without splitting or alienating the
estates came from the substantial rent-rolls from improved agricultural
land which families like the Russells could command. In an emergency,
as under the improvident third Duke of Bedford, the timber on the
Woburn Abbey estates could be sold to prevent the sacrifice of city
properties.2 Or the funds to retain integrity of holding could come from
the infusion of capital gained in other fields; and in no other city were
these fields so numerous as in London.3
Whatever the reasons, more large tenurial units survived in London’s
inner district—between the central district and the suburbs—both
absolutely, and even proportionately, than in the other four cities
studied, and this fact was of great importance to the course of railway
development in the capital.
1 Gladys Scott Thomson, The Russells in Bloomsbury (1940), 186—7.
2 Ibid. 58, 188.
3 Ibid. 298-311. Perquisites and salaries in the central government were not the
least of these.
245
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The north and west

It had particular force, as may be seen from the accompanying sketch
map, in north-west London, where the major trunk route approaches
were dominated by the holdings of a few large landowners. From the
first purchase by the London and Birmingham railway company in
the 1830’s, to the Great Central’s dealings with Viscount Portman
sixty years later, the main-line companies’ plans were influenced by the
existence of large blocks of property in the north-west. ‘All the land we
bought in London’, the London and Birmingham company’s Law
Agent declared, ‘was entirely the property of Lord Southampton, and
then we got into Eton College property. Up to the river Brent, six miles
from London, there were scarcely more than 6 or 8 proprietors.’4

Property ownership and railways in London.

Southampton was one of three commoners connected with the

central government who established title to land when the prebendal
manors of Cantelows, Tottenhill and St. Pancras were sold to their
tenants in the eighteenth century. Charles Fitzroy, brother to the Prime
Minister, the Duke of Grafton, rented some 255 acres, the manor of
Cantelows (in the Kentish Town area), for £300 per annum from the
4 H.C., 1845 (420) X, 29 May, Q.5.

246
 LONDON

Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s.5 In 1768 the purchase was carried
through, the estate settled upon the Fitzroy family, and Charles was
created Baron Southampton in 1780.® His estate was at first developed
upon the basis of forty-year leases; a short period, which together with
the out-of-the-way situation of his estate, north of the New (later the
Euston) Road, led to a marked reluctance on the part of builders to
take up leases except for low quality houses.7 The houses on Southamp­
ton’s lands were officially described in the leases of 1809 as ‘third-rate’;
other epithets were applied to them within a few years. John Nash
described them as ‘mean’, and a disgrace to the north-western apex of
the metropolis; John White categorised the first of the five hundred
houses to be finished as inferior, ‘miserable modern erections’.8 Since
the fate of a successful and elegant estate did not hang in the balance, the
result was, in 1835, that Southampton did not offer the same deter­
mined opposition as the Duke of Bedford to the route and terminal
plans proposed, on behalf of the London and Birmingham railway
company, by Robert Stephenson.9 No restrictive clauses were insisted
upon to limit the railway company’s free use, for forges, workshops or
manufactories, of the land it purchased for its rights of way.10 The chief
grounds of debate were over the allowance for severance and com­
pensation, and the settlement of such claims finally came to half the
company’s disbursements.11
Adjacent to the lands acquired by Charles Fitzroy were the Church
estates acquired by Charles Pratt, created Earl Camden in 1786, and
those of Charterhouse bought by Charles Cocks, M.P., whose son was
created Baron Somers in 1784.12 The Camden, or Camden Town
estates, though originally laid out, under an Estate Bill in 1788, to
provide suburban dwellings for the industrious artisan, declined even
from this modest intention into an area of fourth-rate residences,
public and boarding houses.13 The neighbouring estate at Somers Town
was even more notorious. Optimistic miscalculations marred the initial
development of the area by Somers and Jacob Leroux during the war
6 The Survey of London, XIX (1938), 12.
6 Euston Hall, hear Thetford, was the seat of the Dukes of Grafton, and it was
this family link which gave the square and station on the New Road its name.
J. Bateman, Great Landowners of Great Britain (1883), 190.
7 Frank Banfield, The Great Landlords of London (1890), 19-20.
8 Hugh C. Prince, ‘North-west London, 1814-1863’, Greater London (ed. J. T.
Coppock and H. C. Prince, 1964), 95-6.
9 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1835, London and Birmingham Railway Extension.
Properties numbered 3-110.
10 5 and 6 Wm. IV, c. 56. Donald J. Olsen, Town Planning in London (1964), 151.
11 H.C., 1845 (420) X, 29 May, Q.30.
12 The Survey of London, XXIV (1952), 118.
13 HLRO, Main Papers, H.L., 20 May 1788, Earl Camden’s Estate. Donald J.
Olsen, op. cit. 63. Hugh C. Prince, loc. cit. 97.
247
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

years: ‘some unforeseen cause occurred, which checked the fervour of

building, and many carcasses of houses were sold for less than the
*14 After this setback builder’s were ‘allowed to
value of the materials.’11
build such houses as they pleased’, so that by 1826 the Duke of Bed­
ford’s agent felt it necessary to erect gates ‘so as to shut out the low
population of Somers Town.’15
Neither Camden nor Somers, therefore, had apparently much to lose
by direct deterioration of their property. Moreover the decisions
concerning this area were made between 1833 and 1835; and it is
doubtful that they, or anyone else, could have foreseen at this early
date the drastic effects which the London and Birmingham, the Great
Northern, and the Midland railway companies were to have upon the
great tract of land bordered by the New Road, Regent’s Park and
Hampstead Heath. The mean half-formed streets of fourth-rate cot­
tages, the dilapidated summer houses, clay pits and carpet-beating
grounds, described by Dickens, were intersected and isolated, and
although rapid building took place after the first railway arrived, it
was all dominated by the lines leading to the station; and by the
station itself, where the engines stood ‘bubbling and trembling, making
the walls quake, as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of
great powers yet unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet
achieved.’16 The main streets of Camden Town were given over to
railway hotels and boarding houses, cabstands and omnibuses, even
‘railway patterns in its draper’s shops and railway journals in the win­
dows of its newsmen.’
The other estates in this immediate area, north of the New Road,
belonged to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the Brewers’ Company, and
the Church; and their attitudes towards the railway companies were
also influenced, in a similar way to Camden’s, Somers’ and Southamp­
ton’s, by the nature of the building which had already taken place, and
the probable development prospects of their remaining land. The
Brewers’ Company had begun the development of its estate, in 1811,
by securing an Act enabling the borrowing of £50,000 to provide streets
and pavements for ground to contain 700 third and fourth-rate houses;
but by the 1840’s their estate was almost as bad as Somers Town, and
the presence of an evergrowing maze of yards and approach tracks
precluded any rehabilitation of the area over the next twenty years.17

11 The Survey of London, XXIV (1952), 118, 134.

16 Donald J. Olsen, op. cit. 64-65, 148.
16 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Ch. 6. Other quotations from this chapter
may be seen in W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1957), 202,
Hugh C. Prince, loc. cit. 110. .
17 HLRO, Main Papers, H.L., 30 May 1811, Brewers’ Company, St. Pancras
Paving Bill. The houses were to rent at £30 per annum.
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 LONDON

By the time of the Midland railway’s St. Pancras scheme, in the early
1860’s, the Brewers’ Company’s property, and that of the Skinners’
Company adjoining it, had come to form an unattractive zone of
intermingled craft and service industries, and of low grade rented
houses The area of Skinner Street and Brewer Street, demolished for
St Pancras station, was covered with packing sheds, small workshops,
wine vaults, slaughterhouses, and cheap cottage properties. But it is
noticeable, in the Books of Reference, that the property held by the
Brewers’ Company was rather unusual, in that a majority of tenants
held only one house and were resident in it themselves; which one may
take to have been a sign of respectability of a sort.18
The Church and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital holdings (see sketch
map) were far more retarded in their development than the estates so
far mentioned. They had only reached the stage—customary in all
rapidly expanding cities—of exploitation for their building materials.
This was the area described by Thomas Milne, in 1800, as the zone of
clay-pits, where the earth was removed and baked into bricks on the
spot, at the rate of four million per acre.19 Even at the time the Great
Northern railway company projected its entrance route and station at
King’s Cross, in 1845, the approach ground was still covered with
‘Tile kilns, brick and tile sheds, clay pits and brickmaking grounds.’20
Much of the rest consisted of large open fields, and of what were
euphemistically described as ‘pasture and ornamental grounds’.21
East of the Gray’s Inn Road, and bestraddling the Pentonville Road,
lay the Clerkenwell properties of Lord Calthorpe and the Marquis of
Northampton. Neither of these estates was of first-class residential
status. The Northampton leases, granted from 1815 or 1818 onwards,
were mostly taken up by middlemen, who were not prevented from
infilling the internal yards and courts with cheap houses.22 The Cal­
thorpe properties, were owned by the same family—the Goughs—who
were currently developing a residential estate of the highest quality
at Edgbaston, in Birmingham; but they stood in marked contrast to
that area.23 An Estate Bill of 1814 had proposed to treble the rents of
the Calthorpe land by paving it, and laying it out for building; but the
final result was low grade mixed commercial and residential develop-

18 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1863, Midland Railway Company, Extensions at St.

Paneras
19 G. B. G. Bull, ‘T. Milne’s Land Utilisation Map of the London Area in 1810’,
Geographical Journal, 122 (1956), 25-30.
20 Ibid. 28.
21 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1845, Direct Northern Railway. Properties numbered,
7, 36, 38, 71 and 77.
22 H.C., 1887 (260) XIII, 339, S.C. on Town Holdings. D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 103.
23 The Survey of London, XXIV (1952), 27.

249
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

ment.24 By the time the Metropolitan, Great Northern, and London,

Chatham and Dover railway companies intruded, in the 1860’s, the
district was not one which required skirting on grounds of amenity;
although, even so, expensive tunnelling was used for a good part of the
way from Ludgate Hill and Farringdon Street through to King’s
Cross.25
The other estates in the north-west/central area, belonging to the
Crown, Eton College, and the Duke of Bedford, fell into a very differ­
ent category. The Crown land was primarily reserved as open park,
but John Nash’s plans for it, in 1815, also included spacious terraces
and villas for ‘the first class of society’, and this, together with its
royal patronage, preserved the area absolutely from incursions by
railway companies.26 The projected North London Junction and
Regent’s Canal railways, which would have infringed upon the estate
in the 1840’s, failed to secure authorisation; and the Great Central’s
Marylebone station extension line skirted the western flank of the park.27
Eton College’s lands were likewise laid out for residential development
in 1824, but on a far less ambitious scale. The buildings were ‘inoffen­
sive, deliberately undistinguished houses . . . built to please respectable
but undiscerning clients’.28 Nevertheless they were villas of middle-class
type, and Eton College therefore insisted upon clauses in the London
and Birmingham Bill of 1833 which involved extensive tunnelling to
preserve the district’s future amenity. The Bedford estates, which have
attracted detailed historical study, were also residential areas of high
social pretensions. This had been true even of the smaller Covent
Garden estate in the early eighteenth century, though by the 1840’s
that area was mostly occupied by what the Duke’s steward, Christopher
Haedy, described as ‘a very poor and low class of persons’; market
porters, shoe menders, jobbing tradesmen, laundresses, charwomen and
labourers’.29 The Bloomsbury estate, on the other hand, had success­
fully resisted such deteriorating pressures. It had, on its eastern fringe,
a colony of ill-housed poor, many in domestic service; but the squares
of central Bloomsbury formed for a time probably the most fashionable
central residential area with such close access to the City and Inns of
Court. John Bourne and Christopher Haedy, the Duke’s agents,
pursued a rigorous policy of excluding nuisances; even the opening of
a genteel bookshop was subjected to close scrutiny.30 Construction of
James Burton’s and Thomas Cubitt’s fine terraces, which had hardly
24 HLRO, Main Papers, H.L., 11 May 1814, Lord Calthorpe’s Estate.
25 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 130.
26 H.C. Prince, loc. cit. 97, 100-1.
27 H.C., 1846, XVII, Report, p. 11.
28 H.C. Prince, loc. cit. 105.
29 D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 139-41. '•
30 Ibid. 113

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 LONDON

faltered, even during the Napoleonic Wars, received a check, however,

in the 1820’s.31 The main cause, in Haedy's opinion, was the successful
competition of rival houses of the first class, many built by Cubitt
himself, further west, on the Duke of Westminster’s estate, in the
Hyde Park Gardens and Belgrave Square area. ‘If Mr. Cubitt, when he
commenced building on this part of your Grace’s estate’, Haedy wrote
to the Duke of Bedford, ‘had foreseen that rivalry, he would no doubt
have erected houses which would have been less subject to its influence.
. . . The consequence of his not having done so was that the houses he
built were rather too large and expensive for the locality, and the
difficulty he found in procuring purchasers and tenants for them made
him hesitate to proceed with the erection of houses of a similar kind,
whilst at the same time he felt that to build houses of a smaller kind
and lower price would tend to lessen the value and interfere with the
sale and letting of those he had already built.’32
This was the dilemma in which the Duke’s agents and builders found
themselves on the Bloomsbury estate at the time the railway arrived.
The opening of the Euston, and later the King’s Cross and St. Pancras
terminals exacerbated the problem in two ways. In the first place it is
possible, as D. J. Olsen has suggested, that by unlocking new building
lands suitable for suburban residence and daily commuting to the
City, the railways may have ‘seriously diminished’ the element of
monopoly which the landowners of central districts had enjoyed.33
The building of exclusive mansions and villas in the outer suburbs
in the 1840's and 185O’s may have been undertaken for those who
failed to take up the fine town houses in Bloomsbury. It is hard to say;
although since it took forty years to complete one Bloomsbury Square,
one is inclined to suspect that there must, quite apart from the railways’
effect upon demand, have been serious miscalculation of the market
for houses in the central area. Free railway tickets were certainly
offered as an inducement to those purchasing villas with a rent of over
£50 per annum in Middlesex, but only a few were claimed; and of the
three railway companies with terminals in the New Road, only the
Great Northern railway made any serious attempt to cater for short­
distance traffic.31 Even the Great Northern’s suburban services were
described as ‘quite a small affair’ in the 1860’s, and still fewer suburban
trains ran into the L. & N.W. station at Euston.35
31 Ibid. 55.
32 Ibid. 40.
33 Ibid. 150
34 Merlyn Rees, The Economic and Social Development of Extra-Metropolitan
Middlesex, 1800-1914, (London, M.Sc. thesis, 1954), 55. T. C. Barker and Michael
Robbins, op. cit. 53, point out that only 60 of these passes had been issued by 1857,
and fewer than 100 on the Eastern Counties routes.
36 C. H. Grinling, The History of the Great Northern Railway, 1845-1902 (1903),
202.
251
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Whether the neighbouring railway stations were responsible for the

scarcity of potential tenants in the 1840’s to 187O’s or not, there can
be no doubt that the road traffic generated by the stations had a most
unwelcome effect upon Bloomsbury’s residential amenity. A partially
successful attempt was made to bar the estate to north-south passage
by carts, omnibuses, empty hackney carriages, and to all vehicles after
11 p.m., by erecting gates along the northern boundary. In this way
some of the heavy traffic flow to the stations was diverted round three
sides of a block, to skirt Bloomsbury; and the Duke of Bedford retained
this privilege until 1890, despite public opposition and inconvenience.
‘I am a constant passenger by the Great Northern Railway,’ the Prime
Minister complained in 1890, ‘and I must say that I have never passed
the Sacred Gates in going to the Great Northern Station without mental
imprecations against the persons who originally set them up and the
persons who have since maintained them there.’36 However, though
the main stream of traffic may have been diverted, the functional
influence of three large trunk railway termini was still reflected in the
Bedford Office’s losing battle to restrain the conversion of houses in
the Bloomsbury estate into private hotels and boarding houses during
the late nineteenth century.
In the smaller Bedford estate, at Figs Mead, north of the New Road,
the effect of the railways was still more direct. The area was intersected,
at Ampthill Square, by the final approaches of the London and Birm­
ingham railway to its terminus at Euston, and what had been laid out
as an estate of third and fourth-rate houses for ‘the higher class of
merchants’, bankers’ and counsels’ clerks, attorneys’ managing clerks,
clerks in the law offices, and persons in trade’ steadily declined between
the early 1840’s and the 1880’s.37 Here the deteriorating effect of a
main-line surface railway upon a residential neighbourhood with even
modest social pretensions was demonstrated, and the Bedford Office
subsequently deterred or blocked all further attempts to drive lines
through the main estate. In the plethora of railway schemes in 1846,
for example, no extension from the London and Birmingham terminus
was projected, although both the Direct Northern and Direct London
and Manchester railways both submitted schemes for southward
extensions to Holborn.38 Later schemes, submitted in 1861 and 1871,
for an underground link joining Euston and St. Pancras main-line
stations to Charing Cross likewise skirted the Bedford estate, by
adopting a cut-and-cover route down Tottenham Court Road.39
Further west upon the New Road lay the Portland and Portman
36 D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 149. Mark Searle, Turnpikes and Toll Bars (n.d.), II, 724.
37 D. J. Olsen, op. cit., 67-9, 151.
38 Supra Plate 1, and H.C., 1846, XVII, Report p. 11.
89 BTHR PYB 1/535, 23 March 1871, pp. 1-4.

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 LONDON

estates, with the Eyre estates a little to the north; and south of them,
bordering Crown parkland, lay the Duke of Westminster’s property.
All were similar in quality to the Bedford estate, and apart from the
Metropolitan underground works carried out along the New Road in
the 1860’s, remained immune to railway intrusions until the closing
decade of the century. The houses and villas which had been laid out,
in 1794, upon land which had been in the Eyre family since 1732, were
by no means cramped in style, but like Somers Town they were treated
to street closures by their more elegant neighbours to prevent inter­
communication.40 The neighbouring estate belonged to Edward
Berkeley Portman, descendant of a sixteenth century Lord Chief
Justice; and between 1780 and 1815 the building had commenced, in
the Baker Street/Bryanston Square area, of a first-rate series of squares,
streets and fine terraces upon Portman’s property.41
Two such estates presented a formidable barrier to the last and
most expensive urban terminal scheme in London, that proposed by
the Great Central. Their first Bill in 1891 was, in fact, thrown out on
the grounds of damage to property; and the modified Bill, in 1893,
agreed to comply with burdensome and expensive restrictions. A
lengthy tunnel was to be constructed, eight-foot walls erected to conceal
the trains, no advertisement hoardings were to be erected, nor dwellings
for re-housing the working class in Marylebone or St. John’s Wood,
coal yards were to be roofed in, and railway buildings to be ‘reasonably
ornamental’ in character.42
The Portland, and northern-most Westminster estates, may be
mentioned very briefly, since, as may be seen from the sketch map,
they lay altogether out of the route of railway schemes. Even the
Metropolitan underground only ran along the northern border of the
Portland properties at the New Road. The Portland properties had been
laid out as early as 1717 by Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford and
Mortimer. The property was then transferred with his only daughter,
as her settlement, when she married William Bentinck, second Earl of
Portland.43 In the 1760’s and 1770’s Robert Adam and John Johnson
laid out further squares with houses of the first-rate, worthy of the
aristocracy, ‘judges, generals and Irish bishops’ who occupied them.44
Here, perhaps as clearly as anywhere in England, one can see the
tangible signs of the landed aristocracy’s important role in moulding
urban growth. Indeed the Street Directory can be read in conjunction

40 W. Besant, London North of the Thames, (1911), p. 337. H.C. Prince, loc. cit.
133-4.
41 Ibid. 87.
12 Ibid. 133-4.
43 W. Besant, op. cit. 337-8.
44 John Summerson, Georgian London (1962), 164.
253
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

with Burke’s Peerage. Harley, Cavendish, Vere and Hoiles Streets, the
family names; Oxford, Portland and Mortimer, the titles; Henrietta and
Margaret, two of the heiresses; Wigmore and Welbeck, the country
seats.
The Westminster estate was equally aristocratic. Sir Thomas Gros­
venor had acquired the ex-manorial lands of Ebury and Neyte by
marriage to Mary Davies in 1676, and building in the Grosvenor
Square area had started by 1695. Sir Richard Grosvenor, one of Pitt’s
electioneers, received the titles Viscount Belgrave and Earl Grosvenor;
the titles of Marquess of Westminster and Duke of Westminster were
added to the family later.45 Although the Mayfair estate lay in the
shelter of the Crown lands of Hyde and Green Parks and was never at
any time included in railway projectors’ schedules for compulsory
purchase, the same cannot be said of the Grosvenors’ estates further
south. Admittedly the southern properties were later and less fully
developed. In Rocque’s map (1746), although Grosvenor Square is
completed and Berkeley Square commenced, on the Mayfair estate
the southern holdings were still vacant land.46 Tothill fields, later
Belgravia, were covered, at this time, with Neat (i.e. Cow) Houses and
market Gardens; Lord Grosvenor only secured an Act to enable the
draining of the area in 1826.47 But open fields which lay within a mile
of Parliament itself had a very high intrinsic value. This was by no
means one of the paper estates for which plans were sometimes con­
jured up when the railways entered the land market, but a bona fide
speculation with first class prospects. Thomas Cubitt’s and Seth
Smith’s houses were finding ready lessees at the time London’s first
railway, the London and Greenwich, nosed its way into the south­
eastern suburbs.
The scale and quality of the Grosvenor’s developments in West­
minster and Belgravia were reflected in the appreciation of land values
which, one might have thought, would be enough to deter even the
hardiest railway speculators. The major companies themselves, ap­
proaching London from the north-west and west, had not had the
problem of severing a first class residential estate or even of driving
extensively through a built-up area. Those companies approaching from
the east, which had proceeded through a greater amount of built-up
area had found themselves financially embarrassed, even though the
housing demolished was of low quality.

45 Charles T. Gatty, Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury (1921), I, 28-9, 200.
Frank Banfield, The Great Landlords of London (1890), 53. W. Besant, op. cit. 155-6.
Michael Harrison, Lord of London: a Biography of the 2nd Duke of Westminster
(1966), 19. *
46 John Rocque, A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1746).
47 W. Besant, op. cit. 184.

254
 LONDON

Yet in 1846, an elaborate, if somewhat unrealistic, project for a

railway passing through the centre of the Grosvenor estate in West­
minster was submitted to Parliament, It was to work on the atmospheric
principle, and to form a ‘railway street’, 160 feet wide to accommodate
four lines of traffic, having rows of trees along each side, and following
the route shown in Plate I.48 Land for a station would be taken at the
mews behind Westminster Hospital.49 The promoters of this scheme,
known as the ‘Great Western, Brentford, and Central Junction Termi­
nus Railway’, estimated £1,100,000 would cover the cost of the section
from Westminster out to the Great Western railway company’s track
at West Drayton. The Commissioners rejected the scheme in favour of
the South Western railway company’s terminus at Nine Elms, south of
the river, and its Waterloo extension, newly sanctioned. ‘We are not
disposed to recommend the establishment of a Terminus in the heart of
Westminster, at the expense of much interference with property, and
probably with future improvements, in that part of the Metropolis.’50
Yet, absurd though the scheme might seem, in fact it anticipates in
many ways the railway pattern which later emerged, at great expense
and after twenty years’ pressure by established companies. The route
followed—along the Embankment from the City, south-west through
Westminster, curving north-west at Sloane Square— bears more than a
passing resemblance to that adopted by the Metropolitan District
underground railway twenty years later; and the ambition of a con­
nection between the Great Western railway and a new West-End
terminus was also realised at the same time, in 1863, with the opening
to traffic of the Victoria joint station (No. 9 on sketch map).51
The costs of these railways through the Grosvenor estate, cut in the
1860’s, although not as excessive as those incurred at Marylebone by
the Great Central, were nevertheless extremely heavy. The Metro­
politan District railway was involved in street widening and slum
clearance at Tothill Street, and a great burden of compensation pay­
ments and accommodation works. Over £3,000,000 was expended on the
three miles from South Kensington to Westminster.52 The subsequent
traffic could not bear such heavy charges and show any worthwhile
profit. For a time the Metropolitan District managed to meet the
guaranteed payment on its 5% Preference Shares, but the Ordinary
Shares paid nothing, or an occasional 1 %. The later completion of the
eastern portion of the Inner Circle route, to link up with the Metro.
48 H.C., 1846, XVII, Report, p. 14.
49 Westminster Hospital was then in Broad Sanctuary, opposite the Abbey. I am
indebted to Dr. F. W. H. Sheppard for this information.
50 H.C., 1846, XVII, Report, p. 15.
51 Edwin Course, op. cit. 97. H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 33 and T. C. Barker and
Michael Robbins, op. cit. 150.
62 Ibid. 152.
255
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

politan underground railway, reduced even the payment on Preference

Shares to 2| %.53
The remaining West End terminal to be noted (No. 3 on sketch map)
was the much earlier station belonging to the Great Western railway
company, and located in Paddington, upon land belonging to the Bishop
of London. Originally the whole manor had belonged to the Bishop of
London, and the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, but as time passed
large portions had been alienated to the Thistlethwaite family, and the
Pickering estate.54 Very little building of any sort had been completed
at the time the Great Western railway arrived, except along the Edge­
ware and the Uxbridge roads; although a pattern of streets had been
laid out, oriented N.N.E. in a slightly tilted grid-iron pattern—Spring
Street, Westbourne Street, Ranelagh Street, Praed and Conduit Streets.
Within a few hundred yards of its terminal, however, the Great Western
passed through fields and parkland; and the terminal site itself was
described as ‘a certain field lying between the Paddington land and the
Turnpike Road.’55 For these reasons the land was inexpensive, and the
company was even able to buy sufficient land to begin building before
compulsory purchase powers were granted in July 1837; it was also
able to extend later to an enlarged station, designed by Brunel and
Digby Wyatt, with very little difficulty. The greater part of the necessary
land was already in their possession before 1851, when the company’s
board sanctioned the extension.56
The Great Western railway company’s land dealings, therefore, were
early, simple, inexpensive, and in marked contrast to some of the other
metropolitan-based companies. But one of the reasons for this was the
rather remote situation chosen, and attempts to gain a closer approach
to the Cities of London and Westminster, and even to the West End,
led the Great Western to adopt an unusually active role in the develop­
ment of an underground link railway.

The south and east

South of the river the pattern of landownership bore many resem­
blances to the outer western approaches. Like them the area was
relatively undeveloped. Along the southern bank of the river, and along
the roads leading back from the main bridges, building had taken place,
particularly densely along the Borough High Street of Southwark and
in the Mint district. It was, however, very mixed in type, chaotic in
63 Ibid. 175.
64 W. Besant, op. cit. 143-50. D. A. Reeder, Capital Investment in the western
suburbs of Victorian London (Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 1965), 266. John Britton, Map
of St. Marylebone (1837).
66 E. T. MacDermot, op. cit. I, 13.
68 Edwin Course, op. cit. 189-90. H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 110.
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 LONDON

layout, and poor in quality; riverside trades, timberyards and rope­

walks, warehouses and cheap cottages.
As in western London the Church was the principal landowner.
In Southwark the Bishop of Winchester had extensive holdings,
including a 58 acre estate laid out for 1800 houses.57 To the south-east,
in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, ownership was fragmented, apart
from Sir William Gomme’s holdings.58 In this district, however, build­
ing had not ventured very far from the riverside, so that it was possible
for the London and Greenwich railway to approach to within four
hundred yards of its London Bridge terminus through open fields, and
to purchase spare land alongside the terminus for expansion.59 The
Bricklayers’ Arms extension and station was likewise laid out on open
ground, north of the Old Kent Road.60
The manor of Lambeth also belonged to the Church—in this case
represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury. To these very extensive
lands (some 1500 acres) more was added by an Enclosure Act of 1806;
and in 1820 the granting of long building leases was negotiated.61 To
enable this a private Estate Act, citing the convenience of Lambeth for
‘houses, warehouses, and other buildings’, was secured and small local
firms of builders, most of them operating within a mile of their yards,
began to develop large tracts of south London for ‘clerks, shopkeepers,
skilled artisans and the rank and file of the commercial world’.62
‘Despite the wide variety of meaning which the term “manor” could
imply, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,’ F. H. W.
Sheppard writes, in The Survey of London, Vol. XXVI, ‘the manors
still exercised an exceedingly important influence on the development
of their areas.’63 The length of lease granted, and the scale of fines for
renewal, could be used as instruments to control the type of housing
erected. If the worst came to the worst, the ultimate step was occasion­
ally taken of pulling down the existing buildings when the reversion of a
leasehold fell due.64
These instruments of control assumed, however, that the Church
had a consistent policy to pursue regarding housing on its lands, and
there is little to suggest that this was the case. It may be that the Church
deliberately eschewed the attempts to set up socially select residential
estates, and felt that it would be inappropriate for such a corporate
57 The Survey of London, XXII (1950), 45.
58 W. Besant, London South of the Thames (1912), 152.
59 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 46.
60 Edwin Course, The Evolution of the Railway Network of South-East England
(London Ph.D. thesis, 1958), 314.
61 46 Geo. Ill, c. 57; 1 Geo. IV, c. 48.
62 The Survey of London, XXIII (1951), 4, XXVI (1956), 10-12.
83 Ibid. XXVI (1956), 3.
64 Ibid. XXV (1955), 56.
K 257
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

body to seek to exclude the poor by a rigorous covenant policy, of the

type followed by J. R. Bourne or H. T. Boodle on behalf of the aristo­
cratic owners north of the river.65 It may simply be that the district’s
location and the nature of its pre-existing zoning precluded any con­
certed attempt to lay out better-class properties. The result, at all events,
was that in south London the railways, when they sought for closer
approaches to the City and West End, or even for surface links with
each other, were able to deal with one or two major ecclesiastical
proprietors only. This, together with the generally poor quality of the
buildings scheduled, exempted the southern schemes from the general
restriction imposed by Parliament upon railway schemes in inner
London in 1846. ‘The property to be disturbed,’ the Commissioners
had reported, ‘and consequently the cost of furnishing the accommo­
dation to the public would, on this account ... be proportionately
smaller.’ Other factors, it should be mentioned, also helped to persuade
the Commissioners ‘to look upon the close approach of the Southern
railways to the eastern and western bridges of the Metropolis in a more
favourable light’: there would be less disturbance to traffic, or to the
improvement of thoroughfares; and Surrey and Kent had a greater
number of people ‘having occupations in London, and are more
frequented for occasional relaxation than the corresponding parts of
Essex, Middlesex or Hertfordshire.’66
The wide areas of the clerical manors, which made it possible to
advance from Nine Elms to Waterloo, from London Bridge to Charing
Cross and Cannon Street, over property which belonged almost
entirely to the Bishops of Winchester, Rochester and London, and to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, undoubtedly reduced the delay, litigation
and expense similar schemes encountered in east and north-east Lon­
don. The Church offered no opposition to the schemes, possibly
because, in common with the Police Commissioners, it viewed some of
the properties which it owned with very mixed feelings; and indeed in
some parishes the odd situation arose of vestries opposing schemes to
which the Church, as principal proprietor, had given assent.67
From the railway companies’ point of view the result was to bring
within the bounds of practicality certain schemes for surface railways
which could not have been contemplated in other parts of the Metro­
polis so near the central district; but although the expense was reduced,
0 6 Ralph Clutton was the agent for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and spoke
of the ‘great tendency on the part of the people who have building estates rather to
seek to develop them for dwellings for the middle class'. H.C., 1884-5, XXX, 211,
and D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 21. The ecclesiastical policies are discussed in G. F. A. Best,
Temporal Pillars (1964), 480-98.
66 H.C., 1846, XVII, Report p. 4. s
67 Ibid. QQ.3029-3100 and App. I, p. 249. The church wardens of St. Saviours’
Southwark petition against the L. & S.W. railway company.

258
 LONDON

it cannot be said that the schemes were cheap. The one mile and a
quarter by viaduct from Nine Elms to the derelict pleasure gardens
which occupied the site of Waterloo station, was estimated to cost
£800,000—a very fair sum for 1846.68 Moreover Charles Lee, the
surveyor and valuer, who purchased the land for the London and
South Western railway company, admitted later that it had finally cost
them £1,250,000.69 The South Eastern railway company’s extension
from London Bridge to Charing Cross, planned in 1858, was estimated
in John Hawkshaw’s and Samuel Smiles’ report to the Directors, to
cost £1,070,000. This was discreetly reduced to £800,000 in the esti­
mates laid before Parliament; but the final bill came to £3,000,000.70
North of the river, in the eastern fringe of the City into which the
railways penetrated, the same problems recurred in aggravated form.
Here the largest owners were the historic Companies of London and
the Corporation itself. The buildings included many which were of low
quality, like those on the south bank;but since they were contiguous to
the expanding commercial district their values tended to rise even more
rapidly and prohibitively. They also differed from the southern railway
approaches in another respect. Strict legislative boundaries were set in
the eastern outskirts in 1846, partly as a consequence of the con­
siderable interference with property and traffic already evident from the
cutting of routes and stations carried out in the late 1830’s by the Eastern
Counties (Bishopsgate, No. 5 on map) and London and Blackwall (Fen­
church Street, No. 4 on map) railway companies. Thereafter, although
G. P. Bidder repeatedly urged schemes for an advance to the Artillery
Grounds, or Finsbury Circus, no further encroachments were allowed
until the Broad Street and Liverpool Street schemes in the early 1860’s.
Even the two earlier viaducts through the eastern outskirts, though
they had not encountered unexpected opposition, had certainly en­
countered unexpected expense, stemming from the property transac­
tions involved.71 Tn the Eastern Counties’ case there were also technical
difficulties ‘consequent upon passing through crowded building
property, intersected with sewers, old ditches and numerous cesspools’;
but the main charge was that for land.72 John Duncan, solicitor to the
Eastern Counties company, complained of prices based upon 26 years’
purchase being allowed, even on ‘houses of a very low description, not
worth above 14 or 15 years’ purchase.’73
The London and Blackwall railway company also encountered
68 W. Besant, London South of the Thames (1912), 10.
69 BTHR PYB/112/6, 19 July 1860, p. 115.
70 Edwin Course, op. cit. (1958), 251.
71 Jack Simmons, ‘Railway History in English Local Records’, JTH, I (1954),
163-4.
72 BTHR EC 1/5, 6 September 1842, and Survey of London, XXVII, 252-3.
73 H.C., 1845 (420) X, 29 May 1845, QQ.80, 84.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

difficulties connected with the purchase of property, which went further

than it was prepared to admit publicly. In 1840 the Chairman put a
bold face on his company’s negotiations with landowners. ‘The progress
making, in regard to the extension of the line, although not apparent
to the eye, is considerable; the claims of the several parties whose
property is destined to be removed have been duly considered, and
negotiations are advancing for the purchase of the same. The Freeholds
are, in a great measure, in the hands of the Corporation of London,
and they have already been agreed for.’74 This cheerful progress report
failed to reveal the considerable embarrassment currently being caused
by the number of other residuary interests clamouring for compensa­
tion: the various leaseholders and the tenants, many of whom were
running small businesses on the premises and put in claims for loss of
business connections. Moreover, there was also a great deal of other
property in fragmented ownership, which William Routh had tactfully
left out of account in his Report to the half-yearly General Meeting.
Similar problems of land purchase recurred two decades later, when
the newly constituted Great Eastern attempted to improve upon the
Bishopsgate facilities. G. P. Bidder had, in fact, been Robert Stephen­
son’s assistant in the London and Blackwall railway company when the
extension was made to Fenchurch Street; but he still based his decisions in
the 1860’s upon two miscalculations.75 The first was that Robert Sinclair’s
estimate of £1,363,000 would be reasonably accurate; in fact the total
expenditure came to between two and two and a half millions.76 The
second was that it would be possible to write off the whole Liverpool
Street project as a general contribution to his company’s traffic prospects.
No additional fare for the extension would be charged at all, the benefit
would come indirectly, he told the Parliamentary Select Committee,
from the ‘suburban gentlemen’ who would patronise the line.77
The growth of traffic materialised, on a scale far larger than that
anticipated, but no one would have used Bidder’s epithet ‘suburban
gentlemen’ to describe the 20,000 2d-fare travellers who poured daily
into Liverpool Street by the early morning workmen’s trains. Within
three years the Great Eastern was compelled to approach Parliament
for powers to raise a further £3,000 00u to set the company on its feet.78
Adjoining Liverpool Street was the North London railway company’s
extension fine and terminus (Broad Street), authorised in 1861. Indeed
G. P. Bidder’s first hope had been to share the facilities and expenses by

74 Six-monthly Report, 26 August 1840, London and Blackwall railway company.

75 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1864, 19 July, p. 32, S.C. on Great Eastern (Metropolitan
Station and Railway).
78 Ibid. p.36. Cecil J. Allen, The Great Eastern Railway (1955), 58.
77 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1864, 19 July, p. 11. ’
78 W. M. Acworth, The Railways of England (1900), 409.
260
 LONDON

bringing the Great Eastern in to the same site; but the Great Eastern
company’s bill proposing this had been thrown out in 1862.79 The
North London line was the successor to the East and West India Docks
and Birmingham Junction railway company, planned by Robert
Stephenson and Henry Martin to give access from Camden Town, on
the L. & N.W. line, to the riverside docks. Naturally, it was expected,
with such a route, that the main traffic would be in goods; but, in fact,
it proved popular with a large number of passengers, who travelled
round the semicircle and along the spur to Fenchurch Street station.
Its building had been attended by the usual miscalculations con­
cerning land purchase. Stephenson’s estimate of 1845 had stated
£600,000 would cover the eight miles of track and the cost of land; in
fact the land purchase alone came to £569,000.80 Nevertheless its
construction, along what was the frontier of building development in
the mid-1840’s, was extremely timely, the 8d or Is return fare gave a
reasonable return, and the company had no terminal expenses except
the burdensome toll for using Fenchurch Street station.81 One might
say that it was one of the few urban railways constructed at a bargain
price, and its unusual dividend performance—a steady five to seven
percent—reflected this.82 In 1861 Henry Martin, on the instructions of the
North London railway company, prepared a plan for a direct extension
southwards into the City, following a route parallel to the Kingsland
Road; and over the next four years the line and terminal were cut, at a
cost of £1,000,000.8384
The property through which these inter-related railways in the
1840’s and 1860’s passed in north-east London, was not divided into
large estates, controlled by strict policies. The largest holdings were those
belonging to the Tyssen-Amherst family, descendants of the Francis
Tyssen who had bought the manor of Hackney; but William Amhurst
Tyssen-Amherst himself did not hope to pursue an exclusive estate
plan.81 There was, his agent told a Select Committee in 1887, plenty
of scope for building houses of different classes, for artisans as well as
the wealthier classes.85 Consequently, like Southampton, Somers or
Camden, he raised no difficulties when 250 of his properties were
scheduled in 1845 for the E. & W.I.D. & B.J. link line, 290 for the
79 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1864, 19 July, p. 4.
80 HLRO, P & S, 1846, E. & W.I.D. & B.J. Railway.
81 Six-monthly Report, 24 February 1852, London and Blackwall railway com­
pany. Tolls from the E. & W.I.D. railway opened ‘a new era’ in the Blackwall
company’s finances.
82 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 52, 174. The company was renamed
‘North London’ in 1853.
33 Ibid. 163.
84 W. Besant, London North of the Thames (1911) 546.
85 D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 21.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Broad Street extension of 1861, and 100 for the Liverpool Street
extension of 1864.86 Likewise Sir William Fowle Fowle Middleton, who
held extensive lands in the same areas, was not amongst those landlords
objecting before the Select Committees.
Unlike Tyssen-Amherst and Middleton, the Corporation of London,
which held a relatively small number of properties on the Liverpool
Street extension line, did take steps both to petition against the line,
and to send counsel to represent them; although, to judge from the
Common Serjeant’s cross-questioning, their primary objection was to
the viaduct itself rather than to the sale of property. Amongst the City
Companies in the path of the Broad Street extension were the Gold­
smiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Poulterers and Carpenters, holding
14 to 22 parcels of land each. On the Great Eastern’s route to Liverpool
Street, the Carpenters, Poulterers, Merchant Taylors, Grocers, Skinners
and Goldsmiths held similar portions.87
Moreover, as the Plans and Sections and Books of Reference show,
these properties held by City Companies and large landowners con­
stituted only a relatively small proportion of the 3,300 parcels purchased
for the Broad Street/Liverpool Street schemes. The ownership of the
rest was extremely fragmented; a feature which at the same time
rendered it possible to ignore possible opposition, and enhanced both
the direct compensation charges, and the legal costs associated with the
purchase of multiply-owned properties. Or—even more ominously—
the properties had been gathered into groups of twenty or thirty by
solicitors, or by trustees under wills, who, since similar schemes had
been projected as early as 1846, can hardly have been unaware of the
possible windfall increments railway purchase might bring.

2. Conditions of competition between railway companies

The competitive schemes for urban railways and terminals in Victorian
London were influenced by exclusive features peculiar to the metropolis.
As already mentioned, in Chapter 2, strict limits to the scope of railway
encroachment were laid down, in 1846, and re-affirmed in modified
form in 1863. From this legislative intervention sprang many of the
special issues of London’s railway politics: in particular, the inner link
railway and central station controversies; and in general, the failure
of competition to develop between the large companies serving London
from the north and the south. Competition, of a fluctuating but at
times vehement nature, existed between the railways with southern
86 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846 (E. & W.I.D.), 1861 (North London Extension to
City), 1864, (Great Eastern, Metropolitan Station and Railways).
87 In each case the City Company holdings were concentrated most heavily in St.
Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. Ibid. 1861 and 1864.
262
 LONDON

approaches: the South Eastern, the London, Brighton and South Coast,
the London Chatham and Dover, and the London and South Western
railway companies. It also existed to a certain degree between the major
main-line companies approaching London from the north: the London
and North Western, the Great Northern, the Midland, and the Great
Central railway companies. The river Thames, and the urban bulk of
London itself, however, remained an impenetrable barrier to the
development of competitive through-routes to a degree which requires
further explanation.88
To attempt to give a blow-by-blow account of the rivalries of the
different groups, and to trace the genealogies of the pioneer, client, and
main-line building companies would expand the present Case History
to unreasonable length. Fortunately there is no need to do this to
establish the necessary points of analysis, for although London was the
focus of activity for so many railway projectors in the nineteenth cen­
tury, a corresponding interest in the affairs of the capital and of its
railway network has been shown by historians. The chronicles of
individual companies by the railway historians tend naturally to
converge on London: Williams and Barnes (Midland), Grinling (Great
Northern), Steel (London and North Western), MacDermot (Great
Western), Allen (Great Eastern), Dow (Great Central), Marshall
(Southern railways). In addition, London’s railways have been the
subject of a large number of detailed full-length studies (of which the
most notable are those by Course and White); of original monographs
(notably by Baker, Dyos, Hall, Lee, Nock, Robbins and Sekon); and
also of a modern bibliography (Ottley), and a modern history (Barker
and Robbins), which come as near to being definitive as can reasonably
be expected. To these writings, listed in a footnote, the reader may be
referred for a detailed narrative of the rivalry between companies.89
88 Infra sec. 4.
89 F. S. Williams, The Midland Railway, its Rise and Progress (5th ed. 1888).
E. G. Barnes, The Rise of the Midland Railway, 1844-1874 (1966). C. H. Grinling,
The History of the Great Northern Railway, 1845-1902 (1903). W. L. Steel, The
History of the London and North Western Railway. (1914). E. T. MacDermot,
History of the Great Western Railway (1927-31, and C. R. Clinker revised ed.,
1964). C. J. Allen, The Great Eastern Railway (1961). G. Dow, Great Central (1959
and 1962). C. F. Dendy Marshall, A History of the Southern Railway (R. W. Kidner
revised ed., 1963). Edwin Course, London Railways (1962). H. P. White, A Regional
History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. Ill, Greater London (ed. D. St. J.
Thomas, 1963). J. C. Y. Baker, The Metropolitan Railway (Lingfield, 1960). H. J.
Dyos, JTH, I (1953), 3-19, II (1955), 11-21, 90-100, III (1957), 23-30. Peter Hall,
‘The Development of Communications’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
H. C. Prince, 1964). Charles E. Lee, The Metropolitan District Railway (Lingfield,
1956). O. S. Nock, British Steam Railways (1961), Ch. 8. R. M. Robbins, The North
London Railway (South Godstone, 1953). G. A. Sekon, Locomotion in Victorian
London, (1938). G. Ottley, A Bibliography of British Railway History, (1965). T. C.
Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of London Transport, I, (1963).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The general consequence, already observed in other cities exposed

to competition, was the re-duplication of stations and of connecting
lines, and/or violent disagreements over the use of shared facilities.
Similar results can be observed on both sides of the river, but perhaps
it was to the south, where greater latitude was allowed by legislation
and landownership patterns, that the effects upon the urban map were
more pervasive and lasting. Apart from the London and South Western
railway company’s straightforward advance from Nine Elms to Water­
loo (No. 7 on sketch map), all the other principal stations established
as a result of the southern railway companies’ activity—London Bridge,
Bricklayers’ Arms, Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street, (Nos. 1,
6, 9, 10, 11 on sketch map) fit precisely into the framework of the
competition between companies. Indeed, it is impossible to set forth
any rational explanation of the location and timing of these major
termini which does not take into account the changing relationships
between the four major companies involved.
The building and constant re-building of the earliest London termi­
nal, at London Bridge, is a case in point. Authorised in 1833 and
opened in 1836 by the London and Greenwich railway company, which
operated a mere four miles of track, the site was soon expanded as
larger toll-paying railways (the London and Croydon, the London and
Brighton, and the South Eastern railway companies) began to use the
viaduct and station.90 An adjoining station was built on spare ground
to the north, in the late thirties, by the Croydon company; but ex­
changed, after a few years, for the London and Greenwich’s original
site, where a new and enlarged joint-station was constructed. Quarrels
about facilities and about the toll (of 4|d per passenger) charged by
the London and Greenwich led, first of all to the building of a ‘secession­
ist’ station at Bricklayers ’Arms (No. 6 on map) by the South Eastern,
and later to the leasing of the Greenwich Company by the South East­
ern. Bricklayers’ Arms remained as a type of‘folly’, fulfilling a function
as a goods station (to which it was re-classified in 1852) but built in a
style sufficiently grandiose to make a suitable reception point for
Napoleon III.91 A further merger—between the London and Brighton,
and the London and Croydon companies, which became the London,
Brighton and South Coast railway company in 1845—reduced the
number of protagonists at London Bridge from four to two in the late
1840’s; but the competition between the two remained as intense, and
was given physical expression in August 1850 by the construction of a
dividing wall down the middle of the station.92 Both the L.B. & S.C.
and the South Eastern continued, over the next twenty years, to pursue
90 Edwin Course, op. cit. 19 et seq. H. P. White, op. cit. 22 et seq.
91 Edwin Course, op. cit. 72. ’’
92 Ibid. 37.

264
 LONDON

policies of securing separate bridge-head stations on the north bank;

policies finally realised at Victoria (L.B. & S.C.) and Charing Cross
(S.E.). This competitive extension of the southern lines was further
stimulated by the emergence of a third major company in the late
185O’s—the London, Chatham and Dover railway company.
The London, Chatham and Dover company was an energetic late­
comer to the scene, which played a role in south London similar to
that which the M.S. & L. played in Manchester and Liverpool; and in
view of its ambitious urban railway building projects it is not surprising
that its dividend performance was as poor as that of the M.S. & L.93
Originally authorised in August 1853 as the modest, 48|-mile, East
Kent railway company, within five years the L.C. & D. had built
extensions and secured running powers which took it across the other
southern companies’ territory to a new shared terminal at Victoria
(No. 9 on sketch map).94 At first it had drawn a good part of its support
from local speculative builders or landowners, but when the railway
contractors Morton Peto and Edward Betts lent their backing to the
company its affairs took on a new impetus, and its projects in south
London became more ambitious. This phase in its affairs received a
set-back in 1866, when the collapse of the banking house of Overend
and Gurney brought down Peto and Betts (who left debts of £4,000,000
outstanding), but by that time the shared station at Victoria and the
L.C. & D. extension across the river to Farringdon Street had already
been opened. The typical L.C. & D. strategy, in O.S. Nock’s words,
was to share stations and to make link lines ‘connecting with every­
thing possible, in every direction’.95 The resulting L.C. & D. linkages
with the Great Western, L.B. & S.C., G.N., Midland, L. & S.W., and
Metropolitan companies produced an incredibly complicated and space­
consuming system of connecting lines and intersecting train services.
The L.C. & D. was a major contributor to the ‘Battersea Tangle’ in the
south west; and even in the central district the L.C. & D. carved out a
triangle junction to allow through connection with Moorgate and
King’s Cross via the so-called ‘Widened Lines’.
Victoria, Charing Cross and Cannon Street stations took their place
in this competitive pattern. The Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway
in 1858 was a promotional company of the type with which John
Fowler was associated in London, Liverpool and Glasgow. As already
mentioned, the L.B. & S.C. company was anxious to extend beyond
the shared station at London Bridge, and therefore put up £450,000 of
the promotion company’s capital of £675,000 in 1858. After an
83 H. P. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. II,
Southern England (ed. D. St. J. Thomas, 1961), 39 et. seq.
04 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit 142, 151.
85 O. S. Nock, op. cit. 110-3.
k* 265
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

unsuccessful attempt to take over entire control in 1860, it continued

to share Victoria with the L.C. & D., and with those companies
running through the West London Extension line or the L.C. & D.
Farringdon Street branch; i.e. the Great Western, and even, occasion­
ally, the Midland or Great Northern companies.96 Once the promotion
of Victoria had succeeded, Parliamentary Committees found it difficult
to refuse a similar concession to the South Eastern railway company,
and the Charing Cross and Cannon Street stations were authorised one
and three years respectively after the Victoria Station and Pimlico
Railway was incorporated.97
Rivalry between the companies operating north of the river also
played a part in determining the number and the timing of station
provision in London, though perhaps to a less conspicuous degree.
Paddington remained the sole property of the Great Western railway
company, relatively isolated from the currents of inter-company
rivalry; and the same could be said of the other trunk pioneer’s head­
quarters, those of the London and North Western railway company at
Euston (Nos. 2 & 3 on sketch map). The fierce battle which preceded
the authorisation of the Direct Northern Railway (or Great Northern),
and its ‘frightful expense’—£590,000 in Parliamentary expenses alone—
is a story which is too well known to be repeated here.98 From the
struggle emerged a new trunk line and terminal at King’s Cross (No. 8
on sketch map), which was not, in practice, as directly and rigorously
competitive with the London and North Western as had been originally
anticipated.99 The King’s Cross terminal was soon shared between the
Great Northern and the Midland, as a consequence of an Agreement
negotiated in 1857 between James Allport and Seymour Clarke. By it
the Midland was allowed to install its own clerks and guards, build
sheds for twenty-four locomotives etc., but in return agreed to a scale of
tolls which rose, within five years, to £60,000 per annum, and agreed
also to concede priority to Great Northern trains at the signals.100 The
resulting expense, delays and even accidents persuaded the Midland
company to undertake in 1863, the ambitious and costly programme of
constructing, at St. Pancras, (No. 12 on sketch map) goods (opened
1867) and passenger (opened 1868) stations. Here was a case of a
business accommodation, at first to both partners’ benefit, becoming
less and less satisfactory as the traffic grew, until the ‘guest’ company
withdrew, and undertook the expensive reduplication of terminal
facilities.

96 BTHR PYB 1/107, 20 March 1860, p. 3 (Hope Scott Q.C.).

97 22-3 Vic., c. 131 and 24-5 Vic., c. 93.
98 H.C., 1857-8, XIV, QQ.1730-33.
99 Jack Simmons, The Railways of Britain (1961), 115. ’’
100 E. G. Barnes, op. cit. 164.

266
 LONDON

This risk was avoided at Liverpool Street and Broad Street, the other
northern terminals authorised in the 1860's. For although a proposal
was laid before Parliament, in 1862, by the Great Eastern railway
company, that the expense of a city site should be shared, the North
London railway company, and its sponsor the L. & N.W., strongly
opposed the Bill and secured its rejection. Here again the result was
the construction of duplicate facilities—the Broad Street (1865) and
Liverpool Street (1875) passenger termini, almost adjacent to each
other (No. 13 on sketch map), and each carrying a large short-distance
traffic, but with widely different fares policies and catchment areas.101

It is, of course, extremely difficult to isolate the effect of inter­

company competition from the other factors, of a legislative, financial
or social nature, which affected the timing and distribution of railway
provisions in London. From the examples cited, however, it would
seem that the principal direction it gave was to stimulate the quest for
autonomous stations, regardless of expense. The very high cost of
metropolitan land pulled one way, suggesting a commonsense and co­
operative approach to the problem of terminal costs—which took on
unusually formidable proportions in inner and central London. Given
such land costs the obvious solution was to share sites. On the other
hand, business ambitions, and the practical disharmony created by
day-to-day operations pulled in the opposite way, strongly suggesting
that separately controlled stations were the only satisfactory solution;
and the policies of the Midland or the South Eastern railway companies
can only be explained in this light. These conflicting pressures gave rise
to a tendency towards the proliferation of termini (as seen on a smaller
scale in Manchester); a trend further accentuated by the action of
speculative or promotional companies, catering for and playing upon
the rivalries of established railways. Whether the station companies
were old established toll-charging companies, like the London and
Blackwall, or the London and Greenwich (Nos. 4 and 1 on sketch map),
or opportunistic speculations like the Victoria Station and Pimlico
Railway company (No. 9 on sketch map), they found no shortage of
bidders at the prices they asked.
Only the L. & S.W., L. &. N.W. and G.W. companies pursued
policies which were, on the face of it, relatively uncomplicated by
terminal politics. Each built and owned its own terminal, established it
early, and did not share it. The Great Western enlarged Paddington
(No. 3), as already mentioned. The L. & N.W. and the L. & S.W. carried
out operations which, though expensive to execute, and marked in their
effects upon the urban fabric, were operationally simple: the advance
101 H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 78. T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins op. cit. 131.
267
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

from Camden Town to a new passenger station at Euston (No. 2), by

the L. & N.W., being mirrored by a similar movement from Nine Elms
to Waterloo (No. 7), by the L. & S.W. Yet, if one looks more closely,
even these companies were more influenced by competition than their
straightforward building programmes would suggest. Both the L. &
N.W. and the G.W. became involved in the inner ‘ring’ or underground
railways—i.e. the North London, the West London Extension, and the
Metropolitan railways; responsibilities which were undertaken partly
as a substitute for further and more complex urban railway building
under their own direct management. Moreover, both the L. & S.W.
and the L. & N.W. entertained plans at various times—1845 and 1864
respectively—to push their passenger stations further in to the centre
(in fact to the same site at Charing Cross), though the schemes in each
case miscarried.102 So it does not require any great stretch of imagina­
tion to see even these orthodox companies, the L. & N.W., L. & S.W.
and G.W., as possible station sharers. The pull of a more central
location was in these cases offset by the fact that each company had a
secure base from which to appraise the attractions and the disadvan­
tages of a shared junction. The general impression which is left, how­
ever, both north and south of the river, is that the loosely spaced ring
of fourteen major surface stations only makes sense under the con­
ditions of sectional or isolated competition which prevailed in London
after 1846.

3. The development of railway facilities: a chronological sketch

Fourteen major central stations are listed on the sketch map accom­
panying this chapter, and Broad Street/Liverpool Street are merely
shown as one unit for reasons of scale. If, to this fifteen, the further
central stations deserving treatment be added—Ludgate Hill, St.
Paul’s, Farringdon Street, Moorgate, Nine Elms etc.—no doubt the
complete list could be exended to a score or more. To attempt to present
a summary of the information contained in the Books of Reference and
Plans and Sections, or the arguments which attended the authorisation
of each of these stations by Parliamentary Select Committees, as in
previous Case Histories, would extend the present section to over­
whelming length. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the metro­
politan railway system has been unusually fully covered in the books
already listed, so that extensive and detailed treatment would be
gratuitous as well as lengthy. Therefore it seems reasonable to refer, in
chronological order, but selectively to the London’s urban lines and
stations, emphasising and illustrating the recurring themes which are
treated analytically elsewhere—in particular, the exdrbitant costs of
102 E. G. Barnes, op. cit. 252. H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 40.
268
 LONDON

metropolitan stations, the possible reasons for the scale of these costs,
and their operational and financial consequences.
The earliest terminal, at London Bridge, presents a straightforward
type of land purchase operation. The approach route ran through a
good deal of undeveloped, open land, and at the site large parcels of
low value were in Church hands. At this early date, before the railway’s
own activities had caused values to appreciate, and before the precedent
of steep payments had been established, the costs were not unreasonable.
Admittedly the London and Greenwich railway company had to
approach Parliament for permission to supplement the original £400,000
capital and £133,333 mortgage loan, authorised in 1833, but this was
partly because of the novel expense accompanying viaduct construc­
tion.103 The total capital of the London and Greenwich railway company
stood at about £1,000,000 in 1845, when the South Eastern took out a
lease upon it; and the S.E.’s annual rental of £45,000 assured a steady
4^% dividend for L. & G. shareholders. Further extensions, including
the northern station, and the extensive re-building in the early 1850’s
after the terminal had been divided, increased the total costs of the site
considerably; but on the other hand London Bridge from its early days
carried a traffic which, although short distance, was not notably cheap­
fare, and was very heavy in volume. In the 1850’s the daily arrivals rose
from something in the region of ten to over twenty thousand passengers,
and by the end of the nineteenth century fifty thousand arrivals per
day could be counted. In spite of the complaints by the Chairman of
the London and Croydon railway company, and Charles Knight’s
reference to the ‘immense cost’ and the ‘bickering between companies’,
the expenses incurred at London Bridge station were not at all un­
reasonable, and were satisfactorily discounted when set against its long
and useful life.104
The same might also be said of the two of the other large terminals
constructed in the 183O’s, Euston and Paddington. In spite of the
considerable inflation of estimates, particularly at Euston, the sites
provided permanent footholds for two great trunk companies, were
timely in construction and, retrospectively at any rate, they must have
been viewed as enviable bargains. In each of these cases, as already
mentioned, the land was in the hands of the Church, or a few large
proprietors, and in a very early stage of development.
The cost of the Fenchurch Street (No. 4) and Bishopsgate (No. 5)
terminals opened in the early 1840’s was not so unexceptionable in
relation to their traffic.105 The difficulties and expenses encountered by
the Eastern Counties railways company at Bishopsgate have already
103 Edwin Course, op. cit. 20, 31.
104 Charles Knight, Pictorial Half-Hours in London (1851), 232.
105 The Survey of London, XXVII (1957), 252-3.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

been mentioned, and brief reference has been made to the London and
Blackwall railway company’s constructional and land purchase prob­
lems. Fuller details of the expenses to which this had given rise, even
before June 1841, were set forth in a confidential letter to the Directors
from two of the firms of solicitors employed. The direct land costs
themselves totalled £122,840, as against the £207,700 claimed by the
vendors, for the group of properties under consideration by their two
firms. Since the total land costs up to August 1842, were elsewhere
stated to be £526,000 it may be judged that the two firms handled only
a portion of the total.106 What is interesting and worthy of note, how­
ever, is the explanation which the solicitors felt obliged to attach to
their bill.
‘It has been imagined’, they wrote, ‘that the legal expenses should
bear a proportion to the length of a Railway. We submit that they ought
rather to be considered in reference to the district through which it may
pass; this, in the present instance, as you well know is for the greater
part the most densely populated of any in London, mostly by tradesmen
and manufacturers, and almost every house owned by a different
landlord, with various derivative leases, all of which have to be separ­
ately purchased and conveyed.’ The result of this, and of the claims for
the goodwill lost by enforced removal, was to produce demands, they
explained, which were complex and extortionate.
All this has already been referred to, and illustrated, in other contexts
and other cities. What takes the breath away in this case is the full and
detailed breakdown of the solicitors’ own charges in dealing with the
£122,840 worth of property they had purchased.
£
To attending counsel in Parliament, 137 days 25,010
Stamp duties, court fees, charges for jury cases 37,342
Payments to vendors’ solicitors for conveyances 25,911
Engineering and surveying charges, parliamentary
agency, salaries of clerks, rents, taxes and
advertisements 28,123

116,386
This sum excluded, of course, the charge made by counsel themselves
in Parliament; and the engineers referred to were the solicitors’ engi­
neers, not the company’s consultant or resident engineers. Even if one
limits the solicitors’ charges to those directly connected with the land
transfer, they come to £63,253; or approximately half as much as the
total purchase price awarded.108
108 Six-monthly Report, 30 August 1842, London and Blackwall railway company.
107 BTHR RAC 1 227A, Letter dated 28 January 1843.
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Partly as a result of these, and other similar expenses, the Blackwall

railway company’s affairs were in so precarious a state by 1843 that a
shareholders’ Committee of Investigation was set up, and professed
itself ‘alarmed at the great outlay’; two years later the company was
saved by being absorbed by amalgamation with the Eastern Counties.108
The Eastern Counties itself however was hardly in a better financial
state than the Blackwall, and for much the same reasons. It crashed
financially in 1848, and the rolling stock at Bishopsgate station was
seized for debt.
The three stations authorised in the mid-1840’s (Nos. 6, 7 and 8)
formed a mixed bag, but shared one feature in common; they all cost
more than had been anticipated. The ‘Grand West End Terminus’ at
Bricklayers’ Arms (1843—6) finally cost £1,000,000 instead of the
£400,000 estimated, and passengers could only be induced to alight at
such an inconvenient station by a substantial differential in the fare.108
109
Croydon to London Bridge cost 2s 3d, to Bricklayers’ Arms only Is 3d;
so on strictly financial grounds it made no sense to build such a terminus
to escape the 4|d toll levied by the London and Greenwich. From a
tactical point of view, however, the £1,000,000 spent upon Bricklayers’
Arms served the purpose of bringing the smaller company to terms.110
‘All attempts to create a passenger traffic (at Bricklayers’ Arms) have
failed’, Charles Knight later reported; and in 1852 the station was re­
classified as a goods terminus.111
The L. & S.W.’s advance from Nine Elms to Waterloo (1846-8), by
contrast, was no folly, produced by the tactical needs of a passing phase
of railway politics, but an obvious and logical extension of existing
facilities. Although the cost came to £1,250,000 instead of £800,000,
even this was still not unreasonable, and was accounted for by the
extensive swathe cut through residential property. The 1,600 cottages
and parcels of land, hop warehouses, coach sheds and yards, were
mostly in ecclesiastical ownership, and had been leased in unusually
large batches; not the customary half dozen or dozen per person, but
up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty properties being held by indi­
vidual lessees, not infrequently in conjunction with other individuals
whose names recurred elsewhere in the same Book of Reference, and
who formed a series of shifting partnerships or syndicates. These large
leaseholdings, together with the small number of proprietors, should
have made for relatively cheap land transactions; yet the mile
Waterloo extension accounted for almost 25% of the L. & S.W.’s

108 W. M. Acworth, The Railways of England (1900), 408-9.

109 Edwin Course, op. cit. 71.
110 ‘Making Bricklayers’ Arms was a matter of compulsion in driving the Green­
wich people to reasonable terms’ (Vignoles), C. F. Dendy Marshall, op. cit. 31.
111 Charles Knight, Pictorial Half-Hours, etc. 233.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

entire capitalisation in 1849—a large proportion, but nothing that could

not be digested by a company with growing traffic and competitive
premises.
At King’s Cross station (1846-52), the land ownership pattern, like­
wise, was not unfavourable. There were one or two unusual complica­
tions; for example, the relationship between owners and tenants was
diametrically opposite to that just cited for Waterloo. Instead of one
owner leasing property to syndicates of tenants, a syndicate of thirteen
owners leased their property to a single lessee; but only thirty proper­
ties were affected in this way.112 The greater part of the site was given
over to a smallpox and fever hospital, there was a good proportion of
open ground, and the approaches through Islington were largely
owned by St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, by George Keck (110 parcels
of land), and by Henry Tufnell (150 parcels of land). From the way in
which the estimates were drawn up it is not possible to extract a figure
for the King’s Cross project as a whole; and later estimates as to the
actual cost vary, but it seems likely that here again a station was
established, at a cost around one million pounds, which formed a
substantial asset rather than a burden upon the operating company.
The timing of the stations mentioned so far was clearly of cardinal
importance. The first three major stations, projected and built in the
1830’s, had all proved sound propositions. The Fenchurch Street and
Bishopsgate termini, a little later, ran into serious difficulties. Although
there might, superficially, appear to be no reason why railways setting
off from London in any compass direction should not stand an equally
good chance of making a profit, there were marked differences in
prospects. In the east the combination of short-distance runs through
lightly populated rural areas, and lengthy viaduct approaches through
crowded urban districts, in fragmented ownership, and against a
background of rapidly appreciating land values, had severely strained
the finances of both the Eastern Counties and the Blackwall railway
companies. In spite of these clear indications of the way in which prices
for terminal sites were increasing, however, the next three stations
(Nos. 6, 7, 8), built in the mid or late 1840’s were all viable as business
enterprises in themselves—even Bricklayers’ Arms, in all likelihood,
once it had been converted to a more appropriate use—and they did
not require justification solely upon strategic or competitive grounds.
Yet already this aspect of their construction was assuming greater
importance. The Railway Department of the Board of Trade, reporting
on railway schemes in Kent in 1845 had laid it down as a guide to
selection that ‘preference should be given to those with established
termini’, and on these grounds had recommended the South Eastern
112 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1846, Direct Northern Railway Properties 38-68 in
St. Mary, Islington.
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 LONDON

railway company since ‘it has the Bricklayers’ Arms, or a proposed

extension at Hungerford Bridge.’113114 By the time the building of the
terminals planned in the 1840’s had been completed, the advantages
of a secure foothold in London had become still more marked. Even
shareholders had come to doubt the prospects of return upon the huge
sums required for metropolitan terminals; as John Bright was flatly
told in 1852, when he asked the Secretary to the Railway Department
whether there was any chance that a direct Manchester to London
railway and terminus might be constructed. It was ruled out, Samuel
Laing replied, because ‘the expense of getting a metropolitan terminus
is so enormous, and is probably increasing so much every day, that
unless a rival scheme is grafted upon some existing company, there is
no immediate probability, in the present state of the money and railway
markets, of having it carried out.’ It would be more economical, he
added, in reply to a later question from the chairman of the Select
Committee, to lay down four lines along existing routes than to con­
struct a new approach, ‘the great expense is the terminal stations and
getting into London.’115 The expense was enough, in fact, to cause the
pidgeon-holing of several interesting and ambitious schemes for railway
building put forward in the mid-1850’s, and railway terminal building
was not renewed until the closing years of the decade, with the Victoria
station project in the middle of the Marquis of Westminster’s estate
(No. 9 on sketch map).116
The building of a terminal in such an area might well seem to have
offered insuperable difficulties, both in terms of expense and the
opposition which might be aroused; but an ingenious and relatively
inexpensive way of reducing costs and disarming opposition was
discovered by John Fowler. Fowler was backed, in his formation of an
independent Terminal Company, the ‘Victoria Station and Pimlico
Railway’, in 1857, by Betts, Peto and Kelk, who gave credit and also
became large shareholders, and by the London, Brighton and South
Coast railway company, which subscribed half the capital required for
this speculative venture.117 He was also assisted by two fortunate
chances: the construction (1853-8) of a short (6-mile) spur railway—
‘the railway to a turnstile’—from the Crystal Palace’s new site at
113 H.C., 1845, XXXIX, 13 February, pp. 4-5, 7.
114 H.C., 1852-3, XXXVHI, Q.110.
115 Ibid. Q.250. . .
119 The most ambitious and expensive of which was Paxton’s Great Victorian
Way, proposed in H.C., 1854-5, X, QQ. 711-850. ‘The scheme I then projected was
to form an internal girdle of railways’, Paxton said later. ‘It was at the time of the
Russian war and I had not then the opportunity of submitting it fairly before the
public in order to bring it out.’ The estimated cost was £34,000,000. HLRO, Min.,
H.L., 1861, 11 March, pp. 4-7, S.C. on Charing Cross Railway (City Terminus).
117 H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 32.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Sydenham, to what was grandly called a ‘West End terminus’ on the

south bank of the river, in Battersea; and the existence on the northern
side of the bank, of the ‘Grosvenor Canal’.118 The one-mile long
Grosvenor canal was not, in origin, a canal at all, but part of the old
Chelsea Waterworks and reservoir, which had been constructed in
1725 to provide water for domestic purposes, but later converted to
take barge traffic.119 In 1857 conversations took place between the
Marquis of Westminster and the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway
representatives in which it was suggested that the unattractive and
virtually submerged route and basin of the Grosvenor canal should be
used. Tn approaching it,’ Morton Peto observed, in his evidence to the
Select Committee, ‘you avoid any large viaduct across an expensive
building property by using the canal . . . the wide thoroughfares are
not likely to be surcharged with traffic—and long platforms will be
possible.’120 Special features to preserve the amenity of the district
included the planting of shrubs on the approaches to the bridge, and
the banning of goods trains, the roofing over of the station approach,
the insertion of rubber underlays beneath the sleepers to deaden the
sound, and the building of bridge parapets to an aesthetic standard
judged satisfactory by the First Commissioner of Works.121 Even with
these features, however, the estimated cost came to only £675,000; a
very reasonable sum for a mile and a quarter through such a district,
and there can be little doubt that a contributory factor was the
favourable attitude of the Marquis of Westminster. He owned all
the property, including the canal basin, except for a couple of dozen
parcels of land, houses and a shop, which belonged to William
Stanley.122
One can only speculate as to why he gave his assent to the scheme,
for, in spite of the precautions taken, it did tend to reduce the residential
attractiveness of the immediate area. On the other hand the new
Victoria Street had already opened in 1851, and the character of this
quarter of Belgravia was beginning to change from residential to that
of a more vigorous mixed zone, of shops, offices and places of pro­
fessional and other business. The canal site was also obsolete for
transport use, and an Act of 1852 had forbidden the extraction of water
for domestic purposes. In 1854, moreover, a company called the
Westminster Terminus Railway had secured authority to cross the
river to the site of the Grey Coat School on Horseferry Road; though

118 The Survey of London, XXVI (1956), 6-7.

119 Edwin Course, op. cit. 95.
120 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1858,7 May, pp. 4—5, Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway.
121 HLRO, Min., (Vic. Stn. & Pim. Rly), H.L., 1858, 5 Juty pp. 41-52. Edwin
Course, op. cit. 96. '
122 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1858, Vic. Stn. & Pim. Rly. Properties 32-47, 66-75.
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it had not, in tact, followed up the scheme.123 Presumably, under these

circumstances, it may have seemed wise to settle for £3,000 per annum
chief rent, and for an undisclosed portion of the £675,000.121
A contemporary scheme, proposed at the same time, and authorised
in 1859/61, was the twin Charing Cross and Cannon Street extension
(Nos. 10 and ll).125 This differed from the Victoria Station and Pimlico
Railway, in that it was directly and wholly sponsored by one large
parent company—the South Eastern, but it is interesting to note that
the same business technique of a separate terminal company was used.
Originally estimated to cost £1,070,000, the Charing Cross railway
company had expended £3,000,000 by the time it was wound up, in
August, 1864.126
Although not, perhaps, as irredeemably beyond the margins of
profitability as the later Marylebone scheme, instanced below, it is very
dubious whether the Charing Cross scheme ever broke even. On their
own assessment of £1,070,000 the South Eastern had optimistically
hoped for a return of 7^-%; a surcharge of 3d per head on 8,000,000
passengers who would travel the extra distance instead of alighting at
London Bridge.127 In fact the scheme cost three times the estimate, and
the traffic, for many years, remained far below that expected. Only by
1903 was the figure of 10,000,000 passenger journeys to and from
Charing Cross realised. Moreover it is not clear whether, in his estimate
for running expenses, the secretary, Samuel Smiles, included a sufficient
allowance for the heavy charge of staffing and maintaining a new
station, or of paying municipal rates and other expenses.123 Certainly
the direct costs of operating the engines and rolling stock were increased
far beyond those anticipated by the failure to take a realistic view of the
amount of siding space likely to be available at the station; and Smiles’
estimate of operating costs (which equalled 25% on revenue for the
terminal and short line) seems unduly sanguine, in view of the 47-49 %
operating costs returned on the national rail network as a whole at
this time.129 Altogether it is likely that the new line and station did
123 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 141. C. E. Lee, ‘The First West
End Terminus’, Railway Magazine (1958), 164. Peto and Brassey also sponsored
this project.
124 HLRO, Min., (Vic. Stn. & Pim. Rly), H.L., 1858, 5 July, p. 71.
125 Edwin Course, op. cit. 51.
128 Six-monthly Report, 25 August 1864, Charing Cross Railway, BTHR RAC 1
378.
127 The simple calculation ran: 8 million x 3d = £100,000 + £5,000 for rent of
premises beneath viaduct, — £25,000 running expenses = £80,000, or 8% on
£1,070,000.
128 H.C., 1905, XXX, 614-5. Edwin Course, London Railways (1962) 48, idem,
The evolution etc. (London Ph.D. thesis, 1958), 251. T. C. Barker and Michael
Robbins, op. cit. 224.
129 H.C., 1890, LXV, 680-1.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

not return enough additional revenue even to service the heavy capital
expenditure; and certainly not enough to pay for the scheme and show
a commercial profit.
The question, therefore, arises as to why, even under the favourable
conditions of landownership which made such schemes feasible in
south London, the expense should be so exorbitant. One answer lies
in the fact that in the 1840’s and certainly by the late 1850’s, the area
was very densely built up; and the expense of cutting a swathe, even
through poor property, should not be underestimated in such circum­
stances. William Tite, who was both architect to the London and
South Western railway company and a Governor of St. Thomas’s
Hospital (due for demolition by the Charing Cross scheme) revealed
to the Commons’ Committee that his own company, the South Western,
had contemplated a similar scheme but had been deterred by the
expense. For some years, he stated, an Act had been drawn up ‘for the
continuation of a railway which was to a certain extent identical with
this . . . (but it had been abandoned) ... at the instance of all the old
proprietors in Liverpool and Manchester on the ground that it would
not pay for executing the work.’130 In the late 1850’s less cautious
calculations prevailed, however, than those enjoined on the South
Western company’s management by their provincial shareholders.
A large part of the sums expended on property by the southern
railway companies went to the Church, in respect of their ground rents,
or improved ground rents; but the total was swollen by other payments
in compensation, in the way described by land valuers like Francis
Fuller. Tn London property there are frequently numerous interests,
that is to say there are so many as two or three leaseholders, besides the
tenant from year to year or the tenant at will.... In the same property?
—In the same house. . . . Those interests I suppose must be compen­
sated? At what do you put them? Take the actual tenant’s interest
without reference to the leasehold—I divide them this way. I take the
tenants first of all and I put them down at 5 % upon the cost. Then 5 %
for the interest of the leaseholder, equals 10 %, plus 10 % for compulsory
sale.’131 Another 10% was added for conveyance and surveyors’
charges, and 10% as a ‘safety fund’. This increase of 40% was allowed,
in an experienced valuer’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, over and
above the cost of purchasing the ground landlord’s interest, and the
buildings and outstanding years’ interest held by the leaseholders or
groups of leaseholders. Those most directly affected by the scheme, the
sub-tenants, lodgers and other occupants, received nothing by right,
unless a small inducement to move quietly were paid, presumably out
130 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1859, 28 March, p. 275, S.C. on London Bridge and
Charing Cross Railway.
131 BTHR PYB 1/112/6, 18 July 1860, pp. 76-8.

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 LONDON

of the 5 % extra for the ‘tenant’s interest’. Nevertheless even with the
additional 40%, the estimates were grossly understated; not perhaps
upon the real current value, but upon the value which sympathetic
juries or arbiters were likely to award. It is clear that where calculations
of an engineering and structural nature were concerned the estimates
bore some resemblance to the ultimate costs; but where the purchase
of property was at issue the estimates bore little relationship to reality
or to past experience.
The two major schemes executed in the 1860’s, St. Pancras and
Liverpool Street (Nos. 12 and 13), both cost far more than the parent
companies could properly afford. The Great Eastern was, in fact,
brought into Chancery by the effort of constructing Liverpool Street.
Even such a short extension—under a mile from Bishopsgate—cost
over £2,000,000; and the attitude of the Great Eastern managers
towards it has already been described. The Midland railway company’s
finances were much sounder, and its traffic more firmly established at
the time it planned the St. Pancras extension, and yet the undertaking
lopped two per cent off the company’s dividends.132 Liddell and
Barlow’s original estimate of the cost of the London extension, in
1862, had totalled £1,750,000, but by 1867 a special general meeting
had to be called to raise a further £2,150,000. ‘It has, in fact, been
found,’ a Midland circular to shareholders announced, ‘that the value
of property required and the amount of compensations have been
enormously in excess of what was anticipated, and it would seem that
the cost of carrying the works of a railway into London is such as to defy
all previous calculation.5133 W. E. Hutchinson, Chairman of the Midland
railway company, enlarged upon this theme at the special meeting in
January, 1868, giving as the main cause for the increase in estimates
‘the steep rise in property values after 1862, which had also affected
the rates of compensation paid for land taken for the company’s
purposes.’134
One final scheme remains, the belated entry of the company which
had already played an important role in re-shaping railway provisions in
Manchester and Liverpool—the M.S. & L., now, with a suitable change
of name, achieving metropolitan status. The formidable nature of the
property enclave into which entry was required for the Marylebone
station (No. 14 on sketch map) together with the extra accommodation
works required (although these, at least, could be calculated), and the
fact that almost half the lessees were occupiers, increased the cost
beyond all reasonable estimation.135 Charles Niddell had only been
132 E. G. Barnes, op. cit. 187.
133 Circular to Shareholders, 17 December 1867, Midland railway company,
H. C. Prince, loc. cit. 127. My italics.
134 E. G. Barnes, op. cit. 261.
135 HLRO, P & S, B.Ref., 1892, M.S. & L. (Extension to London).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

prepared to say that the station would probably cost about £400,000;
and total works would be approximately a further £2,525,000, of which
£1,427,000 could be for land purchase.136 In fact the final cost of the
railway scheme came to over £6,000,000; a sum which, on any rational
basis of calculation, meant the surcharging of all terminal traffic at the
rate of over £100,000 per mile per annum. Perhaps one might say that
it is at this point that the railways were, beyond all doubt, overtaken
by the rise in land values.137 Schemes had become increasingly expen­
sive—the St. Pancras, Liverpool Street and Charing Cross/Cannon
Street schemes, had all been approaching the margin in the 1860’s—but
the Marylebone terminal and approach required justification, if it were
at all possible, upon other grounds than those of profitability. On the
basis of the traffic running into Marylebone Station ten years after its
opening, an extra 12s should have been levied upon each passenger to
meet the interest charge alone on the works necessary to bring him the
last two miles of his journey.138

4. Summary and general considerations

There is one unusual feature of London’s railway pattern emerging in
the course of narrative which perhaps merits closer examination. Apart
from limited exceptions, noted below, London was never completely
traversed by any single main-line company. The northern and southern
groups of railway companies did not merge into cross-river amalgama­
tions. London remained a species of watershed from which railways
flowed separately to the north and the south.
Indeed, it may appear to require no explanation or comment that
London should have presented a barrier to the amalgamation of railway
companies. Yet much more elaborate and unlikely mergers took place,
and the long-distance main line companies demonstrated a keenly
competitive spirit over the extension of their services northwards. The
compulsion to seek trunk running arrangements even crossed the
Border, in the 1870’s, in the form of traffic alliances between the L. &
N.W. and the Caledonian, the Midland and the Glasgow and South
Western, the Great Northern and the North British companies.139 It
would seem no more than logical that the great trunk lines from the
north should seek to run from coast to coast; and there is, in fact,
136 Ibid. Railways Nos. 6-12.
137 ‘Immense compensation’ had been paid to the Marylebone proprietors, W.
Besant, London North of the Thames (1911), 342.
138 H.C., 1905, XXX, 614-5. Passengers to and from Great Central terminus
totalled 500,000 in 1903. The interest charge on the total capital expended for the
Marylebone scheme (at 5 %) = £300,000. .
130 O. S. Nock, Scottish Railways (1961), 9-10. HLRO, Min., H.C., 1873 7 May,
pp. 18-20, S.C. on Caledonian Railway (Glasgow Central Station).
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 LONDON

evidence that such an ambition crossed the minds of some of the main­
line companies’ managers, although the field was given over to specula­
tive gestures rather than convinced business strategy. To take first of
all the most likely candidate—Edward Watkin. As Chairman of the
M.S. & L., the Metropolitan and the South Eastern railway companies,
Watkin would seem to have been almost ideally placed for executing a
through linkage from Northern England to the South Coast; or even
(as Cleveland-Stevens suggested) from the north of England to Europe,
if the projected Channel Tunnel scheme had come to fruition.140 There
is, however, no direct evidence that such a scheme seriously entered
Watkin’s calculations. Watkins ‘did not confide his policy to many
people’, or disclose any set programme—even to his own General
Manager, John Bell. Moreover the last link in the connection, that of
the Great Central's entry into London, was only executed on the eve
of Watkin’s retirement in 1894, and, in Harold Pollins’ opinion, may
not have been in Watkin’s mind before the late 188O’s. Even after the
entry to London had been effected, it is difficult to see how direct
express connections across London could take place between the
Marylebone/Baker Street and the South Eastern railway system.141
There is, however, some direct evidence from other quarters of main­
line schemes for crossing London. At the time of the Cobden Treaty
liberalising trade with France (1860), both Seymour Clarke of the Great
Northern railway, and James Allport of the Midland pressed forward
schemes for a through linkage. The Midland hoped to join the southern
railways at Charing Cross, ‘to avail themselves of the bridge there.’142
Already, Allport pointed out in 1863, the French Treaty had had the
effect of increasing the continental traffic, and he expected it might
increase fivefold ‘in a few years’. The Midland railway company, which
already passed 100,000 tons of goods through London, wished to share
in this rapidly growing traffic.143 The Great Northern, likewise, ex­
perienced a similar anxiety to claim a share of the continental trade,
conducting specific and detailed negotiations with the London, Chat­
ham and Dover, the company which constructed the only through line
in central London, that over Blackfriars Bridge (centre of sketch map).
Seymour Clarke’s primary motive for seeking the connection was to
reduce the cross-town cartage, which was costing the Great Northern
£50,000 per annum, and necessitated the stabling of five hundred
horses.144 If the demand for trunk passenger bookings from Dover to
the north or vice versa rapidly increased, however, then the under­

140 H. Pollins, ‘The Last Main Railway Line to London’, JTH, IV (1959), 85-95.
141 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 211.
142 H.C., 1863, VIII, Q.504.
143 Ibid. QQ.510-23.
144 Ibid. QQ.367-80.
279
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

standing with the London, Chatham and Dover company would be

doubly useful. On his side J. S. Forbes, the General Manager of the
L.C. & D. railway company, shared the same hopes. He had at one
time been the manager in charge of stabling and carting for the Great
Western company, and was, therefore, unusually interested in the trans­
shipment problems caused by the break in connection. It cost, he
estimated, an additional five or six shillings per ton to transfer the
freight from the Great Northern to the L.C.D. lines, apart from the
burden of running a large carting establishment. The employment of
agents, such as Pickford’s or Chaplin and Horne’s, could reduce this
burden, but only at the cost of raising further problems of accommoda­
tion and status.145
It must be admitted that the other managers of the southern railway
companies did not share Forbes’ enthusiasm. Cornelius Eborall, of
the South Eastern railway company, dismissed any idea of a central
junction at Charing Cross with the northern companies as ‘a perfect
Babel’. ‘There is much more to be done in widening the streets’, he
asserted, ‘than can possibly be done by railway communication.’146
Frederick Slight, of the London, Brighton and South Coast railway
company, which was still digesting the effects of its move to Victoria,
also held the view that no north-south linkage, other than that provided
by the West London line upstream, was advisable. Yet a union of the
Great Northern and the London, Chatham and Dover companies
might have caused a reconsideration of these views.
Colonel Yolland, Inspector on the Railway Department of the Board
of Trade, who was asked to draw up a general plan (much to John
Hawkshaw’s disgust), certainly spoke of the anxiety felt by all three of
the northern main line companies in the early 1860’s; and the solution
he suggested was that the L. & N.W., the Midland, and the Great
Northern companies should all be allowed to make a junction with the
southern railways at Charing Cross, where the levels would be suitable,
and the river bridge already under construction.147 Seymour Clarke,
perhaps the most ardent supporter of the idea of a north-south route,
went even further, and suggested that two large new central termini
should be built; one on the south bank to which the northern companies
would have access, and one on the north bank for the southern com­
panies.148
However, these grandiose notions of railways spanning London came
to nothing, with the exception only of the London, Chatham and Dover

145 Ibid. QQ.848-51. Some of the goods, such as the iron masts from the north for
Chatham dockyard, caused serious carting problems.
148 Ibid QQ.659, 670-6.
147 Ibid. QQ.193, 218-27, 1092 (James Booth, Col. Yolland, John Hawkshaw).
148 Ibid. Q.35O.

280
 LONDON

company’s metropolitan extension to Farringdon Street and Holborn,

authorised in 1860. Apart from this, the only other line across London
sanctioned by the Joint Select Committee of 1864, after careful con­
sideration of the public issues involved, was a cut-and-cover scheme
which offered to construct contemporaneously three important new
streets from Tottenham Court Road down to the Embankment, and
to carry out extensive demolition in the notorious slum districts at
Seven Dials, and High Street, St. Giles.149 The expense which this public
aspect of its construction involved resulted in the indefinite postpone­
ment of the scheme—the ‘Hampstead, Midland, North Western and
Charing Cross Junction’; and the same fate overtook the Central
London Railway in 1871, and other similar projects.150
Linkages were made outside the central area, both upstream, by the
West London, and downstream, by the East London railway and
tunnel; but in each case the small companies concerned became
‘service’ railways—meeting grounds for all interested parties rather
than links between specific companies. The East London line (1869-76)
came under the joint management of six companies—the L.B. & S.C.,
the L.C. & D., and the South Eastern companies to the south of the
river, the Great Eastern to the north, and the two Underground
companies.151 The West London Extension railway across the river
(1859-63) was owned by four railway companies and offered facilities
to the London and South Western and the L.B. & S.C. south of the
Thames, and to the L. & N.W. and the G.W. north of the river. Both
the East and West London connections were useful for the transfer of
freight, but their development of through passenger traffic was belated
and insignificant.152 Essentially London remained a city where the
journeys were broken, traffic was transferred by street from one main­
line terminus to another, and the railway companies changed.
This topic has been discussed in some detail because, on at least
two occasions, the barrier to competition seemed likely to be swept
aside. In 1846 and in 1863 it appeared almost inevitable to contem­
poraries that London was about to be served in the same way as the
other major cities. ‘It seems that we are to be allowed no rest from
railway engineering operation’, wrote John Hollingshead in 1862,
‘until the great idea of a central station in the City of London is made
to take material shape. Every railway, at present condemned to have its
terminus in the outskirts, is looking wistfully towards that coveted
spot within the shadow of St. Paul’s, and making signs to its brethren
149 P. J. Edwards, History of London Street Improvements, 1855-1897, (1898) 61.
H.C., 1864 (87) XI, 2-3.
150 BTHR, PYB 1/535, 23 March 1871, pp. 1-4.
151T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 145. H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 94-5.
152 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 229. H. P. White, op. cit. II, 125-7.
281
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to join hands in drawing the circle together. The Eastern Counties is

not content to remain at Shoreditch; the Great Western is dissatisfied
with Paddington; the North Western and the Great Northern are not
happy at Euston Square and King’s Cross; the Brighton railway is
discontented with Southwark, although it has stretched out in a
roundabout direction and has succeeded in crossing the river at Batter­
sea, and in reaching Pimlico; the South Eastern has already taken
steps to push on to Hungerford Market by way of the suspension
bridge, where it expects to be joined by the South Western railway,
which is fretting down in the hollow of the Waterloo Road; and the
Greenwich, Chatham, Southend and other lines are all directing their
eyes to one common centre.’153
Hollingshead was a professional journalist, a protege of Charles
Dickens, and a shrewd observer of many different aspects of London
life; and in his view the junction of the main-line companies seemed not
speculative but imminent. His views were exactly echoed, thirty years
later, by another well-informed observer, Charles Booth, to whom the
impenetrable nature of the metropolis seemed a matter for wonder.
‘Reaching London from north, west and east, the railways for the most part
touch, but do not cross, this semi-circle; and the southern lines, with one
exception, are content if they can deliver their passengers on the northern
bank of the river. The one exception, which passes its trains under the very
shadow of St. Paul’s, and discharges its passengers at Holbom, was most
dearly paid for. Even tramcars infringe but little on this charmed circle;
within it plies the omnibus, but it is still more essentially the sphere of the
hansom cab.’154

The failure of the main-line companies to break this ‘charmed circle’

profoundly changed the pattern of railway construction, and influenced
its functional efficiency, in the whole London area. ‘The necessity
imposed on all the railways of making their connections without
infringing on the central area however’ the Royal Commission on
London Traffic of 1905 concluded, after its detailed survey, ‘has had
an unfortunate effect on the railway system taken as a whole. The
connections which have actually been made are not nearly so useful for
local traffic, or so convenient for connecting purposes, as they might
have been, if the central area had not been barred, nor do they harmo­
nise so well with comprehensive urban and suburban railway schemes
designed to meet modern needs.’155 This oval of prohibited ground—
four miles from east to west and one and a half from north to south—
not merely distorted directly the pattern of railway building, but also
exercised an arbitrary and indirect influence upon the conditions of
163 J. Hollingshead, Underground London (1862), 204.
164 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London (1892), I, 189.
165 H.C., 1905, XXX, 609.

282
 LONDON

competition between companies. The central government’s unique

exercise of a legislative veto combined with metropolitan central land
values to erect a barrier around the core of the city which was virtually
impassable to surface railways.

283
 Part Three

The Impact of Railways

on Victorian Cities
The railway as an agent of internal change
in Victorian cities; the city centre

1. Introduction
The rapid growth of the major Victorian cities was accompanied by
internal changes in communications which, though not as dramatic as
the arrival of the railways, were essential to sustain continued expansion
throughout the nineteenth century.
The greatly increased internal circulation of people and goods, by
day and night, in the expanding cities, had to be accommodated by
expensive street re-alignments and improvements. The alterations in
each town required no new techniques, and make a dull chronicle, but
neither the investment effort nor the results should be underestimated.
The sums involved in cutting new streets in Birmingham and London,
where the most drastic alterations took place, ran to a million and a
half per scheme in the 1870’s; operations comparable in nature if not
in total scale, with the urban railway works. The improvement of
Victorian cities’ internal roads kept pace, though only by the narrowest
of margins, with the growing numbers of road vehicles, and provided
them with variable routes for transit at approximately one third to
one half of modern urban road speeds.1 The new variety and number
of public cabs and omnibuses, and the volume and increasingly
specialised types of commercial vehicle which thronged the streets in
mid-century, reflect a service industry which was growing as rapidly
as any in Victorian cities.2
In London, for example, although the numbers employed in regular
1 From 3-28 to 4-55 m.p.h. (H.C., 1863, VIII, QQ.1226-8) to between 5 and 10
m.p.h. effective speeds. R. J. Smeed, ‘The Traffic Problem in Towns’, Town Planning
Review 35 (1964-5), 133-58.
2 John Hollingshead, Odd Journeys in and out of London (1860), 182-6, describes
the great range and variety of horse drawn vehicle seen on the streets.
287
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

service for the railways, as clerks, porters, guards, drivers and other
officials, roughly trebled between 1861 and 1891 (from 8,300 to 24,800),
the numbers employed as carmen and carters also trebled (from 14,700
to 43,800). The employment offered by the passenger cabs, omnibuses
and coaches in 1891 added a further 48,200, so that the totals engaged
in horse-drawn urban transport of passengers and goods were more
than three times as large as those in regular metropolitan railway ser­
vice. With their families and dependents they numbered, according to
Charles Booth’s calculations, some 260,000 people—one of the largest
occupational groups in London.3 It is true that many of the carters,
cabbies and omnibus drivers were engaged upon cross traffic and feeder
services connected with the railways, but others provided services which
were sturdily competitive. Within a ten mile radius of London by far
the greater part of retail distribution was in the hands of the carters.
Even Mr. Seymour Teulon, an ex-director of the South Eastern railway
company, who lived twenty-one miles out of town, found it more
convenient to use a carter in the 1860’s; and in 1900 the vans and carts
had a virtual monopoly, 90% or more, of the merchandise and shop
goods, over a two-hour journey or ten-mile radius.4 On the streets of
London’s inner district the horse buses, given a new profitability by
the fall in imported feeding-stuffs, gained passengers at a faster rate
than the railways in the fourth quarter of the century.5
The last quarter of the nineteenth century also saw the belated
application of the railway principle to urban street traffic. Although at
first introduced experimentally—in Glasgow, for example, the first
horse tramways were intended to move coal and other goods by night
and passengers by day—they were soon established as the only practical
method of improving upon orthodox horse-power; doubling the stage
lengths and trebling traction.6 Using very limited technical means the
street tramway provided the most substantial of all contributions to
the Victorian cities’ internal transport problems, conveying, by the
end of the century—even in London, where the lengths of run favoured
the railway—forty five per cent more passengers annually than local
railways.7 The tramcar played a role which was important enough to
survive for many decades into the age of electricity and the petrol
engine. It shared the drawbacks of a fixed-route system, seen so clearly
in the urban surface-railway lines; but the force of these drawbacks
was greatly reduced by the fact that the stops were frequent and easy

3 Charles Booth, op. cit. VII, 284.

4 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.16441 (Teulon); H.C., 1904 (305) VII, QQ.113^4.
5 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 243, 261, 271.
6 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1872, 3 June, S.C. on Glasgow, Coatbridge and Airdrie
Tramways.
5 H.C., 1905, XXX, 570.

288
plate 5 London’s traffic in 1872 as seen by Gustav Dore:
London Bridge (see p. 313)
plaie 6 South Laurieston. Glasgow, 1858 (see p. 292)
 (By permission of H.M. Ordnance Survey)

plate 7 South Laurieston, Glasgow 1913 (see p. 292)

plate 8 London traffic in 1872 as seen by Gustav
Dore: a traffic jam (see p. 316)
 THE CITY CENTRE

of access, and the routes widely and cheaply dispersed.8 In these ways
the growing internal traffic of Victorian cities was accommodated,
using simple techniques which had been available at the time early
horse-railway pioneers like Thomas Hill had canvassed their ideas in
the 1820’s.9

2. Railway land hunger and the Victorian city

Yet still, even after the other internal transport changes have been
given their due weight, the most revolutionary of all the novel features
of the mid-nineteenth century city were its new railway stations, and
they exercised, over each city, both a general and a local influence. In
the first place, the railway station stood as a symbol of the most recent
of major advances in technology; the extension, to locomotion and
distribution, of steam power, which had already revolutionised sub­
stantial sectors of industrial production. In the environment of the
Victorian city the modernity of the railway station was outstanding:
one arrived by mechanical transport, in a manner which differed only
in degree from that of today, before stepping out into a world of horse-
drawn vehicles. ‘Wonderful Members of Parliament,’ wrote Charles
Dickens, ‘who little more than twenty years before had made them­
selves merry with the wild railroad theories of engineers, and given
them the liveliest rubs in cross examination, went down into the north
with watches in their hands, and sent a message before by the electric
telegraph to say that they were coming.’10
The Victorian railway was also the most important single agency in
the transformation of the central area of many of Britain’s major cities.
Unlike the ubiquitous horse omnibus, cab or tramcar, operating cheaply
upon the public thoroughfare, it could only function if large areas of
the town were exclusively set aside for its fixed routes and separate
rights of way. Nor could its equipment be dispersed at night into
scores of small yards and stables, located wherever a cheap and con­
venient space presented itself. Although, like the horse-drawn traffic,
the railway was called into being primarily to serve the traffic needs of
established business and residential areas, it was a noisy and obtrusive
servant. Soon the space it required was comparable with that of any
other single group of commercial or industrial land users.
It is not easy to present an undistorted measurement of the impact

8 Cost per mile: Tramways £40,000 (without street widening)

Tubes £25O,OOO—£3OO,OOO
Railways £1,000,000 (cut and cover)
H.C., 1905, XXX, 590.
8 MRL, Political Tracts, P 3411, P3486.
10 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Ch. 6.
L 289
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

of railway land-hunger upon Victorian cities. For example, there is,

as yet, no standard classification of the central business districts of
British cities comparable to that carried out in the United States by
J. E. Vance, R. E. Murphy and B. J. Epstein.11 Nor are there, as yet,
any published series of historical land use maps; although some work
is now being undertaken in this field. Under the circumstances the most
simple and practical definition of the comparable central districts of the
five major Victorian cities has seemed to take the built-up area in 1840,
when detailed maps of each are available, and to measure planimetri-
cally the intrusions into this area made by the railways during the rest
of the century.
Worked out upon this basis the central space requirements of the
railways up to 1900 can be seen to vary between five and a half per cent
for London (where the legislative policy of exclusion has already been
described) to seven and a half or nine per cent for the port and terminal
cities, Glasgow and Liverpool.
% of central
Built-up area Railways in zone owned by
in 1840 central zone railways in
(acres) in 1900 (acres) 1900
London 14,453 776 5-4
Birmingham 1,439 75-5 5-3
Liverpool 1,673 151 9-0
Manchester 1,886 137 7-3
Glasgow 1,117 84-5 7-6
Given the necessary correction factors, these results accord reasonably
well with Harland Bartholomew’s work on fifty-three cities in the
United States, where the average land use claim staked by the railways
was 4-86%, rising to 12-76% for a transfer point like Kansas City.12
Bartholomew also reported, though unfortunately it is not possible in
the present state of urban studies in this country to parallel his figures,
that on average the American urban railways were second only to
commercial and trading land users in the central area, and consumed
11 Raymond E. Murphy and J. E. Vance Jnr., ‘Delimiting the Central Business
District’, idem ‘A comparative Study of Nine Central Business Districts’, idem and
Bart. J. Epstein, ‘Internal Structure of the Central Business District’, Economic
Geography, 30 (1954). 189-222, 301-336, 31 (1955), 21^46.
12 Harland Bartholomew, Land Use in American Cities (Cambridge, 1955) 58-9.
An example of the correction needed may be illustrated from a British city. J.
Cunnison and J. B. S. Gilfillan, The Third Statistical Account of Scotland: Glasgow
(Glasgow, 1958), 47, Table IV, gives modern land use figures, according to which
4-5% of land within the City Boundary was used by railways jn 1944-5. But the
area included covers 39,725 acres, of which 40-3% was undeveloped, 10-9% open
land. This is not inconsistent with the figure cited in the text above.
290
 THE CITY CENTRE

approximately three quarters as much area as heavy and light industry

combined. In view of the absence of comparable information here no
similar relationship between the railways and other central land users
can be demonstrated, but it is perhaps reasonable to suggest, on a priori
grounds, that proportions of at least a similar order might be expected
in the major British cities.
The railways’ land-hunger, however, could be seen to the greatest
effect in the peripheral areas outside the central district of each city.
Here land was consumed for marshalling yards, locomotive and carriage
works and sheds, link and cut-off lines, and circumferential railways,
at a prodigal rate. By 1900, for example, taking an average track width
of 22 yards, as the amount usually allowed for the limits of deviation,
Glasgow’s urban lines and terminals, and the railways skirting the city,
together with their associated yards and sidings, occupied over 820
acres—an area equal to three-quarters of the built-up acreage of the
whole city in 1840.13 In Liverpool and Manchester also, the lands in
railway ownership in 1900 were half as large as the built-up areas of
each city sixty years earlier; although in Birmingham, for reasons
already suggested, and in London, where the city area was already very
large by 1840, the railway’s land acquisitions were not so disproportion­
ate.
Reference to urban maps illustrates and explains this remarkable
land hunger. In Glasgow the St. Rollox—Sighthill—Springburn com­
plex of engine works and goods yards covered over one hundred and
ninety acres to the north-east of the city; to the south, the Caledonian
railway company’s various coal depots, carriage sheds and marshalling
yards covered another hundred and sixty. North of the river, link
railways skirted the town from east to west in a great semicircle. In
Birmingham the Curzon Street and Vauxhall yards covered a hundred
and twenty acres to the east of the city. In Manchester the Ardwick
yards covered nearly ninety acres, and the Central and Ship Canal yards
covered a further thirty and fifty acres respectively; a hundred acres
more was laid out for the Lancashire and Yorkshire and L. & N.W.
goods sidings, and the Windsor Bridge cattle yards in Salford; and a
link railway skirted the east of the town to Miles Platting, where
sidings and yards covered another hundred and twenty acres. In Liver­
pool the northern dock sidings, and those at Kirkdale and Sandhills
covered seventy-five and fifty-five acres respectively; with the Aintrec
sidings, also to the north but a little further out of town, adding a
further forty acres of marshalling yards. A link railway running from
13 F. S. Williams, Our Iron Roads (1852), 93, ‘exclusive of cutting or embankment’.
The official view was that 34 yards, or 12-97 acres per lineal mile should be allowed,
and even this was probably an underestimate on the urban approach lines. H.C.,
1867-8, LXII, 275.
291
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Garston in the south skirted the built-up area, before curving in towards
the coast again to the north of the town, connecting en route with the
enormous sidings at Edgehill, which covered a hundred and fifty acres.
These features, as with the other towns mentioned, are so large as to
stand out, even in the diagrammatic maps accompanying Chapter 1.
In London, north of the Euston Road, a series of depots and yards
covered over three hundred acres; and similar, though smaller, groups
of railway depots, servicing, storage and marshalling areas marked the
other major exit routes. As in the other cities, peripheral railways also
skirted the town; the spectacularly unsuccessful West London (Punch’s)
railway; the timely and successful North London, which had started
life as a mere dockside line with the northern trunk routes; and the East
London, a contractors’ line built by John Hawkshaw, Samuel Brassey
and Lucas brothers.14 In some of these cases the lines had originally
run along the fringe of the urban frontier, but had later been surrounded
by buildings; otherwise they were the nearest surface railway equiva­
lents to the ceintures of the northern cities.
The space consumed by these yards, for loading, storage, shunting,
servicing, and even for building the engines and rolling stock, requires
little comment or explanation, except once more to stress the very
large total acreages set aside for this specialised use in each town’s
outer districts, and the barrier effect of these great unbridged urban
clearances.
Examples of the barrier effect could be cited for any city but are
difficult to discuss without illustration. Indeed the large-scale Ordnance
Maps give a more graphic impression than any words of the effect of
severance and isolation the intrusive railway sidings and ever thickening
through routes had upon the districts in which they were located. The
illustrations (Plates 6 and 7), which could easily be matched for any of the
other four cities, show a small part of the development of southern
Laurieston and Tradeston, a district which was intended to be one of
the finest residential areas in Glasgow by its projectors David and
James Laurie; but which fell a victim to encroachments by industrial
users, and was given the coup de grace by the Caledonian, and the
Glasgow and South Western railway companies.15 Although only 1-1|
miles from the Exchange and central business district, it was cut off, a
resident complained, ‘as if it were a walled city or something like that.’16
Laurieston rapidly deteriorated between 1840 and 1900 into a slum
annexe to the Gorbals; a useful overflow district (for some of the

14T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 217 (Punch’s); Michael Robbins,
op. cit (1953) (North London); The Builder, XXVII (1869), 630 (East London).
15 John R. Kellett, Glasgow: a Concise History (1966), 14-18.*,
16 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1846, 9 July, p. 272, S.C. on Caledonian Railway (Dunlop
Street Station).

292
 THE CITY CENTRE

thousands displaced by more central railway demolition) with large

houses capable of subdivision into warrens housing a hundred and
fifty people under one roof.
It would be an over-simplification to ascribe Laurieston’s dilapidation
to the railways alone. Anderston, at a similar distance to the west of
the city centre, developed a similar pattern of shabby mixed zoning
and gross residential overcrowding during the same period, although
the railways were excluded from the district. Clearly, the evolving
‘twilight zones’ of Glasgow, east London, and other Victorian cities,
were no mere by-product of the railways’ approach routes and sidings.
The root cause, as those who took an interest in the urban working
class from Pearson to Booth or Costelloe pointed out, was the usurpa­
tion of central space by business, commercial and railway users,
combined with the sustained demand for casual labour in the centra
district. ‘A slum, in a word,’ said Costelloe, ‘represents the presence o
a market for local casual labour.’17 There were in London half a million
who had to live close at hand to be ‘on the spot at the lucky time’; in
the Drury Lane slums for the Covent Garden market, at Tower Hill
for the docks, in Soho for the West End tailoring trade.18 Even in the
skilled craft industries—where equipment might have to be borrowed
three or four times per day—the pull of the central district was almost
as strong as in the casual labour market. The opportunities for cheaper
food on credit from local shopkeepers, and for the part-time employ­
ment of womenfolk in the central area, were amongst the other factors
contributing to the overcrowding of the central area listed by the Royal
Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes.19 These factors
applied with similar force not merely in London but in the other major
Victorian cities.
The making of a slum is too large and general a process to be ascribed
to the railways alone, but it is noticeable that districts divided and
confined by the railways tended to be cast finally and irretrievably into
the now familiar mould of coal and timber yards, warehousing, mixed
light and heavy industrial users, and fourth-rate residential housing.
Apart from the yards and sidings, which filled an obvious operational
purpose, however, there were also large tracts of cross-overs and
connecting lines, the utility of which was far more questionable.
Although built, on occasions, to serve an ephemeral or tactical purpose,
17 B. F. C. Costelloe, The Housing Problem (1899), 48-9. A Reprint of pp. 41-63 of
Trans. Manch. Stat. Soc., 1898—9.
18 Ibid. 48. For these reasons those working in Shoreditch declined the offer of a
cottage and garden at Potters’ Bar on the railway which had trains running into a
terminus near their old houses. ‘They were offered housing and railway facilities
for the same rent they paid in the slum. Yet not 5 % of them would even look at the
offer.’
19H.C„ 1884-5, XXX, 22-3.
293
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

these products of rivalry were just as permanent and immoveable as

the sections of track with a durable function. They could not be rolled
up when the occasion which had prompted them had passed; and yet
the statute book is full of these short links and extensions, often
grouped wholesale under a discreet ‘Additional Powers’ bill. They were
listed, at the close of the year in The Times, but in the smallest adver­
tising type, and the driest legal style; ‘and the result’, John Hollings­
head complained, ‘is that projects more revolutionary in their effects
upon persons than an Indian rebellion or a Parisian riot, are able to
give that “preliminary notice” of their birth which is required by parlia­
mentary regulations, without disturbing even the timidest and oldest
inhabitant amongst us.’20
Every town can produce examples of these cross-overs, triangle
junctions and link lines, but the most spectacular are the ‘New Cross
tangle’ and the ‘Battersea tangle’ in south London. Originating at the
time of the Victoria, and Bricklayers’ Arms stations, and added to in
succeeding generations, these networks of lines consumed over three
hundred acres of inner suburban land. They are large enough to stand
out on any aerial photograph of London, and are indicated, lower
right, and lower left, in the diagrammatic map of London accompanying
Chapter 1. Their complexities have inspired chapters in two recent
books by O. S. Nock and Edwin Course, which unravel the historical
intentions of each addition to the track in this vast network.21 In this
attempt they have been bolder than Mr. Serjeant Sargood, who,
perhaps speaking with the assumed ingenuousness which counsel
sometimes affected, abandoned all attempt at explanation. ‘There is
such a network of railways I do not think there is any one person in
England, unless it is perhaps Mr. Allport, who knows what the different
lines are. They run in such innumerable directions, and engines are
passing along them at such angles at such various speeds, and with so
much complication, that I do not think anybody who did not know
that they will all be arranged safely but would suppose that they must
all come to a general convergence and wreck, and that it will be the
end of them all.’22
The railway companies engaged in the struggle for Britain’s major
cities were not deterred by any such apocalyptic visions from pursuing
a policy of building, at all costs, their own linkages. John Hawkshaw
explained the very strong feelings upon this subject entertained in
railway boardrooms.23 There were four clear categories of railway
20 J. Hollingshead, Underground London (1862), 203.
21 O. S. Nock, British Steam Railways (1961), 109-26. Edwin Course, London
Railways, (1962), 63-81, 105-117.
22 HLRO, PYB 1/579, 27 May 1873, p. 7. .
23 HLRO, Min., H.L., 1866, 13 July, p. 227, S.C. on M.S. & L. (Central Station
and Lines).
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 THE CITY CENTRE

independence. First, the ideal for which each company strove, was a
line built, staffed and controlled by the promoting company. Second,
a joint line, regarded as a poor substitute for autonomy.21 *24 Even the
Cheshire Lines Committee, supposedly an alliance, needed arbitrators
to settle the disagreements which constantly arose between the con­
stituent companies; and the extreme in disharmony was demonstrated
on joint workings such as the Manchester South Junction line.25 The
operation of this urban link railway was controlled by a joint committee
composed of an equal number of directors from the M.S. & L. and the
L. & N.W., with chairmen alternating from each company. Since the
directors’ votes invariably cancelled each other out, it was by the
casting vote of the chairman that decisions were made, and last quarter’s
decisions invariably countermanded.26 Third in order of preference
came the granting of running powers. This was essentially the action
of a company whose own intentions had been frustrated, and had
sought the alternative of an expensive appeal to Parliament for statutory
rights to use sections of a competitor’s track or station. Powers wrested
by statute from a grudging competitor in this way tended to be greatly
diminished in practice by the day-to-day possibilities for operational
obstructiveness. Finally, and lowest on the scale, was the mere ‘grant
of facilities’ on sufferance.
Given conditions of competition, and the fluctuating hot and cold
relationships even between allied companies, it was inevitable that each
railway company should, in addition to its immediate space require­
ments for running and marshalling, seek to make urban links, under its
own direct control, duplicating competitors’ approach linkages just as
it duplicated their stations.27

3. The function of the central business district, land values, and the
arrival of the railways
There is, despite architectural differences, an essential similarity in the
character of the central business districts of Victorian Britain’s five
largest cities which gives a key to the feature to which, in substantial
measure, they owed their pre-eminence: the highly developed exchange
21 Although it was better than nothing, and O. S. Nock describes it as ‘a typical
London, Chatham and Dover strategy’ to induce large companies to share expenses.
In this way the L.C. & D. became involved in line or station sharing with six major
companies. However the result, once more, was ‘an incredibly complicated series of
connecting lines.’ O. S. Nock, op. cit. 111.
26 HLRO, Min., (M.S. & L.), H.L., 1866, 13 July, p. 229.
™ Manchester City News (1881-2), 24, ‘Notes and Queries’ Supplement, MRL
9427 M 9 A.
27 For examples of this in London and Liverpool referred to by a railway manager
see H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.6681-3 (Cawkwell).
295
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

and market services they carried out for their extensive hinterlands.
In the case of the metropolis and of the cities whose rapid eighteenth­
century growth had been associated with mercantile trade—Liverpool
and Glasgow—the point may seem so obvious as to be a truism; but
it is equally true of Manchester and Birmingham, which might, at first
sight, appear to be essentially manufacturing cities. In their central
districts also, and to the same extent, were concentrated the apparatus
of accounting and credit, of storage and selling.
Visitors to Manchester in the nineteenth century who had expected
the centre of the cotton textile industry, ‘Cottonopolis’, to be nothing
more than a great factory district, were surprised to find a town of
warehouses and banks, as quiet at night as the City of London.28 The
factories from which the greater part of the goods dealt with on the
Royal Exchange came were not in Manchester, but at Stalybridge,
Bolton, Stockport, and other manufacturing towns and villages.29
Manchester’s primary function, evolving even before the railways were
built, was as a market, banking, business and distributing centre.30
This central land use was not merely prior in time to the railways, it
also preceded them, logically, in importance. Although for a time their
immense size and capitals enabled railway companies to compete for
sites in, or verging on, the commercial core of the city, it must be
stressed that the railway and the telegraph were only the instruments
by which these marketing functions were accelerated, and extended in
area. The railways existed to carry the traffic generated by the daily
transactions which were undertaken in the business district. For
example (to continue to use Manchester as illustration) the number of
subscribing members of the Royal Exchange during the Napoleonic
Wars was about 1500, rising to 2000 merchants and manufacturers by
the early 1840’s. As the railway linkages with the Lancashire factory
towns were completed this number rose, to 3000 by 1850, 4000 by
1860, and 7500 by 1885.31 Only a certain, debatable, proportion of
this increase can be assigned to the railways; other factors, both in the
international economy and industrial technology acted as equally
important joint causes. The more limited and useful point that may be
made here, however, is that the railways were closely, if not indispen-
28 ‘The centre of the town is, like all centres of modem towns, wholly given up to
business. Hardly in London itself is there a more utter absence of residential life
than on Sunday exists for a mile or so around the Exchange at Manchester.’ George
Saintsbury, Manchester (1887), 193.
29 James Tait, ‘A Brief Sketch etc.’, Manchester in 1915 (British Association,
1915), 6, and Chap 6, sec. 4 supra.
30 T. W. Freeman, ‘The Manchester Conurbation’, Manchester and its Region
(British Association, 1962), 49-50. .
31D. A. Famie, ‘The Commercial Development of Manchester in the later
Nineteenth Century’, The Manchester Review, VII (1956), 332.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

sably, associated with the marked increase in the number of transac­

tions in the central business district, which this increased membership
represented. The manufacturers who came up to the Exchange used,
as a matter of course, the telegraph to receive advance information,
and railway contract tickets for the journey.32 By the 188O’s, in fact,
every important firm in the Lancashire cotton industry was represented
by an office or an agent in Manchester, and three-quarters of Britain’s
. cotton yarn and woven cloth was marketed there. These offices, ex­
changes and warehouses, although they might, individually, be elbowed
out of the way for sites, were the railways’ raison d’etre.

The point has been made emphatically because it is reflected in the

pattern of land values in the central business district, with which the
railways had to contend at every stage of their development. In each
city land values in the central district were based upon the rents at
which premises could be let. It was this which made high density build­
ing profitable and which gave the actual ground its value. The rent
offer was highest in those areas which were central in relation to
established market and exchange uses and to existing transport facilities,
and it changed as these factors changed.33
At the time the railways arrived, however, the central land values
were established upon an extremely narrow compass; a few paces
could make a difference of several hundred per cent in the value of
land. And the inertia of this pedestrian scale of values continued after
the railways arrived, because the internal traffic problem within the
central districts of the great cities was not amenable to solution by
steam transport. Around the Exchange in London, for example, land
fell off so rapidly in value that sites at the far end of Cornhill were only
worth a third of those nearer the centre; and there was a marked
difference in the value of land even between the north and the south
sides of King William Street. In general, values fell off in mid-Victorian
London, from a peak central figure of 20s (rent, per superficial foot,
per annum), to 10s extremely quickly (even in the length of one street),
and only slightly more slowly to Is. South of the river no land was
worth more than Is a foot, and the offer rapidly declined to 6d if the
site was at any distance from the riverside. In the central business
district of Manchester, values were not far short of those in the City of
London and the gradient of rents demanded was equally steep.34
32 ‘Railway contract tickets’ were the reason why the Manchester Guardian stopped
reporting local Blackburn yarn prices. Nine-tenths of the subscribers to the Royal
Exchange used Victoria station (No. 4 on sketch maps). Ibid. 331, 333.
33 For a theoretical discussion of these and of the other major factors which affect
urban rents see R. H. Turvey, The Economics of Real Property (1957), 1-52.
34 The Builder, XXIX (1871), 3 June, 420-1.
l* 297
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Many factors played a part in producing these central values: the

amount of land available in one lot, its aspect and light, whether it was
on a corner site, its convenience of access, suitability for specialised
building, non-liability to interference by adjacent owners, and its
geological characteristics.35 But the basic platform from which the
values commenced was given by proximity to established market
functions. ‘To be in a market is, we all know, of great importance,’
remarked Mr. Edward L’Anson, in 1871. ‘It is something to be in
London, itself one vast emporium and mart, but it is more still to be in
the great market itself.’36
Similar views have been discussed and amplified more recently in
this country by Ralph Turvey and Nathaniel Lichfield, and in the
United States by Richard L. Meier. ‘The urban core’, writes Meier,
‘provides the institutions and services which enable the making and
breaking of contacts at a high rate. . . . The daily migration to the
centre of the city is an attempt to maximise the transaction rate.’37
Perhaps the most important factor in maximising the transactions upon
which the city depended, suggests Meier, is the face-to-face meeting,
‘with the conversation tugged this way and that in order to discover
the bases for co-operation and the grounds for conflict’, terminating
with the handshake or signature. Although Meier is speaking of modern
American experience, his observations find very apt illustration in the
historical functions of central business districts in British cities. In the
Manchester Exchange, for example, ‘transactions of immense extent,’
wrote Leon Faucher in 1844, ‘are concluded by nods, winks, shrugs or
brief phrases. . . . There is perhaps no part of the world in which so
much is done and so little said in the same space of time. A stranger
sees nothing at first but a collection of gentlemen with thoughtful,
intelligent faces, who converse with each other in laconic whispers,
supply the defects of words with nods and signs, move noiselessly from
one part of the room to another, guided as if by some hidden instinct
to the precise person in the crowd with whom they have business to
transact.’38
Because they set in motion a whole chain of operations in manu­
facturing, warehousing, transporting and selling, and because they
depended to such a marked extent, even in the days of the telegraph
35 The list could be extended, of course, to include questions of the goodwill or
prestige of a site (often very important) the right to use without restrictions, etc. For
a discussion see Nathaniel Lichfield, Economics of Planned Development (1956),
67-83.
36 The Builder, XXIX (1871), 3 June, 420.
37 Richard L. Meier, A Communication Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge,
Mass., 1962), 64-5.
38 Leon Faucher, Manchester in 1844 (Manchester, 1844), 21,'-and D. A. Farnie
loc. cit. 331.

298
 THE CITY CENTRE

and efficient postal service, upon the personal meeting, the dealers on
the Exchange, and their associated offices and credit agencies, were
able to bid for central location against all comers. Land values in the
City of London were six to eight times as high as even the most elegant
West End residential addresses. They were even two or three times as
great (for the smaller sites required) as the prices the railways were able
to bid for central land. The core of the central business district, there­
fore, must be taken as immovable by direct railway pressure.39 Resi­
dential areas, historic buildings, graveyards, hospitals, craft workshops,
even, where necessary, factories, could be traversed or swept away,
but not the central Exchange area.
Other subdivisions within the structure of the central business district,
however, were not so invulnerable, and came lower in the rent paying
hierarchy. The railways in the five cities studied were able on occasions
to drive wedges into the central business district, or to define and
circumscribe the area; but it must be frankly stated that their percep­
tible effect, even in the long term, upon the location of central business
district functions was smaller than has sometimes been suggested.
In London the City remained the principal resort and exchange, but
the westward spread of some business functions was under way a
century before the West End Stations were built. Indeed London had
always had two nuclei, the City and Westminster; and the area between
them, the so-called West End, had formed a zone into which some
business functions had begun to migrate in the seventeenth or even the
late sixteenth century. ‘The City of London gradually removes West­
ward,’ wrote John Graunt, in 1676, ‘and did not the Royal Exchange
and London Bridge stay the Trade, it would remove much faster.’40
The trades, specifically, which were migrating westward at that time
were drapery, from Canning and Watling Street to Ludgate Hill,
mercery from Cheapside and Lombard Street to Paternoster Row.
Leadenhall Street and Fenchurch Street were losing other retail trades.
In the eighteenth century these retail trades tended to move still
further westward. Shops left Paternoster Row for Fleet Street, or
moved along Holborn and St. Giles, en route to the Regent Street,
Bond Street and Oxford Street locations of the early nineteenth century.
To a certain extent their migration may be attributed to a strong
attraction towards the aristocratic quarters of Mayfair and Belgravia,
whose residents provided their clientele. To a certain extent the retailers
may also have been speeded in their departure by the willingness of
39 Louis K. Loewenstein, ‘Location of Urban Land Uses’, Land Economics, 39
(1963), 411, suggests that a host of ancillary services, printers, restaurants etc. also
helped to make this central district ‘relatively impervious to change.’
40 John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1676),
75.
299
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

other fringe activities of the central business district to step into their
premises. Mercery, for example, was virtually chased into the West End
by the expanding printing business; first the professional publishers of
legal and other documents in Paternoster Row, then the newspapers of
Fleet Street.
Whatever the reasons, the result by the early nineteenth century was
that the principal shopping functions had detached themselves from the
rest of the central district by a greater distance than in the other cities,
and had begun to form a more westerly zone of their own.41 The build­
ing of West End stations at Victoria and Charing Cross was no more
than a recognition and (one might say) reinforcement of the changes
in land use which were already under way.
The exchange functions in London, as in most of the five cities,
remained firmly rooted in the oldest part of the town. ‘The City,’ in its
modem sense, covers almost exactly the old walled city of London. In
Liverpool, likewise, the office, banking and exchange quarter corres­
ponds closely to the earliest part of the town. ‘The first fact which strikes
a historian, on studying the map,’ wrote Ramsey Muir in 1910, ‘is that
the office area includes the whole of the original town of Liverpool as
laid out by King John, and very little more.’42
The establishment of this central location for the essential exchange
functions need not be the product of as long a history as that of London
or Liverpool. In America the same tendency has been remarked by
Warren R. Seyfried, who explains it in organic terms: cities, like other
organisms, ‘were born small’, the developing transport system converged
towards the original nucleus, and the market was fixed (with appro­
priately high rents and land values) where convergence was greatest.43
The remaining land uses, and any prospective alterations and improve­
ments in the transport system, had the option of naturally conforming
to the established pattern, or of waging an uphill and unprofitable
struggle to break it down and establish a series of new locations. In all
five Victorian cities selected for study here, the choice was taken to
conform.
In London it is noteworthy that although the major national trunk
routes terminated there, one has only to glance at the traffic figures in
1855, or even 1905, to see the quite disproportionate role in urban
41D. F. Stevens, ‘The Central Area’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
H. C. Prince, 1964) 170-1, and A. E. Smailes, ‘The Site, Growth and Changing Face
of London’, The Geography of Greater London (ed. R. Clayton, 1964), 20-33.
42 Ramsay Muir, ‘Liverpool, an Analysis of the Geographical Distribution of
Civic Functions’, Town Planning Review, I (1910), 37-40. ‘Office Liverpool is very
obstinate and very conservative. ... It has chosen its centre and no power will
remove it.’ •,
43 Warren R. Seyfried, ‘The Centrality of Urban Land Values’, Land Economics,
39^(1963), 276.
300
 THE CITY CENTRE

traffic played by termini which had relatively minor roles in the trunk
route system; such as London Bridge, Fenchurch Street, and Liverpool
Street stations. Though comparatively little used by long distance
travellers then, or now, they secured the greatest degree of convergence
upon the heart of the central business district, and with this the reward
of dense business traffic. If the Great Northern and the London and
North Western railways’ plans for extensions into the Holborn/Fleet
Street area, described earlier, had been sanctioned in 1846, the northern
main-line routes might have enjoyed equally close access to the business
district, whilst retaining their outer termini at King’s Cross and Euston
for trunk traffic. The increased convenience of their projected termini
in Farringdon Street might have led to the exercise of increased demand
pressure, as early as the 185O’s and 1860’s, upon the respective railway
companies, and upon the landowners to the north and north-west of
London, to give accommodation to a wider range of business, pro­
fessional and clerical commuters. On the other hand it would have
driven a wedge down from the north between the City and the expand­
ing West End. The sheer expense of competing for land on such a
scale with central business users, and the drastic interruption of east­
west street communications which these northern schemes involved,
gave a decisive advantage to the railways with approaches through the
relatively undeveloped district of cheap residential housing south of
the river. The City and West end remained relatively undisturbed, by
the railways, except for the underground Metropolitan and Circle lines
of the 186O's and 1880’s; the westward spread of some of the business
functions towards, and finally into, the high-class residential area
continued uninterrupted.
In Glasgow a similar westward shift of some of the leading com­
mercial premises from Buchanan Street and the Exchange was also in
progress in the second and third quarters of the century, and was not
diminished by the shortage of railway accommodation in that area.
Although one might have expected the Bridge Street, George Square
and Buchanan Street stations (Nos. 1, 2 & 3 on map), which were the
most central termini in Glasgow until 1873, to exercise a contrary
attraction, pulling the commercial premises back to the centre and
south, the march of business into Blythswood and into the West End
of Glasgow continued unchecked.44 The key factor in this case, as it
probably was in London’s, seems to have been the availability of land
and premises in units of the right size, character and price. These
considerations quite outweighed the locational pull of the railway
44 D. R. Diamond, ‘The Central Business District of Glasgow’, Proceedings of
the I.G.U. Symposium in Urban Geography (Lund, 1962), 525-34. Unpublished
historical land use maps by W. Forsyth of Glasgow University for 1825, 1850 and
1875, founded upon city directory material, illustrate the movement in progress.
301
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

termini. After all, as the Case Histories frequently illustrated, the

opportunities presented by the evolving pattern of land values and
land ownership were also a major factor in determining the location
of many of the railway termini themselves. By moving into the spacious
and well-kept sites offered by the once high-class residential area of
Blythswood, commercial users were merely responding to similar
opportunities.
Since the westward march of business was not retarded by the
construction of the early terminus at Bridge Street, Glasgow, the
obvious step was, as in London, to plan more westerly stations; and
one such station, to be situated in Blythswood Holm, was contemplated,
and some of the land for it acquired, as early as the 1840’s. By the late
1860’s, however, when the Caledonian company returned to the scheme,
the designated site had appreciated so greatly in value that the land
costs would have been prohibitive, and the railway company had to
content itself with a slightly less central location.45 When it came to a
contest with business users over the few hundred yards of most highly
prized central space the railways had to retreat.
In Birmingham the two main central stations were established
unusually early, yet a high degree of specialisation in the central
district already greeted the railways on their arrival, with clearly defined
jewellery and gun quarters, public offices and retail centre. Indeed the
Snow Hill and New Street projects went to great lengths to establish
locations for themselves which were convenient for already existing
functions. Several hours of the Select Committees’ time on the rival
bills was taken up hearing detailed evidence regarding the precise
walking distances to the principal warehouses, the Post Office, the Royal
Hotel, the professional quarters and the banks.46 Indeed the New
Street committee’s patience was so tried by a clash between opposing
counsel over the relative distances to Spoon and Attwood’s Bank, that
the chairman intervened; ‘This is not very important. Might we not
move on ?’47 As ino ther cities, there was a tendency to take it as read
when counsel showed a tendency to particularise too greatly over the
internal structure of the central district.
However, it is clear that, both in Birmingham and Glasgow, there
was a tendency for the railway stations, and the short distances of their
approach lines which fell within the central area, to act as outer boun­
daries for the central business district, and even to sever from the main
46 According to Thomas Binnie’s valuation even this site (No. 7 on sketch map)
cost, at £100,000 per acre, five times as much as the Blythswood Holm site in 1846.
HLRO, Min., (W. of Scot. June.), H.C., 1846, 26 March, p. 88 cf. BTHR, PYB
1/579, 12 May 1873, Q. 136.
46 HLRO, Min., (B.W. & D.), H.C., 1846, 24 June, p. 232. HLRO, Min., (L. & B.
Ext.) H.C., 1846, 11 June, p. 9. *'
47 Ibid. 11 June, p. 35.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

body some central space users of less exalted status. In Glasgow, at

the time of the abortive Caledonian Dunlop Street scheme in 1846,
evidence of such severance had been submitted. Some of the humbler
business functions had been left behind in the westward march. The
principal packing places and calenderers (who operated steam presses
and mangles) had remained in their old locations near the High Street;
the ‘servants’ hiring market’ was still further east in Gallowgate.48
The provision of a large terminus and viaduct between them and the
Blythswood offices, it was suggested, might isolate them still further.
Likewise in Birmingham, the early and extensive railway land requisi­
tions tended to form a barrier, in this case to any eastwards extension
of the central business district, a point Elrington and Tillott have
commented upon; and also to throw the small severed portion of the
east central area into the new industrial belt, which rapidly spread
between 1860 and 1900 along the Rea and Thane valleys towards
Salford Bridge.49
It is difficult to believe that the railways did more than underline
the differentiation which was already developing within the inner
districts of Glasgow and Birmingham. However, to be on the wrong
side of the tracks, or at the back of the station, in the small central
areas severed, placed an end to hopes of future expansion. Moreover it
was in some cases aggravated by the road closures which the approach
lines or viaducts involved, or by the noise, nuisance, heavy traffic and
damage to goods associated with the fringe industrial activities which,
apart from the railways, now became the only neighbours for those
cut off in this way.
Apart from this limited measure of severance in east central Glasgow
and Birmingham, neither city shows any marked reorientation of the
central business district which can be assigned to the direct influence
of the railways’ terminal site selection. In Glasgow the westward
movement already in progress continued unchecked. In Birmingham
the centre of the specialised business district hardly moved. Indeed
since the original projectors had gone to such lengths to establish
proximity in Birmingham it would be suprprising if such re-location
had occurred; although Conrad Gill opens a line of speculation which
is particularly interesting in view of the Street Commissioners’ projected
street plans in east Birmingham in 1838. ‘If Curzon Street had remained
the principal station for some time longer those (new) streets would

48 In Candleriggs, Brunswick and Wilson Streets. HLRO, Min., (Caled. Dunlop

St.), H.L., 1846, 8 July, p. 117; loc. cit. p. 170-2.
49 C. R. Elrington and P. M. Tillott, ‘The Growth of the City’, A History of the
County of Warwick (Victoria County History, 1964), VII, 4-26; M. J. Wise and
P. O’N. Thorpe, ‘The Growth of Birmingham 1800-1950’. Birmingham and its
Regional Setting: a Scientific Survey (British Association, 1950), 222-4.
303
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

certainly have been made’, he writes, ‘and the commercial centre of the
town would have been drawn to the East.’50
In Liverpool there was, perhaps, more evidence than anywhere else
of a re-centering of certain elements in the central district, although the
heart of the central business district—the exchange and office area—

The Central Area of Liverpool in 1910. Founded on Ramsay

Muir, ‘Liverpool, an analysis of the geographical distribution
of civic functions’, Town Planning Review, I, 304 (1910).

remained impregnably fixed in its old location inland from the Pier
Head and Castle Street. ‘From the peculiar position, of the business
parts of Liverpool, viz. their congregation on the banks of the river,
60 Conrad Gill, The History of Birmingham (1952), I, 338.
304
 THE CITY CENTRE

the land in that neighbourhood is raised to a most extravagant value’,

wrote the reformer Joseph Boult, in 1846.51 These values displaced
thousands from the water front areas over the next twenty years, and
drove them inland (eastwards) to the newly run up cottage properties of
Everton and West Derby. Those who, as William Trench, the Medical
Officer of Health put it, ‘preferred to crowd into the restricted area of
contiguous streets rather than, at the expense of a morning and
evening walk, seek better air in the outskirts of town’, moved only a
few hundred yards to the overcrowded, cholera-ridden slums of Vaux­
hall Road and Marybone.52
As the central business district expanded it could only move inland,
of course, and as land values rose in the exchange district, not only
residents but even some of the central functions—administration, retail
shopping and the restaurant/entertainment trade—began to move out
of the old town. Partly they may have been expelled by site competition
rather than attracted by the railway stations. But the retreat inland
from the waterfront still permitted building and purchase over a 180-
degree arc; and yet all the lesser functions directed their growth
towards Lime Street station, with a unanimity which it is hard to
assign to coincidence.
The shopping area, which ran along the Lord Street/Bold Street axis,
south eastward from the waterfront, added a wing or extension reaching
back northwards along Renshaw Street towards Lime Street. The
hotel and entertainment area, at the end of its regrouping, was also
concentrated in an unusually narrow compass around Lime Street.
An even greater change took place in the location of the administrative
area—the law courts, municipal and public buildings, the Post Office—
as expansion and reconstruction took place in the mid and late nine­
teenth century. Once again it was oriented towards Lime Street,
forming a species of platform or avenue between the office and exchange
quarter and the terminal which, for many years, was the only exit for
Manchester, Birmingham and London passenger traffic.
The deliberate nature of the choice made, in one case at any rate,
is attested by the letter received by the corporation from C. B. Banning,
the postmaster, in 1847, asking ‘Whether the Corporation of Liverpool
have any lot of land containing about 1,500 sq. yds. situated somewhere
near the Railway Station in Lime Street, or between that building and
the Exchange, which they will be willing to let the Government have as
a site for the new Post Office.’53 The site was eventually combined with
51 Joseph Boult, ‘On the Improvement of Tenements in Towns’, Trans, of the
Liv. Poly. Soc. (1846), 85.
52 LRL, Council Minutes, 1863-4, 518, Report by M.O.H.
63 LRL, Council Books, XX, 4 August 1847, Finance Committee Minutes XII,
6 and 13 August 1847.
305
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the cutting of a new thoroughfare, Victoria Street, the nearest equiva­

lent in the Victorian cities studied to a continental Bahnhofstrasse.
The original suggestions for the scheme had been laid before the
Liverpool Polytechnic Society, an unusually influential town forum,
in 1843 by Samuel Holme, later mayor.51 *54 The advent of the railways,
Mr. Holme suggested, should be taken as an opportunity to demolish
the dilapidated old Islington market and use the site for magistrates’
courts and a police station, to match the assize court and ‘form a
splendid quadrangle with the assize courts on one side and the grand
facade of the railway station on the other.’ The station in question was,
of course, Lime Street, and the corporation’s pride in the facade was
understandable since it had contributed generously towards completing
the building; an act of unique and unrequited civic generosity.
A major suggestion, partially realised later, was the demolition of
the fever-ridden dens south of Dale Street, and the construction of a
60-foot wide street (on the line of modern Victoria Street). ‘Being in
line with Brunswick Street,’ Mr. Holme wrote, ‘it would be most
valuable for shops or places of business, which would tend to concentrate
trade in the very heart of the town and give a direct passage to the railway
station. . . . Much would be gained by the thousands who every day
walk round this neighbourhood instead of walking through it, and the
property between this new Street and Dale Street would be materially
increased.’55
Here Mr. Holme touched upon one of the primary reasons for the
inertia of the central district, and the suspicion under which schemes
likely to reorient it fell. Quite small movements in fashion and con­
venience were reflected by very marked differentials of land value, as
already indicated; so rather more was at stake in altering the balance
of a city than might at first appear. However where, as in this case, or
as in the case of some London realignments, the property was derelict
and everyone (except those evicted) stood to gain, the principal obstacle
was shortage of corporate funds.56
In Manchester, as in London, Glasgow and Birmingham, there was
no perceptible re-location of the central business district as a whole
which can be assigned to the presence of the railway stations. The
centre of the warehouse district, however, did migrate southwards by
51 S. Holme, ‘Upon the Public Improvements of Liverpool’, Trans, of the Liv.
Poly Soc. (1843), 30-4.
66 Loc. cit. 33. My italics.
66 Northumberland Avenue in London, is possibly the nearest equivalent to
Victoria Street, Liverpool, but only ran from Charing Cross station to the Thames
Embankment, rather than to a central point. It was also planned and constructed
contemporaneously with the station. Its net cost, after the re-sale of land was
£600,000. P. J. Edwards, History of London Street Improvements,' 1855-1897 (1898),
61.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

up to half a mile, from the Cannon street area, where nearly 400 were
located in 1820, down towards Portland Street—which was described
as ‘the essential Manchester’ by the 1860’s.57 ‘Poor Cannon Street—
almost deserted’, depreciated greatly in value, and became a convenient
site for country manufacturers at lower rents. This southward shift
was partly accounted for by the growth in number and value of ware­
houses—many of the Portland Street/Mosley Street warehouses were
completely new; but many Cannon Street firms, such as Potters and
Norris, E. & J. Jackson, J. S. & J. Watts, thought it worth while to
uproot themselves from established premises, and move the few
hundred yards involved.58 In doing so the later migrants were actually
moving away from Victoria station, which is only a stone’s throw from
Cannon Street, and they were not moving directly towards the
London Road station but, if anything, to a point equidistant between
the two main stations, and as far away from them as they could be
without actually moving out of the central business district altogether.
Nor does it appear that wider access roads or lighter traffic could have
compensated for the increased distance. Portland Street was described
by John Pendleton in the 1890’s, as so crowded with drays and carts
piled high with Manchester goods moving slowly stationwards that
‘it required quite an acrobatic feat to cross such a maze and struggle of
traffic.’59
There seem to have been two main reasons for this contrary drift
of the commercial element in Manchester’s central business district
away from the stations. First, the Manchester warehouses were no
mere transit sheds, but were used for display and sale by sample. ‘The
best and handsomest buildings in the City of London are only ordinary
representatives of the warehouses now built in Manchester’, claimed
Mr. J. F. Bateman in 1866; and others spoke of the ‘unsurpassed and
palatial’ nature of the buildings, designed at great expense by some of
the most eminent Victorian architects.60 A spacious and airy setting
was essential for buildings of this character. Secondly, these wider
spaces were available at reasonable rents in the southern arc of the
business district, within the limits defined by the Manchester South
Junction viaduct. The opportunity presented by the pattern of land
57 D. A. Famie, loc. cit. 328-9.
58 Manchester as it is (Manchester, 1839) 173 et. seq. Even at this early date the
movement was under way. Potters and Norris had moved to George Street, A. & S.
Henry had opened ‘imposing’ premises in Portland Street, and Hargreaves had
built a ‘beautiful’ warehouse at Meal Street. Portland Street was ‘rapidly converting
to warehouses’.
89 John Pendleton, Our Railways: their origin, development, incident and romance
(1896), I, 130.
80BTHR PYB 1/383, QQ.3288-9; C. Stewart, The Architecture of Manchester
(Manchester, 1956), 41-55, idem, The Stones of Manchester (1956), 67-8.
307
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES,

values and land ownership was of more immediate importance than

transport facilities. Bateman, who was a civil engineer with thirty
years experience of Manchester, explained the warehousemen’s feelings
on the subject as follows. ‘Within certain limits a station may be an
improvement, but a person establishes a warehouse not with reference
to the station but with reference to the general convenience of his
trade: but if there were two places, one a mile and the other half a mile
off from a station, he might take the one that was only half a mile off
the station.’61
As in the Blythswood area of Glasgow, functional competition for
land developed by the 1860’s between the railways and business men;
and, as in Glasgow, the railways lost the contest. James Lynde, city
surveyor, in his evidence, stressed the reluctance of first class ware­
houses to come within a considerable distance of the railways, and
asserted that if the M. & S.L. trans-urban viaduct, projected in the
186O’s, were allowed to run, adjacent and parallel to Portland Street,
across the central business district, no further business expansion would
be possible, and that a large segment would be severed to the south­
east from the valuable central land. He and Bateman were pressed to
enlarge their views upon the subject, which are, perhaps, worth quoting
more fully.
‘With regard to what you say about depreciating the property for ware­
houses,’ Lynde was asked, ‘I presume that if it becomes necessary for the
trade of Manchester that there should be increased warehouse accommoda­
tion, and that more warehouses should be built, they will be built some­
where?—Yes, they will be built somewhere, but there is no district in which
they could so conveniently be built as the district now proposed to be cut up.’
‘If they cannot go there, then they must go to some other part of Man­
chester?—It follows as a matter of course.’
‘Then after all it is a balance, one part of Manchester being deteriorated and
another part improved?—It is so to a certain extent, but certain trades go
to certain districts, and if you cut off one half of the trade from the other it is
very inconvenient.’62
The severing effect of a viaduct in the central business district could
not be overstated, Lynde believed. As City Surveyor it was part of his
job to examine streets, pavements and bridges, and he found the
greatest nuisances in the city were in the region of the Manchester
South Junction viaduct. No foot pavements were possible because of
the arch entrances, the arches were heaped with lumber, and the streets
congested with the horses and carts of merchants of inferior trades,
parked at right angles to the traffic. ‘Parties willing to occupy ware­
houses alongside the viaduct could not be found’; instead they
61BTHR PYB 1/383, Q.3341.
63 Ibid. QQ.3258-60.

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 THE CITY CENTRE

only brought ‘a low class of person into the neighbourhood.’63

The objection was not to the station itself—which might well,
Bateman estimated, increase values within a radius of about half a
mile—but to the approach routes, particularly viaducts, and particularly
if they crossed the city centre. ‘Can you fix any limits in reference to
the viaducts ? How far on each side of the viaduct would any harm be
done by it?—I do not think it would be a limit of distance; it would
rather be a limit of time. The result in my mind would be this: that if
that railway (the M.S. & L. Central) were made, the property which
now, if the district were left alone, would be rapidly absorbed for
warehouse purposes, would cease to be absorbed, so that the ware­
houses to be built would find other places in which to be built in
preference. And, finally, when the whole of that property was covered
with warehouses, and they were obliged to resort to the part near the
railway, they might fill up the intervening space.’64
These were opinions not facts, of course, as Mr. Denison, Q.C.,
counsel for the M.S. & L., quickly pointed out. But they do fit the
apparent shifts in the internal structure of the central business district;
and the chairman of the M.S. & L. himself, though giving evidence
expressly to promote the scheme, virtually conceded the point when he
stated that his company’s anxiety to proceed at once with the scheme
partly sprang from the fact that ‘in two or three years’ time the area
will be covered with warehouses.’65
In Manchester, then, the warehouses may be seen as rivals, not
merely clients, to the railways. How far this experience may have been
general remains a matter of some doubt. During the hearing on the
M.S. & L. bill counsel attempted to demonstrate that there was no such
repulsion or antipathy between the two land uses in Liverpool, where
the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway approached its station (Exchange,
No. 3 on map), by a high viaduct running close to large warehouses,
many of which had been built after the line was completed; in London,
likewise, many examples could be found of warehouses seeking to
move into the fringe of residential dilapidation which ran along the
routes of urban viaducts.66 Writing quite independently on this topic
in 1861, with close first hand experience of London, William Denton
also referred to the ‘natural association’ of railway and warehouse,
causing a dual effect upon working class housing: first by the railway
demolitions, then ‘add to this that the making a great railway station
leads naturally and inevitably to the conversion of dwelling houses

63 Ibid. QQ.3183-3269.
64 Ibid. Q.3328.
65 HLRO, Min. (M.S. & L. Central Station), H.C., 1866, 9 May, p. 135.
66 BTHR’PYB 1/383, QQ.3319-25, 3331.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

into warehouses and other uninhabited houses.’67 In view of this and

other similar evidence, it seems reasonable to deduce that a critical
factor was the character of the warehouse, and the purpose for which
it was intended, whether exhibition and sale, or mere storage; but that
even this was subordinate to site opportunities.
Apart from this movement, in which the railways played an unusual
role, there was no substantial re-location of the other functions of the
central business district in Manchester which cannot be accounted for
by the process of growth and site opportunities. The exchange, office
and banking centre expanded, but retained its location north of the
King Street/Spring Gardens axis; shopping continued to grow out­
wards from St. Ann’s Square and Market Street.68
Once again, as with Birmingham, this apparent lack of disturbance
to central functions should give no grounds for surprise, in view of the
original location of Victoria and London Road stations; which were
planned, within the limits of available capital and sites, to serve and
reinforce the already established functions. This intention had been
clearly brought out during the public controversy in 1842 between the
rival railway companies engaged. At the twentieth half-yearly meeting
of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, the company’s directors,
entreated shareholders to ‘take the map of Manchester in their hands,
and form their own judgement of the comparative merits of Hunt’s-
Bank and Store-street’ (i.e. Victoria and London Road stations Nos. 4
& 3 on map) ‘for a central junction station; bearing this important
fact always in mind, that with the probable increase of Manchester
and the surrounding districts, in the ratio and in the direction witnessed
in the last twenty years, the Store-street station will become, year by
year, more central and more convenient for all the great purposes of
business and general intercommunication; whilst the site of Hunt’s-
Bank, already in a comparatively distant quarter of the town, seems
likely to become, in the course of years, still more remote from the
great central localities, whether of business or general and miscella­
neous resort.’69
The Liverpool and Manchester case was exaggerated, but it estab­
lishes the point that consideration was given, in the early days when
routes and sites were still being chosen, to proximity to the existing
business district. In a counterblast, the Manchester and Leeds directors
argued, ‘The superior convenience of Hunt’s-Bank as a central station
is attested by the fact that of the 28 inns and hotels in Pigot’s Directory
67 W. Denton, Observations on the Displacement of the Poor by Metropolitan
Railways and by other Public Improvements (1861), 10.
68 D A. Farnie, loc, cit. 336. T. W. Freeman, loc. cit. 49, and.Fig- 15 Idem, The
Conurbations of Great Britain (Manchester, 1959), 187.
89 Six-monthly Report, 26 January 1842, Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
310
 THE CITY CENTRE

for 1841, 19 are nearer Hunt’s-Bank, 2 are equidistant, 7 are nearer

Store-street.’70
All things considered, there was, in fact, little to choose between the
two sites. The enquiry conducted by the council to decide the best
location for the General Post office concluded that the ‘centre of great
business’ was equidistant between the foot of the High Street and the
Exchange; a choice which was settled by Sir Oswald Mosley’s offer of a
suitable site in this area for the Post Office.71 This location favoured
Victoria, but only by 200 yards.

Only in Liverpool, therefore, is there any historical evidence of the

marked gravitational influence which has occasionally been ascribed
to railway stations. In Japan and Denmark, for instance, Peter Scholler
and Aage Aagesen both report ‘influence on [the structure of the city’
and a ‘trend towards the station for market sites’; in Newcastle, M. R.
G. Conzen detects a tendency for the central business district to be
drawn southwards; and in Portsmouth, A. E. Smailes writes of‘signi­
ficant re-centering of the town’.72
It may be that when an adequate series of historical land-use maps
have been constructed for the five great Victorian cities, more evidence
will emerge of the gravitational influence of railway stations upon their
business districts. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that in
the five cities chosen, the growth of business, credit and exchange
facilities had been a feature of urban history for a century or more, and
had been enormously accelerated over the fifty years after 1780. By the
time the railways arrived in the 183O’s the five cities had populations
ranging from 200,000 to 1,500,000. The complexity of their land
ownership and land value patterns, and the already well developed
localisation of their central business functions, ensured that they would
not provide simple arenas for the free play of any single economic
agency, no matter how powerful.

4. The railways' effects upon traffic and land uses in the central business
district
a. Traffic
In spite of the shortage of detailed traffic figures for the major Victorian
70 Reply of the Directors of the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company ... on the
subject of the proposed junction Une through Manchester (1842), MRL, Miscellaneous
Tracts, P2896.
71 MRL, Council Proceedings, 1838-42, pp. 100-1.
72 Proceedings of the I.G.U. Symposium in Urban Geography (ed. Knut Norborg,
Lund, 1962), 586-7 (Scholler), 597 (Aagesen), 392 (Conzen). A. E. Smailes, The
Geography of Towns (1964), 122.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

cities there can be no doubt, from eye-witness accounts, that street

traffic reached, by the 1860’s, levels which were unexampled in all the
cities and almost intolerable in the Metropolis. ‘In the City,’ one
businessman testified in the mid-1840’s, ‘we make no appointment
when we have occasion to use a carriage; the whole place is stuffed up
to such a degree.’73 During the next ten years it was to become even
worse.
A wide variety of land uses played their part in generating this urban
traffic, but from no point did so much originate as the railway stations.
Charles Pearson, at one stage of his evidence to the Select Committee
on Metropolitan Communications attempted to set down some sort of
list of ‘those establishments which occasion the presence of persons
from the Metropolis and from the provinces daily in the City of London
to such an enormous extent.’74 Moving from east to west in the City he
enumerated: the Customs House and India House, the Bank of Eng­
land, the Royal Exchange, Lloyds’, the great banking houses, the
Clearing House, private banks and joint-stock banks, the various in­
surance companies, life, marine and fire, the Australia, Canada and
Levant companies, the Coal Market and Corn Markets, the wholesale
fish, poultry and meat markets catering for nearly two million people,
the linen, cotton, silk and wool offices in Gutter Lane and Wool Street,
those for colonial produce in Mincing Lane, for iron and paper in
Thames Street, the Post Office, the Paternoster printing firms, the
Bankruptcy, Wills and Administrations, Central Criminal, and the
Admiralty Courts. All of these buildings generated endless daily
comings and goings on foot, by cab and omnibus. The position was
similar, on a smaller scale, in the central districts of all the provincial
cities.75
No single central business district function attracted and focused
more traffic, however, than the railway stations. They were the origina­
ting points of a great part of the cab traffic, and their names figured on
the destination boards of many of the new horse omnibuses which
replaced the short-stage coaches in London in the 183O’s. Existing
omnibus companies, Adam Shelford, Inspector of City Police testified,
extended their routes ‘wherever a railway station or terminus opened
some distance off’, and extra police had to be detailed to control the
increased traffic.76 The heaviest traffic in London by the late 1850’s,
in fact, was over London Bridge, where traffic had increased more than
73 H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.1541 (Chaplin).
74 H.C., 1854-5, X, Q.1349.
76 For a modem attempt to measure the number of trips by employees, callers
and vehicles generated in part of the central business district of a major provincial
city (Deansgate, Manchester) see Franklin Medhurst, ‘Traffic ipduced by Central
Area Functions’, Town Planning Review, XXXIV (1963-4), 50-60.’
76 BTHR PYB 1 112/6, 18 July 1860, pp. 43-4.

312
 THE CITY CENTRE

tenfold in a decade; a flow of 1700 vehicles an hour at the 9-10 a.m.

and 4-5 p.m. peaks. This increase John Hollingshead attributed largely
to the joint station at London Bridge. ‘From the day of steam encroach­
ment my tranquillity was at an end.’77
The Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications of 1854/5
listed the total number of those arriving and departing from the
principal stations daily as 75,000; of whom 8,500 came to, or left,
Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross stations—all far enough from
the centre and from the southern terminals to necessitate transport.78
The arrival of long-distance passengers, with their mountains of lug­
gage, caused a disproportionate amount of confusion and congestion
on the approach roads to these main-line terminals. Most of the
railway arrivals from these, and other, stations dispersed throughout
the town, but there was a certain amount, estimated at about 10%,
of interstation traffic; enough, later in the century, to persuade the
Great Northern, the London and North Western, and the Midland
companies to run special inter-terminal omnibuses, either under
contract or under their own direct management.19 By 1906 the numbers
of omnibus routes using railway stations as their termini came to
dozens, and the departures and arrivals varied from one to four per
minute.80
More marked still was the quantity of heavy cartage which originated
or terminated at the railway stations. Hundreds of waggons, carts and
vans could be seen at any of the major termini by mid century; nearly
a thousand at Camden Town and Euston and equivalent numbers at
Nine Elms, Paddington and the other depots.81 At Camden Town could
also be found the depot of Messrs. Pickfords, specialised carriers,
with its steam cranes, steam hay cleaner, steam cutters, and gas lighting
for night work, the pride of the Penny Magazine and the Quarterly
Review.62
Pickfords, who had run a profitable trunk service of their own by
express van from London to Manchester between 1818 and 1825,
were only one of the large carters who found, when they had acclima­
tised themselves to railway competition that, if they turned their

77 John Hollingshead, Odd Journeys in and out of London (1860), 177.

78 H.C., 1854-5, X, Tables II and IV, App. pp. 215-6.
79 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 262.
60 Number of omnibuses per hour
Victoria 215 King’s Cross 69
Liverpool St. 208 Waterloo 59
London Bridge 72 Charing Cross 50
H.C., 1906, XLI, 145, App. 6, Table 14.
81 H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.1770 (Bevan).
82 BTHR PIC 4/1; the Penny Magazine, 20 August and 8 October 1842, Quarterly
Review, December 1848.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

attention to urban carting and railway feeder services, the annual

volumes of their business could be more than sustained at the pre-steam
levels.83 Chaplin and Horne, Sherman, and Dibbin, all took over old
inn-yards, which had been deserted by the long-distance traffic, for use
as receiving houses for railway goods.84 ‘These houses and yards are
chiefly in the very narrowest and most confined streets,’ wrote Charles
Pearson, ‘they answered well enough when the arrivals of coaches and
waggons were few and far between; but now, when they are converted
into suction-pipes, drawing together the whole trade of the City to the
stations in carts and waggons, they create the most serious interruption
to regular trade.’85 At these carriers’ yards the small loads were accumu­
lated, two or three chests of tea in one van, a bale of goods or a couple
of tons of iron in other carts; then later in the day they were trans­
shipped and taken to the terminus in leviathan waggons, for the appro­
priate departure time. On other occasions, as when the processing of
goods intervened, the number of cart journeys before despatch could
rise to four or five. The Directories of provincial cities reveal similar
activity amongst the carriers in each city.
In Glasgow, for example, the carrier’s quarters (as in London) were
situated in the narrow streets—in this case the small streets leading
from Gallowgate and Trongate—and collected goods for distribution
around the three districts into which the town was divided.86 The goods
collected at the railway stations also ran the additional hazard, at
Jamaica Street Bridge, of conflicting streams of extremely heavy
harbour traffic. Large carts, loaded with boxes, bales, coal and pig
iron, in course of movement from the south bank (which took two-
thirds of the export trade) to the north bank (where the import and
bonding warehouses were situated), clashed with the carts making
their way into the town from the Bridge Street goods terminus and
with those making their way from the industrial quarter at Port Dundas,
in the northern outskirts, down to the south bank of the river.87
This confusion between the dock, railway, and through traffic also
arose at Liverpool, where bitter complaints led, in 1856, to the first
discussions about a high-level rail or tramway, to separate the traffic
flows. At Glasgow, however, since the traffic between the main southern
goods terminal and the town, and between the two sides of the harbour,
was all funnelled down one thoroughfare, the effect was greatly mag­
nified. Jamaica Street by the 1870’s with 900 vehicles per hour, was ‘as
crowded as Cheapside or London Bridge’, in the opinion of the manager
83 S. Salt, Railway Commercial Information (1850), 11, 18.
84 H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.2834.
85 Ibid. App. 23, p. 283.
88 Post Office Directory, Glasgow, 1852-3, 60. *'
87 John R. Kellett, Ec.HR, XVII (1964), 359.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

of the London General Omnibus Company.88 As in other cities, no

small part of the congestion was caused by the unwieldy vehicles
dispersing the railway goods, collecting them for delivery to the station,
or carrying out inter-terminal transfer. Pickfords, Camerons, and
Wordie, who carted for the different companies, all complained, by the
early 1860’s, of the great delays encountered both in loading goods
and in moving them to and from their quarters.89
As with the goods cartage, so the increased passenger traffic in
Glasgow also focused upon the railway stations. The numbers of
cab-stands increased five-fold in the two decades after the passenger
terminals opened, and more than half of them were at, or outside, the
stations. Catering for passenger arrivals offered a sufficiently large and
assured business by the 1860’s to form a valuable concession, and attract
larger, multiple-cab operators. John Walker, for example, stabled and
paid tax on 366 horses in the mid-1860’s, and bid £500 for the concession
at Buchanan and Queen Street stations.90 At the average cab-fare, and
assuming a profit of 25 % to 33 %, this would mean that he must cover
40,000 journeys to break even. In fact his cabs probably made at
least 75,000 to 90,000 journeys per annum. In a good month they made
225 daily trips from Queen Street and 75 from Buchanan Street
stations.91 In addition to the station cab service, horse omnibuses were
running every two and a half minutes through the main streets outside
the railway termini by the 1870’s.92
Since, as already mentioned, the major companies in Glasgow
frustrated each other’s efforts to secure a central terminal in the 1840’s,
the problem of street traffic congestion was already acute when the
second wave of railway projects broke in the 1860’s. The basic idea of
the rival Glasgow and South Western, Caledonian, and North British
schemes was in each case to approach more closely the central business
district; and this obviously would lead to the debouching of still more
traffic onto Argyle Street, and other overloaded central thoroughfares.
In view of this, the rudimentary nature of the provisions at the pro­
jected Union station were strongly criticised by the Dean of Guild
Court. Provided the traffic could actually get on and off their premises
without blockage, the Union company were quite satisfied with the
result. What their plans would be likely to do, however, the Dean of
88 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1872, 28 May, pp. 122-30, 156-92, S.C. on Glasgow and
District Tramways.
89 Pickfords were agents for the G. & S.W., Camerons for the Caledonian railway
company. HLRO, Min., H.C., 1864, 13 May, p. 85, S.C. on Union Railway.
90 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1866, 8 May, p. 8, S.C. on Glasgow Police. He owned
45 licenced and 55 job cabs.
81 HLRO, Min., (Union), H.L., 1864, 12 July, pp. 114-5.
92 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1872, 7 May, pp. 51-61, S.C. on Glasgow Corporation
Tramways.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Guild Court pointed out, was simply to cause a jam twenty or thirty
yards down the street from the station, where traffic joined the main-
east-west stream.93
What was obviously desirable, especially for the later, more central
stations built in the 1860’s, was the extensive realignment of approach
roads, in co-operation with the local authorities or statutory bodies,
and with the expense shared between them and the railway company.
In London a number of schemes of this sort were carried through,
though the railway companies’ contributions were not as generous as
some would have liked. There are examples on a small scale from
Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham of street re-alignment. In
Glasgow, however, there was no such accommodation, partly for
reasons already suggested, partly because of the inflexible grid-iron
street plan laid down in the 1770’s and 1780’s for the district into which
central business functions were now migrating.

In all the other cities the contribution of the railways to urban traffic
was similar in kind: square yard for square yard, the railway stations
generated more traffic than any other buildings. Yet although Birming­
ham, Liverpool and Manchester had their own nineteenth century
traffic problems, which merit more detailed separate study, none of
them appear to have produced the sustained blockages typical of the
river crossings at Glasgow and London.
Hopes that the railways might also supply the solution to the prob­
lem which they had so largely augmented were realised very imperfectly
during the nineteenth century, even in London. It was in the capital,
where, by the 1860’s, one could ‘walk over the roofs of vans and buses
as readily as over the united up-raised shields of the Roman soldiers
outside the walls of some beleaguered city’, that the idea of a ‘railway
amongst the sewers’ was put forward as a solution to street traffic
congestion.94 Henry Mayhew describes how the idea was first shadowed
out by the late City Solicitor (Charles Pearson). ‘We knew him well,
and while discussing our joint schemes for the utilisation of convict
labour, have often smiled at the earnestness with which he advocated
his project for girdling London round with one long drain-like tunnel,
and sending the people like so many parcels in a pneumatic tube, from
one end of the metropolis to the other.’95
If a reformer like Henry Mayhew found time to smile, whilst discus­
sing convict labour, at Pearson’s visionary ideas, the public reaction
can easily be imagined. ‘It shook its head and laughed at the idea of a
93 HLRO, Min., (Caledonian Central Station), H.C., 1873, 9. May, pp. 90-160.
91 Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London (1865), 145.
95 Ibid. 144.

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railroad amongst the sewers’, John Hollingshead wrote, ‘The omnibus

and cab interests, as represented by their drivers, were particularly
facetious on the subject, forgetting what their predecessors, the stage­
coachmen, had predicted of railroads in general, and how signally their
prediction had failed.’96
London’s traffic congestion in the 1860's, however, had reached
crisis proportions. Transit from one end of the metropolis to the other
was as difficult and slow as at the time when no roads at all existed.
The primary agency of this increase, in Mayhew’s opinion, was the
arrival of the railways. ‘The increased flood of immigrant passengers
from the provinces and torrent of goods that kept pouring into
the great emporia of the capital . . . caused an utterly new phase of
traffic.’
The building of the Metropolitan underground line, to relieve this
street congestion, could well stand as the epitome of Victorian urban
railways. The scheme originated in 1837 in the mind of Charles Pearson,
the City Solicitor, who, in spite of his prosaic office, was an idealist and
visionary. ‘Thousands of hours and thousands of pounds of my money
and time have gone to the prosecution of this scheme, as to which I
desire nothing but to see success, and do not seek for any remunera­
tion.’97 He had a special model, ‘not a toy; it has been got up by
professional men employed by myself’, of his underground railway and
central terminal schemes, which he offered to lay out in the dining-room
of Guildhall for the members of the Royal Commission of 1846 to
inspect. Nine years later the Select Committee on Metropolitan
Communications was also badgered to inspect his model, and peruse
his memoranda and coloured plans. He lived to see an underground
railway based upon the scheme which he had conceived, begun in 1859,
though it was still not opened to traffic at the time of his death.
The scheme was carried through, however, by a group of men who,
though less far-sighted and disinterested than Pearson, brought
together the necessary elements for re-making a city.98 The engineer was
the brilliant but avaricious John Fowler, concerned, as his record with
the Metropolitan District later showed, rather with personal achieve­
ment than sound business; but capable of sustaining the confidence of
others in the scheme—even when the Fleet river burst into the workings.
Another director was the solicitor William Burchell, who arranged half
the total expenditure (the part concerned with land purchase and
compensation), without obtaining prior agreement, or keeping proper
books. Burchell also connived at the payment of a quarter of the
96 J. Hollingshead, Underground London (1862), 205.
97 H.C., 1854-5, X, Q.1357.
98 The following paragraph is based upon T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins,
op. cit. 99-126.
317
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

declared dividends out of capital, a practice which had been considered

dubious since George Hudson’s disgrace in 1859; and he was con­
nected with the contracting firm Peto and Betts, whose associates
Thomas and Solomon Tredwell became joint builders of the line, and
large shareholders in it. The chairman of the company was William
Malins, who floated the scheme by persuading the bankers Heywood,
Kennards & Co. to advance the necessary deposit to comply with
Standing Orders, in return for appointment as the Metropolitan’s
bankers. His skill in presentation before the Select Committees earned
a tribute even from Parliamentary counsel. In Myles Fenton the Metro­
politan gained a general manager of unusual ability: and finally, in
Edward Watkin, a new chairman who set the company on its feet as a
business proposition when irregularities had brought it to the verge of
bankruptcy.
The Metropolitan was such a remarkable success operationally as to
precipitate the rush of urban railway projects in 1863 described in an
earlier chapter. Its services, at five to ten minute intervals, represented
a new approach to railway transport, and were more popular than any­
one had dared to hope. This was reflected in the margin by which its
weekly receipts of £720 per mile exceeded the average (£30 to £40) per
mile per week for the major trunk routes."
Its effect upon traffic congestion, however, was not as marked as
might be supposed. For a time the New Road omnibuses, with which
it directly competed, were reported to be running almost empty, in
spite of halving their fares, but once curiosity about the new under­
ground railway had died down their seats filled up again. Although by
the end of the 1860’s the Metropolitan was carrying twenty-five million
passengers per year, and extending its works through the City, the
London General Omnibus Company still carried forty million pas­
sengers per year, as it had before the underground railway was con­
structed. Once again the railway’s role had been to create, or stimulate,
additional new traffic.

b. Land uses adjacent to the central stations

As already mentioned, up to 9 % of the old inner area of the five largest
Victorian cities was directly purchased and taken over for railway uses;
and by definition something in the order of a fifth of central land users
found themselves neighbours, perhaps involuntarily, of the railway
companies. Although the railways repelled the specialised display
warehouses, and the new department stores of the 1860’s and 1870’s—
which sought the carriage trade and objected even to street tramways—
they attracted other land users.100 Places for refreshment and entertain-
99 Henry Mayhew, op. cit. 146.
100 Street-Railways or Street-Tramways (1868), BM 8235 ee 31.
318
 THE CITY CENTRE

ment, for eating and lodging, and for retail shopping, gathered con­
veniently around the terminus. The lock-up shops under central railway
arches always let readily, unlike the arches under the viaducts in the
outskirts; and the squares or streets where the main passenger terminals
were situated presented an obvious confluence of people and traffic,
which resulted in a rising demand for sites of all descriptions around
the stations.
The larger passenger stations acted as magnets for hotels, in particu­
lar, as the numbers breaking their journey or visiting each city increased,
and the small inns at which travellers had arrived were converted to
carriers’ quarters or non-residential public houses. The increase in
inter-city traffic was quite beyond the capacity of the traditional inns
and lodgings to accommodate, and entirely new and greatly enlarged
premises had to be built to cater for it. According to one estimate the
national total of coach and mail passengers in 1833 was 2,688,000; to
this should be added a further twenty-five or thirty per cent for arrivals
by post horses, canal boats & etc., giving three and a half million
travellers.101 Thirty years later the number of rail travellers was
204,635,075; an increase, in relation to the larger population, of about
forty-fold.102
The railway companies themselves provided large hotels at each of
the great towns, all on a large scale. The railway hotel at St. Pancras,
designed by Gilbert Scott and, in his words, ‘possibly too good for the
purpose it is to serve’, was the largest hotel in Britain at the time it was
With such assured increases of passenger traffic there was
built.103104
105
hardly any speculative element at all in the building of hotels at the
station sites; and this extension of land use by the railways into an
associated field was never questioned either by shareholders or by the
legislature. Other hotel promoters, large and small, made haste to
follow in the middle years of the century.
In London a small group of hotels grew up in Pimlico, associated
with Victoria station.101 The same thing occurred, on a larger scale, in
Paddington and Bayswater, near the main arrival point for travellers
from the West Country, and in Bloomsbury, associated with the
northern main line termini.100 In Liverpool the hotel quarter also
redistributed itself, over the same period, from the old town to the
neighbourhood of Lime Street, the main terminal for overnight

101 T. Baines, Lancashire and Cheshire, Past and Present (1868), II, p. lii.
102H.C., 1890, LXV, 681.
103 Sir G. Scott, Personal and Professional Recollections (1879), 271 quoted in
Jack Simmons, op. cit. 92.
104 D. F. Stevens, ‘The Central Area’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
H. C. Prince, 1964), 192-3.
105 D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 113^1.
319
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

passengers; and the other cities witnessed a similar, though perhaps less
marked, re-location of hotels and the services associated with
them.106
If one turns from these arrangements made for the local reception
of travellers to those made for the reception and storage of goods, the
urban railway terminals may be observed exercising a similar, if weaker,
attraction. Once again—and this can surely be taken as a guide to the
assured and unspeculative nature of the enterprise—the railway com­
panies themselves laid out capital, which might well have been put
to other uses, in providing specialised markets incorporated into their
terminals in the major cities. London had two wholesale potato
markets at railway terminals. That which the Great Northern railway
company constructed at King’s Cross had thirty-seven small covered
warehouses, each with a short line of rails. They could be leased for
sums of £35 to £65per annum', or a 2d per ton surcharge could be paid
if the consignee preferred to operate without leasing a warehouse.107
In Liverpool the L. & N.W. railway company had a potato depot at
Crown Street, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire company one at Great
Howard Street.108 In Manchester the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway
had a carrot and potato market at Oldham Road station where it sold
only the goods which it had transported, paying the Corporation
£1,000 per annum for the licence.109 In Glasgow and Birmingham
perishable foodstuff markets were not incorporated in the station yards,
but were situated very near them. Indeed proximity, or convenient
access, to railway stations became one of the most important con­
siderations in the siting of the new and enlarged central wholesale
markets for perishable foodstuffs in the mid and late nineteenth
century.
The traffic soon extended to a far wider range than the root crops
which had at first formed the staple. Cattle trucks brought meat, by
the mid 1840’s; the fish trade was, in the words of a wholesale fish
dealer, ‘entirely changed since the introduction of railways and tele­
graphs.’110 By the 1880’s a city like Manchester could draw upon spring
cabbages from Evesham and Lincolnshire, broccoli and cauliflowers
from Northamptonshire, green peas from Nottinghamshire, or even
106 W. Smith, ‘The Urban Structure of Liverpool’, Merseyside: a Scientific Survey
(British Association, 1953), 192-3.
107 LRL, Council Minutes, 1863-4, p. 583, Report of Town Clerk on London
Markets.
108 Loc. cit. pp. 587-93.
109 Manchester of Today (Manchester, 1888), 74.
110 The early cattle trucks were ‘to be fitted with spring buffers and drawbars, to
answer occasionally for passengers.’ Jack Simmons, op. cit. 443. LRL, Council
Minutes, 1872-3, pp. 563-8, Conference between Markets Committee and Wholesale
Fish Dealers.

320
 John Fowler,
WILL*' WILSON.
PLATE 9
Original plan of area
scheduled for purchase
and demolition at
Victoria Station,
London, 1858
(see p. 327)

(By permission of HLRO)

plate 10 Housing conditions and land use in
Manchester, 1904 (see p. 337)
key Lighter shading shows offices, warehouses, com­
mercial buildings
Darker shading shows inner district of back-to-
plate 11 The railway arches: paupers at night
(see p. 345)
^6
 THE CITY CENTRE

France, potatoes from Lancashire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Jersey,

carrots from the Midlands and France, cucumbers and onions from
Bedfordshire, soft fruit from Kent, and imported apples from Liver­
pool.111 Those dealing wholesale in these commodities in the central
area, though not tied to exact locations, clearly would consider easy
access to a station a positive advantage, and be prepared to pay for it.
Even if the important coal traffic, which grew so rapidly after the 1860’s,
be excluded (since it was largely distributed from outlying stations) the
list of centrally distributed commodities could be extended. There were
the famous vaults at St. Pancras which contained thousands of gallons
of Bass; the facilities for storing and distributing milk from Euston,
St. Pancras, Paddington and Vauxhall. ‘City cows’, writes Hamilton
Ellis, ‘vanished like the scavenging pigs of earlier centuries.’112
One would imagine that the establishment of all these wholesale
outlets for the cities’ daily needs would itself generate a great deal of
traffic. So it did, but the traffic was merely originating from new points
rather than new in itself. Carting to the markets, large and small,
throughout the cities, had always been heavy, but had tended to
converge from the surrounding countryside. At least one Borough
Engineer came to the conclusion that the concentration which railway
delivery afforded actually ‘diminished greatly the number of vehicles
proceeding to the markets through the streets.’113 What was clearly
happening, if his observation was correct, was that wholesalers were
congregating around the termini to take advantage of the short journeys,
full loads and speed of turnover.
The amounts which the wholesaler, or, for that matter, the large
hotelier, or the small well-sited retailer, were prepared to bid for
proximity to the inner stations, or for vantage points in the traffic
streams which the stations generated, were reflected in rising land
values. The appreciation of site values around the city terminals
was so marked, in fact, as to present an embarrassment to those
companies which had at first underestimated their land requirements.
After his early experience in this field Robert Stephenson was one of
those who enjoined upon his board the policy of erring on the side of
extravagance in scheduling land for compulsory purchase. ‘Mark me,
Mr. Glyn, you require it all,’ he said at the time of his land purchases
from the Earl of Southampton at Camden Town, and the Duke of
Bedford at Euston, ‘but if you did not require it, the value of property

111 Manchester of Today (Manchester, 1888), 73.

112 E. G. Barnes, op. cit. 253; Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History (1954), I,
407.
113 James Newlands, in his report on Paris Markets to Liverpool Corporation,
LRL, Council Minutes, 1863-4, p. 613.
m 321
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

in the neighbourhood will be so enhanced that you will be able to part

with it to advantage. ... In my whole experience I have never known a
case where the railways have caused the value of property to fall.’114
To this extent the railways were their own enemies, causing a rise
in the price of land which they themselves might later come into the
market to purchase; and nowhere was this more evident than in the land
around the city terminals. In spite of making what, on Stephenson’s
advice, was considered to be a sufficient purchase at Euston in 1835,
the Chairman of the L. & N.W. was compelled to admit, in 1848, ‘we
have since then been obliged to buy streets—streets, gentlemen—to give
the public the accommodation they require.’115 Both the Midland rail­
way, in its St. Pancras operations, and the Metropolitan railway in the
1860’s, went to extremes to anticipate future space requirements, in
order to avoid the ransom prices which they might be charged for any
extensions.116 In one case, virtually a whole parish was demolished,
using techniques of deception and force which reflected grave discredit
on the Midland company, and provided reformers with an example of
railway clearances which was cited for twenty years.117 In the other
case, the Metropolitan company found itself the owner of nearly a
thousand urban properties, on lands surplus to its requirements, and
was obliged, before its Acts expired, to set up a special Surplus Lands
Company to deal with the properties it had retained.118
Part of this rise in land prices was undoubtedly due to the impact of
the railways themselves upon the land market. Adroit purchases
fringeing likely areas of expansion, or lying across possible urban
extensions, undoubtedly helped to send up the value of land. There
were ingenious techniques, described elsewhere, which could be used
to take advantage of the railway companies’ appearance in the land
market; and, where there were no alternative choices of route or site,
the railways often paid twice the average amount agreed upon by
independent valuers.119 Since the railways, wherever possible, made
their approaches to the urban core through working-class housing,
this gave the owner of slum property yet another chance of speculative
gain.
On the other hand, part of the appreciation of property values around
114 Samuel Salt, op. cit. 95-6.
115 Six-monthly Report, L. & N.W. railway company, 18 February 1848.
116 Six-monthly Report, Midland railway company, 15 January 1868. W. E.
Hutchinson (Chairman) states 407 acres had been bought near London, instead of
209 ‘to forestall rising land costs.’
117 H.C., 1874, LIX, 159-62. H.C., 1884-5, XXX, passim.
118 Six-month Report, Metropolitan railway company, 25 July 1885.
119 This is a conservative estimate. Some railway directors, like G. P. Bidder,
believed that, on the average, railway companies paid four times the value of given
land. H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.17170.
322
 THE CITY CENTRE

the terminals was genuine; not induced by the prospect of ransom sale
to the railway companies, but the product of bona fide alternative land
use demands. Between the 1840’s and 1880’s the larger Victorian cities
regularly experienced a 2|% to 3|% annual increase in central land
values, but it is not easy to say what proportion of this should be
assigned to the direct agency of the railways. Modern work in the
United States, attempting to relate land values to transport facilities,
came to the conclusion that, in New York at any rate, the trend of
values was ‘largely influenced by factors other than transit develop­
ments.’ But the analogy may be misleading, and other economists,
speaking more directly from British nineteenth century experience,
have taken the view that the sustained rise in urban site rents—
which exceeded the rise in the national income throughout the
nineteenth century—was symptom of rail transport’s inherent tenden­
cy to ‘freeze’, and densely to concentrate, both population and in­
dustry.120
Until further work is carried out to illuminate the complexities of
site use and value in the central districts of Victorian cities, perhaps
the most that can be said, by way of generalisation, is that values can
be observed to rise quickly in the area between the termini and the
most favoured street intersections of the central business district, for
a variety of causes, amongst which a major new contributor by the
1840’s was the locational advantage bestowed by a station’s proximity.
Although the nucleus of the central business district continued with its
own processes of assimilation and discard, influenced more by estab­
lished uses and by land supply than by the railways, the areas between
it and the stations now experienced a new inflationary factor. It was,
it must be stressed, still only one factor amongst many; but ‘distance
from the railway station’ was an important and novel consideration to
which at least a part of the increment in inner land values should be
attributed.
William Tite, the engineer and valuer responsible for the extension
120 The total rise in rental values in the central area of Manchester, for example,
was 35-40% per decade 1861-81.
1861 Rental values £972,894
1871 „ „ £1,362,164
1881 „ „ £1,803,000
H. Baker, Trans. Manch. Stat. Soc. (1868-72), 92—4, (1881-5), 9-13. This was
reflected in central land values exceeding £200,000 per acre by 1880. H. Baker,
loc. cit. (1868-72), 94, W. Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning
(1965), 100.
For American experience see E. M. Spengler, Laud values m New York in re­
lation to Transit (New York, 1930), 129-31, and Paul F. Wendt, ‘Theory of Urban
Land Values’, Land Economics, XXXIII (1957), 234. For ‘concentration’ see Colin
Clark, ‘Transport—maker and breaker of cities’, Town Planning Review, 28 (1957-8),
245-8.
323
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

from Nine Elms to Waterloo (No. 7 on map) described the railway’s

primary effect as that of ‘giving new frontages and new opportunities
for building’. ‘There is no doubt that the advantages which you describe
might result from placing the railway there, but the question is,’ he was
asked, in cross-examination, ‘whether the public so far appreciate
those advantages as to show it by giving a higher price for the land?—
They would, of course,’ Tite replied, ''where the railway brings direct
advantage as a station.’121
Here Tite had touched upon a most important qualification. Around
the terminal the attractions were apparent to some, if not all, categories
of land user. But no one, except heavy industrial firms with their own
sidings, wanted to be placed alongside the railway line at distances of
half a mile or more down line; so that from this point outwards, the
railway routes tended to run through belts of dereliction. Of course,
though everyone might wish to be located by a terminus rather than an
unbroken, possibly elevated, stretch of line, in the nature of the case
this was impossible. With each terminus were associated many acres
of approach routes, and even those railways which had tunnel exits
and entrances did not continue their tunnels clear of the town, but
emerged at ground level in the so-called ‘inner districts’, adjacent to
the business centre.

c. Demolition
There was another problem of growing magnitude in the mid-Victorian
city centre to which the railways contributed substantially, without
being able, or willing, to provide a remedy; that of demolition in the
central areas. In many ways it was a more serious and intractable
problem than that of traffic, certainly in its social and sanitary aspects;
and once again it was hoped that new types of short distance under­
ground railway might solve the problem. At a public meeting in
December 1858, chaired by the Lord Mayor of London, Charles
Pearson and Lord John Russell spoke in favour of a central terminal
combined with a cheap fares policy, and persuaded the meeting to
pass two resolutions; the first complained of the overcrowding of the
streets, the second of the overcrowding of the dwellings of the poor.
The two were associated and to be solved by the same means—the use
of the railways as ‘an outlet’ for the pressures both of population and
traffic.122
It will be clear from what has been said earlier, that the intense
overcrowding in those working class houses which remained intact in
the ‘City without the Wall’ parishes in London, and in the central and
inner districts of the provincial cities, was the product of a number of
1!1 H.C., 1846, XVII, QQ.405-7. My italics.
122 Illustrated London News, 4 December 1858, 524.
324
 THE CITY CENTRE

economic forces, of which the railways were only one. ‘Now and again’
wrote H. Baker in the Transactions of the Manchester Statistical
Society (1871), ‘complaint is vocal at the so-called “wholesale” eviction
of population, and demolition of dwellings consequent upon railway
enlargement; but scarcely even a passing notice is taken of the con­
tinuous pushing out of the population from the central sub-districts
of the city by the centric aggregation of trading interests.’123 The
conversion of the central area to warehouses and offices, though less
spectacular than the railway intrusions, and rarely affecting such large
units of territory, was undoubtedly responsible for as many evictions
in total as the railway companies. Large though they were, the railway
clearances can hardly explain, as sole cause, the phenomenon observ­
able to varying degrees in each city: the emptying of population from
the central areas, beginning in London, Birmingham, Manchester and
Liverpool from the 185O’s, and Glasgow from the 186O’s. Nor, if we
take into account the orders of magnitude of population movement
involved, does railway demolition, even if we assign to it the very large
numbers suggested below, do more than partially account for the
exodus. But it was a conspicuous, abrupt and direct agency and, like
the demolitions by the school boards and street improvement com­
mittees, it attracted note.124 The more gradual process of commercial
replacement as leases fell in, or by piecemeal purchase, though perhaps
more far-reaching over a long span of time, was not as concentrated,
nor did it make use of compulsory powers and such urgent methods:
blocking streets, unroofing houses to get the occupants out, and
reducing the inhabitants of whole working class districts like Somers
Town to the state, in Lord Shaftesbury’s words, of ‘people in a besieged
town, running to and fro, and not knowing where to turn.’125
The social effects of these violent and sudden demolitions, and the
contemporary comment upon them, has already been made the subject
of a comprehensive and illuminating study for the London area.126 The
same problem also recurred in the provinces, where it excited similar
comments. ‘Demolition Statements’ were also returned under Standing
Order 191 in the provincial cities, ludicrously understating the numbers
of members of the working class likely to be dishoused: 1,275 people in
the 255 cottages due for demolition under the 1866 Manchester Central
Bill; 540 in 135 houses to make way for Liverpool Central; 6,142 in
443 of the larger Glasgow tenements for St. Enoch’s station, and a
further 2,178 people and 141 houses for the Caledonian Central station

123 H. Baker, Trans. Manch. Stat. Soc. (1868-72), 87.

124 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Report p. 19.
125 Loc. cit. p. 25, and Hansard, CLXI (1861), 1069.
126 H. J. Dyos, JTH, II (1955), 11-21, 90-100.
325
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

a few years later.127 To judge from independent comment, and from

estimates by local officers of health and other witnesses, it is clear that
these figures are no reliable guide, and, indeed, would hardly explain
the public attention attracted by railway demolitions.128 But they were,
of course, returns made by the railway companies themselves, the very
‘people who have every motive for under-stating the number that they
displace.’129 Since census returns cannot be used, for a variety of
reasons, to show short term local migrations of population, we are
thrown back upon the informal guesses of contemporaries, and these
multiply the numbers officially returned by a factor varying from
threefold to tenfold. Alternatively, the proportions of the built-up area
of each town demolished, mentioned earlier {viz. 5|% to 9%) may
serve as a guide. For example, 7|% of the central area of Glasgow in
1840 contained roughly 20,000 people, and this number is far likelier
to reflect the real number displaced than the official return of 8,320.130
But though more plausible than the official figures, even these estimates
probably err on the side of understatement; for it was not just any 7£%
of the town that was chosen for the railways’ route. In Glasgow, and
in the other towns without exception, the areas which were invariably
selected for demolition were populous working class districts. The
thinly inhabited commercial or industrial areas were meticulously
avoided, for reasons to which reference will be made later.
However, although the social problems of demolition recurred in the
northern cities, in much the same form, the problem was particularly
acute in London. The Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Working Classes decided, ‘The compulsion to live close to work is not
such a difficulty in provincial towns as it is in the metropolis.’131 A
somewhat complacent view, which does not accord with the findings of
William Trench in Liverpool, or John Leigh in Manchester, but one
127 References for these have already been given in the Case Histories. The com­
panies building Snow Hill and New Street Birmingham, Lime Street and Exchange
Liverpool, or indeed, any stations built before 1853, were not required to submit
demolition statements. The Demolition Statement for the C.L.C. 1872 plan—the
present day Manchester Central—is missing, though the Lords’ Committee mentions
312 houses, occupied by 1,663 persons of the labouring classes, in the area due for
demolition.
118 The Midland railway company’s operations in the 186O’s, for example, were
only stated to be 4,347, but contemporary estimates put the figure at 20,000 to
32,000. Similarly, there was no Demolition Return for one of the largest projects—
the Great Eastern’s Liverpool Street extension (see H. J. Dyos, JTH, II (1955), 12,
III (1956), 26-9), whereas 7,000 people in 450 houses were affected by the demolition.
H.C., 1884-5, QQ.10164-5, 10181-5.
128 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.9110.
130 Or if one takes the average for central land absorbed by the railways and
multiplies it by a factor of 300 (300 to 400 per acre being q common density in
working class areas) the comparable result is 22,500 displaced. ’
131 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Report p. 23.
326
 THE CITY CENTRE

takes the Commissioners’ point.132 It was essentially a Metropolitan

problem, because of the scale, both of the demolitions and of the
distances, displacement might involve.
In London, something of the order of 800 acres of central land was
taken for railway uses in the course of the nineteenth century: an area
sufficient for a fair-sized town in itself. The numbers displaced, came
to over 76,000 between 1853 and 1901, according to H. J. Dyos—who
makes it clear that this figure represents an absolute minimum on which
to base estimates and is in no real sense an accurate count.133 This
number spread over the area involved would, in fact, work out at
95 per acre. According to Dr. Lethaby’s estimates in 1861 the average
in the central parishes was nearer 150 per acre, rising to as high as
300 per acre in some districts. The lower of these two figures would
give 120,000 people affected by displacement in the period from 1840—
1900; and taking 5£% of the population of the central parishes produces
a similar total.131 There are two further reasons for expecting the total
count of those evicted by the railways in London to reach at least
120,000. The returns under Standing Order 191 only started in 1853,
and so exclude the considerable displacements connected with the
building of the several stations at London Bridge, Fenchurch Street,
Shoreditch and Waterloo, and the lesser displacements at Paddington
and Euston. They also referred only to the houses of the ‘labouring
classes’, so that the returns were not even intended to be full‘Demolition
Statements’, but only partial statements of the demolition of those
houses which it was necessary to classify as belonging to the ‘labouring
classes’. The result was a further paring down of the quantities involved;
as two examples, one from London, and one from the provinces, may
illustrate. The Victoria and Pimlico railway and station scheduled
several hundred properties owned by William Stanley and the Marquess
of Westminster, some of which may be seen in the accompanying
illustration (Plate 9): yet since the social and occupational categories
of the occupants was not established as ‘labouring classes’, the Plans
and Sections were endorsed, ‘Not 30 in any one parish to be taken’.135
The demolition involved, however, was still quite considerable. Or in
Liverpool, the first M.S. & L. scheme for the Central Station stated
that 135 houses, containing 545 members of the labouring classes,
would be scheduled for demolition; but the full number of properties—
whose inhabitants were no less real for not being the subject of
132 LRL, Council Proceedings, 1871-2, 702-17. MRL, Reports of the M.O.H.,
March 1884, pp. 22-7.
133 H. J. Dyos, JTH, II (1955), 13, 98-9, JTH, III (1957), 23-30.
134 Dr. Lethaby’s report, dated 22 June 1861, is quoted in H. D. Davies, The Way
Out (1861), 7-8.
135 HLRO, P & S, 1858, Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway. The plans were
deposited, as usual, in November of the preceding year.
327
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

philanthropic statistics—came to over 800.136 If one wishes to form a

picture of the total amount of demolition, therefore, some addition
should be made for those not falling within the definition ‘labouring
classes’ whose houses were taken. Altogether it would be surprising if
the true number of those who lost their homes were not upwards of
120,000.
In case this estimate may seem unwarrantably large, it is perhaps
worth rehearsing additional reasons for increasing so substantially the
numbers contained in the Demolition Statements. First of all, the
statements were not official in any real sense except that they were filed
with official papers. The census was taken by the companies themselves
and was not subjected to any official checking other than that of
formal record. The railway companies concerned with persuading
Parliament to sanction the taking of property and eviction of tenants,
were hardly likely to submit, in the November before their bill was
heard, a return which might cause alarm to Select Committees.
However, the inaccuracy of the Demolition Statements goes further
than this. The railway companies gave unequivocal signs by the
practices they pursued, that they were not merely concerned to minimise
the likely results of their schemes by taking the lowest reasonable
estimate. There was a deliberate intention to mislead. Schemes were
broken down into parts so that each slice did not seem excessive.137
Properties in the route of projected advance were also bought up
privately by agents before the scheme was announced so that the
question of consent or displacement did not arise; and there is evidence
to suggest that this was a practice further extended in the second wave
of projects in the 1860’s than it had been in earlier days. There was even
an attempt, of doubtful legality, by the Midland railway company, in
the early 1870’s, to carry out wholesale pre-demolition of 700 cottages
by means of a separate company, from whom the land was later to be
leased.138
Advance purchase had three beneficial results: it was cheaper to
136 HLRO, P & S, 1862, M.S. & L. Liverpool Central Station Railway; P & S
1864, Liverpool Central Station Railway. The first deposited plans of the M.S. & L.
scheme of 1862 contain no Demolition Statement, nor any reference to one, nor do
the registers at HLRO refer to one—a strange breach of procedure.
137 As in the Central Station project at Liverpool just cited, or the Union project
at Glasgow, where the College Goods station was left out of the Plans and Demo­
lition Statements.
138 Tn conversation with one of the Midland Directors, I was informed that the
Company had in fact actually acquired the land, had bought up nearly all the
leasehold and occupiers’ interests, that they had pulled down a number of the
houses, and had vacant possession of a still larger number; that the Railway Com­
pany intended to carry out the proposed scheme by means of a separate company
from whom they would lease the undertaking when completed.’ Sir Sidney Waterlow
M.P. to Richard Cross, Home Secretary, 20 May 1874, H.C., 1874, LIX, 159-62.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

purchase before the railway company came openly onto the market;
it enabled sizeable private profits to be made; and it meant that the
untenanted houses did not appear in the Demolition Statement.
Sometimes if the purchase could not be made privately, a hint was
dropped that compulsory powers were to be applied for in a future
session to add pressure to persuasion. Miss Octavia Hill described the
process in detail.
‘Usually the railway company communicate with the landlords, and
tell them, “We are going to take your property”; the landlord gives
the ordinary weekly or monthly notice to the tenants, and long before
the railway comes the tenants have been got rid of; so that the landlord
pockets the compensation, and that is what is taking place I am told and
in spite of the advice of my fellow workers, in Albert Buildings. In
Albert Buildings, Lambeth, the tenants are told by the agents of the
railway company that they will have to move, and that their best plan
is to get out soon. This is before the Act is obtained. The companies,
therefore, can go before Parliament, and say, “We do not displace
people; there is nobody there”.’139
In other words they displaced a great number of people unofficially
and only counted those who were left. Apart from the pressures Miss
Hill described, the railway companies were not above bribing tenants
to leave, Joseph Chamberlain alleged; and the Medical Officer of
Health for St. Pancras, S. F. Murphy, gave evidence that the railway
companies paid more for a house handed over to them empty.140 Even
in the actual counting there was further scope for whittling down. As
William Denton pointed out, the term ‘artisan’ used in the Standing
Order could be given a very narrow interpretation, to include mathe­
matical instrument makers, but exclude tailors, shoemakers etc.141
Moreover the railway companies, in their evidence, were apt to refer
to ‘tenants’ who were usually heads of households; taking no account
of subtenants, lodgers and other members of the family. For this
reason alone it was suggested (and agreed to by Edward Watkin) that
the figure should be multiplied by four to give occupants.142
Supporting evidence, not to labour the point, was put forward by
the Assistant Secretary to the Board of Trade, the Clerk of Public
Bills in the House of Lords, and the Surveyor for the Metropolitan
Board of Works, all to the same effect: the Standing Order, even after
it had been reinforced in 1874, was ‘systematically evaded’ and the
returns were, in Joseph Chamberlain’s words, ‘grossly inaccurate’.143
139 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.8841.
140 Ibid. QQ.12432, 1578-1674.
141 Ibid. Q. 10722.
142 Ibid. QQ. 10643-5.
143 Ibid. QQ.9974-10061, 10740-3, 9943-54: Report p. 52, ‘The evidence was
unanimous that the Standing Orders were either evaded or were insufficient.’
Q. 12432 (Chamberlain).
m* 329
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The railway companies’ Demolition Statements could not, in fact, bear

even the slightest critical examination. Drawing them up was an essay
in deception, and probably the best attitude to adopt towards them for a
conscientious manager, who wished to keep his hands clean, was
Edward Watkin’s affectation of lordly indifference.
‘There is a Standing Order of the House of Lords directing a return
of the number of persons evicted by railway companies, is there not ?—
I really do not know. You know better than I do, but very likely that is
so.’144
Apart from its direct impact, demolition produced a second effect,
which was perhaps still more important from a social point of view:
the overspilling of those evicted into adjacent areas. ‘The poor are
displaced,’ said The Times, in 1861, ‘but they are not removed. They are
shovelled out of one side of the parish, only to render more over­
crowded the stifling apartments in another part. . . . But the dock and
wharf labourer, the porter and the costermonger cannot remove. You
may pull down their wretched homes: they must find others, and make
their new dwellings more crowded and wretched than their old ones.
The tailor, shoemaker and other workmen are in much the same posi­
tion. It is mockery to speak of the suburbs to them.’145
Because of the increased demand for house space from these un­
fortunate refugees, not merely were the surviving slums packed even
more densely than before, but rents in the vicinity rose by up to 50 %.
Those evicted from their squalid courts moved on, with their half
crown or guinea compensation, to the areas described two years later in
the Illustrated London News. Countless houses of ‘precisely the same
original bad quality as those which had been pulled down, but made
infinitely worse, while being proportionately dearer through those very
improvements.’
‘They enter upon a new and terrible competition, which is for the
most part finally settled by fresh discoveries in the art of huddling the
largest number of human beings into the smallest possible spaces.’146
The leading article just cited concluded upon a note of premature
optimism. ‘Lord Derby—to his honour be it recorded—has taken the
lead in enforcing the novel but obviously right and necessary role that
the promoters of such improvements shall make due provisions for
the people they displace.’147 Making provisions, however, raised further
144 Ibid. Q.10448.
145 The Times, 2 March 1861.
146 Illustrated London News, 17 January 1863, 83.
147 Derby introduced the petition on 28 February, referring particularly to the
North London railway company’s operations at Broad Street. ‘In the whole parish
there is not a single gentleman’s house, or even a large shop.’ Costermongers and
dockworkers with their families, living at a density of 10 or 11-per house, were the
chief sufferers. Shaftesbury also spoke in support. Hansard CLXI (1861). 1063-9.
1698-9.
330
 THE CITY CENTRE

problems. Re-housing could hardly be carried out by building new

replicas of the appalling slums demolished, yet there was no other way
to produce low rents in such central districts. The nearest approach
was by barrack-like workmen’s dwellings, but even in these the rents
were often beyond the means of those displaced. If the building prob­
lems were solved, how could it be ensured that the same tenants would
be re-admitted? Would the railway companies act in good faith, more­
over, or would the improved dwellings be quietly removed later to
make way for warehouses? Were railway companies to be tied, in
perpetuity, not to sell or convert their property to other uses? These
difficulties ensured that the attempts to tighten up legislation on re­
housing came to little. The alternative solution, really cheap transport,
although an issue pursued by reformers with great vehemence, also fell
short of the goals intended for it, for the reasons suggested elsewhere;
but it was in 1861, in the aftermath of Derby’s speech on demolitions,
that the first clauses for cheap workmen’s services were secured.148
One further question concerning the fabric of the city centre, and the
effect of railway demolition, remains. Why did the railways always
choose to smash their way through the densely packed working class
residential districts? A glance at the Plans and Sections of the twelve
major schemes affecting London, which were listed by the Assistant
Secretary of the Board of Trade, shows that residential demolition was,
in fact, the invariable practice, unless some open space which had
miraculously survived—an old pleasure garden or open-air market—
presented itself.149 Given the necessity to schedule buildings, the railway
promoters always chose slums, even after the grave social costs this
policy incurred were apparent. In the popular view it seemed almost
as if the railways were directed either by utter hecdlessness of conse­
quences or by sheer malice. The ‘Goths and Vandals Railway’ was
Punch's satire in 1861; ‘Attila in London’ the title of an article in
Dickens’ All the Year Round magazine in 1866; and there was, more
generally in literature, a rapid movement of opinion in the 1860’s
away from the enthusiastic and uncritical reception the railways had
received twenty years earlier.150 For this change of attitude the daily
spectacle of demolition and eviction in the great cities was partly
responsible. Yet the demolition of residential housing was no idle or
callous choice. There were three basic reasons why this class of property
was selected.
1,8 The North London railway company’s Broad Street extension, and the Metro­
politan railway company’s Finsbury Circus extensions, 24-5, Vic., c. 196, and
24-5 Vic., c. 233. Three years later the important Great Eastern, Metropolitan
and Metropolitan District, and London, Chatham and Dover clauses followed.
H.C., 1872, Xin, Q.7383.
149 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.9974.
150 H. J. Dyos, JTH, II (1955), 14-6.
331
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The first was simply that, however aggrieved they might feel about it,
tenants had no legal standing to object. Their interests were supposedly
covered by a lump sum in compensation for removal.151 If they were
awkward and vocal enough, or could enlist the help of a local clergy­
man, or another philanthropic member of the middle class on their
behalf, they might cause this sum to be increased. But that was the end of
their rights, and until the national and municipal franchises were
extended there was nothing further they could do about it. William
Denton believed it was the legal impotence of tenants which swayed
the railways’ route-makers. ‘Much of the injury which new lines of
railway cause could be prevented if the shortest and best routes were
considered, and not merely whether the people on a given spot were or
were not able to offer effectual opposition to the scheme proposed.’152
No doubt this legal consideration entered into the companies’
choice of routes, especially in the haste and delicate balance of Private
Bill procedure, where the absence of opponents with legal standing
deprived hostile counsel of one of their principal opportunities to tip
the scales against a bill. Railway companies, however, obviously be­
lieved that their routes, if not always the shortest, were the best avail­
able.153 Yet exigencies of competition could arise under which it would
be true (as Parliamentary witnesses suggested) that ‘the parties care
very little whether the line they have adopted is exactly the cheapest
and best.’154 Departures from first choice might be forced upon a
company by competitors’ blocking schemes or pre-emption of land,
or simply by the need for speed of action.
The practical restrictions upon an urban railway promoter’s freedom
to choose his route must not be exaggerated. It was possible, if the
timing of a bill were properly managed, even to plan a line overlapping
with rival schemes for a great part of the route, and to rely upon adroit
counsel, and the reputation of the engineers and company concerned,
to secure preference. It was also possible, though more difficult, after a
competitor had bought land which successfully gave monopoly access
and obstructed other approach routes, to persuade Parliament to allow
one railway company to take and demolish the buildings of another
company. When the Caledonian railway, for example, applied for a
151 Or the payment of rent-arrears outstanding. The weekly tenant had no claim
to compensation whatsoever. Dyos, loc. cit. 95-6.
152 William Denton, op. cit. (1861), 25.
163 In the equation land costs, and the probable operational cost, weighed on the
one side, the minimum length of approach route on the other. A slightly longer
route which avoided awkward curves and gradients on an approach to a city termi­
nus, or gave more space for the subsequent handling of traffic might be preferred.
‘Choose that which is the least expensive even though it should not always be the
most direct’, advised Robert Stephenson, quoted in E. A. Cours'e, op. cit. (1958), 5.
154 H.C., 1836, XXI, QQ.356-76.

332
 THE CITY CENTRE

direct route of their own into Glasgow, ‘to avoid’ as their counsel put
it, ‘going by a circumbendibus through someone else’s station’, property
belonging to the opposing Glasgow and South Western railway lay
on their route.155 They proposed to take part of it and miss the G. &
S.W.’s Board Room, in Bridge Street, by a few yards, so that the noise
of the Caledonian engines thundering past, the Select Committee was
told, would make it exceedingly difficult for the G. & S.W. directors
to conduct their business. ‘If they want another Board room,’ said
George Cunningham, obviously savouring the moment, ‘there is no
difficulty in giving it to them—the whole offices are very small.’156
The successful conclusion of such clashes, and the imposition of a
further compulsory purchase schedule over a part of land which, only
a few years before, had been exclusively granted by Parliament, was
very rare however; more frequently the successful establishment of a
statutory claim had the effect of excluding competitors, or forcing them
to choose an inferior route. To this extent Denton’s allegation that
railways did not choose the shortest and best routes was correct, but
it does provide a full explanation of the railways’ selection of sites and
routes.
The second, and more important explanation, lies in the pattern of
land ownership on the periphery of the great cities. As suburban
manorial or ecclesiastical units of tenure broke up, and came on to the
market, great proprietors emerged, as traced the Case Histories above.
There were very obvious advantages, in terms of speed and simplicity,
to negotiations with these great proprietors; and the railways always,
for preference, dealt with them rather than with a multiplicity of small
owners.157 On the great landed estates residential houses were held
under a variety of leases, ranging from the complicated three lives and
twenty one years system in Liverpool, to the repairing, or building,
leases of twenty-one to ninety-nine years in London. What is noticeable,
however, is that with certain exceptions, the large estates tended to
favour residential land uses. On the whole, industry and commerce
were less than proportionately represented on the great proprietors’
land, either as a consequence of estate policy, or because the larger
industrial and commercial users themselves preferred to purchase free­
hold. The objection to using rented premises was not so marked in
trade and commerce, but the Books of Reference suggest that most
155 BTHR PYB 1/579, 27 May 1873, p. 8.
156 HLRO, Min., (Caledonian Central), H.C., 1873, 7 May, p. 73.
157 Although the weekly and the yearly tenants did badly, on the whole, from
demolition, the tenants with longer interests, the lessee and the freeholder, were in a
stronger position. Manuals of advice—‘Never delay or let the time for improvements
go by because a railway ... is coming that will take your property’—instructed them
as to the best course to take to secure full compensation. T. H. Hovenden, New
Railways and New Streets (1872), 13.
333
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

manufacturers preferred to become proprietors of their own sites.

The great estates, lay and clerical, which offered the convenience of
dealing with one landlord, ten or a dozen middlemen and an amorphous
group of tenants (many of whose leases might be due to fall in), were
predominantly residential in character.168 Added to the convenience
and legal simplicity of dealings with them, was the sheer cheapness of
the transaction. Even though a price perhaps several times the value of
the crumbling courts and terraces might be paid to secure consent, it
was still by far the cheapest method.159 The buildings themselves were
low in value compared with business or industrial premises, and by
selecting this route two further economies were achieved. By it was
avoided the expensive litigation over the value of land and buildings
which endlessly reduplicated dealings with small proprietors could
involve. Also avoided were the exorbitantly large awards sympathetic
juries often gave, in addition to land and building awards, for the loss
of shadowy ‘goodwill’ and business connections attached to small
proprietors’ premises.
To find such a parcel of dilapidated residential properties and
exploit them did not seem heartless to the railway entrepreneurs, but
merely sound business; and many of the conceptions for urban schemes
originated with the discovery of a route through such properties. It
was no conspiracy, merely commonsense, though even The Times
voiced contrary suspicions. ‘The special lure to capitalists offered by
railway projectors, is that the line will pass only through inferior
property, that is through a densely populated district, and will destroy
only the abodes of the powerless and poor, whilst it will avoid the
properties of those whose opposition is to be dreaded—the great
employers of labour.’160
Circumstances could conceivably alter the magnetism which slum
districts exercised over railways seeking access. If, for example, the re­
housing Standing Orders of the closing decades of the century had
been made effective, and railway companies had been compelled to
provide, in anticipation, and by stages, replacement housing for the
slums demolished, it would have put an end to this type of urban
railway enterprise. The difficulties which reaccommodation involved
were illustrated when Edward Watkin persuaded his fellow directors on
the Metropolitan railway to carry out a pilot re-housing scheme at the
158 Information from a landowner's estate office was itself of value, as Watkin
revealed. ‘We have completed purchases where there was any chance of new leases
being set up.’ H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10572.
169 This was the point stressed in the 1884-5 Royal Commission’s Report, and in
the questioning of some witnesses. ‘The reason why railway companies often schedule
and take the poorest properties ... is that they have hitherto been the cheapest to
obtain.’ H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Report, p. 20, QQ.863-4. '•
160 The Times, 2 March 1861.
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 THE CITY CENTRE

Minories in central London in the early 188O’s. The land, though

worth £10 per square yard, had to be written down at a nominal price;
and with this favourable start the 750 rooms at one shilling or one and
sixpence per week were to bring in 2% or 3% return. ‘I would say that
we are thoughtful people, and anxious as far as we can to make our
work answer, not merely as a matter of profit and loss, but as a fulfil­
ment of what we consider to be our duty.’161
Watkin’s scheme, like all other attempts at central re-housing, failed
before the same difficulties of rapidly appreciating central values which
defeated private builders and even the L.C.C.; but it suggests the third
cause for the railway choice of residential properties for demolition.
In the period between 1840 and the mid-1860’s the first and greatest
task in Britain’s cities seemed to be to get rid at all costs of the cholera-
ridden slums, and to ‘ventilate’ the city centres. Mr. Simon, the Medical
Officer of Health for the City of London, expressed, in a report to the
Corporation in 1855, opinions which were echoed by men in his
profession in all the major cities.
‘There are many parts of the City where great and immediate advan­
tage would arise from an expenditure of money applied, solely to the
purpose of destruction1, parts, where the purchase of an entire court, or
series of courts, for the sole object of pulling down houses, and leaving
open spaces in their stead, would be the cheapest as well as the most
effective manner of dealing with their sanitary difficulties; and I have
earnestly to suggest for your consideration that proceedings of this
nature will require to be pursued to a very great extent, and at a large
annual expense, within the City.’162
No one who had entered these squalid courts could feel the slightest
regret or sentiment at their demolition. Demolishing them seemed to
fall into the same category as prohibiting unsound meat or grossly
adulterated bread, and there were many who applauded the railways
for their work. By the following decade, however, more sceptical voices
were raised. ‘The railway locomotive’, wrote Henry Davies in 1861,
‘has a giant’s strength, but is no better than a blind and undistinguishing
Polyphemus when he is called in as a sanitary reformer.’163 After the
1860’s ‘reformers hopes were pinned’, as H. J. Dyos has pointed out,
‘to more general solutions of London’s housing problems—particularly
to the Lodging Houses and the Torrens and Cross Acts.’164 Yet even
these measures evinced something of the same negative spirit in their
attempts to cure slum conditions by demolition, or by the simple

161 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.10475-8, 10601-10.

162 H.C., 1854-5, X, 167. My italics.
163 Henry Davies, op. cit. 27.
164 H. J. Dyos, loc. cit. 18.
335
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIEo

prohibition of overcrowding and sub-standard housing. Unfortunately

time showed that it was one thing to condemn meat or bread, where
better articles of the kind were speedily forthcoming, but quite another
to condemn houses.

336
 XI
The railway as an agent of internal change
in Victorian cities: the inner districts
and the suburbs

1. Physical effects upon the inner districts of the city

The main effects of railways in the centre of the Victorian city were to
add to the congestion of traffic and the overcrowding of worldng class
housing, and to contribute, both directly and indirectly, to the changes
in land use and the rapid increase in land values. Their characteristic
effects in the inner districts were to compress the areas which were
within walking range of the city centre, to interrupt communications
between them, to stabilise their land values for residential uses and
reduce their improvement prospects. The fringe of the central district,
comprising the inner areas of cheap housing, small trades, storage
yards and dumps, into which the working classes overspilt in the 186O’s,
formed a region where the effect of urban railway building seems, at
close quarters, to be more far-reaching than might initially be expected.
Not merely did the many-tracked urban routes, with their fringe lands,
act as formidable physical barriers, but they also produced a curious
effect upon the inner districts through which they passed, freezing their
value, and confirming their dereliction.
Two detailed examples may serve to illustrate the effect. The map
(Plate 10) is reproduced from a Report for the Citizens' Association for
the Improvement of Unwholesome Dwellings, Manchester, 1903.1
Inspired by Booth’s and Rowntree’s surveys of London and York,
it attempted to describe the situation of the 200,000 poor in Manchester,
75,000 of whom were living below the level of ‘primary poverty’, as
defined by Rowntree. Their map summarises available evidence at
1 T. R. Marr, Housing Conditions in Manchester and Salford, 1903 (1904), Frontis­
piece.
337
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the end of the nineteenth century concerning the location of back-to-

back houses, (the worst of all surviving slum properties), bye-law
houses, industrial and commercial properties. ‘Our purpose’, wrote
their secretary and editor, T. R. Marr, ‘has been to get information
which would enable those who reach Manchester by train to realise
the condition under which people live in these streets.’2
The striking way in which the railways served to delimit the central
business area by 1900 is clear enough from the map to need little under­
lining. Except for a small quantity of dilapidated housing squashed
between the new Cheshire Lines Committee Central Station, the Great
Northern railway goods depot, and the old Liverpool Road terminus
of the Liverpool and Manchester railway (now converted to a goods
depot), and a few back-to-back houses between the approaches to
Exchange station and the river Irwell, the whole central district of
warehouses, shops and offices was by 1900 delineated by the railways
running south-west from Victoria, and west from London Road
stations. Less distinctly, the eastern boundary was defined by the area
of mixed industrial and residential zoning running between the Lanca­
shire and Yorkshire railway’s Oldham Road, and the Midland rail­
way’s Ancoats, goods stations. Here, apart from a few shopkeepers in
Ancoats Sanitary District No. 1, and some clerks, mechanics and arti­
sans in the 11th district, lived the porters, labourers, hawkers, tramps,
hurdy-gurdy men and people of no definite occupation, sandwiched
between the railway sidings, dye works and cotton mills, iron and
boiler works, gas and sanitary installations, and works making oil and
grease.3 The houses were of the cottage type with stone flags resting
directly on a clay subsoil, unventilated, with defective drainage, a third
of them occupied by more than one family. Altogether a particularly
bad example of the type of no-man’s land created by speculative build­
ing in the areas between railway sidings and industrial users on the
outer fringe of an urban central district. Tn no other district do we
find,’ reported the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, ‘such
an aggregation of extremely old, low, damp, filthy and dilapidated
dwellings, nor any houses arranged so as to enclose so much that is
noxious and offensive.’4
The railways cannot directly be blamed for creating or perpetuating
these conditions. An extraordinarily detailed survey carried out in the
1880’s by John Leigh, the Medical Officer of Health, illustrated the
causes of acute distress amongst the working class in ‘twilight zones’
like Ancoats, and his evidence accords exactly with that of Charles
2 Ibid. 64.
3 MRL, Reports of the M.O.H., 1884, p. 48 et seq.
4 An Enquiry into the causes of Excessive Mortality in Nofl District, Ancoats
(1889), 38. MRL 614 RE 1.

338
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

Booth. They were places of resort for poorly paid casual labourers
who were unable either to move from the district or to pay higher rent;
therefore they were accommodated in shoddy and cheap housing, with
defective sanitation and cramped space; finally, the precarious balance
which might be maintained whilst in employment, good health and
spirits, was upset by loss of work, sickness, bereavement or intemper­
ance. Although there were some complaints to him about dense smoke
and other industrial nuisances, the railways were not mentioned as a
major factor in their discomfort.5
Yet the railways played an indirect part in concentrating population
in these areas and in determining their locations. Their extensive central
demolitions contributed to what a contemporary member of the
Manchester Statistical Society described as ‘the summary elbowing out’
of residents into the outer areas.6 Moreover, it can be demonstrated
that the railways themselves marked out the inner districts through
which they passed as suitable overspill areas for those ‘elbowed out’
of the centre.
Amongst the Medical Officer of Health’s Reports in Manchester is
a most unusual series of maps drawn by Richard Bastow, probably
founded on Adshead’s land-use map of 1850, which is itself remarkably
detailed. Bastow’s maps show on a large scale, for all the central rating
zones, not merely land uses, but also the varying ages of residential
housing.7 With their help it is possible to analyse the physical effect
of the urban termini, and their approach and link lines, upon the
surrounding urban fabric in greater detail for Manchester than for any
other of the major cities chosen for study.
They show clearly, as is already well known, that once the demolitions
which accompanied the driving of the railway into the city were over,
the routes, for a considerable margin along both sides, tended to attract
thick belts of industrial users, storage and constructional businesses and
the like. They also show, however, that where residential housing was
left standing, it was never renewed. Bastow’s age groupings for houses
are ‘1850-1870', '1830-1850', and 'Before 1830'. In the whole of Man­
chester and Salford there was, with the exception only of the Miles
Platting district, not one substantial area through which the railways
ran which showed housing built or rebuilt after 1830; and many of the
cottages past which the railways rattled at roof top level were a hundred
years old at the time the Medical Officer wrote, derelict properties

5 Reports of the M.O.H., 1881-6 passim.

0 H. Baker, ‘On the Growth of the Manchester Population, Extension of the
Commercial Centre of the City, and Pressure of Habitation, 1871-81’, Trans.
Manch. Stat. Soc. (1881-5), 9.
7 MRL 614.0942 M 4.
339
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

dating back even to the 1780’s.8 It is conspicuous that where the rail­
ways passed no residential replacement took place. They were frozen,
as far as renovation or improvement was concerned, as completely as
if time had stopped in 1830. Capital sunk in replacing residential hous­
ing in such an environment with a more up-to-date equivalent was
obviously considered capital wasted. The best plan for a proprietor
was to patch the properties up, accept a lower class of tenant, and wait
until a further major alteration made it possible to abandon residential
use altogether: until a commercial or business offer was made, a
corporation clearance or street widening scheme swept the district
away, or the railways themselves enlarged their approaches.
Richard Bastow’s unique series of maps shows only one prominent
area in which modern cottage properties, under 20 years old, had been
erected in substantial numbers adjacent to railway lines; those border­
ing on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway at Miles Platting, occupied,
in large part, by the relatively well paid railway workers.9 Miles Plat­
ting, however, one and a half miles from the centre, was almost far
enough out to be called a suburb, and was newly-built. ‘Whilst healthy
zones of new growth match the annual expansion of the city, the
rottenness at the core increases,’ wrote a contributor to the Manchester
Statistical Society in 1871. ‘Moreover it is not practicable,’ he continued,
‘that all the labouring classes should live in the suburbs.’ For the casual
labourer in the city a walk of 4 or 5 miles a day would be ‘a tax too
burdensome to be borne.’10 Given the demand for casual labour, the
labourer’s need for easy access to the daily-changing opportunities for
employment, and reluctance to move away from the home meals and
short walks of the inner districts, the house farmers found no difficulty
in letting rooms there, no matter how dilapidated and ramshackle the
buildings might be.
One is reminded of the passage in which Dickens describes the view
from the viaduct as Mr. Dombey’s railway journey draws to its end.
‘Everything around is blackened. There are dark pools of water, muddy
lanes, and miserable habitations far below. There are jagged walls and
filthy houses close at hand, and through the battered roofs and broken
windows, wretched rooms are seen, where want and fever hide them­
selves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and crowded gables, and
distorted chimneys, and deformity of brick and mortar pinning up
deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance. As Mr. Dom­
bey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his thoughts that the
8 District No. 2, the area around Victoria station fell into this category. The
warehouses were replaced, or they chose to remove, but some of the housing surviving
off Hanover and Mills streets dated back to 1780.
9 Ibid. Report, March 1883, 31. ,
10 G. T. Robinson, ‘On Town Dwellings for the Working Class,’ Trans. Manch.
Stat. Soc. (1868-72), 69.
340
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

monster who brought him there has let the light of day in on these
things: not made or caused them. It was the journey’s fitting end, and
might have been the end of everything; it was so ruinous and dreary.’11
Dickens was perfectly correct to point out that the railways let the
light of day in on such living conditions, by holding them before the
eyes of those of the travelling public who looked out of the window as
they approached the terminal. The railways did not cause the deficiency
in the supply and quality of housing, nor the illness, intemperance and
unemployment which marked the residents in these quarters. But
similar views from the viaduct were all too characteristic of the final
approaches to termini in most of the great cities. Indeed, to move on
to the second detailed example, Charles Dickens himself has left a
vivid description of an equally wretched area, isolated between the
approach routes of the London and North Western and Great Northern
railways at Euston and King’s Cross. Agar Town and Somers Town
formed an area of short leases and intermingled residential and indus­
trial uses, dominated by the approach lines of railway termini, similar
to Birmingham’s Saltley, Manchester’s Ancoats, Glasgow’s South
Laurieston or Liverpool’s South Scotland and Vauxhall wards.
The north London area of dereliction differed from that of Ancoats,
just described, in two ways. First, the houses were new and their life
span only twenty-one years, instead of the fifty or more years for which
the ramshackle terraces and back-to-backs of Ancoats had to serve.1213
But they were even more dilapidated, consisting of sheds and hovels
run up by journeymen bricklayers and carpenters working on Sundays
and in their spare time, an ‘English Suburban Connemara’, as Dickens
described it. ‘There were the dog-kennel, the cowshed, the shanty, and
the elongated match-box styles of architecture. To another, the in­
genious residence of Robinson Crusoe seemed to have given his idea.
Through an opening was to be seen another layer of dwellings at the
back: one looking like a dismantled windmill, and another perched
upon a wall, like a guard’s lookout on the top of a railway carriage.
Every garden had its nuisance—so far the inhabitants were agreed—
but every nuisance was of a distinct and peculiar character. In one was
a dung-heap, in the next a cinder-heap, in the third, which belonged to
the cottage of a costermonger, was a pile of whelk and periwinkle
shells, some rotten cabbages and a donkey: and the garden of another
exhibiting a board inscribed with the words “Ladies School” had
become a pond of thick green water.’14 The centre of the district was

11 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1869), 176, Chap. XX.

12 An attempt was made to extend the leases, as John Hollingshead discloses,
‘expecting no doubt to profit by the advance of railways on the metropolis.’ John
Hollingshead, Ragged London (1861), 130.
13 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Chap. 6, quoted H. C. Prince, loc. cit. 111-12.
341
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

occupied by the mountains of refuse from the metropolitan dustbins,

and by the small scale trades associated with such an area: rag collec­
tors, knackers’ yards, bone boiling, manure making, and soap manu­
facturing works, brick kilns and a gas works.
The ‘Ladies School’ notice was a reminder of earlier days when a
few larger houses, market gardeners and dairymen had occupied the
area, which was owned by the Church Commissioners. In 1841, a
couple of years after the Euston railway station had been opened,
William Agar, a lawyer who had taken a lease from the Church Com­
missioners, parcelled out the estate indiscriminately into twenty-one
year building leases. When these fell in again in 1862 the whole area
was demolished to make way for the St. Pancras station of the Midland
Railway company—which, because its scheme fell just outside the
defined limits of the Metropolitan area, was allowed full powers of
demolition without even the quid pro quo of cheap workmen’s services,
imposed in the same year upon the Great Eastern company in the
terms of its Liverpool Street Station Act.14
The second way in which Agar and Somers Towns differed from
Ancoats was that the former areas did not merely front the terminal
approaches, they were actually sandwiched, after Thomas Brassey had
completed the Great Northern’s works to King’s Cross (1852), between
two of the largest terminal approaches for a distance of a mile and a
half, up to Camden Town. This overlapping of the areas of dereliction
left a zone, or wedge, in which all development was paralysed, and which
formed a convenient and obvious route for the third great company to
drive in its northern approach.
To a certain extent such densely occupied and makeshift inner
suburbs were a product of the rapid growth of urban population itself,
including the growth of a large class unable to pay for anything better,
and were not the result of any action by the railway companies; but the
railways might be said to have worsened the situation in two ways.
First, they added substantially to the stream of dispossessed leaving
the central district, without either providing alternative accommoda­
tion or really cheap fares. By these actions they produced the very
opposite effect to that commonly ascribed to the railways; they increased
the degree of overcrowding and compressed the mid-Victorian city
rather than assisting it to expand. The immediate results of this pressure
of overcrowding can be seen in the subdivision of existing tenements, the
occupation of empty houses where these could be found, and the run­
ning up of ‘temporary’ housing of the type small builders or weekend
entrepreneurs were prepared to supply, no matter how short the build­
ing lease. In areas where houses had stood untenanted the empties
were taken up; and this side-effect of demolition was'one which larger
14 H.C., 1905, XXX, 568-9.
342
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

builders with stocks of empties on their hands openly welcomed. In

fact the clearest way to trace the movement of population caused by
railway demolition, John Leigh, the Manchester Officer of Health,
suggested, was to note the rate at which empty houses were taken up
in the adjacent reception areas. He quotes, from his own experience,
the example of how, after the destruction of the old three-storey houses
which had occupied the site of the C.L.C.’s Central Station in Man­
chester, two or three of the sanitary areas in the upper part of St.
George’s district began to show a marked increase in mortality.
‘This led to a house-to-house visitation, for there was no epidemic at this
time, nor apparent reason why the mortality should be of a higher rate than
usual, or higher than in the neighbouring sanitary districts. It was ascertained
that a considerable number of persons who had been displaced from some of
the worst streets off Deansgate by the operations for the Central Station had
migrated to these sanitary districts, carrying, of course, with them their bad
habits and deteriorated health. They had been led to these localities by the
fact that a number of the houses had long been empty, and were available at
low rents. They raised the rate of mortality of the districts, but, benefiting
by the change, had lowered their own.’16
These reception areas were scattered, within walking distance of the
casual labour markets, around the inner areas of the city, sometimes
in the shadow of the station, sometimes in some other area of low
residential amenity: on occasions the inflow was even accommodated
by the rookeries surviving in the central area. But, and here was the
second influence of the railways, they cramped and confined the inner
districts into which migration from the centre took place, by their
network of main lines, viaducts, yards and works, and, as it were,
suggested areas where, because residential values had been frozen, the
overflow might accumulate. Unlike other areas, for which the process
of gradual improvement and residential replacement was always a
possibility, however remote, the inner districts intersected by the rail­
ways were fixed in dereliction.
The effect upon amenity was combined with an effect upon com­
munications. Ancoats was particularly bad in this respect. ‘With a
population equal to that of a large city’, wrote John Leigh, ‘it has not a
single road or street enabling that vast population to communicate in a
fairly straight line with the city with which its business chiefly lies. A
series of zig-zags, along narrow streets, form its avenues to the city.
Every year adds to its dismal character, and lessens the enjoyment of
its inhabitants.’16 Like the inhabitants of Saltley, the equivalent area
in east Birmingham, the 48,000 inhabitants of Ancoats suffered from
an interdiction of communications by the railway workings. Apart
15 MRL, Reports of the March 1884, 120.
16 Ibid. March 1884, 48.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

from the sheer difficulty and expense of bridging railway land, the
routes themselves were often raised on embankments or viaducts,
crossing the street pattern at angles, with the minimum headroom and
width; so that where road communications were poor, or incompletely
formed, the possibilities of future widening and realignment were
drastically curtailed.
In London similar effects were produced, both in the east and in the
south, by railway approaches through the inner districts. Petitions
against the London and South Western railway company’s projected
route from Waterloo to Thames-side at Clink Street summarise the
objections. ‘It will run direct across all the southern entrances to
London, crossing at a low elevation, the important and leading
thoroughfares of Waterloo Road, Blackfriars Road and Southwark
Bridge Road, and enclosing as it were the southern part of the metro­
polis with a brick wall and preventing all future improvements.’17
Such destruction of communications between the inhabitants and the
central district was ‘contrary to the feeling which has abolished city
walls and gates as obstructions to business and recreation.’18 Mr.
Charles Stephens, owner of a hundred and fifty acres freehold in
Camberwell, and a hundred more in Lewisham, described a land­
owner’s anxiety to the Royal Commission of 1846 in these words.‘Such
a railway will place an impassable and hideous wall between the most
important and populous parts of this parish—and will induce the
building of houses, wherever that event shall take place, in a confined
manner and of an inferior class.’19
Although on this occasion the protests were timely and effective, in
other areas representations were not organised, were too late, or were
directed to bodies not competent to deal with them. A few hundred
yards from the line just rejected, the London and South Western
company completed a viaduct to Waterloo, which caused, almost at
once, the very effects predicted by the petitioners of St. Saviour’s,
Southwark, and St. Giles’s, Camberwell.20 ‘A rapid deterioration
followed the coming of the railways to Lambeth,’ writes the Survey of
London. ‘Streets were cut up and buildings torn down or dismembered,
while the series of dark, damp arches under the lines encouraged the
more disreputable element of the population.’21
17 H.C., 1846, XVII, App. 1, p. 249.
18 Loc. cit. p.256.
19 Ibid. Q.2810.
20 ‘This is an evil ... in connection with the impassable boundaries of railway
lines, as will be seen on the South Western map by tracing the course of the railway
from Nine Elms to Clapham Junction.’ ‘The worst elements have for the most part
taken refuge in blocks of houses isolated by blank walls or railway embankments
or untraversed by any thoroughfare.’ Charles Booth, op. cit. (1892), I, 265, 281.
21 The Survey of London, XXIII (1951), 1.
344
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

The railway arch was, of course, a functional necessity for many

of the approach routes, if they were to avoid the wholesale street
closures and level crossings, against which Parliament had set its face.
All the early hopes that arches might be turned to advantage miscarried,
however, and within a few years they became symbols of all that was
shabby and down-at-heel in Victorian urban life. Some of the central
arches were let to people who lived on the premises, in spite of ‘the
difficulty of providing chimneys and such other little difficulties’, and
carried on a low class of trade.22 Some of the arches of the Blackwall
railway were bought by ‘a very benevolent person, who has fitted them
up as houses for the poorer class of people’: and near the Minories
station a clergyman’s application for the use of the arches for an infant
school was granted. ‘The Committee were very happy to do all they
could in granting them at a very moderate rent, and a large and very
interesting school is carried on under those very arches.’23 During the
commercial crisis of 1866 unemployment relief at 9s a week was given
to upwards of 400 men in Bethnal Green ‘in three vacant railway
arches which have been kindly let for the purpose.’24 They can be seen
in the illustration on Plate 12, engaged in breaking granite for the roads.
More casually, the arches were used as overnight shelter by the human
derelicts of Victorian society; by spirit drinkers and unsuccessful
criminals, by Gustav Dore’s ‘sleepers out’.25 A railway arch was chosen
as the symbol of ultimate degradation by the popular Victorian artist
Augustus Egg, for his narrative paintings showing the fate of an
unfaithful wife.26
Wherever the arches of railway viaducts appeared, the wretched
flotsam of urban life followed. Complaints concerning their deteriora­
ting effect were made against the London and South Western, the
Eastern Counties, the Greenwich and the Blackwall railway companies
in London: and repeated on similar occasions in the provinces. ‘A
viaduct,’ wrote one resident in east London, ‘would not be tolerated
in a respectable neighbourhood and undoubtedly renders a bad one
worse.’27 Nor, as time passed, was any improvement apparent. The
first bad impressions were only confirmed by further experience.
‘I travel something from 25,000 to 28,000 miles a year by railway,’
said an engineer in 1866, ‘and have done so for the last 25 years. I have
my eyes pretty well open generally and I know no railway passing
through a town on arches . . . without it being to my mind a very

22 HLRO, Min., (M.S. & L.), H.L., 1866, 16 July, pp. 8-12.
23 H.C., 1846, XVII, QQ.413-4 (Tite).
24 Illustrated London News, 15 February 1868, 156.
25 Gustav Dore and Blanchard Jerrold, London: a Pilgrimage (1872).
26 Graham Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene (1953), Plate 49.
27 H.C., 1846, XVII, App. 16, pp. 273-4.
345
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

serious detriment to the town property through which it passes.’28

‘You see it in all towns,’ the Town Clerk of Manchester concurred,
‘if you go along a railway with a viaduct; the very character of the
property you look down upon shows that it is not the place where
improvements may be looked for—the viaduct puts a stop absolutely
to any improvement from the time it is constructed.’29

2. The railways and the location of industry

There was, however, another side to the coin. To residential property
owners and to industrial firms using road cartage the viaducts were a
nuisance and obstruction, but to the heavier industrial firms in the
suburbs the railway lines gave valuable linkages with suppliers and
markets. In each of the major Victorian cities the same tendency for
industry to disperse into the inner districts, to the river side, or to more
distant suburbs is apparent.
It is difficult to know how much to assign to the influence of rail
connections, in view of the other powerful influences working to
produce the same result. The growing scale of the business units engaged
in manufacture demanded acreages of floor space which could only be
acquired by moving out from the city centre. The large urban factory in
the central district was an anachronism by the 1860’s, progressively
squeezed out of the city centre by rising land values; though the small
scale workshops specialising in the clothing, furniture, printing, precious
metals and jewellery, watchmaking, precision engineering and the light
metal trades, showed a surprising tenacity, particularly in Birmingham
and London, and continued to multiply in the inner districts, or even
in certain quarters of the city centre.
Again, it is difficult, in view of the supremacy of carting over short
distances, to assess the significance of railway linkages in the redistri­
bution of industry. For every factory with railway sidings there were
a dozen without; but those which took advantage of direct rail con­
nections tended to be the larger and more modern. Some, specially in
heavy engineering, formed groupings of firms large enough to dominate
employment in their district, as at Gorton, or Newton Heath, near
Manchester, or Springburn near Glasgow.
The connection between the large firms in the areas just mentioned
and the railways was unusually close because they were all suppliers
of engines and rolling stock. The Manchester firm of Beyer, Peacock
and Company, although at first it produced a variety of ironmongery
in a centrally located factory, soon became identified with locomotive
28 HLRO, Min., (M.S. & L.), H.L., 1866, 16 July, p. 78 (Bateman).
29 BTHR PYB 1/383, Q.2995.
346
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

manufacture and with Gorton.30 ‘What a change has come over the
scene,’ wrote John Higson in The Gorton Historical Recorder. ‘The
ancient trees are felled, the lanes are being superseded by roads and are
assuming modernised appellations; pack horses are fled; their place is
supplied by railway engines—In the course of time, the situations of
our hedgerows and fields will become lost under the sites of streets and
houses, and form a part of the vast city of Manchester.’31 By the late
1860’s over forty acres was covered by the works and sidings at Gorton,
and a further forty five acres and thirteen miles of sidings covered part
of Newton Heath.32 Another Manchester firm, Sharp, Stewart and
Company, which had originally made cotton machinery, and had also
been located centrally (at the Atlas works, between Oxford Street and
Great Bridgewater Road), performed a still more complex migration
in 1885, not to the outskirts of Manchester, but to the specialised
engineering suburb of Springburn in Glasgow.33
These engineering works form special cases, of course, because of
their intimate business and sales connections with the railways, but
they are important enough in themselves to be mentioned by name;
and they produced the interesting phenomenon of extremely specialised
areas in Glasgow, Manchester and east London which were virtually
suburban versions of Crewe or Swindon.34
Evidence also exists of other large firms, not directly connected as
suppliers and manufacturers to the railway companies, which built new
premises adjacent to the railways or, if already established, sought rail
linkages. Soho, near Birmingham, for example, one of the cradles of
the Industrial Revolution, where Matthew Boulton’s factory pre-dated
the railways by seventy years, secured early connections with the main
line to Wolverhampton.35 Some other established Birmingham firms
moved out of the central area in a similar manner to that seen in
Manchester. Tangye’s, for example, left the small factory at Clement
Street, where they had made the hydraulic rams and pulley blocks upon
which the firm’s fortunes had been founded, and moved to an eleven
acre site half-way between the G.W. railway Handsworth, and the
30 The Engineering and other Industries of Manchester and District (1887), 47.
‘Gorton Foundry’, in the Manchester Guardian, 2 July 1925.
31 Op. cit. (Droylsden, 1852), p. V.
3 ! Manchester of Today: an Epitome of Results (Manchester, 1888), 149. ‘Works
visited etc.’, MRL 620 94273 INI.
33 Manchester City News, 28 March 1903. Great Central Railway, Official Album
(1902). Old Glaogow Club, Transactions 8 January 1951.
34 Stratford in east London occupied a position similar to that filled by Gorton
in Manchester, or Springburn in Glasgow. London: Aspects of Change (ed. R. Glass
et al, 1964), 64. 6,800 workmen were employed there at one time, compared with
17.000 at Gorton.
35 D. C. Eversley, ‘Industry and Trade, 1500-1880’, A History of the County of
Warwick (Victoria County History, 1964), VII, 132-40.
347
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

L. & N.W. railway Soho stations.36 The entirely new factory of the
B.S.A. company likewise set up its works and colony at Small Heath
on the Oxford line.37 All three of these were also engineering works,
though not connected with locomotives or rolling stock; but at King’s
Norton other light manufacturers, from paper to india-rubber making,
were established near the railway line.38
An assessment of the importance of rail connections to the suburban
industrialist must await a more detailed study. It will not be an easy
task, for although the relative costs of alternative modes of transport
for supplies and finished goods must have been carefully considered by
entrepreneurs, particularly at the height of the railway rates controversy
in the 1880’s, yet published business histories are disappointingly silent
on this point.39
However, in lieu of contemporary information, a great deal can be
sketched in ex post, from the geographical distribution of industrial
works spreading outwards from the great towns, and this has been done,
in convenient form and with great local knowledge, by the surveys
carried out for the British Association, at Birmingham, Manchester,
Glasgow and Liverpool.40 At London, although a great deal of similar
material has been gathered in original theses, only one, by P. G. Hall,
has been published.41 To avoid the repetition of much that is already
familiar, and requires extremely detailed topography, the reader is
referred to these well illustrated studies. From them and from other
local sources, the emergence by the late nineteenth century of Man­
chester’s ‘industrial collar’, of the wide belt of industrial building in
the Midlands from Birmingham towards Wolverhampton, and of
Liverpool’s and Glasgow’s changing districts of industrial specialisa-
36 Birmingham Mail, 13 July 1880.
37 D. C. Eversley, loc. cit. 132-3.
38 G. C. Allen, The Industrial Development of Birmingham and the Black Country
(1929), 291 et. seq. M. J. Wise and P. O’N. Thorpe, loc. cit. 222-4.
39 Modem work, taking the form of questionnaires to industrial firms, suggests
that whilst transport costs and facilities rank very high in most firms’ calculations,
other considerations receive only slightly less weight. Some of these—planning
permission, the incidence of local taxes—have received new significance in the
twentieth century; but one consideration often mentioned as critical, and which
applied with undiminished force in the nineteenth century, is the availability of low
priced units of land, located where future expansion would be practicable. T. E.
McMillan Jnr., ‘Why Manufacturers Choose Plant Locations’, Land Economics,
XLI (1965), 239-46.
40 Birmingham and its Regional Setting: a Scientific Survey (British Association,
Birmingham, 1950); The Glasgow Region: a General Survey (ed. R. Miller and J.
Tivy, Glasgow, 1958); A Scientific Survey of Merseyside (ed. W. Smith, Liverpool,
1953); Manchester and its Region (ed. C. F. Carter, Manchester, 1962).
41 P. G. Hall, The Industries of London since 1861 (1962). See also J. E. Martin
‘Three Elements in the Industrial Geography of Greater London’, Greater London
(ed. J. T. Coppock and H. C. Prince, 1964), 246-65.

348
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

tion, can be approximately traced on the ground. But the course of

industrial history in each great town, its successes in certain fields of
manufacture, and abandonment or failure in others, the extent of
diversification in its manufacturing base; these are matters which
cannot be linked by any simple causal chain to the coming of the rail­
ways. The railways are merely one element in the whole network of
external economies which bound together the areas of regional special­
isation associated with each great city.
As part of the growth of inter-dependent industries, physical proxi­
mity, or cheap and easy access to fellow-manufacturers engaged on
other stages of the production process, was obviously of cardinal
importance; but it could be achieved by means other than rail linkages,
and the more closely concentrated the region, the less use were main line
railways within it. This applied even to large-scale manufacturers, but
for the small scale producers operating on short runs and small quan­
tities from ready built factories or workshops in the Victorian cities’
inner districts the linkages between them were of a complexity which
made them quite unsuitable for short-haul by the railways. The small,
miscellaneous loads of the Birmingham or London manufacturer, the
frequent need for trans-shipment for further processing after a short
journey, the heavy terminal charges, made the railways slow and
uneconomic for the local movement of goods. In his study of London’s
industries in the later nineteenth century, Peter Hall has given a
fascinating picture of the small trades, depending upon close connection
with component suppliers and associated skills, and constituting
‘incomparably the major industrial area of London.’ ‘With this type of
productive organisation’, he points out, ‘the real assembly line runs
through the streets; a journey around the Victorian manufacturing
crescent (of inner north and east London) on any typical weekday
reveal the extraordinary congestion of goods vehicles, hurrying in all
directions about their business.’42 Clearly railway goods trains were
not suited to the maintenance of such local and rapid linkages.
If we are looking for what Colin Clark has dubbed ‘micro-locational
factors’, it could be argued that we find them rather more in the case
of the canals than the railways.43 The industrial concentration around
the Port Dundas canal basin, in the north of Glasgow, is far more
striking than any rail-based concentration.44 In Birmingham the two
mile stretch of canal between Bordesley and Aston had already 124

42 Greater London, 227-8.

43 Colin Clark, ‘The Location of Industries and Population’, Town Planning
Review, 35 (1964-5), 195, 211 et. seq.
44 Peter Fleming, Map of the City of Glasgow (1807 and 1821). George Martin,
Map of the City of Glasgow, (1842). S. G. Checkland, ‘The British Industrial City
as History: the Glasgow Case’, Urban Studies, I (1964), 45.
349
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

works and wharves along its bank twenty five years before the railways
were constructed; and the ‘tongues of industrial development’ out to
Smethwick and towards Derby were also located along the Birmingham
and Wolverhampton and Fazeley canals.45 These routes were later
reinforced by railways, which followed the canals closely, for reasons
suggested earlier, but the prior locational impulse was that of the canals.
In Manchester the Ashton and Rochdale canals, built at the turn of
the eighteenth century, attracted over a hundred textile mills, breweries,
chemical works and foundries; and other industrial users spread along
the Bolton, Bury and Junction canals.46 In Liverpool the industrial
grouping along the canals was less marked. The Leeds and Liverpool
canal, which entered from the north, accumulated a few mills, vitriol
and gas works along its banks; but the other major canals all entered
the Mersey upstream, and their effect was lost in the general port and
river traffic; and in London the effect of urban canals was necessarily
limited.47 Where canals had been established, however, even in London,
they continued—like the Regent’s Canal and Hertford Union canals in
East London—to attract industry to their sides throughout the nine­
teenth century. Eight-ninths of the traffic on these canals was simply
for local transfer by the end of the century, and soap, varnish and tar
works congregated along the banks.48
In the Midlands and North, where canals had always been more
successful and widespread than the London area, they also continued
to attract industry throughout the railway age. The effect of their
established location was cumulative. ‘The canals have been in existence
a great many years, and a great many mills and industries of various
kinds have been carried on upon the banks of the canals, brought
there by the facilities which the canals afforded from time to time, and
the traffic to all those places could not be carried so conveniently by
rail as it could by canal.’49 They were far better suited for local, factory
to factory traffic of single loads than main line railways; and the water
they supplied was invaluable to industrial users. In fact several canals
45 A. E. Smailes, The Geography of Towns (1964), 94-5, and Fig. 12. Conurbation:
A Survey of Birmingham and the Black Country, (Birmingham, 1948), 18, ‘Remote
from natural communications it owes its creation to its mineral resources, but its
structure to canals and railways.’
46 L. Wharfe, ‘The Emergence of the Metropolis’, Rich Inheritance (ed. N. J.
Frangopulo, Manchester, 1962), 107-9.
47 Wilfred Smith, ‘The Location of Industry’, A Scientific Survey of Merseyside
(Liverpool, 1953), 179. Jonathan Bennison, Plan of the Town and Port of Liverpool
(1835).
48 Henry Rees, The North Eastern Expansion of London since 1770 (London
M.Sc. Econ. thesis, 1946), 52-63. See also J. E. Martin, ‘Three Elements in the
Industrial Geography of Greater London’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
H. C. Prince, 1964), 258-61 and Fig. 53.
4tH.C„ 1872, XIII, Q.4182.
350
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

with urban stretches, such as the Regent’s canal in London, found

themselves earning an appreciable proportion of their revenues from
selling their water rather than from carrying traffic; and in general
urban canals continued to provide exceptions to the general picture of
decline in waterborne transport.50 Birmingham still imported over a
million tons of coal by canal in the late 1860’s; and a correspondence
of great vehemence conducted with the canal company was one of the
major preoccupations of the Chamber of Commerce in 1870.51 It was
to the idea of enlarged, or ‘ship’, canals that the Corporations of
Manchester and Birmingham naturally turned early in the following
decade.52 If we are looking for locational factors for industry, within
the area of the three conurbations, Manchester, Birmingham and
Glasgow, the railways must obviously share their role with the canals.
Two points of particular relevance to urban history emerge from
studies of railways, canals, and the regional location of industry. The
first is that nearly all goods, except those manufactured near the
point of export, or those marketed locally, spent part of their journey
as railway freight. Coastal shipping and canals were competitive for
minerals, building materials, for industrial goods on very short dis­
tances, and for some categories of agricultural produce, but otherwise
long distance transport virtually was railway transport. To this extent
the possession of private sidings, or the seeking of locations adja­
cent to the line, was not the distinguishing mark it might at first appear.
Indeed there were cases of firms which had local access to a branch
line still finding it worth their while to cart their goods to a more
central terminus.53 On the whole, however, it is clear that the direct
rail transport of goods from suburban sites was not open to the
same objections as the transport of passengers. Although similar
inconveniences tended to build up at peak hours, time was not so
critical a factor; and, for all the complaints, the freight rates for
merchandise goods were well within the means of manufacturers and
50 The Regent’s Canal company sold 5,000,000 gallons of water per day, the
greatest amount, in proportion to its length, of any canal. The Grand Junction
company sold 4,000,000. For E. J. Lloyd’s arguments on the subject of short distance
competition by canals see H.C., 1872, XIII, QQ.5060-78.
51 A differential urban rate was levied on canal traffic in Birmingham. Letter,
3 July 1870, BRL, Chamber of Commerce Reports, 1865-87.
52 BRL, Council Proceedings, Committee appointed to investigate the possibility
of enlarging the Birmingham and Worcester canal for 200 ton vessels, Report
20 March 1888. Charles Hadfield, British Canals: an Illustrated History (1959),
247-54.
53 Glasgow City Archives, Petitions, Briefs and Minutes of Proceedings, Glasgow
Corporation Tramways, Bill II, 425. Turton also reports, in a recent survey, that
only 3 firms out of 18 situated in the ‘railway towns’ of Swindon, Crewe, Eastleigh
and Ashford, received or distributed more than 50% of their freight by rail. B. J.
Turton, loc. cit. 110.
351
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

their agents. Indeed the appeal was put forward, more than once, that
‘Trains that would deal with men as you deal with the clothes they
wear and the food they eat, passing them at the same rate of price
(i.e. 14 workmen per ton) would enable you to give a greater amount
of assistance to the labouring classes in London than by any other
mode.’54 Moreover the charge on goods, whether high or low, could
be handed on ultimately to the consumer. The working man was not
in an analogous position regarding his own transport costs. So although,
when his works migrated from Bridge Street, Birmingham, to Bourn-
ville, Richard Cadbury regularly walked the distance, and his bio­
grapher describes him helping his workmen to clear the snow off the
tram lines in the winter, at least the railway accommodation for his
products and raw materials was far more adequate than that for his
men.55
The second point, stemming from what has been said, is that to the
extent to which the suburban dispersal of factories was associated with
an increased supply of suburban workers’ houses, the problem of
urban congestion and overcrowding was being tackled in the most
effective way possible. It was all very well to agitate for the provision
of really cheap workmen’s services as the means of enabling the
working class to enjoy the low rents and low death rates of the suburbs,
whilst working in the city, but the ‘dormitory’ ideal raised serious prac­
tical problems. A more logical solution was to disperse both industry
and workers, and to do it in that sequence. ‘At present it operates this
way,’ William Denton complained in 1884, ‘the railway companies
avoid the employers of labour, and they only remove the employed,
and then you must have overcrowding; whereas if the employers of
labour were removed—then their people would go with them.’56 When
the Metropolitan railway were building their extension from Aldersgate
to Moorfields, for example, their route was selected so as to avoid
Whitbread’s Brewery. If they had not, the consequence, Denton claimed,
would have been that Whitbreads would simply have moved to the
outskirts, taking the workpeople’s traffic they generated with them.
‘At the present moment most of the large brewers are occupying ground
which they only occupied in the first instance because it was at a dis­
tance from London at that time; but London has come up to them.’57
He saw more hope in moving industries outwards, where there was
building room, so that the workmen might be able to live near their
work, than in cheap fares. Yet although, in his evidence, Denton
strongly enjoined this policy upon the Royal Commission on the
54 H.C., 1846, XVII, QQ.2829-31.
65 H. C. Alexander, Richard Cadbury of Birmingham (1906), 232.
66 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10688.
*’ Ibid. Q.10695-7.

352
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

Housing of the Working Classes, its implications were too drastic to

gain acceptance. The railway companies would have had to be directed
to pass, where possible, through expensive industrial property; a
course which was impractical, belated, and certain to meet with the
firmest resistance from the parties involved. Not merely were his views
not taken up, but they were not even given passing mention in the
Commissioners’ Report. A glance at two cases where the compulsory
purchase of factories was envisaged, is sufficient to show why the
recommendation seemed hopelessly impracticable. At one stage of the
M.S. & L.’s central station plans in Manchester, the scheduling of the
Oxford St. works of Messrs. Sharp, Stewart & Co. fell under discussion.
The Corporation of Manchester favoured the idea, but did they realise,
Mr. Denison Q.C. asked, that the factory was valued at half-a-million?58
Moreover, as the N.B. railway company’s dealings with the Coatbridge
Iron Works demonstrated, no factory premises could be partially
taken. In view of the complex factors which might be involved in a
change of layout, or the loss of part of their space, factory owners
and their solicitors had the right to insist that the whole premises,
or none at all, be scheduled. The subsequent legal discussions also
led, on occasions, to troublesome concessions over future rates of
carriage.59
Even without legislative encouragement, however, the migration of
industry to sites on the outskirts or in the suburbs of the major cities
gathered momentum in the last quarter of the century. But it must be
recalled that the fastest growing employment sector in Britain’s economy
in the late nineteenth century was not in manufacture but in tertiary,
white-collared services, and many of these were associated with the
city’s central districts.60 So the problem of urban housing remained,
and to many it still seemed at the end of the century that the only
solution lay in ‘improved locomotion’. If rail services were cheapened
and extended, ‘the relief of pressure would be immediate’, Charles
Booth wrote in 1901. ‘The action would be something like that of land
drainage on stagnant, water-logged land; whereas the attempt to meet
the evils of overcrowding by piling up great blocks of model dwellings
is like an attempt to obviate a marshy foundation by putting in concrete,
digging a hole and pumping out the water.’61

58 BTHR PYB 1/383, 18 May 1866, QQ.3302-5.

59 G. U. Coll. Sol. Papers. Box 3, N.B. railway company, Coatbridge branch.
60 The real problem was the transfer of the central business functions, as some
observers realised by the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Any transfer of work to the
country will not do more than slightly reduce the rate at which the business popula­
tion of London has been growing in recent years.’ H.C., 1906, XLI, Q.4743.
61 Charles Booth, Improved Means of Locomotion as a first step towards the cure
of the Housing Difficulties of London (1901), 17.
N 353
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

3. The railways and suburban growth

a. Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham
It has already been noted that in each of the great cities of Victorian
Britain the increase in activity, and expansion of area of the central
business districts antedated the coming of the railways by at least half
a century. In a similar way, the development of suburbs also preceded
the provision of railway services, by periods of at least a decade or
two for each of the larger cities, with one exception.

Glasgow
The exception was Glasgow, where suburban life, in the English
sense, was slow to develop, and throughout the century owed even less
to rail connections than the other cities. The two main areas of pros­
perous middle-class residence, Langside/Pollokshields and Kelvinside,
were both situated no more than two or three miles from the centre; too
close for rail services to be attractive, even if they had been adequately
provided. The most rapidly growing working class ‘suburbs’ such as
Maryhill, Partick or Bridgeton likewise were very close to the centre,
within easy walking distance for those with employment there.
Attempts to fit railway transport into this narrow compass were
peculiarly unsuccessful and belated. The Cathcart circle line, intended
to develop southern suburban traffic, by means of stations less than
half a mile apart, was partially opened in 1887, too late to be said to
have influenced the extent or direction of suburban building to more
than a marginal extent. The maximum journey travelled upon it was
three miles, and the inconvenience of going to fixed stations for the
20 to 30 minute service had to be taken into account.62
Attempts to run a suburban service from east to west were still more
unsuccessful. A dozen stations were provided along the 6| miles of the
Glasgow Central railway; but the line was not opened until 1896-7—
within five years of the electrification of the trams. Since it included
lengthy underground sections, the further burden of underpinning
streets and diverting sewers added to the cost, and all the subsequent
drawbacks of steam operation through tunnels were encountered.63
At a greater distance from the city there were, even from late 1840’s,
a few out-of-town residents with business to transact in Glasgow
sufficiently frequently to make it worth buying a contract ticket; but
these wealthy commuters were not numerous—all season tickets on the
Caledonian line, including the Clyde coast, only came to £1,000 per

62 G. H. Robin, Railway World (1963), 53-7, 102-8.

63 GRL B76055-6 contains in two volumes the petitions, eyidence and counsel’s
speeches on this line. It was to cost £1,231,458, GRL B76055. Manuscript estimates
by Charles Forman.

354
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

annum in the early 186O’s.64 Attempts were made to encourage further

building on the Dumbartonshire and Ayrshire coasts by offering free
travel for eleven years to all those who had newly taken houses with a
rental above a certain minimum figure, but this act of calculated
generosity failed to encourage the growth of an outer ring of dormitory
suburbs. Indeed Glasgow never developed symptoms of the suburban
sprawl typical of many other cities until well into the twentieth century,
and remains an extraordinarily compact and densely populated city.
In the nineteenth century Glasgow itself was the dormitory, the
Singer Works at Clydebank, or the various steel works at Newton and
Coatbridge, were the work destinations. The workmen’s train services
which were running in the late nineteenth century tended to assist this
curious ‘reverse’, or outward flow of commuters, rather than to disperse
the resident population. When Robert Millar, General Manager of the
Caledonian, was giving evidence to the Select Committee on Workmen’s
Trains, 1903/5, he was questioned carefully, and almost incredulously,
upon this point.
‘It was the reverse of London? You took from your populous centre
workmen to work away from the centre and you brought them back
at night?—That is so; and that is the rule in Scotland. It is not abso­
lutely the case, but it is the rule. A great many engineering works
starting in Glasgow originally, the population settled down round about
the engineering and shipbuilding works. As the city increased, the
works were sent out into the country and the population remained.’65

Liverpool
All the other cities, however, showed early signs of suburban growth.
Thomas Baines, historian of Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century,
marvelled at the ‘effect of the great facilities for locomotion’, changing
both town and countryside around the Mersey. ‘Comparatively few
large and beautiful dwelling houses are now built in town, while
thousands are scattered over the sea-shore, from Southport to Hoylake.’
The wealthy had already begun by the 1820’s to desert Abercromby
Square and take villas in the ‘pleasant villages from Bootle to Aig-
burth.’66
However, Baines makes it clear that he is using ‘locomotion’ in the
more general sense which the Victorians attached to the word. The
instruments of this ‘locomotion’ were the steamers, which began
services in the 1820’s, and the omnibuses, which started in 1831, and
were running ten or twelve routes at the time Baines wrote.67 There
64 BTHR (Edinburgh) CAL 4/71, Traffic Statements 1850-65.
65 H.C., 1905 (270) VIII, QQ.6, 238-40.
66 T. Baines, Liverpool in 1859 (1859), 8.
67 Idem, History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool (1852), 629.
355
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

were, in fact, no railway lines connecting Grassendale and Aigburth

with the centre of Liverpool until the decade following Baines’ History
of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool. This early suburban traffic
between the more prosperous southern suburbs and the central business
district was carried mainly by omnibus and private carriage; and it
was advanced by Ramsay Muir in 1910 as the main factor in the
evolution of the extremely localised Bold Street/Church Street/Lord
Street shopping avenue.68 This shopping axis, with its extensions along
Castle Street and North John Street, lay on the direct line between the
office quarter and the wealthy southern suburbs, and the approaching or
departing road traffic tended to be narrowly channelled down this
single route.69
Liverpool’s main suburban growth of mid century (1831-71) was
likewise largely independent of railway development. The most
substantial growth, from 7,000 to 122,500, took place in the districts
immediately north east of the centre, Kirkdale, and Everton; both no
more than two miles, or a half-hour’s walk, from the central area, and
rather less than that from the new northern docks. Toxteth Park, to
the south, was increased in population by the processes of site-infilling
and denser building from 24,000 to 80,000 over the same period, and
West Derby, to the east, from 9,600 to 50,600; but both of these were
within three or four miles of the city centre.70 Further out, acting as
middle class outriders of this suburban extension, villa settlements
were to be found in clusters inland, spread evenly in an arc, Walton,
Knowsley, Huyton, Wavertree, Childwall and Woolton, and along the
coast to the north as far as Southport.71
At first, residents in these outer suburbs had to make do with little
or no railway connection, but one of the objectives of the Cheshire
Lines Committee’s ring railway in the 1870’s was, as James Allport
explained, to cater for the profitable first and second class traffic which
this building generated. ‘Our line is not only an accommodation for our
goods traffic to the North, it really gives a very good suburban railway
. . . there are a great deal of villa sites and it would be a line very much
used for that purpose as a suburban railway.’72 George Underdown,
General Manager of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire rail­
way, also spoke in support of the ‘omnibus services’ they had been

68 Ramsay Muir, loc. cit. 237-40. Wilfred Smith, ‘The Urban Structure of Liver­
pool’, Merseyside: A Scientific Survey (British Association, 1953), 197.
69 J. A. Picton, op. cit. (1875), I, 417.
70 Sheila Marriner. ‘History of Liverpool, 1700-1900’, Merseyside: a Scientific
Survey (Liverpool, 1953) 107-114.
71 T. Baines, op. cit. (1859), 8-9.
72 HLRO, Min., H.C., 1874, 28 April, pp. 28-9, S.C. on C.L.C. (North Liverpool
Extension to Ranelagh Street).
356
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

asked to open to Hunt’s Cross, Childwali, Much Woolton ‘and other

pretty areas’. ‘Excuse me, who asked you?’ a landowner's counsel
interposed. ‘A gentlemen who lives in the neighbourhood. One gentle­
man?—Yes. I thought it was one.’73
The traffic was deliberately limited at the outset to the type of
passenger who could afford to pay full fares, or receive a concession
for buying a contract ticket, and even with this restriction, its incep­
tion was greeted by landowners with mixed feelings.74 The most suc­
cessful bulk traffic was not developed until the last decades of the
century, with the extension of more modest red brick houses for
the lower middle class clerks northwards to Waterloo, Crosby and
beyond. From these homes came the relatively heavy daily short-dis­
tance traffic which the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway carried
into Exchange Station, conveniently located on the fringe of the office
quarter.75

Manchester
In Manchester the extension of suburbs followed a similar course
to that of Liverpool. The feature of the first quarter of the nineteenth
century which excited comment was the movement of the fashionable
residential district from the toll-gate-guarded inner areas of Victoria
Park and Ardwick out to Alderley Edge and Wilmslow, or even further
to Bowdon and Knutsford. This was at first a movement of a small, but
wealthy and land-hungry, group of the new middle-class ‘Cottentots’
and relied upon private carriages; but by the early 183O’s, when the
horse-omnibuses began their services to Pendleton, Rusholme, Brough­
ton, Cheetham Hill, Eccles, Harpurhey, Newton Heath, and Didsbury,
the middle-class exodus increased in volume.76
Apart from the Altrincham branch of the Manchester South Junction
railway, opened in the late 1840’s, there was little attempt to develop
‘dormitory’ traffic by any of the main line companies serving Manches­
ter. The bulk of their traffic consisted of inter-city travellers, arriving
from Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Liverpool: the twice-weekly
tradesman, the commercial traveller returning or setting out on medium
or long-distance journeys.77 The numbers of season ticket holders were
small until the last decades of the century, and the number of regular
commuters of the modern, daily, strap-hanging type, probably did not

73 Ibid. 29 April, p. 21.

74 Mr. Haywood was the principal objector, but Derby and Sefton also owned
land on the route and petitioned against the bill. Ibid. Petitions. (These are men­
tioned in the first MS. pages before p. 1 of the first day’s proceedings.)
75 Ramsay Muir, loc. cit. 240.
76 T. W. Freeman, loc. cit. 54-6, and Fig. 16.
77 BTHR PYB 1/383, 29 May 1866, QQ.631-8.
357
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

amount, in the 1860’s, to more than a few thousands per day.78 The
horse omnibus was competitive, even on the Stockport run; and a
glance at the siting of intermediate stations is enough to show that the
new middle class suburbs must have relied principally upon the omni­
bus.
In Manchester, as in other cities, rail journeys by the working class
were reserved for holidays and the occasional excursion.79 All that the
suburban railway and horse omnibus services did for Manchester was
to siphon off the well-to-do, and leave the main bulk of the working
class in the centre, and in the inner ring of speculative terrace houses.
‘A large portion of the middle-class, the clerks, warehousemen and
others seize upon the new suburbs,’ wrote a contemporary, referring
to Manchester in the early 1870’s, ‘vacating their houses in town, which
are most frequently absorbed for shop and business purposes, or
subdivided and sublet, until the dwelling which has served for one
household contains as many families as it did persons.’80
The exodus was confined to the middle class. The working class
remained in the state Leon Faucher had described in 1845, ‘struggling
for a few feet of land in the midst of some filthy purlieu.’81 Suggestions
were made in Manchester, as in the other cities, that facilities for a
wider social class to travel daily might circumvent the danger of central
overcrowding to health; and the Health Officer pointed to the marked
difference between central death rates and those outside the city
boundary. In the 1880’s a pressure group, similar to those campaigning
for cheap trains in London, was formed to urge the reluctant railway
companies ‘to enable workmen to live among more healthy surround­
ings, and to allow them to work at greater distances from their houses
than formerly.’82
78 Nor would the number increase until there was a marked improvement in local
services, wrote a contemporary in the 188O’s. ‘Rusholme will demand to be placed
in better communication with Old Trafford and Pendleton and Broughton, and
Cheetham will seek to be connected with Hulme and Chorlton by some means which
will not consume a great part of the day in going and returning.’ Manchester City
News (1881-2), Notes and Queries, MRL 9427 M 9 A.
78 By the end of the century an impressive amount of working class holiday traffic
was handled for the longer journeys to the west coast seaside resorts during the ‘Wakes’
weeks, the fares being paid in advance through ‘going off' clubs. Railway Magazine,
XXVIII, (1911), 10.
80 G. T. Robinson, ‘On Town Dwellings for the Working Class’, Trans. Manch.
Stat. Soc. (1871-2), 68.
81 Leon Faucher, op. cit. 93.
82 Lancs. Federation of Trades and Labour, Cheap Trains for Workmen (1899),
MRL 385-31. This pamphlet attacked both the Cheap Trains Sub-Committee of
the Corporation, which only secured ‘inadequate, and in some cases trivial, reduc­
tions’, and the railway companies who (it alleged) were usingjhe tax reliefs granted
to them to give relief on the profitable middle class contract traffic whilst retaining
‘oppressive’ fares for workpeople.
358
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

Even in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however,

central conditions had not been noticeably eased by cheaper railway
transport in Manchester. Indeed cheap railway transport had not been
offered. In the Manchester district between 1884 and 1900 a half-fare,
or a single fare for a return ticket, was called a ‘workmen’s fare’; on
this basis the two most popular journeys, to Gorton 2| miles and to
Miles Platting l| miles, cost 2-Vd and l|d respectively. The two or
three workmen’s trains which ran to Oldham charged 7d for 9j- miles;
that is, three shillings and sixpence per week, a sum quite beyond the
budget of most working men in the 1890’s.83 They would be satisfied,
they said, with a weekly fare of Is 6d for journeys of from six to ten
miles.84 Such a tariff might begin to bring daily rail travel within the
reach of the working class, particularly if the irksome restrictions on
hours, and on returning early from work if ill or paid off, were removed.
As late as 1904, a special sub-committee on the Housing of the
Working Class, set up by Manchester Corporation, still clung to the
belief that ‘cheap and rapid transit is the only cure’ for the working
class housing problem. It was a formula which had, by now, been
repeated for nearly sixty years; but by 1904 the corporation was looking
to a different medium and to its own resources for the solution. ‘The
modern electric tramway,’ the sub-committee concluded, ‘will come
to the rescue.’85 All the northern cities relied greatly on the tram, but
none more than Manchester, which by 1905 had four times as many
trams per head of the population as London, and even twice as many
as Glasgow.86
It is doubtful, in fact, whether the solution of the working class
housing problem could be vested in any transport medium, since it
sprang from deficiencies in demand which went far beyond the power
of cheap rate fares, or relatively small differentials in rent, to redress.
But the street tramway certainly seemed to have much to recommend
it by comparison with railways. Not merely could a municipal corpora­
tion control the laying out of routes, but it could constantly supervise
the frequency of services and the issue of cheap tickets, using a municipal
rate if necessary to sponsor transport at fares below real costs.

83 H.C., 1900 (187) LXVI pt. 1, 52.

84 Lancs. Federation of Trades and Labour, loc. cit.
85 Sanitary Committee, Housing of the Working Class, History of the Schemes and
Description etc. (Manchester, 1904), 10.
86 No. of inhabitants
per mile of tramway
Manchester 8,937
Liverpool 13,368
Glasgow 14,216
London 33,661
H.C., 1905, XXX, 587.
359
 T H E IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Even the ordinary horse tram produced a marked effect. ‘Within a

few years the old, despised horse tramway had created a new volume
of traffic’, argued H. H. Gordon, in a discussion at the Royal Statistical
Society in 1918, ‘which was larger than that aggregated in two genera­
tions before, by railways or omnibuses.’87 H. H. Gordon was referring
to the horse trams in the course of an argument to show that the build­
ing cycle in London, which reached a peak in the late 1870’s, was
associated with the introduction of horse trams; a view which J. Parry
Lewis has discussed in a recent book.88
When the tramways were electrified, and average speeds rose to
seven or eight miles per hour, not merely was the effective radius of
operation increased, and building diffused along the routes, especially
near the fare stages, but the capacity of the central areas to absorb
traffic was also increased. C. R. Bellamy, the General Manager of
Liverpool’s tramways, even claimed that a fourfold increase in the
street traffic-handling capacity of the central area was achieved by the
electric tram, compared with the horse omnibus or cab.89 John M.
McElroy, the Manchester tramways manager, gave similar evidence.90
Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow were as busy as London, it was
argued, but did not create the same sense of confusion in their central
districts because the streets were not cluttered with omnibuses and
cabs.91
All in all, the tramway deserves more thorough consideration than
it can be given in this brief digression. In America the notion that
something as prosaic as a horse-drawn tram could produce ‘streetcar
suburbs’, or ‘star-shaped cities’ has been entertained for some time,
but the idea has only been partially tested in Britain.92

Birmingham
In Birmingham the development of new suburbs depended at first
upon the private carriage and omnibus. The Colmore and Calthorpe
lands at New Hall and Edgbaston, formed the earliest inner suburbs;
and they, like Islington (named and planned after its London counter­
part) were intended at first to provide a more elegant and spacious

87 J. Calvert Spensley, ‘Urban Housing Problems’, Journal of the Royal Statistical

Society, LXXXI (1918), 162-228. Gordon’s point is made on p. 226, and is discussed
in J. Parry Lewis, Building Cycles and Britain's Growth (1965), 130-2.
88 J. Parry Lewis, op cit. 131.
89 H.C., 1906, XL, Q.25481-553.
90 Ibid. Q.25762 et. seq.
91 In London, of course, tramcars were banned from the central area. T. C.
Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 186 et. seq.
92 Wilbur R. Thompson, A Preface to Urban Economics (Baltimore, 1965) 362.
Sam B. Warner, Street car suburbs: the progress of growth in Boston, 1870-1900
(Cambridge, Mass., 1962).
360
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

retreat for the new moneyed class of the early nineteenth century.9394
The New Hall estate, just west of Snow Hill, was too central to remain
residential for long, but underwent a metamorphosis to business uses
similar to that in Blythswood, Glasgow. Edgbaston, however, remained
residential throughout the nineteenth century, and retained the reputa­
tion of being pre-eminently the ‘carriage trade’ area.

Location of Birmingham’s suburbs.

Other new suburbs which were well established before the railway
age were at Small Heath to the east, and Sparkbrook to the south.
Though not as exclusive as Edgbaston, both suburbs contained houses
laid out in generous style; a few could be found with grounds of ten
to fifteen acres, and whole streets with average rents of £100 per house
per annum.9i All were connected, by the first omnibuses, to the central
district in 1834 and 1835; though the fares charged by Messrs. Smith
and Doughty, the first omnibus operators (e.g. 8d return to Small
93 M. J. Wise and P.O’N. Thorpe, loc. cit. 214.
94 Birmingham Daily Mail, 17 September 1903, house and 16 acres Small Heath.
The Property Advertiser 2 May 1881, houses in Beechfield Rd. Sparkbrook, renting
at £80-£110 per annum.
n* 361
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Heath), were almost as much out of reach of the ordinary artisan as the
£100 rentals.95
By 1836 two omnibus companies, The Birmingham Omnibus Con­
veyance Company and the Midland Omnibus Company, had com­
menced operations on a larger scale; the latter-named company running
railway feeder services from the High Street to the Vauxhall station,
the former plying through West Bromwich and Wolverhampton to
Dudley. The development of these services largely remained, for thirty
years, a special field for the small operator to show his enterprise.
William Sheppard, Joseph Brookes, William Mayer and Thomas
Chapman were amongst the small entrepreneurs who operated the
extending network of routes shown in Wrightson and Webb’s Direc­
tories in the 1840’s, to Nechells, Saltley, Handsworth, Smethwick, and
Camp Hill.96
A resident of Handsworth, in his reminiscences, placed the decade
of most rapid growth of services as the 1860’s, ‘when the need of
some regular communication with the parent city of Birmingham had
to be met. .. and it was met by a service of omnibuses. ... At first, two
rival proprietors monopolised the service, one named Tolley and one
named Mayner (sic). From Villa Cross to town there was a half-hourly
service, and the fare for the single journey was 6d—in snowy and
difficult weather sometimes raised to eightpence or ninepence. As was
inevitable, however, the steadily growing requirements of the locality
brought competition in due time, first in the shape of rival omnibuses,
and later in the form of the more modern tramway. This was just as
the toll-gates were beginning to disappear.’97 In 1872 the Birmingham
and Staffordshire Tramway began operations through Handsworth
and West Bromwich; and by 1900 tramcars were providing transport
over the 3 miles for Id, at two or three minute intervals during the
busiest part of the day. The railways played virtually no part in this
suburban extension. ‘For a wide reaching parish like Handsworth its
railway accommodation had always been miserably inadequate.’98
By the 1880’s the suburbs just mentioned, together with Aston and
Ashted, were already referred to as ‘the old suburbs’.99 Aston Manor,
indeed, was the largest suburb bordering upon Birmingham at the
time of the Boundary dispute of 1888, mustering a population of 66,000,
as against the 22,500 of Balsall Heath, the 25,000 of Handsworth and
the average of about 9,000 each for Harborne, Erdington, Yardley,

85 Alec G. Jenson, Early Omnibus Services in Birmingham, 1834-1905 (1963), 2-3.

96 Ibid. 4-5.
97 F. W. Hackwood, Handsworth, Old and New (Handsworth, 1908), 70-1.
98 Ibid. 72.
99 Robert K. Dent, Old and New Birmingham (Birmingham, 1880), 618.
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 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

Moseley and Selly Oak.100 But Aston was only to 2 miles north of
the city centre, within easy omnibus or even walking distance; and the
railway served only the north and east of the area by means of the
Aston and Witton stations.101
Between 1880 and the end of the century the Taylor and Stechford
estates, which had limited the extension of residential building to the
south at Moseley, and to the east at Stechford, were broken up and
laid out for building.102 Yardley and Acock’s Green also developed as
residential areas in the last decades of the century to the east, Erding-
ton and Perry Barr to the north east and north, Harborne to the south
west. These outlying districts, three or four miles from the centre, were
predominantly middle class, and the omnibus journey was uncom­
fortably long and expensive. Consequently the increase of railway
facilities, on a limited scale, and avoiding cheap fares, played an
important part in their early development. The Birmingham West
Suburban railway, authorised in 1871, ran out through Selly Oak and
Bournville to King’s Norton and handled specifically suburban com­
muter traffic.103 ‘Naturally the opening of the West Suburban Railway
played a not unimportant part in the development of the district’, the
Birmingham Daily Mail wrote, in an account of Selly Oak and Bourn­
ville in 1903, ‘but it is to the trams that the influx of the present popula­
tion is chiefly due.’104
The Harborne railway opened to traffic in 1874, and carried local
passengers out to Harborne, and also, by a circular half-hour service,
to Soho, Handsworth and Perry Barr, where property values quadrupled
over the next twelve years.105 Yet this traffic was, as the prospectuses had
anticipated, a traffic of ‘business people’ with adequate means to rent
or purchase, looking for ‘favourite neighbourhoods’; and the numbers
involved, though significant, were not as large as has sometimes been
assumed. The British Association survey, for example, describes
Acock’s Green, three miles south-east of the centre, as growing to
considerable size by 1880 ‘because of ease of railway communication’,
a view which is considerably over-simplified.106 In fact Yardley parish

100 C. Houghton, A Short History of the Boundary Question (Birmingham, 1888) 6.

101 H. A. Botwood, A History of Aston Manor (Birmingham, 1889), 78. 1860-80
was the period of most rapid growth.
102 Birmingham Daily Mail, 15 October and 3 December 1903. W. S. Brassington,
Notes on the History of King's Norton (Birmingham, 1880), 41 et. seq.
103 C. E. Stretton, The Railways of Birmingham (1897), BRL 173855. For a good
map of suburban railways see C. R. Elrington, ‘Communications’, A History of the
County of Warwick (Victoria County History, 1964), VII, 41.
104 Birmingham Daily Mail, 12 November 1903.
105 Railway Magazine (1900), 289 et. seq. (1915), 421 et. seq. C. Houghton, op. cit.
10.
los M. J. Wise and P. O’N. Thorpe, loc. cit. 224.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

(which included not merely Acock’s Green but also Stechford, Yardley,
Sparkhill, Greet and Haymills) only increased in population from
3,000 to 17,000 between 1861 and 1891. ‘They were able, so to speak, to
keep themselves to themselves’, a contemporary newspaper account
of Acock’s Green and Olton remarked in 1903. ‘An unseen tide of
bricks marched through Sparkbrook to Greet, and through Small
Heath to Haymills,’ until ‘the village’ itself was threatened, but for a
long time ‘a railway service suited to the few rather than the many,
kept them select, and the absence of any other popular means of
conveyance adapted to the needs of the multitude enabled both places
to set at defiance the advancing tide from a great town.’107
This was not merely journalistic licence; as is demonstrated by the
figures for the yearly issue of tickets at Acock’s Green in 1903, which
were specially collected for a Great Western railway traffic analysis.
221,000 tickets were issued in the year, and even assuming that every
ticket was issued to a commuter, the number travelling up to Birming­
ham daily would only be about eight hundred. The Small Heath and
Sparkbrook stations, on a similar basis of calculation, may have
added a further twelve hundred in 1903.108
‘The trams will wake up the railway company, which for years has
been content to serve “the Green” with a monopolistic consideration
based upon its own interests rather than those of the public’, the
Birmingham Daily Mail prophesied. ‘Already, it can be seen, the
Great Western has been brought to its senses. The issue of third class
season tickets about a year ago was a sign of the times.’109 Unfortunately
the railway company had left its initiative too late, and between 1903
and 1914 the numbers of tickets and the money receipts at Acock’s
Green, Small Heath and Sparkbrook stations steadily declined.
It was the same story at the stations on the opposite side of Birming­
ham, to the west and north west. The Handsworth and Smethwick
traffic, which reached a daily total of possibly seven hundred passen­
gers by 1903, halved over the next ten years; the Soho and Winson
Green issue of tickets fell from about four hundred to less than a
hundred per day.110 These stations were all in the Greater Birmingham
area, within three miles of Snow Hill, and exposed to competition from
trams and (after 1904) from motor omnibuses.
The most resilient traffic returns were from stations at a greater
distance; over the thirteen miles to Wolverhampton, for example, the
train service was able to retain its passengers.111 Whether Wolverhamp­
107 Birmingham Daily Mail, 26 November 1903.
108 BTHR GW 4/281, p. 12.
109 Birmingham Daily Mail, 26 November 1903. *'
110 BTHR GW 4/281, p. 14-16.
111 Loc. cit. p.20.

364
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

ton could be described as a suburb of Birmingham is another matter.

It was certainly not one in the accepted dormitory sense, but a city in
its own right.
This indeed is commonly the picture in the northern and Midland
cities. The length of journey over which railways could begin to operate
efficiently would take a traveller in the provinces from the centres of
the great cities out to Wolverhampton, Paisley, St. Helens or Stockport
—to cities with a clearly independent economic life of their own. Only
in the London area, where the population reached six and a half
millions by 1901, and residential development was most widely spread,
would similar lengths of journey fail to clear the frontier of suburbia.
Consequently it is to London that we must turn for the strongest case
in favour of the precocious development of railway suburbs.

b. London
The work journey
In London, although the tradition of suburban travel was even
older—William Cobbett had spoken in the 1820’s of the stock-jobbers
who worked on ‘Change and travelled by coach as far as Brighton—the
position was not basically dissimilar.112 Outer suburban nuclei which
had originated in the days of the short-stage coach were rapidly en­
larged by the omnibus, and, further out, by railway services; the railway
really came into its own operating over twenty mile distances, like that
from Redhill or Reigate to London. Moreover, members of the middle­
class with the inclination and the means to buy land and build in the
outer suburbs, and with enough time and money to travel up to town,
were sufficiently numerous in the Metropolis to cause the provision,
within a few decades, of a wide-ranging suburban rail service, for a
small social class, which was unparalleled in the other Victorian cities.
It must be emphasised, however, that even in the London area
regular suburban travel was confined to a relatively small class until
the 186O’s. It was far larger than in any provincial city, but then London
itself was eight times as large as any other British city. Viewed in this
light its 27,000 commuters a day who arrived by rail in the mid-1850’s
does not seem disproportionate; and falls into perspective when placed
alongside the 244,000 daily foot and omnibus passengers entering the
City.113 Evidence laid before the Select Committee on Metropolitan
Turnpikes in 1856 claimed that the early development of many of the

112 William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1825), I, 149.

113 27,000 is a deliberate overstatement. It includes all passengers using Fenchurch
Street and London Bridge stations on the assumption that they were heads of
households on daily work journeys. I agree with T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins,
op. cit. 58, that the daily total was probably only 6-10,000, but have taken a higher
figure to avoid any suggestion of understatement in the argument which follows.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

suburbs four or five miles out, like Clapham or Hammersmith, and

even some of the inner suburbs, like Islington or Holloway, was partly
influenced by the horse omnibus services offered. ‘Builders and parties
in the district,’ it was suggested, ‘raised money to get the omnibuses up
there.’114
As in the other cities, however, the numbers who could afford to
travel daily by sixpenny omnibus were necessarily limited, and one
must be careful not to assume that commuting to the City was, even
in the inner suburbs, the only or even the commonest work journey.115
Evidence suggests that only a small proportion of the working popula­
tion, a quarter to a third at most, used any form of public transport at
all; the rest either had local jobs, or if their work took them to the
centre, they walked, sometimes using toll short-cuts, or ‘halfpenny
hatches’ to shorten their journey.116 Even in the suburb of Camber­
well, with its high percentage of clerical workers, H. J. Dyos concluded,
‘the development of adequate facilities for suburban travel was ap­
parently irrelevant.’117
Reliance upon walking extended, in the 1850’s, not merely to the
street traders, the casual and manual labourers, but also the clerks
who had to be at their desks at a fixed time. Dickens has left a picture
of them quitting their houses in Somers Town and Camden Town and
‘pouring into the City, or directing their steps towards Chancery Lane
and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men, whose salaries have by no
means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily
along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house.’118
One has only to look at contemporary opinion or at the fares
structure to realise that, as in the provinces, the suburban railway
passenger in the mid-1860’s was still predominantly middle class. ‘It
is only within the last few years that persons of my condition of life,’
said Charles Pearson in 1846, ‘have been satisfied to live out of town;
we were crammed and jammed together in the City, and believed that
it was essential to our convenience and to our happiness. Now 6d
takes us by an omnibus backwards and forwards; the poor man has
not 6d to give.’119
114 H.C., 1856, XIV, QQ.1391-3, and Harold Pollins, ‘Transport Lines and Socia^
Divisions’, London, Aspects of Change (R. Glass et. al. 1964), 34.
115 Commuting by omnibus at five or six shillings a week may be compared with
the average mid-century money wage for operatives of twenty-one or twenty-two
shillings. G. H. Wood, ‘Real Wages and the Standard of Comfort since 1850’,
Journal of theRoyal Statistical Society (1909), Table 2.
116 H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: a Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester,
1961), 62-3. M. L. Moore, A Century's Extension of London’s Passenger Transport
Facilities, 1830-1930. (London Ph.D. thesis), 31.
117 H. J. Dyos, op. cit. (1961), 63.
118 Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, scene 1, quoted in H. C. Prince, loc. cit. 112.
u» H.C., 1846, XVII, Q.2834.
366
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

Charles Pearson, who as City Solicitor qualified, one would have

thought, as one of the more affluent members of the middle-class, was
putting forward the plea, reiterated again and again over the next
fifty years, in London and in the provinces, for a really cheap and
convenient rail service, as a means of spreading the social, sanitary
and even (in Pearson’s view) the moral advantages of suburban life to a
wider class. It is worth noting that he did not expect the extension of
this privilege right down to the bottom of the social scale, but only to
the better order of ‘mechanics’. ‘You have, amongst the superior order
of the mechanical poor, 100,000 persons who come to their work into
or close to the City every morning at six or seven o’clock; 100,000
mechanics who are earning 25/- to 35/- per week; you have 25,000
clerks, the superior order of warehouseman, and so on, earning their
£80, £90, £100 or £120 a year who come in at nine o’clock in the
morning.’120 It was to this group, the lower middle and upper working
classes, that he wished to see the advantages of suburban life extended
by cheap rail travel. And so it was, over the period between 1850 and
1880, but only gradually, and only to this still limited class. Nor was
this achieved entirely by the agency of the railways, which, even in
London, were neither quite as revolutionary, nor revolutionary in quite
the way that has sometimes been supposed.
If one takes as an example of prevailing fares in the mid-1860’s the
suburban contract tickets on the Great Northern line, the second-class
season to Moorgate from Finchley, Mill Hill or Wood Green cost
roughly £13 10s, say 5s per week; from a slightly more distant suburb
like Barnet, the cost was roughly 10s per week.121 Such fares were,
after twenty years, still ten times as high as the fares which Pearson
had thought would be necessary to give mobility to a wider class.
Moreover, the Great Northern was one of the more enterprising
railways in its suburban ticket policy.

Early suburban travel and the growth of the outer suburbs

It may seem, halting for a moment in the mid-1860’s, that there is
here a paradox concerning suburban growth. One cannot argue with
the evidence for the growth and new prosperity by the 1860’s, even of
remoter suburbs out of range of the horse omnibus. How then can the
railways’ case possibly be overstated ?
The marked growth of outer suburbs can be reconciled with the
restricted high-fares policy, described in an earlier chapter, by taking
two further factors into account. First of all, there has been, in some
of the more enthusiastic writing on the subject, a general tendency to

120 Ibid. Q.2829.

isiBTHR RCH 1/115, Superintendent’s Minutes, January 1866-December 1869.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

overestimate the role of the commuter in suburban life. Even in the

twentieth century, with motor buses and cars, deep tube extensions and
electrified rail services, the vitality and extent of the economic activity
which the suburbs generate on their own account is often under­
estimated. If one examines the employment patterns in commuter
suburbs in the extreme dormitory areas at the end of a century of
change, the following picture emerges. In 1951, out of the 2,413,000
employed persons who were night-time residents of the inner and
outer rings of suburbs fringing the administrative county of London,
496,000, or one person in five, travelled to the central area.122 By
comparison, nearly a million of the suburban resident population
worked locally and a further four hundred thousand only made short
journeys to adjoining local authority areas; and, of course, those who
resided without ‘working’ in the official meaning of the word—the
older people, children, housewives etc.—did not leave the area, except
occasionally. Moreover, as John Westergaard observes, ‘a considerable
expansion of service trades was needed to cater for the rapidly growing
population of the outer areas’ and these areas themselves contained
substantial ‘wedges’ or ‘pockets’ of secondary employment.123 There
was therefore a certain amount of cross movement, or inflow into the
outer suburbs each day from adjacent areas, so that their net loss of
working population was only 27 per hundred, or approximately
600,000. The total number of residents in the same areas (including the
‘non-working’ population) was approximately 6,000,000.
In other words, between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the
population, even of a modern suburb, are genuine residents and require
the necessary services and amenities provided locally for their day-to­
day life. ‘Certainly the daily journey into the Central Area provides
the clearest index of the interdependence of the various parts of the
conurbation’, writes James H. Johnson, in a study of recent suburban
growth, ‘but the importance of this movement for residents in all the
twentieth-century suburbs should not be exaggerated.’124
Unfortunately there are no figures by which we could arrive at a
similar calculation of job-ratios for the suburbs of the 1860’s or 1900’s,
interesting though such a study would be. It would surely be reasonable
to assume, however, that more than ninety per cent of their growing
122 John Westergaard, ‘Journeys to Work in the London Region’, Town Planning
Review, XXVIII (1957-8), 41, 45. The ‘central area’ as defined in this study includes
the City of London, Holbom, Finsbury, Westminster, St. Marylebone and St.
Pancras.
123 John Westergaard, loc. cit. 42-3. Westergaard also submitted written evidence
to the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London, 1957 (1962),
V, 656 et seq.
124 James H. Johnson, ‘The Suburban Expansion of Housing'in London’, Greater
London (ed. J. T. Coppock and Hugh C. Prince, 1964), 152.

368
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

populations were resident. It is equally clear that it would be widely

mistaken to assume that everyone residing in the suburbs earned their
living in London; even more so to imagine that they travelled up by
train.
The nearest that available evidence will stretch to such an analysis
of job-ratios is the inadequate calculation carried out for the inner
suburbs at the close of the nineteenth century by the L.C.C.125 This
enquiry was confined to 167 societies or branches of Trade Unions,
mustering 160,000 members, in an area where the total number of
workers totalled perhaps 330,000, and suggested that 25-3 % or 82,500
people may have made daily journeys.126
The point worth underlining here is that approximately 250,000 of
the working population in the area of South London covered by this
investigation did not travel to work in 1890. The six or seven hundred
thousand non-working members of the population in the area covered
by the investigation also, by definition, did not travel to work. Indeed,
only one person in twelve in the southern suburbs used public transport
of any sort, railway, tram or omnibus, to get to his work in 1890;
three other wage earners worked locally; and the remaining eight from
each dozen were the members of the wage-earners’ families who
remained in the suburbs throughout the week.
Even in the inner suburbs, which might be supposed to be more
completely dependent than those at a distance, substantial amounts of
local employment were generated. Although it tended to be over­
shadowed by the traffic and economic activity of the central business
district, and the bustle of the growing entertainment and shopping
areas in the centre of London, there were strong currents of suburban
life which should not be ignored. The pronounced character and ties
which attached to many of the suburbs at the turn of the century
suggest that it would be a mistake to regard them as mere appendages
of the central district, or creations of the railway service.
The same argument may be applied, with varying results, to the
outer suburbs. Some of them, particularly those to the south of Lon­
don, tended to cluster round pre-existing villages and small towns,
where a nucleus of skills and services already existed. The railway
suburb was very rarely planted arbitrarily in the middle of open fields,
and on the occasions when it was—as at Linford Essex, where ‘the
farmland was left with an odd sprinkling of houses that looked as
though they had strayed from Ilford High Street’—the results were

125 ‘Job-ratio’ is the expression coined by Westergaard to describe the number of

employed persons recorded in the day time census of a given area per hundred
employed persons resident there at night. Loc. cit. 38-9.
126 L.C.C. Report on the Inadequacy of Workmen's Train Services on the South
London Railways (1897), quoted in H. J. Dyos, JTH, I (1953), 12.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

sufficient to discourage further speculation of the same sort.

More commonly the initial picture in the 1860’s and 1870’s was that
of a ‘village with a railway’ rather than that of a railway suburb. When
Edgar Harper, the L.C.C.’s Statistical Officer, who made a closer and
earlier study of this subject than anyone, was asked how—since the
services were not good and the fares were relatively high—he accounted
for the growth of the southern outer London suburbs, he replied that
‘a part of the growth must fairly be ascribed to the growth of old towns
such as Croydon, Epsom, Kingston and Richmond, part of which is
independent of the provision of railway facilities to central London.’127
The second point, stemming from what has just been said, is that
the relatively exclusive first class daily travellers, who were the principal
beneficiaries up to the 1860’s, and the somewhat wider, but still pre­
dominantly middle-class commuters of the 1870’s and 188O’s, though
relatively small in numbers, were able to release great potentialities for
expansion in the undeveloped rural districts around London. The type
of commuter in the 1860’s, whose money was driving up land prices
near railway stations within a thirty-mile radius of London, was
characterised by Seymour Teulon (in 1866) as ‘a gentleman who wants
to buy 20 or 30 acres of land and build himself a good house.’128 Even
if he could not afford thirty acres he still tended to be what a writer to
The Builder described as a ‘pursy citizen’. ‘We only build nowadays
for the gentry. . . . One would think that there was no increase of
population lower down than the classes which rejoice in £500 a year.’129
Although the gentleman in question might travel to his professional
or commercial work in town, he left behind him not merely his numer­
ous family—wife, unmarried daughters, younger children—but also a
considerable retinue of local, or locally resident, servants. If he wished
‘to keep a station in accordance with his income’, as the Victorian
books on domestic economy put it, he would, at £1000 per year,
employ three female servants, a coachman, a footman, and keep
stables with two horses and a coach, or at any rate, a phaeton. The
middle-class scale rose at one end to twenty-two domestics, ten horses
and four coaches at £5,000 a year, down to two maidservants, one horse
and a groom at £400 a year—the retiring pension for an army officer of
middle rank.130 Keeping up such an establishment was not a matter of
free choice, but de rigueur (to use the Victorians’ own phrase).
Although visitors and the newspapers arrived by train, most of the

127 H.C., 1906, XLI, Q.5058.

128 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.16585. Teulon’s evidence was given on 26 April 1866.
129 The Builder, October 1848, quoted in Parry Lewis op. cit-„ 86.
130 Quoted in C. S. Peel, ‘Homes and Habits’, Early Victorian England (ed. G. M.
Young, 1934), 126.

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 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

products required by the family and servants in the mid-Victorian outer

suburb were provided locally; even the shop goods tended to arrive by
cart, unless they were brought back as parcels on the passenger train
after a visit to town.131 The money spent with local tradesmen supplying
and maintaining the house in its turn stimulated the growth of local
service industry, and drew in further labour from the surrounding
countryside. Indeed, as their size increased beyond a certain point the
outer suburbs tended to provide services for a rapidly extending local
area of their own, and even attracted, according to their character,
either small scale industry or retired people seeking out-of-town
residence.132
A further point of note concerning the suburban commuter of the
1850’s and 1860’s, is that, since he asked no special fares reduction, he
was free to choose his site within a wide arc around the whole of
London. Some railway services and areas were more attractive than
others, of course; and in this profitable and more limited range of
suburban traffic there does seem to have been genuine desire, on the
part of the companies, to compete over services and even, within limits,
over fares. Although Seymour Teulon’s ‘gentleman’ came from the
southern outer suburbs, which were particularly well served, he could
also be found to the west or north of London. Edwin Chadwick, for
example, had bought a piece of land on the Richmond line, ‘intending
to build upon it, but was prevented from doing so. I was told, however,
not to sell it again as it would “pay for keeping”, and it has done so.
I have sold a little more than half at the price I paid for the whole.’133
Even in districts, the character of which has now markedly changed,
such as Edmonton or Tottenham, to the north and north-east, the
middle classes could be found. William Birt, manager of the Great
Eastern, lived there himself and described it as ‘a very nice district
indeed’, (in the 186O’s) ‘occupied by good families, with houses of
£150 to £250 a year, with coach-houses and stables, and gardens, and
a few acres of land.’134 The £150 to £250 a year was the valuation at
which such a house would rent, i.e. £5 a week, or four times the average
working wage in London.

The expansion of daily suburban rail travel after 1860

Between the mid-1860’s and the end of the century the social classes

131 H.C., 1904, VII, QQ.1113-4.

132 J. T. Coppock, ‘Dormitory Settlements around London’, Greater London
(ed. J. T. Coppock and H. C. Prince, 1964), 266.
133 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.984. Chadwick paid £350 per acre and estimated
that it had risen in value of £800 to £1,000 per acre, ‘an increase not entirely but
mainly due to the formation of railways.’
134 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q.10217.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to whom rail travel was the necessary link between job and home
expanded to include less substantial members of the middle class, and
even members of the class Pearson had described as ‘superior mech­
anical poor’, half a century earlier.
It cannot be said that this was the outcome of a strenuous and
premeditated attempt to develop the traffic on the part of the railway
companies. The Great Western, the L. & N.W. and the Midland refused
point blank to make any concessions to suburban travellers or to
workmen, in terms either of services or fares throughout the nineteenth
century. The other newcomer from the north, the Great Central,
cannily made arrangements that, since they ran their trains over
another company’s lines for part of the way, they would not pick up or
carry any workmen passengers.133 Between them these companies
closed a great arc, of virtually ninety degrees, from west to north, to
cheap suburban travel.
Even those companies which earned the reputation of a more active
and generous policy do not stand up to close examination. The Great
Northern railway, for instance, probably provides the best example of
an enterprising suburban policy pursued by a trunk-route railway
company, in the period from 1860 to 1900. Moreover, unlike the Great
Eastern’s, its policy was the product purely of market forces and not
legislation. Since the Great Northern company fed most of its pas­
sengers for central London onto the Metropolitan railway it had not
been put to the expense of clearing central residential areas, nor to the
burdensome quid pro quo of providing Workmen’s services for those
members of the labouring classes it had dishoused.135 136 Its growing
traffic tended to be based upon the half-rate fare associated with the
lower-middle class clerk—rather than with the quarter-rate workmen’s
fare; it also sold an unusually large number of season-tickets, and
Grinling has suggested that the Great Northern’s reluctance to abolish
the distinction between second and third class sprang from the manage­
ment’s belief in the usefulness of the third class for specifically suburban
traffic.137
In the last two decades of the century the Great Northern railway’s
passenger traffic increased from 12,900,000 to 30,000,000 passenger
trips, or between 800,000 and 1,000,000 extra passenger trips per year.138
If, for the sake of argument, all these extra journeys were made by
clerks travelling to town from stations in the new suburbs, then about

135 H.C., 1904, VII, Q.723.

136 The 1883 Cheap Trains act only gave general powers, and no specific statutory
obligations (by clauses inserted into the company’s acts) were laid upon the G.N.
Copy of Statements furnished to the Board of Trade etc. BTHR MT 2/57, 28.
137 H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 156-8; C. H. Grinling, op. cit. (1903), 300.
138 Ibid. 354-6 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 214-16.
372
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

1,600 extra clerks would be accommodated each year on the G.N.’s

suburban services. If one then turns to look at the growth of the three
largest suburbs directly on the G.N. i.e. Hornsey, Wood Green and
Southgate, their joint rate of growth was, in fact, about 4,000 extra
inhabitants per annum in the 1880’s, rising to 5,000 in the 1890’s.139
Not all the inhabitants were breadwinners, but dividing the 5,000 by a
factor of three (to find the appropriate increase in the number of
employed persons) also produces the same figure of 1,600 per annum.
Of course, all that this shows is that there is a superficial correspondence
between the rate of growth of the three northern suburbs chosen, and
the theoretical power of the Great Northern to absorb the extra traffic
generated. An impossible number of correction factors would have to
be added to show a closer correlation than this. Wood Green, Hornsey
and Southgate—although spectacular examples of rapid growth—were
not the only growing suburbs within the G.N.’s catchment area; and
obviously not all the increased traffic can be assumed to be that of
daily clerks. Yet undoubtedly a great deal of the traffic was of the
extremely heavy peak-hour variety associated with commuting; equally,
the northern suburbs produced an unusual balance of occupations
dependent for employment upon the central business district, and even
a style of architecture associated with the commuting clerk.140
In a sense, however, the spread of housing northwards for this
social group may be seen as nothing more than the logical extension of
the occupational zoning already established. The parishes of Islington
and Hackney were the traditional homes of the clerk, conveniently
placed within two miles of the City, and mustered 40,000 clerks at the
time of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London.^1
The wedge-shaped expansion of such housing to distances of seven or
eight miles from the Bank of England gave the railway an opportunity
to operate over distances at which it was technically efficient. The rise
in real wages, and the growth of demand for the services of white-
collared employees, provided it with traffic.
Yet the Great Northern railway company could not be said to have

13 » 1881 1891 1901

Hornsey 22,486 44,523 72,056
Wood Green 9,882 25,831 34,233
Southgate 8,289 10,970 14,993
H.C., 1906, XLII, 728-38, and Merlyn Rees, The Social and Economic Develop­
ment of Extra-Metropolitan Middlesex, 1800-1914 (London M.Sc. Econ. thesis,
1954), 68-74.
110 C. H. Grinling, op. cit. (1903) 349-56, 374-6. G. F. A. Wilmot, The Railway in
Finchley (Finchley Public Libraries Committee, 1962), 29-31. The houses were
yellow stock brick and slate roofed, and sold for c.£400 in the late 1890’s. Edwin
Course, op. cit. (1962), 202; H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 161.
141 Charles Booth, op. cit. (1896), VII, App. IV, 492.
373
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

gone out of its way to acquire these commuters. What at first appeared
a welcome ‘suburban increment’ to add to the profitable longer distance
traffic was soon referred to, in Grinling’s phase, as the ‘suburban
incubus’.142 Pressures to extend the really cheap, 2d return, fares to
the G.N.’s area, were firmly resisted. The cheap train fares that were
run were not even advertised, until representations and legal action
by cheap travel committees or the London County Council secured it.143
Typical cheap fares of the 1890’s on the G.N. from Hornsey or Finchley
were 5d to 7d per day return. This was on the popular half-price ticket
used by clerical workers arriving before eight a.m.; workmen’s tickets
were available at quarter-price but the passengers on these trains
arrived in London before six a.m.; the ordinary third-class return, after
eight a.m., was a shilling to one and twopence.144 Compared with the
fares of thirty years earlier (5s per week contract ticket) the drop in
fares could not be called revolutionary.
The attitude of the G.N.’s chairman, Henry Oakley, could not have
been made clearer. To all representations from the L.C.C. and the
Board of Trade concerning the unreasonable hours, the inadequacy,
and the expensiveness of the Great Northern’s service, he replied to
the effect that, ‘it is not practicable to lay down any general rule . . .
either with reference to hours of running or the rate to be charged, . . .
the accommodation already afforded . . . meets all the requirements
that have yet been made.’145 His main practical objections were to the
heavy expenses which mass traffic incurred at and near the terminals,
and to the extremely short time over which these facilities, and the
extra rolling stock, were fully employed. The demand for cheap travel,
he asserted, ‘would be all right if they do it all day and all night, but
unfortunately, it is only between such a short time that we have not the
means of making a profit.’146
This ‘peak-hour’ problem—which Charles Pearson had not fore­
seen in his scheme—made Oakley all the more determined not to allow
his more profitable trains to be squeezed out. To make a conession on
workmen’s tickets by allowing them to arrive later in the morning
would mean that the profitable half-fare passengers would simply
receive the difference in fare as a gift from the Great Northern; to
allow later half-fare tickets would cut into the still more profitable
142 C. H. Grinling, op. cit. 300-4, 354-6.
143 H.C., 1903, VIII, 597 et. seq.
144 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 216.
146 H.C., 1894 (C7542) LXXXV, 4-5.
146 Ibid. 20. He also objected to the difficulty in providing insurance for accidents
at very low fares, as did the G.E., which suggested £100 limit to compensation.
This, as Cheap Train committees pointed out indignantly, was’the maximum value
the railway companies were prepared to put on a workman’s life. Copy of State­
ments etc., BTHR MT 2/57, 4.
374
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

ordinary return tickets. When he was asked, in addition to making

concessions over fares and times, to run services over distances and to
areas where no clear and full-price demand had shown itself to his
satisfaction, his refusal was categorical. Nor was Oakley unusual in
this; his views were shared by directors and managers, even on the
southern lines. The chairman of the South Eastern railway spoke in
similar terms, as did the chairman of the London, Brighton and South
Coast railway—even descending to particulars as to how much per
annum the South Eastern and the L.B. & S.C. railways would lose if
any further fare concessions were made.147 Charles Scotter, General
Manager of the London and South Western, also shared the same
views. Indeed at one stage of a conference called at the Board of Trade
to enable representatives of the L.C.C. to meet the railway companies,
the exchange became so heated that the formal procedure of record
broke down, and the railway managers and local government officers
spoke in an antiphonal chorus.148
Henry Oakley: I should strongly object to come under any obligation to run
workmen’s trains beyond a distance of 10 miles. . . . There is a huge area
there, of 15 to 20 miles, where the houses are scarcely to be seen.
Two officers of the L.C.C.:
They will soon come.
Run the trains and they will come.
Henry Oakley and Charles Scotter:
That, I say, is a dream.
Yes, a dream.
Yet the traffic did grow, if not by design, at least in response to
demand pressure. The railways were not pressed any further upon the
issue which had provoked the joint expostulation from Oakley and
Scotter. Indeed when the London Reform Union and the National
Association for the Extension of Workmen’s Trains took a test case,
concerning the G.N. and the North London railway, before the Railway
Commissioners, Mr. Justice Wright in his summing up specifically
stated, ‘it is certainly not the duty of the Commission to lay upon the
railway companies the onus of opening up neighbourhoods to create
a demand for cheap trains.’149 Partly, no doubt, this matter was
avoided the more readily because by 1900 the prospects of electrified
tramways promised more effective dispersal of urban population than
local railways, partly because this was an issue upon which the railways
could not be pushed any further without being asked to abandon the
whole commercial principle upon which they operated. The trams, in
147 H.C., 1894 (C7542) LXXXV, 16.
148 Ibid. 29.
149 The London Echo, 21 July 1899. The Echo conducted a crusade for cheap fares.
Railways and Canal Traffic Cases, X, 293.
375
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

fact, lived up to their promise, and with their free way-leaves and
inexpensive equipment were well suited to the running of pioneer
routes in anticipation of demand; the horse omnibuses with their still
greater flexibility of service, continued to be the most appropriate means
of providing transport for areas of lighter density or more uncertain
prospects.150

The development of traffic in anticipation of demand

Here was the crux of the whole matter; the question as to whether
railways pursued a policy of cheap suburban fares in anticipation of
demand. If this were so, and if it could be shown that this was, in fact,
the systematic policy and regular practice of the railway companies
serving London, then there would be some justification for describing
the railways as an important cause of suburban growth in the period
up to 1900.
The only area where a convincing case has been made out for
sufficiently massive and early suburban growth, prompted and sustained
by rail services, is in the north east; the area of Edmonton and Waltham­
stow. There a spectacular, tenfold, increase of population took place
between 1861 and 1901.151 By the end of the century not merely did
the north-eastern suburbs house 50% more than any other outer
section, but the housing densities and the rate of immigration into the
area were 100% greater than those in other sections.152
There can be little doubt that this enormous growth of suburban
population, out of all keeping with the general average, was assisted
by the extremely cheap fares offered by the Great Eastern railway;
though the tendency of new industry in the Lea valley to provide
increased employment for non-commuters in the outer eastern zones
must not be overlooked.153 In contrast to the examples cited earlier, the
proportion travelling from this area to work in central London may
have come to one person in six of the total, one in two of the working
population.
The stages by which the Great Eastern came to assume its role in
the 1860’s and 187O’s do not suggest a consciously pursued and pre­
meditated course of action. The company had already, to use the
General Manager’s own words, ‘had the obligation put upon it’ by the
Act of 1864 to issue workmen’s tickets. Since the company grossly
over-reached itself in constructing the Liverpool Street terminal, and

150 H.C., 1872, XII, QQ.368-71.

161 W. Ashworth, ‘Type of Economic and Social Development in Suburban
Essex’, London, Aspects of Change (ed. R. Glass et. al. 1964),*33.
162 H.C., 1906, XL, Q.5057.
163 Ibid. Q.5152. J. E. Martin, loc. cit. 258-62.
376
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

found itself in Chancery for a time in the mid-sixties, traffic had to be

taken wherever it could be found: but the General Manager, William
Birt, made it quite clear that, in his view, the social changes and
speculative building set in motion by the Great Eastern’s penny fares
to Edmonton and Walthamstow had ‘utterly destroyed the neighbour­
hood for ordinary passenger traffic. . . . Indirect loss (to the share­
holders) arises from the fact of the district where workmen are located
being spoilt, and the ordinary passenger traffic being pushed out. . . .
Do you think that the ordinary traffic paid better than the workmen ?—
I am sure of it.’151
J. F. S. Gooday, William Birt’s successor, felt the same grievances
just as acutely. The better paying ordinary fare traffic was not two or
three times as great in volume as the cheap tickets, as on all the other
London lines. It was approximately equal in volume to the cheap fares.
As for the first class seasons, this traffic was rapidly diminishing. ‘They
do not move further down the Great Eastern line,’ Gooday asserted,
‘they move over to the Brighton and other companies’ lines, where the
workman does not exist to such an extent. I was manager of the
Brighton line, and can speak to that.’154155
Apart from the Great Eastern railway company’s operations from
Liverpool Street, there is little in the other London railway companies’
services to suggest more than a normal response to demand pressures;
a reasonably lively response in south London, a distinctly tardy one
to the north-west and west.156
A complete and detailed summary of the overall position was
produced for the Royal Commission on London Traffic of 1906 by
Edgar Harper, and appears in the form of a statistical appendix in
Vol. Ill of their Report. From this the table overleaf has been con­
structed.157 Impressive though Harper’s achievement is for a traffic
census conducted over sixty years ago, it leaves much to be desired.
Even assuming that the figures’ accuracy is beyond reproach a sub­
stantial allowance should be made in the total arrivals for journeys
not made by the head of the household or not made by him for work
purposes; for the substantial irregular business traffic of local tradesmen
and market people, resident in the suburbs, but taking advantage of
the cheap morning fares to arrange purchases and sales; for the seasonal
and weekend excursion traffic; together with the growing number of
journeys generated by rising incomes and increasing leisure, for the

154 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.10218-21.

153 H.C., 1906, XL, Q. 18559.
156 H. J. Dyos, JTH, I (1953), 15-16, refers to unequal provisions in south London.
Even as late as 1912 workmen’s tickets only accounted for 40% of the total in the
6-8 mile zone, falling off to 35% in the 8-10 and 20% in the 12-15 mile zones.
157 H.C., 1906, XLI, App. 6, Tables Nos. 35, 47, 170-80.
377
 T H E IM P A C T OF R A IL W A Y S ON V IC T O R IA N C IT IE S
SUBURBAN LONDON, 1901
Average rent
Population Increase No. of population increase per room Density
1891-1901 /No. of immigrants per week per acre

West 420,041 45% 130,816/ 84,357 2/4d 4-3

North 417,009 43-9% 128,304/ 75,062 2/0id 5-9
Population of East 675,300 62-4% 259,566/167,036 2/0d 11-5
outer suburbs South-East 295,819 30-3% 68,776/ 40,535 1/lOJd 4-5
South-West 239,778 29-1% 53,941/ 32,698 1/1l|d 4-7
CO
oo 2,047,947 45-5% 640,403/399,688 2/0d 5-9

At Other work- Cheap or

workmen’s men’s fares, half-price Total by Ordinary
2d fare up to lid fare cheap fares Total

West 5,820 15,275 675 21,770 44,066 65,836

Daily arrivals North 1,820 8,377 2,954 13,131 57,778 70,929
by rail from inner East 19,929 20,807 14,262 54,998 62,597 117,595
and outer suburbs South-East — 18,917 — 18,917 69,510 88,427
South-West — 23,119 — 23,119 44,566 67,685

27,569 86,495 17,891 131,955 278,517 410,472

 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

purposes T. C. Barker enumerates—day trips up to town to visit the

various exhibitions which were a feature of late Victorian London,
journeys for shopping and for entertainment.158 Exactly how many of
the 410,000 total of daily arrivals would survive after these subtractions
is a matter for pure guesswork, but 250,000 bona fide daily commuters
would seem to be a generous estimate. Add to it the numbers arriving
by tram and omnibus and the result is, even by 1906, a formidable
movement of the working population, perhaps one man in four, from
the inner and outer suburbs into the City and West End.159
Even though Harper’s figures may be insufficiently informative in
certain respects, however, they merit condensation into a table and
discussion at some length because, for all their failings, they give an
unusually detailed picture of urban rail traffic in London at the turn
of the century. Two points, in particular, stand out from the evidence:
the contrast between the geographical distribution of travel at different
fares; and the relative volumes of travel at the different fare rates.
It is clear, for example, that, in spite of the attention attracted at
the time, and since, to cheap fares, the proportion they formed of all
London’s daily rail traffic was small. The really cheap 2d fares formed
only seven per cent of the total; other concession fares of all sorts only
a third. Out of the one and a half million members of the lower clerical
and manual working class who were eligible for cheap fares, Harper
estimated, only twenty-seven thousand got the 2d fare, and only one
hundred and thirty-two thousand got any type of cheap fare.160 ‘I find
the cheap train has practically no effect on the distribution of popula­
tion’, Harper concluded. ‘Strange to say, they do not have the effect
of distributing the population. They are a boon, it seems to me, to an
existing population in the locality; but where you get the 2d trains,
there you not only get those trains crowded, but you get an enormous
growth of population.’161
The preponderance of cheap traffic from the eastern suburbs is
outstanding. The Great Eastern had virtually a monopoly of the 2d
return traffic, bringing nearly 20,000 daily at 2d return in forty-eight
trains from the suburbs. A further 35,000 passengers followed at
reduced rates in seventy-four more trains.
The numbers arriving from other compass points at workmen’s
fares (in column two) may seem at first sight to be large enough to
bear comparison with the Great Eastern; nineteen thousand from the
south-east, twenty-three thousand from the south-west, and fifteen
thousand from the west. But these fares, though called ‘workmen’s’
158 T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 203-8.
159 H.C., 1905 (Cd. 2597) XXX, 4-8.
160 H.C., 1906, XL, Q.4756.
161 Ibid. Q. 5180-2.
379
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

ranged in price up to 9d, lOd and lid per day. They represented those
clerical workers who were singled out for sympathetic reference by the
Commissioners.162
‘The vast majority of people who come to their business in the centre of
London every day, and who do not actually perform manual labour, possess
very limited incomes, and, by the nature of their employment, are compelled
to preserve a respectable appearance. If they fail to do so they may lose their
employment, and very seriously impair their prospect of advancement. To
such persons the payment of a daily fare constitutes an appreciable pecuniary
burden.’
These were the suburban dwellers who formed the middle range of
travellers, one hundred and five thousand, as opposed to twenty-seven
thousand benefiting from the really cheap 2d return fare. Both groups
of travellers were dwarfed by the two hundred and eighty thousand who
paid the full ordinary fare.
On the whole the picture is one of a traffic owing its expansion
primarily to the widening of effective demand and the growth of a
larger class who could afford to pay the railways’ charges, rather than
of the revolutionary expansion of popular suburban travel by active
promotion and cost reductions.
There remains the notable exception, the Great Eastern railway
company, which more than any other assumed, albeit involuntarily,
the role of anticipating and creating demand. Moreover the company
managed to carry workmen up to 10| miles for a penny without
making a loss, even excluding the £1,750,000 remission of duty for
which the Great Eastern’s cheap services qualified it between 1883 and
1903.163 And although the operational difficulties of peak-hour cheap
travel may have been unwelcome, they did not prove insuperable.
Indeed it was argued at the time that the Great Eastern’s services proved
that similar action was technically within the grasp of all the railway
companies serving London.
There was also the further point suggested to the Select Committee
on Workmen’s Trains in 1904, that if other companies could see their
way to adopting policies as generous as the Great Eastern, the pressure
would be taken off that company as ‘many of what are now sparsely
populated districts would be rapidly built up.’164 Perhaps more impor­
tant still, from a social point of view, would be the effect this further
relief would have upon the working class suburbs in the north-east.
The L.C.C.’s statistical officer, Edgar Harper, laid great stress upon
this point in his evidence to the Committee. ‘It is essential, to prevent
162 H.C., 1905 (Cd. 2597) XXX, 16. The average weekly fare for these travellers
would be approximately 2s 6d. .
163 H.C., 1904, VII, Q.47. '
164 Ibid. Q.569.

380
 THE INNER DISTRICTS AND THE SUBURBS

the overcrowding of the working class towards the north-east, that

similar facilities should be given all round London.’165
In other words, there was a danger that the poor living conditions
and overcrowding of the dilapidated inner districts might simply be
transplanted, if cheap fares were restricted to one enclave. ‘There is
abundant undeveloped land which could be used to provide healthy
homes for the working class in other districts’, argued George Dew,
member of the L.C.C.’s Housing Committee, ‘. . . certain districts have
been shut right away from the workpeople.’166
The report of the Select Committee, when it appeared in 1905, was
visibly influenced by this evidence. ‘Unless this spreading of the
population is provided for by cheap locomotion for workmen,’ it
warned, ‘the worst results to the welfare of the population must ensue,
by the overcrowding of the workmen into the comparatively few
districts to and from which such cheap locomotion is at present pro­
vided.’167 The L.C.C. had brought home its anxieties to the government.
The next logical step was for the L.C.C. to take into its own hands the
provision of suburban passenger transport services.

One is left with the question as to what other reasons there may
have been for the failure of railway companies in all the major cities
to develop energetically cheap and widely distributed passenger traffic
services, apart from the operational difficulties and finer profit margins;
neither of which—as the Caledonian and the Great Eastern railway
companies showed—rendered commercial operation completely im­
possible.
Of course it is possible—and this would be the easiest explanation
of the wearisome, foot-dragging proceedings which followed the Cheap
Trains Act of 1883—that the whole failure to develop cheap traffic
can be assigned to indolence and inertia on the part of the railway
companies: that it was flagging entrepreneurial drive which made the
operational problems seem a good and sufficient reason for declining
to take risks.
Yet there was sufficient energy, and a large enough supply of capital,
for the completion of the Inner Circle line in the early I880’s, and for
the expensive entry into London of the Great Central in the following
decade. Where there seemed to be an opportunity to stake a claim to
profitable new traffic, the railway companies did not hesitate to spend
freely, even wastefully. One might have thought that the sheer scale of
operation of the Great Eastern, the reasonable dividend returns (3 %)
165 Ibid. Q.48.
168 Ibid. QQ.692, 781.
167 H.C., 1905 (270), VIII, Report p. XIII.
381
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

which it maintained, when it had recovered from the expenditure on

Liverpool Street station, and the loud public acclaim its policy com­
manded from Select Committees, local authorities and reforming
pressure groups, would have weighed in the scale against the L. & N.W.,
G.W., and Midland railway companies’ anxiety over their trunk main­
line traffic. A larger accommodation, on more generous terms, for
short-distance traffic could surely have been made if there had been, in
the estimation of Partington, Grierson, and Arnold, the respective
traffic managers of each company, a clear opportunity. There were
other reasons, quite outside the railway companies’ control, why the
cheap ticket traveller was ‘shut away from abundant undeveloped
land’, discussion of which raises the large general question of the
railways and the land market.

382
 XII
Railways and the land market

1. Railway services and the social geography of the suburbs

Up to the mid-1860’s, it has been suggested, the extension of rail
services over the whole area around London had taken place evenly,
with no more difference between one compass point and another than
might be accounted for by the vicissitudes of competition and the
existing differences between counties. And if the railways with northern
entrances to London seemed less interested in short distance traffic,
this seemed natural enough for major trunk routes. To the south and
south-east, the lack of industry and of large cities, and the relatively
short distances involved, gave a strong incentive to the development of
intensive local traffic, as E. A. Course and H. Pollins have already
pointed out; and this tendency was augmented by the existence to the
south and south east, of a large number of towns and villages of
reasonable size to provide nuclei for further residential building.1
Some were spas and watering places, or seaside resorts, some market
towns or old established boroughs. In total they provided more pre­
existing centres around which suburban development could cluster in
the third quarter of the nineteenth century than other areas near the
capital. To the north and north-west, by comparison, the countryside
was less diverse and agriculturally less rich, and there were long­
standing reasons why the detached villages were smaller and more
widely spaced.2 But, in general, the pattern of suburban train services,
though still socially exclusive, did not appear at all inflexible. There
seemed to be nothing, in 1865, to prevent the even-spread geographical
extension of services as incomes and effective demand rose.
Whilst commuting was confined to the more prosperous ranges of
1E. Course, ‘Transport and Communication in London’, The Geography of
Greater London (ed. R. Clayton, 1964), 74-111. H. Pollins, ‘Transport Lines and
Social Divisions’, London, Aspects of Change (R. Glass et. al. 1964), 39.
2 James H. Johnson, loc. cit. 144.
383
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

the middle class, marked social distinctions between the rail services
offered by the different companies, or the residential accommodation
offered by the outlying railway suburbs, were not apparent. Low
density villa settlement at a discreet distance from the station was the
rule. Occasionally there were complaints that the new middle class
immigrants had let down the social tone: as at Brighton, where the
race meetings and assembly rooms declined, aristocratic patronage was
withdrawn, and the remaining older residents learned to accept reluc­
tantly the new pattern, of middle class residents, and working class
excursionists ‘disgorged on the Steyne from the cancer-like arms of
the railroad’.3 But in general the middle classes were welcome both as
residents and passengers. They asked no fares concessions and travelled
by contract ticket. They could afford to pay well for land and to lay out
their houses with ‘drives’ and shrubbery, in respectful imitation of the
country houses owned by the class with whom they now shared the
country’s government.
Yet social distinctions, in area and service, were only concealed
whilst suburban rail travel retained its limited character. By the turn
of the century, those of the working class whose jobs enabled them to
live at a distance, and who sought to leave the central and inner districts
were all channelled out to the north-eastern, or to a lesser extent, to
the south-eastern suburbs. The railway network, in 1899, to quote
B. F. C. Costelloe, the chairman of the Local Government Committee
of the L.C.C., had become ‘an imperfect system of transit devised
almost entirely for middle and upper class requirements.’4
It will already be clear from the historical evidence which has been
put forward earlier that Costelloe’s account of the basic features of
suburban railway service fell within the limits of pardonable exaggera­
tion. The historical evidence on this point may be substantiated by
reference to the present day socio-economic zones in the London area.
J. Westergaard’s written evidence to the Royal Commission on Local
Government, 1962, shows clearly that the pattern of residential zoning,
by class and income, in central and suburban London still bears the
imprint of the limited transport facilities which characterised the closing
decades of the nineteenth century.5 The Victorian working class zones
spreading eastwards from the central district, were merely extended
further eastwards; both to the north and south along the Thames, and
to the north-east, along the Great Eastern railway route. The pre­
dominantly middle class outer areas of north-west and south London
gave rise to mid-twentieth century outer suburbs of the same social
3 H. C. Brookfield, A Regional Study of Urban Development in Coastal Sussex
since the Eighteenth Century (London Ph.D. thesis, 1950), 149-56.
4 B. F. C. Costelloe, The Housing Problem (1899), 56.
6 Loc. cit. V, 656-98.

384
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

colouring. James H. Johnson, who has summarised Westergaard's

information in the map reproduced below, comments upon the way
in which ‘those areas which are less socially desirable tend to have grown
as an extension of similar areas around the fringes of Victorian Lon­
don.’6 In other words, where clear distinctions of social status existed
between the different areas of Victorian London, they have tended
simply to be perpetuated and extended further outwards into adjacent

Socio-economic zones of the London conurbation

Key: A, centra! London zone; B, inner working-class zones; C: middle and outer
zones of relatively low social status; D, middle and outer zones of relativ­
ely high social status; E, West End and Hampstead zones.
Based on a map by J. Westergaard, and reproduced from James H. Johnson, ‘Sub­
urban Expansion of Housing in London’, Greater London, (ed. J. T. Coppock and
Hugh C. Prince, Faber, 1964), 149.
6 James H. Johnson, loc. cit. 149. It should be added that the western area of
working class housing shown in the map, like the modem light industrial develop­
ment associated with it, is largely a product of the 1919-39 period. For reasons
already suggested the area was relatively lightly developed in Victorian times. Peter
Hall, ‘Industrial London: a General View’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
Hugh C. Prince, 1964), 237-42.
o 385
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

suburbs, as if all social classes were castes and all travel were pedestrian;
and there is little sign of the revolutionary breaking-down of the
social homogeneity of areas which the more sanguine advocates of
cheap travel anticipated in the late nineteenth century.
The questions still remain, however, as to whether the railway
services of the late nineteenth century played a positive or merely
neutral role in the evolving pattern of suburban social zoning, and
whether the railway companies acted—as Costelloe suggested—by
conscious design.
Certainly expressions of opinion by railway managers can be found
which appear to substantiate Costelloe’s interpretation. Edward Watkin,
for instance, after speaking of the Metropolitan railway’s showplace
of model cottages and gardens, which had been built near the com­
pany’s works at Neasden, seven miles north-east of London, went on
to suggest that railway companies in general might ‘with very great
good indeed, be permitted to build little colonies in places contiguous
to their railways.’
‘All the questions about the arrangement of trains and so forth
would be in their hands, and therefore it would be more easy than for
independent people, would it not?’ the Commissioners asked.
‘Yes. It would be more easy,’ Watkins replied, ‘Of course, it is
hardly the function of a railway company, but it is difficult to say
where the function of a corporation does end.’7
Watkin was next asked whether railway companies shrank from
providing services to encourage the formation of neighbourhoods with
housing for people with low incomes, in case the effect of cheap housing
were ‘to drive out a richer class, who are more profitable customers.’
He did not directly answer this question—and indeed it was fairly
obvious that any railway company would prefer passengers who were
prepared to pay higher fares and pay them in advance—but he did
define a little more narrowly where the cheap housing should be located.
‘I can imagine, for instance, that if we carried passengers, say to
Hastings or Folkestone, at the same price we carry them to Ramsgate
or Margate, and if we were to alter the character of these places from
popular resorts of tolerably well-to-do people, to popular resorts of
people who have very little money to spend, mischief might be done;
and the point would be to try to select proper places for these colonies
of working people.’8
The ‘proper places’ were already in course of selection in the 1870’s,
and the General Manager of the company which had earned the
reputation of being the poor man’s benefactor, William Birt of the
Great Eastern, also expressed views on the subject to the Royal Com-
7 H.C., 1884-5, XXX, Q. 10479.
8 Ibid. Q.10483. My italics.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

mission on the Housing of the Working Classes which were similar

to Watkin’s, but even blunter. The selection of the workmen’s escape
routes to the suburbs should be strictly limited, he claimed, for two
reasons. First, the spread of working class districts robbed the railway
companies of remunerative traffic, ‘That is our main objection; that
it does seriously interfere with our revenue earning.’ ‘Do you consider,’
a member of the Commission asked him, ‘that a railway company
can possibly put it forward, even as a moral claim, that they have an
interest that shall be considered in excluding what you might call a
low class of people from a certain district, so that they might have that
district as a high class district from which to earn a good dividend ?—
I do indeed.’9
So far, though he was being unusually frank, one might say that
Birt was simply speaking as a businessman concerning a matter which
directly affected his company’s fortunes. His second point, however,
takes us onto rather different ground.10
‘Allow me to say that from the Edmonton district, and from the Waltham­
stow and Stratford districts, we issue tickets to Liverpool Street, and that
these districts are spoilt for ordinary residential purposes. What we would
urge is this, that the working classes should be kept to these districts. We, the
Great Eastern Railway Company, are prepared to provide any number of
trains that may be wanted for their accommodation, but we shall have to
urge, probably before the Board of Trade, that other districts which are not
spoilt should not be thrown open to the working classes, otherwise these
districts will become spoilt too. There is no hardship, I submit, in limiting
the districts thrown open to the working classes.’
There could be no clearer expression of the company’s wish to
develop rail services for areas of less intensive, higher quality residential
building; a desire which, as W. Ashworth and H. J. Pollins have recently
pointed out, was translated into effective policy in the years just before
and after the 1914-18 war.11
These views can also be found explicitly in the evidence of other
railway managers, though not usually so openly expressed.12 Weight
is added to them by the fact that Watkin was Chairman of the Metro­
politan and the South Eastern railways, both of which were considered
progressive in their policy over suburban traffic, and Birt was General
Manager of the only line to offer a chance of escape at a fare which was

9 Ibid. QQ.10320, 10325. Mr. Lyulph Stanley put the second question to him.
10 Ibid. Q. 10326.
11 H. Pollins, loc. cit. (1964), 45, W. Ashworth, 67.
12 The General Manager of the G.N. also put it ‘We want to open up a district
for something a little better than workmen.’ H.C., (Cd 5052), 1910. See also W. R.
Lawson, British Railways—a Financial and Commercial Survey (1913), 292-4, and
H.C., 1906, VII, Q.llll.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

less than the differential in rents between the suburbs and the central
slums. Yet Birt speaks as if he regarded himself as the gatekeeper of a
ghetto. Was Costelloe perhaps correct in suggesting that the suburban
railway system was ‘devised’ almost entirely for middle and upper class
requirements ?
No doubt Birt and Watkin did not find it any easier than others to
shed the class prejudices which went with their income and social
position; but unless one subscribes to a very debased form of Marxism
indeed, it would hardly seem likely that their whole policy, and that of
the other railway managers, was simply a concerted attempt to keep
the poor in their place. If an interpretation in terms of class is to be
rejected as too flimsy, what other motives, apart from the operational
considerations discussed earlier, could serve to explain their attitude?

2. Underlying causes of railway policy

Three further reasons for the railway companies’ inaction may be
discerned; two of them of lesser, the third of crucial importance. The
first was that, apart from the passenger traffic, which was of dubious
profitability for working class services, the railway companies stood to
gain little else from the establishment of a suburb. ‘When a new suburb,
if I may put it so, “springs up”,’ Frederick Harrison, General Manager
of the L. & N.W. was asked in 1905, ‘do you say it does not benefit
the railway to a very material extent?’ ‘There is,’ he replied, ‘something
in all building materials at the outset; but when the population is there,
their food and all the commodities they require generally go byroad.’13
The dependence of the suburbs upon the railway station, though real
enough in one sense, was not as complete as a superficial glance might
suggest. The bustle of activity in the new suburbs chiefly benefited the
local tradesmen and carters who supplied most local needs. Miscel­
laneous goods, by rail to Walthamstow and Edmonton, for example,
came to a mere 24 lb and 12 lb per head per year of their population
of 156,000 compared with 1,603 lb per head per year for the 12,500
inhabitants of a town like Chelmsford, thirty miles from London.
Even coal was carted: the railways taking 4,000 tons a year to Waltham­
stow and Edmonton, but 7,500 tons to Chelmsford.14 Here was a
strong disincentive to strenuous promotion of suburban services.
A second disincentive was the grievance, of long standing, relating
to the system of rating, or local taxation, of the railways. Without
going fully into the history of this issue, the main objection to the system
was this: that when the parish rates for railways had been fixed in the
1840’s—at the time when railway companies seemed to have the key to
13 H.C., 1905, VIII, Q.622.
14 H.C., 1904, VII, QQ.l 113-4, and H.C., 1906, XLI, App. 56, 583.
388
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

unlock all the country’s capital—an extremely onerous method of

calculation had been introduced. Its effect was to burden the railways
with an utterly disproportionate share of local taxation. For example,
in Huyton, a suburb of Liverpool, out of 2,615 acres in the parish, the
railway took 25; but its share of the £15,039 rates raised in the parish
came to £5,267. Other examples could be, and were, multiplied end­
lessly by Samuel Laing and other angry directors, from all parts of the
country. ‘Why should a country village’, it was asked, ‘be allowed to
tax the source from which those very advantages (of connection with
London) were derived?’15
Several anomalies contributed to the heavy incidence of this tax
burden. It had been laid down (in the London and South Western,
Mitcheldever case) that the estimated rental of a railway should be the
amount a tenant might give if he leased the railway from the company.16
However, unlike other property in the countryside—residential, farm
or factory buildings—the permanent way could not be considered to
have any rental value in itself, or be convertible for any alternative
uses. So the only way of assessing it was taken to be upon the receipts
of the railway company: its trade was assumed to be attached to its
This immediately put a railway company in a different category
realty.1718
from mills, farms, or factories where the value of machinery and the
quality and amount of output was ignored. Industrial assessment was
regulated solely by the probable amount of rent which would be paid
for the buildings, the profits earned on the premises being wholly
exempt from taxation. As a result of this method of assessment the
railways paid twenty times as much as industrial users per head of
employees.13
The tax also placed them on a different footing from all other
companies or individuals deriving a profit from carriage, none of whom
paid more than formal license fees.19 Nor did the payment of the lion’s
share give them a larger voice in vestry affairs; for no one was allowed
more than six votes, however large their holding, or contribution to
the rates. ‘We seem to have been a sort of public plunder,’ said Daniel
Neilson of Liverpool.20
This was a burden the railway companies had become resigned to
bearing; but the pressure to run workmen’s services to suburban areas
after 1883, revived the old grievances over rating. When it was sug­
gested, for example, that any losses incurred in running cheap services

15 LRL, Public Meeting of Railway Shareholders (1849), 4.

16H.L., 1844, XI, 475.
17 C. de L. Nash, Railway and Land Taxation (1844), 9-10.
18 MRL, Rating of Railways, Public Meeting at Manchester (1849).
19 LRL, Public Meeting of Railway Shareholders (1849), 16.
20 Ibid. 6-7.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

should be met by a levy on the rates, the railway companies’ immediate

response was to point to the disproportionate share of the rates which
they themselves already paid, and the fact that the rates might be used
for such purposes as sponsoring rival tramway services. Such a con­
tributory levy would merely be taking money out of one pocket to put
it in the other: and on the three occasions when a rate was suggested
as an ‘equitable concession’, to encourage the development of less
profitable services on the urban frontier, in 1867, 1884 and 1906, the
suggestion was rejected by the railway managers.21
Their second objection to rating was the very considerable increase
in rates which accompanied the transformation of a rural area into a
suburb: an increase which was all the greater if the public utilities
necessary for a large concentration of workers’ houses were to be
provided. The low rated workers’ houses, in fact, presented a serious
problem to the new suburban authorities themselves in the working
class areas. ‘We want a fair sprinkling of the class that will take a
house which is assessed at over £16 per year’, stated the chairman of
the Walthamstow Urban District Council.22 As it stood, five-sixths of all
houses in the Walthamstow U.D.C. area were rated at below £16 per
annum in 1904, and the simple rule was followed that the greater the
proportion of low rented houses the higher the rate in the £ must be.
As a rural district became a suburb the rates went up, in other words;
and if the suburb was working class, instead of middle class, they went
up, on average, to 10s in the £ as opposed to 5s in the £.23 In either
case the railway companies had to pay more, but the amount was
proportionately greater, and the per capita residential contribution to
them peculiarly unfavourable from the railway companies’ point of
view, in a working class suburb. Not merely that, but as the rates
steadily rose in an area, shopkeepers, tradesmen and the ‘better class’
of people tended to move out, both depriving the railways of more
lucrative traffic and leaving them to shoulder the rates alone.24 The
Select Committee on Workmen’s Trains of 1903-5 admitted, in their
Report, the force of the complaints put to them on this score.
‘It is quite apparent, as the railway companies urged,’ ran the Chair­
man’s Second Draft Report, ‘that their action in giving travelling
facilities will tend to increase the value of the land, and by consequence
the rents and the rates (of which the companies always pay a large

21 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.984 (Chadwick), H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ. 12933,
12950-5 (Shipton), H.C., 1906, XL, Q.5244 (Harper).
22 Q.1964 in H. of C. S.C. evidence on City and North East Suburban Railway,
quoted by J. F. Gooday, H.C., 1906, XLI, App. 56, 581-3.
23 H.C., 1904, VII, Q.1113. Edmonton was 10s 5d and Walthamstow 9s 9d com­
pared with 5s to 8s for other suburban areas.
24 H.C., 1906, XL, Q.18568.

390
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

proportion) in the favoured locality. But this indirect, although it may

be inevitable, consequence ought not, we think, to be allowed to out­
weigh the inestimable advantage of spreading the working population
and so relieving congested centres. If in any case of exceptional hardship
it should be thought advisable to rate the railway company’s property
in the developing district at e.g. agricultural value, we do not shrink
from suggesting that this course be taken.’25 The concession held out
in the final sentence was too tenuous and too late to affect the railway
managers.
The third and most important issue—which had also been mentioned
in passing by the Select Committee chairman—was that of land
ownership. Here again, it seemed, the railways got the worst of both
worlds, both as purchasers and as vendors. They were, of course,
considerable purchasers of land; ten acres per mile for a country line,
plus large tracts for sidings and stations.
Their direct effects, as purchasers, upon the land market can be
seen in the scale of awards for arbitration cases, given according to
the procedures laid down in the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act and
the Railways Clauses Consolidation Act of 1845. These procedures
quickly established the principle that the sums to be paid for the land
compulsorily acquired by a railway company should be based upon its
value to the vendor, together with further amounts as compensation for
interruption of business, loss of goodwill, damages for the intersection
and severance of the property and for any deterioration which could
successfully be argued.26 To this sum was added a further 10% for
compulsory purchase, raised to 50% in rural areas.27
The safeguarding of property could hardly have gone further, and
indeed, from the records of independent valuations carried out by
both parties at the time of sale, it appears likely that the railway
companies commonly paid twice the current market value of land.
The Lands Clauses procedure was an open invitation to any landowner
on the outskirts of a town to produce a plan showing that his land,
though open fields, or market gardens and summerhouses, was poten­
tially valuable suburban building land; and examples of these non­
existent estates, whose paper streets would be deranged by the railways,
have been mentioned in the Case Histories.
More exasperating still for the railway companies were the verdicts
sympathetic local juries returned even on land without development
prospects, however shadowy.28 ‘It is altogether a Jury question,’ one
25 H.C., 1905 (270) VIII, Report p.XXI.
26 See App. 3 infra.
27 H.C., 1906, XL, Q.19894.
26 The excessive awards by local juries and arbitrators also caused complaint
from local authorities attempting to proceed under the Artisans’ Dwellings Act.
H.C., 1884-5, XXX, 12640-5 (Lefevre).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

railway solicitor admitted in a confidential brief to a company’s

witnesses, ‘when land is in the market, whether compensation should be
given for the gain the vendor might have had by retaining it for longer.529
Payment, in other words, had to be made, on occasions, even for the
loss of possible future gain on undeveloped land; and in this way future
prices were anticipated and made real.
The railways’ direct impact on the land market was enough to cause,
in itself, a marked rise in local land prices; but as it was always the
buyer, the railway company drew no benefit whatsoever from this rise
in land values.
Nowhere was the rise in values more tantalising than in the suburbs.
Although central land values as a whole in the Victorian cities may
have risen by something of the order of 75% to 100% in the thirty
years after 1840, and values in the more favoured streets by three to
five fold, land prices in the outer suburban districts appreciated by ten
to twentyfold over the same period. ‘If the first railway engine,’ Henry
Davies wrote in 1861, ‘had been laden and fed funnel-wise, with
guineas, and if the wheels had been constructed with an apparatus for
whirling the gold by centrifugal action over the land it traversed we
should have an allegory in action which would correctly describe the
working of the railway system.’29 30 Evidence based upon prices asked in
estate agents’ offices, and upon Seymour Teulon’s submissions to the
Royal Commission of 1867, suggests the following table of mid­
century suburban land values.31
Per acre Per acre
1839 1869
Redhill £50 £700
Hastings (1849) £300 £2,000—£10,000
Weybridge £20 £4,000
Reigate n.d. £35 (1867) £1,000
Caterham n.d. £30 (1867) £400
35% increment was the immediate average increase in value which
Teulon assigned directly to the influence of the railways, over areas
situated within one mile of the line, on level roads, falling off to 25 %
in two miles, and, more gradually, to amounts which were still per­
ceptible up to six miles from the line. These observations tally well
with more recent work on land values and suburban railways. Charles
Hayes’ work on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad may seem
too far removed in time and circumstance from mid-Victorian Surrey
29 Memorandum for Witnesses, Yorkhill Jury Trial, Mrs. Graham Gilbert’s case,
Glasgow Univ. Coll, of Solicitor’s Papers, Box 1. My italics..
30 H. Davies, The Way Out (1861), 32.
31 H.C., 1865, XXXVIII, QQ.16485-8, The Builder, XXVII (1869), 205.
392
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

for any useful analogy to be drawn, but the patterns he found, once
stated, have an inevitable and commonsense quality about them which
invites comparison. Residential values appreciated as the distance from
the line was reduced, until a point between a quarter and half a mile
from the tracks was reached, where values were depressed. The point-
to-point values ‘formed a jagged line, with peaks close to the stations
and dips between the stations’; and around each he found a ‘rough
pyramid with its apex at or near the suburban station.’32
In this wealth which they were creating, the railways had no share.
Indeed if they required to extend their works at any time they might
well find themselves contributing involuntarily, by the jury and arbitra­
tion procedures, to give the upward spiral of land prices yet another
turn, at their own expense.
The statutory powers under which they were empowered to buy
land also compelled them to sell lands surplus to requirement on
completion of their scheme. They were usually given ten years in
which to dispose of the land ‘in such manner as they deem most
advantageous’; and it was possible to apply for an extension of the
time period, providing it could be shown that the land, though still
unused, was likely to be required for the purposes sanctioned by the
original Act. At the end of the ten years the land had to be offered
back for sale to the original owner or his heirs, in whom the absolute
right of pre-emption was vested. If he refused to buy it back, or could
not ‘after diligent enquiry’ be found, then the land could still not be
put up for sale in the open market. It must be offered, as if under
Enclosure Bill procedure, ‘to the person or several persons whose
lands shall immediately adjoin the lands so proposed to be sold.’33 The
lands superfluous to railway requirements could, whilst unused, be
let, or put to any use the railway company chose, provided they did
not offer it for sale. Only one exception to this is recorded by Hodges’
Law of Railways', that allowed by the Metropolitan Inner Circle Com­
pletion Act, 1874, which allowed the company to grant building leases
and sell ground rents.34
So even on the few occasions when the railway company found itself
in the role of vendor, it did not enjoy the full increment in land value
which the passage of time, and its own expenditure in the district,
might seem to merit. ‘The witnesses that are brought up, as a rule,

32 Charles R. Hayes, ‘Suburban Residential Land Values Along the C.B. and
Q. Railroad’, Land Economics, XXXLII (1957), 177-81. The original idea of such a
pattern came from Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago
(Chicago, 1933).
33 W. Hodges, A Treatise on the Law of Railways (7th ed. 1888), I, 332.
34 37 & 8 Vic., c. 199, sec. 64-5.
o* 393
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

generally prove to their own satisfaction that the land has sunk away
enormously, and that the construction of our railway has injured the
whole thing,’ complained one railway director. ‘If you are compelled
to sell,’ he was asked, ‘do you labour under any difficulty in getting
the additional value?—Yes we do; and then the adjacent owner does
nothing to encourage us. He knows that the time will come when he
may pounce down upon it and claim it at agricultural value, while
meanwhile we have been building up a track, and he gets the whole
benefit of our expenditure, in addition to the great advantage he has
got from the increment of his own property. I may point out that the
Lands Clauses Act was passed at a time when landowners were abso­
lutely supreme in Parliament, in 1845, and did just whatever they liked;
and although we have to pay large sums for injuring the property that
we go through, and pay large sums by way of severance, we do not
get anything whatever for the increment in value we give to the balance
of the land. We may turn a property from £100 an acre value into a
value of £500 an acre; but the owner will come along and charge us
with the whole cost of the severance of his property, and the deprecia­
tion of his property by the side of our railway, and we are not entitled
to claim a shilling set off by reason of the additional value which we
put upon the balance of the land.’3536
Although the sale of surplus lands constituted a welcome rebate on
many schemes amounting on occasions to a return of about 20% of
the original capital laid out, the railway companies’ powers of sale
were only limited.38 They certainly did not extend to the purchase and
re-sale of lands at improved ground rents, the short term development
of building land, or the laying out of estates—and it was in these ways
that the richest harvests were being reaped. Whilst the railway com­
panies invested large amounts of capital with no better prospect than
a three to five per cent return, adroit country gentlemen, suburban
landowners, speculative solicitors and builders doubled and trebled
their capital in a decade.37
It was suggested from time to time that at any rate some of the
railway companies should be given additional legislative powers to
own and sell land. Charles Pearson proposed a scheme in which the
railway company would be proprietor and landlord as well as carrier;
and Henry Davies, in 1861, suggested an iron tramway for traction
engines, with a belt of 200-400 feet of land on either side belonging to

35 H.C., 1906, XL, QQ.19892-4.

36 John R. Kellett, JTH, VI (1964), 236.
37 D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 106-7 quotes examples in the Notfing Hill area in west
London of appreciations of value from £800 to £1,800 in four, and £2,400 in six
years in the 1850’s.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

the company.38 R. W. Perks, an M.P., and ex-chairman of the Metro­

politan District railway also suggested in 1904 that railway companies
should be allowed to buy land to obtain a portion of the additional
value they were creating.
If this were allowed, ‘for railway companies projecting lines out onto
unbuilt upon areas’, the whole interest of the railway companies in
energetic suburban development might be reoriented. ‘My suggestion is,
not to ask for bounties or bonuses, or local authorities subsidising our
railways,’ said Perks, ‘but to ask for permission to acquire, and if we
choose, to hold and get the increment of any uncovered building land,
without being subject to these conditions as to sale.’39 If his own
company, the Metropolitan, were allowed to take, in this way, two or
three hundred acres for development and sale, and were further
allowed to run co-ordinated road services of electric powered feeder
cars, to extend the catchment area of their suburban stations, it would
be possible to abolish the ‘Workmen’s’ ticket, claimed Perks, and to
institute a new low price uniform fare, bringing regular suburban
travel within the range of a far wider social class.40
The prospect of railway companies adding to their already consider­
able powers by becoming speculative landlords might well have been
expected to cause any Commission to reflect carefully before adopting
Perks’ recommendations; but the Royal Commission on London
Traffic of 1905-6, ‘perhaps the strongest commission ever appointed
by any British government’, came down in favour of the proposal, as
a most likely means of promoting that rapid and even spread of
suburban growth which all agreed was so desirable.41
‘We think it right to point out,’ wrote the Commissioners, ‘that the
provision of the means of transit is a costly business and that some
“recoupment” might be obtained by the judicious acquisition before­
hand, at a fair price, of the land intended to be opened out for building.’
London’s traffic problems, the Commission decided, were capable of
technical solution: ‘there is no physical obstacle which could not be
overcome by engineering skill; the difficulty is simply one of money.’42
38 H. Davies, op. cit. 46. The idea was taken up again by the Light Railways
movement. Why could not very light railways be laid, at a cost of £4,000 per mile
instead of £40,000, if the margins of existing roads were used ? See Joseph Taylor’s
letter to The Builder, XXVII (1869), 1 May, 351.
39H.C„ 1906, XL, Q.19896.
40 As the American policy had been for some years, H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ.
14175-7 (Meyer). On the other hand the Metropolitan railway company itself had
tried feeder and catchment road services from 1866-1901, and discontinued them.
The farming-out of subordinate operations caused financial and technical difficulties.
P. A. Keen, ‘Metropolitan Railway Road Services’, JTH I (1953), 216-37.
41 Parliamentary Debates, CLXX (1907), 179.
42 H.C., 1905 (Cd. 2597) XXX, Report pp. 16, 30, 71. The land was to be bought
by agreement and not be part of the compulsory purchase schedule.
395
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

A share in some of the direct appreciation of land values created, in

part, by expenditure on transport improvements, would unlock large
enough funds to cover any necessary expenditure; and would still
leave untouched increments of ‘betterment’ in adjacent lands which
would be substantial enough to give landowners an interest in laying
out their property to accommodate the new communities.
However, no action, either upon this count or upon any of the
Royal Commission’s other recommendations, was taken by the new
Liberal government which came to office after the electoral landslide
of 1906. ‘Governments are always “very fully alive” to the importance
of the subject and so on; but then they always appeal to the wisdom of
festina lente’, complained Lord Ribblesdale in 1907, in reply to the
‘sparse and shadowy’ answer he had received, like Sir John Dickson
Poynder ‘in another place’.43 They, and many other busy and distin­
guished men had given generously of their time over two years to
produce a massive eight volume report which The Times described as
‘publicly accepted as the standard text-book in France, Germany and
America on urban traffic.’ ‘That appears to be the whole unction which
the Commissioners are ever likely to be able to lay to their bosoms’,
Lord Ribblesdale concluded.44
The report and its recommendations disappeared into the pigeon­
holes; the new government pleading ‘the greater urgency of other
matters with which we have to deal.’45 Some suggested that the report
had been sabotaged by the L.C.C., through the influence John Burns
exercised over Lloyd George. Whatever the political causes, the
recommendations were laid aside indefinitely; and in the different
post-war atmosphere the licensing of railway companies as real-estate
speculators was more remote than ever. Apart from which, the deep
tube railway, the municipally sponsored electric tram route and the
motor omnibus were beginning to lay the new patterns of twentieth
century urban and suburban traffic.
It is difficult to say whether, if the concessions suggested by Perks
and endorsed by the Royal Commission of 1905-6, had been granted
earlier, the pattern of suburban development would have been sub­
stantially different; whether total growth would have been accelerated
or more evenly spread, or the social composition of the suburbs affected.
One cannot escape the feeling that the railway companies, as specula­
tive proprietors, might well have found themselves influenced by the
same factors which decided suburban landlords, for preference, to give
over their estates to limited-density high rental settlement.
This, certainly, was the policy eventually pursued by the only railway
43 Parliamentary Debates, CLXXXI (1907), 10. *-
44 Ibid. CLXX, 187.
45 Ibid. CLXX, 189.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

company exempted from the statutory ban upon residential estate

ownership—the Metropolitan.46 Watkin felt uneasy, from the begin­
ning, about the long-term existence of such a large amount of surplus
land. ‘Parliament might,’ he warned, ‘some day say that it was a danger­
ous thing for a small railway company to have a rent roll of £80,000 a
year, with about 1,000 tenants, and they (the Metropolitan) might be
unwillingly compelled to sell the property.’47 Accordingly it was
deemed discreet to divide the ordinary stock into two portions, one
representing railway earnings, and the other the rentals and profits of
the surplus estate, and later still (in 1919) to set up a subsidiary com­
pany, Metropolitan Railway Country Estates, to which the Surplus
Lands Committee’s work was transferred.48 The policies pursued by
this company in the Rayners Lane, Amersham and Rickmansworth
areas of the Chilterns in the 1920’s and 1930’s may perhaps be a mis­
leading guide; but ‘Metroland’ (as their advertisements described the
area they served) was typified by modest middle-class semi-detached
houses, and there was little to mark the unusual parentage of the
estates.49
Apart from this, historical practice gives little indication of the
policies which might have been pursued had the privilege of land­
ownership been bestowed, at an early date, to a larger number of
companies. There were, of course, the well-known railway-owned
houses, at Crewe and other railway towns, and various Metropolitan
lodging houses owned by railway companies, like the Polygon building
at St. Pancras. But there is a great difference between buildings acquired
and put up, with shareholders’ assent, to accommodate the company’s
workpeople or meet its rehousing obligations, and the free purchase of
land as part of a scheme of speculative building and estate development
by railway companies. Railway companies had no corporate authority
to make such speculative purchases, still less to undertake the develop­
ment and re-sale of lands acquired under compulsory purchase
schedules.
There was, on the other hand, nothing to stop the directors of
railway companies, or their contractors and solicitors, from using their
business knowledge to make private investments in land; and a great
deal of such speculation went on in the course of railway building.50
46 Under 37 and 8 Vic. c. 199, sec. 64-5, as already mentioned.
47 The Economist, 25 July 1885, 912.
48 Every £100 stockholder was given £50 Surplus Lands stock, H.C., 1906, XL,
Q. 19549.
49 H. P. White, op. cit. Ill, 137, Edwin Course, op. cit. (1962), 217-8, J. T. Coppock,
‘Dormitory Settlements around London’, Greater London (ed. J. T. Coppock and
H. C. Prince, 1964), 275-9.
60 Yerkes at Golders Green, Peto at Southend, H. Pollins, loc. cit. (1964), 51,
Edwin Course, op. cit. (1962), 216.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

However, no one, even the most highly placed in the company’s coun­
sels, could be completely sure, until the bill had passed the committees
of both Houses, that a projected line would not be modified, or rejected.
So from the previous November, when bills had had to be deposited,
everyone was as wise as the railway directors. As Francis Gilbert,
engineer of the Acton and Hammersmith railway remarked, in 1874,
‘The moment a line is deposited and there appears a chance of carrying
on, the speculative builders of London all rush to the ground to cover
it with houses. Many cases have arisen where the Act has not gone
through one committee before the builders were on the spot and
commencing to sell.’51 Such specialised dealings were better left to the
solicitors, valuers and builders, who knew where to buy, what to pay,
and how to exploit a site; and one would expect to find the railway
directors placing private investments through them, rather than acting
directly in their own names.
One practice which was severely frowned upon if it came to light, of
course, was to buy land privately and then sell it at greatly enhanced
prices to one’s own company. John Parson’s resignation from the
Metropolitan railway in 1863 followed the discovery that he, together
with Major-General Boileau and Colonel St. Quintin, two landowners
in Fulham and Kensington, had just sold small pieces of land for which
they had paid £800 per acre to the Metropolitan at the rate of £20,000
per acre.52
Rewarding though private investments by the directorate of the
railway companies may have been to individuals, the effect upon
company policy was different from that which statutory permission
for corporate investment and sale of land might be expected to have
produced. It was, no doubt, possible on occasions for an interested
party to bend the opinions of his fellow-directors, and of the full-time
professional staff of a railway company, to favour execution of a plan
which would enhance his own private property investments. But such
a policy could not be pursued overtly, and there was more than a
possibility that other members of the company might feel some alter­
native scheme was more to their own advantage. Moreover, the railway
companies did not belong to their directorates to use indiscriminately
to promote their own indirect gain. There was a duty to return a profit
to the shareholders which ensured that schemes, by and large, would
have to stand on their own merit. If there had been a corporate interest
in land purchase many of the objections to outright speculation in the
choice of combined routes and land purchases would have been re-

61 D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 105. The actual provision of facilities was the signal for a
further rush of speculative builders. H.C., 1904, VII, Q.138. '
62 D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 270. T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, op. cit. 126.
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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

moved, and the whole background to railway policy on suburban fares

and services substantially changed.
Perhaps the best guide one can find to the possible results of an
entry by the railways into the speculative land market, is to look at
their operations at the so-called ‘railway ports’, Holyhead, Fleetwood
and Grimsby, where the railways invested heavily in docks. Although
there are, of course, certain fundamental differences, this is possibly
the nearest parallel one can find to the railway companies becoming
landowners. The result, from the railway companies’ point of view was
satisfactory in terms of the direct financial return; and the three ports
grew at a far faster rate than the norm for Britain.53 Admittedly the
financial return was partly the result of technical economies in trans­
shipment ; but, leaving the results aside, a point germane to the present
discussion is the violent reaction which the preferential railway rates,
given to develop traffic at the new ports, caused amongst established
interests. This sustained outcry would have been redoubled if railway
companies had been given the power to set up their own cheap housing
estates around London and other cities, and to run services at privi­
leged fares, or charge rents which included a season ticket. Railway
amalgamations had already raised the fear of monopoly, and railway
rates had been the subject of detailed enquiry and complaint by the
1880’s.54 Whatever the Royal Commission of 1905-6 might feel, violent
opposition could be expected, not merely from those who favoured
public or municipal schemes to link transport and residential develop­
ment, but also, on the other flank, from the landowners, builders and
solicitors who had been the contingent beneficiaries of railway promo­
tion.
So the railway companies continued to enter the land market only
as buyers, for specialised uses, and under unfavourable terms. The
sense of injustice to which this gave rise was referred to by Charles
Booth, who admitted that ‘divergence of opinion had arisen as to the
increment of site values which would follow’ the growth of suburban
centres. Booth, who had become convinced by his close study of Lon­
don’s conditions, as had Charles Pearson fifty years earlier, that cheap
travel was the only answer to central housing difficulties, argued, in
1901, that the ‘plums of advantage’ should, if necessary, be thrown to
the speculator, if it helped to speed the exodus of the working class.
‘Are we to allow a disgraceful state of things to continue . . . and per­

53 Railway Rates and Railway Administration as affecting the Trade of Liverpool

(Liverpool, 1881), 11-12. Holyhead’s trade with Ireland had doubled within ten
years, whilst Liverpool’s had only increased by 7%.
64 H.C., 1881 (374) XIII and XIV; H.C., 1882 (317) XIII. In the following decade
no fewer than six reports on rates were laid before Parliament by the Board of
Trade, and two reports by Select Committees.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

haps grow worse’, he asked, ‘because of a dispute as to the apportion­

ment of the profit which will come from its abatement ?’55
His question was meant to be a rhetorical one, but the answer was
by no means as certain as Booth assumed. The apportionment of the
increments in land value was, in fact, highly material to the speed and
extent of suburban growth, and those who stood to benefit most from
it either stood outside the railway companies, or drew their benefits
outside their corporate framework.

3. Apportioning the increments ini and value

Two compromise solutions to the problem of apportioning land values
were possible. The landowners might at any rate give the land necessary
for railway building, or cede it on generous terms, instead of wringing
from the railway companies the last penny of that compensation which
the law so generously allowed. Or the landowners might be induced to
put up substantial amounts of the capital necessary for railway exten­
sions. By either of these methods the landowners would be contributing
something in return for the increments they were likely to receive.
Both methods were practised, to a certain extent, but both were
subject to certain drawbacks. Although there were no instances of
outright gifts of land to the railway companies, there were quite a
large number of examples of sale on very favourable terms. ‘The land­
owners along there were so anxious to get a line made,’ said a director
of the South Eastern railway company (referring to the Caterham
branch) ‘that I believe the company bought the land on very good
terms.’56 Sometimes the generosity of the terms of sale was offset by
the insertion of clauses in the deed of sale giving the right to demand
that a station be erected when a stated number of houses had been
built on the remaining land. At others the value of the bargain was
reduced by awkward accommodation works and other stipulations.
But quite generous local inducements were offered in this way, par­
ticularly in the free-ranging period of middle class suburban commuting
in the 1850’s and 1860’s.
Two important points arose concerning these concessions over the
selling price of land. The first was that although it might seem no more
than fair to offer in this way to share the land profits to be made, it was
essentially a bargain struck between individual landowners and the
company. And though some might give, all would benefit in a given
area. It was for this reason that J. B. Denton, in a paper to the Institute

55 C. Booth, Improved Means of Locomotion as a First Step* towards the Cure of

the Housing Difficulties of London (1901), 4.
56 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, Q.16488.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

of Surveyors, in 1869, rejected this means of encouraging railway

promotion. ‘A better scheme must be devised than that of asking
landowners to give their land for nothing.’57 The second point, to which
reference will be made later, is that the initiative in such a transaction
came largely from the area concerned: it was a local offer, and if it was
not forthcoming the railways either had to pay the full price or look
elsewhere.
There were also a large number of examples, dating back to the
earliest railways, of suburban and urban landowners offering support
to railway schemes by means of direct capital investment. ‘A large
landowner will take shares, or will subscribe to the line,’ Mr. Rodwell
explained to the House of Lords’ Committee on the Central London
Railway bill in 1871, ‘for the purpose of getting the indirect advantages
of railway communication to the district. He subscribes in such a case,
not expecting to get a return upon his investment but for the purpose
of getting the communication and indirect advantages of the railway.’58
Rodwell was counsel for Lord Southampton, 109 of whose houses in
the Tottenham Court Road area were scheduled, and who was in the
curious position of subscribing to a railway whilst opposing it in com­
mittee. It was possible, Rodwell’s argument ran, to wish to encourage
in principle the building of additional lines of communication, whilst
wishing to stand up for one’s right over details; and the correct pro­
cedure for this was to oppose the bill, even a bill for a company in
which one might have bought shares, but to oppose it merely on clauses
and not on the preamble.
Others were less exacting about their terms than Lord Southampton,
and merely subscribed unequivocally, looking to the indirect benefits,
like Captain Ross. Captain Thomas Ross may well stand as a typical
example of the smaller urban landowner who turned to railway invest­
ment in this spirit. ‘I have subscribed £1,000 to this railway, the first I
ever subscribed to,’ he told the South London railway bill Select
Committee, in 1857, ‘because I lose tenants repeatedly by not being
able to say positively that there will be a railway.’59 He owned 78
houses in Clapham, ‘all full of clerks’, earning from £100 up to £400
per year, and able to pay a decent rent of £30 to £50 a year. They were
discouraged, however, by the sixpenny, three-quarters of an hour,
omnibus ride, and lengthy walk to travel to and from their work. ‘My
property is going to the dogs for want of a railway.’60
Other landowners were prepared not merely to subscribe but even
57 J. B. Denton, ‘On the Future Extension of the Railway System’, Trans. Institut.
of Surveyors, I (1868-9), 128-38, and discussion subsequently in The Builder, XXVII
(1869), 205, 229.
58 BTHR PYB 1/534, 20 July 1871, p. 10.
59 BTHR PYB 1/84, 15 June 1857, p. 19.
60 Loc. cit. p. 17.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to build their own branch line. The building of the Bexleyheath line,
south east of London, by local initiative in the 1890’s provides an
excellent illustration of the methods employed by local promoters.
Several landowners (one also a barrister) and two retired railway
contractors floated the scheme, chose the route to pass through their
property to the greatest advantage, and allocated a station each to
themselves. Bamehurst station was opened for Colonel Barne, one of the
landowners—though it was thirty years before housing went up on the
scale anticipated; the site of Bexleyheath station was altered by a
quarter of a mile to bring it onto land which Mr. Kersey, one of the
directors and shareholders, owned and wished to develop; Kidbroke
station was the price which had to be paid to persuade the Earl of St.
Germans to withdraw his opposition; Eltham Park station was opened,
by agreement with Lord Rowallan, to accommodate passengers from
his estate.61 Once parliamentary powers had been secured, the Bexley­
heath railway company was taken over by the South Eastern railway
company, as had originally been intended by the local promoters;
though an approach to the London, Chatham and Dover company
was required to persuade the S.E. to absorb the speculators’ branch.
Edwin Course, in his interesting study of this line, also refers to a
major difficulty encountered at Bexleyheath which, in fact, tended to
recur regularly wherever local landowners and developers had pro­
moted a line. It was the reluctance or inability to meet subsequent calls
upon shares.62 To subscribe for a railway in the sense of putting down
one’s name and paying the first ten per cent on the shares was one
thing; it was quite another to meet subsequent calls for the remaining
ninety per cent at a time when capital might be urgently required for
developing the land through which the railway was to pass.63 D. A.
Reeder reports similar reluctance to pay the full amount on railway
shares in the west London suburbs. An initial rush by large landowners
to invest, in Notting Hill, Hammersmith, and west Kensington, was
followed by tardy payments of share calls. ‘It may be,’ he writes,
‘that what capital the local promoters had was tied up in trade, build­
ings or house property, at the time when the railway they had brought
into being needed further finance.’64
Another obstacle which intervened, even for landowners who were
willing to invest in railways, was the state of common law regarding
charges against entailed estates. By 1874, the time of the land survey

61 Edwin Course, The Bexleyheath Railway, 1883-1900 (Woolwich, 1954), passim',

idem, op. cit. (1962), 207-15.
™ Ibid. 211.
63 The commonest way of avoiding further calls was to sell.the shares, even at a
loss. The Economist, 21 October 1848, 1186.
84 D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 101.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

usually known as ‘The New Domesday Book’, something of the order

of one half to two-thirds of English and Welsh land was entailed: that
is to say, excluded from the free market by being attached to the family
name.65 The settlement could be set aside, and the estate broken up and
sold in whole or in part, but only by ‘expensive, prolix and vexatious’
legal procedures.66
In a similar way the lands held by corporate bodies, ranging from
the Brewers’ Company to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, were
inalienable.67 So that, like the private owners of settled estates, these
corporations were in the peculiar position of being able to dispose of
their land to a railway company—whose compulsory purchase schedule
overrode even entail—but not able to dispose of it, or part of it, to
raise money to invest in the railway company, or even to invest in the
development of the rest of their estate. Since the land could not freely
be sold, the usual way to meet any expenditures that were required to
improve the estate, therefore, was to charge terminable annuities against
it. A Private Bill would be secured for corporate or entailed property,
setting out the advantages of the estate, ‘lying commodiously’, or
‘conveniently situate’ for building, stating the present and the probable
improved rents, and the sum to be borrowed.
As the law stood until 1863 an estate’s rent roll could only be bur­
dened with these annuities for such tangible improvements as drainage
and building, but in April of that year a Lords’ Select Committee met
to consider whether power should be granted to charge entailed estates
for the purchase of railway shares, as being an improvement of a
similar order.68 Evidence was heard from many witnesses, including
John Clutton, Agent for the Crown Estates, and an experienced railway
valuer, who expressed the view that railways formed much better
security than drainage for those seeking to improve their estate; a
view in which he was supported, though more grudgingly, by George
Ridley, one of the Enclosure and Tithe Commissioners.69
The money for railway shares would have been lent, to the landowners
willing to burden their estates with the charge, by Land Improvement
65 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963),
66-70.
6S Although in law strict settlement was theoretically distinct from entail, in
practice settlement was the usual instrument by which primogeniture was enforced.
G. C. Brodrick, ‘The Law and Custom of Primogeniture’, Systems of Land Tenure
in Various Countries (Cobden Club Papers, ed. J. W. Probyn, 1876). This article
was itself typical of the agitation for a free land market in the 1870’s which led to
the Settled Land Act of 1882. Thereafter life tenants were able to sell easily, but the
building even of branch railways was virtually finished. F. M. L. Thompson, op. cit.
319-26.
87 VeraZoond, Housing Legislation in England, 1851-67 (London M.A., 1932), 17.
68 H.C., 1863 (209) VIL
™ Ibid. 23 March 1863, QQ.418-41; QQ.357-92.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

companies, which already advanced money for improvements of the

traditional kind, but had no power to make advances for shares. ‘We
are,’ said William Napier, the managing director of one of these
companies, ‘agents between the money market and the landed interest.’70
‘Supposing that a General Act were passed,’ Earl Hardwicke asked
Napier, ‘what do you think would be the effect of it on the speculative
railway world; would it not be immediately to turn loose an immense
number of speculative solicitors over the whole country talking to the
farmer, and immediately suggesting that every atom of land must be
railroaded ?’71
Hardwicke’s suspicious attitude must have been shared by his fellow
peers on the committee, for its final report, though conceding that the
evidence laid before them ‘proved that both the letting and selling value
of land is in general greatly increased by its having the advantage of
easy access to a railway’, and that landowners ‘would probably have
contributed much more largely to these undertakings but for the
obstacles opposed by the present state of the law’, cautiously recom­
mended that the Enclosure Commissioners should be consulted in
each case, and that no charges should be levied until the Enclosure Com­
missioners were shown the railway completed and opened for traffic.72
These recommendations were incorporated into the Improvement of
Land Act, 1864, and, of course, rendered the Act quite useless from the
railway promoters’ point of view. If the annuity could not be charged
until the line was complete the whole point was lost, as the builder and
contractor Charles Fox complained.73 What was needed was loan
capital, or share purchase, in advance of construction. Moreover the
attitude of the Enclosure Commissioners was one of considerable
scepticism. How would they know what services would be run, even
if the required stations were opened, or how long those services would
be maintained ? What would be their frequency, convenience and cost ?
‘Drainage is not a speculation,’ said one of the Enclosure Commis­
sioners, George Darby, ‘As to drainage I can see my way; as to buildings
I get into considerable difficulty; but when I come to what I consider
still more speculative as to value, namely railways, of course my
difficulty is infinitely increased.’74

It can readily be seen, without multiplying further examples, that

71 Ibid. 18 March 1863, Q.289-97. They charged and collected the improved
rent charges. However his company—formed in 1853—had no power to advance
money on railways. Q.197.
72 Ibid. Q.270.
72 Ibid. 23 April 1863, Report. •.
73 The Builder, XXVII (1869), 209.
71 H.C., 1863 (209), VII, 23 March, Q.3O3.
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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

both of the suggested compromises over apportioning the land profit

had serious drawbacks. Gifts of land, or sale on terms which represented
a sacrifice of potential value by particular owners, were bound to be
limited in scale so long as the benefits of rail communication could be
seen to be general and not particular in effect. Share subscriptions by
landowners to defray the cost and to share the risk of extending the
line were handicapped by the state of the law and, if advanced out of
spare funds, tended to fall short as soon as the scheme got under way,
at the very moment when they were most needed. This is what happened
for a time to the Metropolitan District railway in the mid-1860’s, which
came to a halt when confronted by ‘the cabbage and asparagus fields
of Fulham’.75
In fact, to the extent to which they helped to finance a line, landowners
were deliberately choosing a smaller return on part of their capital.
Their real interest lay in withdrawing capital from the scheme as soon
as it was clear that other investors with less ambitious expectations, or
with less local knowledge and opportunity for property speculation,
could be induced to take over. Very large returns were possible, after
all, in property dealings which owed nothing whatsoever to the railways.
It was possible, if the requisite amount of capital were on hand at the
right moment, to bring off a coup like that of the Glasgow surveyor and
valuer Thomas Smellie. Choosing the area of Pollokshields and Bella-
houston, rapidly growing inner suburbs, he bought a plot of land for
£12,000 (plus £20,000 for the mineral rights) in March of 1863, and
sold it in October of the same year for £102,000, trebling his capital in
six months. This piece of property, on the Paisley road, was in no way
connected with the railway, or even with the steady appreciation of
land values. ‘I do not call the difference an increase of value at all,’ he
explained, ‘I call it buying in a slump and selling in detail.’76 Railway
investment, however much it might in general march with property
appreciation, would obviously have to take second place if competition
for funds occurred; and incidents similar in kind, if not in scale, to the
land deal just mentioned, occurred in all rapidly-growing areas of the
Victorian city.

4. Demand and supply factors in the urban land market

The inability of railway companies to share in the profits to be made
from appreciation of land values, and the failure of methods to bridge
the divergence of interests between the companies and landowners has
an important bearing upon the pattern of suburban growth, and the
participation of different railway companies in that growth.
75 D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 94.
76 Glasgow Univ. Coll. Solicitors’ Papers, Respondent's Proof p. 15, N.B. railway
company v. Blackie and Bain, 1866-7.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

The outcome of the railways’ incapacity to reap corporate benefit

from anything except the traffic a line generated was to give them a
neutral, passive role in the outward spread of the larger Victorian cities.
They played the classic role of intermediary between the supply and
demand forces in the land market. On the one hand, the supply of
residential land was subject to many factors quite outside the control
of railway companies; on the other hand, the development of effective
demand for housing was a slow and massive process in which the
railway companies’ influence in the nineteenth century was important
at the margin, rather than paramount.
Considered in this light the observations of the railway managers
concerning rail services and social class begin to make sense, and cease
to appear either priggish or conspiratorial. That this was the way in
which they themselves viewed their role can be argued from a closer
examination of their opinions. Henry Partington, for example, speaking
for the L. & N.W.—which was one of the most reluctant to concede
cheap fares—revealed the ground upon which his company ultimately
stood, in a series of exchanges with the Select Committee on Work­
men’s Trains, in 1904. At first he maintained, rather aggressively, that
the L. & N.W., unlike some other companies, had never had any
specific statutory obligation put upon it.77 Then, realising that such a
legalistic approach made no impression upon the Committee, he shifted
his ground, placing the responsibility for his company’s diminutive
traffic in workmen’s tickets at the door of the landowners in his area,
who ‘often object to the character of their property being deteriorated
by the introduction of the working class.’
This opinion was no mere piece of self-justification put out by
Partington to fox the Select Committee. In their confidential internal
memoranda the railway companies had already debated this subject,
and Partington had expressed similar views even more frankly in
April 1898. ‘What is more to the point,’ he said, ‘the Cheap Trains Act
presumes that certain districts where the landowners and others are
notoriously averse to the introduction of the working class element
would become reconciled to it. The L. & N.W.’s London and suburban
district is generally not working class, and there is no probability that
the adoption of facilities for that class would make it otherwise.’78
Henry Oakley, who presided over this meeting of the railway companies,
emphatically rejected the role of social reformers for which the Cheap
Trains Act had cast the railway companies. ‘After discussion the com­
panies are of the opinion that it would not be practicable or desirable
77 H.C., 1904, VII, QQ.1813-45. Significantly Partington, who had the supervision
of workmen’s fares, was only an Assistant Goods Manager. The members of the
S.C. were openly ruffled at the L. & N.W.’s casual attitude in sending a junior offcial.
78 BTHR LNW 4/150, 4 April 1898.

406
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

to alter the principle of their present arrangements which have been

the growth of many years, and are found to adapt themselves well to
the wants and necessities of the Districts of varying character through
which the Suburban lines of the several companies pass.’79
If reform of a suburb’s class structure, and of its prevailing rents
and class of residential accommodation were required, it was of little
use expecting railway companies, who were reluctant intermediaries
expressly forbidden to take part in property development themselves,
to reshape their districts by means of a time-table and fares schedule.
The study of the considerations influencing the supply of land, and
of making effective the growing demand for it, in and around Britain’s
major cities, is an extremely large subject, which has only here and
there received the detailed historical treatment it merits. Nevertheless,
in the more limited context of railway building it is possible to suggest
some of the factors which entered into the equation.

a. Demand
On the demand side, the main factors were rising real incomes,
improved means of raising credit for house-owning, the rate at which
new jobs were created—in the outskirts as well as the central district—
and the pressure of immigration from the countryside. To these demo­
graphic, employment and income factors must be added, if lengthier
work journeys were contemplated, the general decrease in the length of
the working day. Indeed, one of the earlier commentators upon the
rise of the suburbs, S. J. Low, writing in the Contemporary Review,
1891, placed this higher in importance than rising incomes. A man ‘is
able to live in the suburbs, not so much because he has more wages
as because he has more time.’80
The interaction of these demand factors with those of supply pro­
duced a long rhythm of building cycles which, as far as residential
building was concerned, shared a sturdy independence of the more
general trends in the Victorian economy’s trade cycle. Recent studies
by economic historians have devoted much attention to the phasing,
amplitude and local variations of these building cycles.81
Three points arise from the historical study of demand factors in
housing which are relevant to the present enquiry. In the first place,
it is clear that building cycles tend to be very closely associated with
migration cycles; indeed that some building cycles are ‘little more than

79 Ibid. Report on meeting.

80 Contemporary Review, IX (1891), 557.
81 H. J. Habbakkuk, A. K. Cairncross, E. W. Cooney, D. J. Coppock, P. J.
O’Leary, W. A. Lewis, J. P. Lewis, S. B. Saul, Brinley Thomas, B. Weber and others.
For a recent discussion and bibliography see J. Parry Lewis, Building Cycles and
Britain's Growth (1965).
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

a migration cycle in disguise.’82 Although the quantitative processes

of internal migration have only recently been investigated, and our
knowledge of them is incomplete, studies which have been carried out
suggest that the growth of suburban building activity does not require
explanation, as is still occasionally assumed, solely in terms of an out­
ward current of house-seekers from the city centre.
The suburbs themselves were distinguished by mortality rates which
were extremely favourable, on occasion as little as a half to two thirds
of those in the central districts; and, indeed, the health of suburban
life constituted one of its positive attractions.83 Over the second half
of the nineteenth century, therefore, perhaps 30% of the suburbs’
population increase might be assigned to their own internal surpluses
of births over deaths. Then again it is clear that internal migration did
not take place mainly over long distances, or exclusively by railway
routes. The new recruits to the growing suburbs were primarily drawn
in from the surplus population in the immediately surrounding country­
side. Contrary to popular impression, it was to the suburbs rather than
to the city centre that most immigrants tended to go. R. Lawton’s
study of the distribution of Liverpool’s population in the mid-nine­
teenth century showed the largest proportions of the suburban popula­
tion had either been born locally, or had immigrated from the adjacent
countries of Lancashire and Cheshire.84 Roughly 45 % of the inhabitants
of the nine outer areas fell into this category. A further 25 % of resi­
dents in the outer districts were long-distance immigrants from all parts
of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The remaining 30% came
from ‘the Liverpool area’, including cross migrants from other outer
suburban areas.85 In other words at least 70%, and perhaps 75% to
80%, of Liverpool’s suburban growth in the mid-nineteenth century
was due to the arrival of immigrants from immediately neighbouring
counties or from further afield; only 20% to 30% of the increase was
due to migration from the city centre. This was also the impression
gained by H. J. Dyos in his detailed study of the area south of the
Thames. ‘The usual picture of central London,’ he writes, ‘as the recep­
tion area for immigrants, who moved to the outer suburbs later, is

82 A. K. Cairncross, Home and Foreign Investment, 1870-1913 (Cambridge, 1953),

25.
83 Even at the end of the nineteenth century death rates in, for example, Man­
chester, varied from 15-21 for the sparsely populated suburbs, to 29-22 for the
30,000 still living in the Central district, or 28-32 for Ancoats. This disparity was,
in fact, one of the arguments used by cheap fares reformers. T. R. Marr, op. cit.
17 et. seq. Birmingham showed the same contrasting figures for Edgbaston and the
central parishes. D. E. C. Eversley, loc. cit. 135.
84 R. Lawton, ‘The Population of Liverpool in the mid.-nineteenth century’,
Trans, of Hist. Soc. Lancs & Chesh. 107 (1955), 89-120.
85 Loc. cit. 119, Table 2.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

misleading. Immigrants into the suburbs were far more numerous than
those into central London itself.’86 There is no evidence to suggest
that the process of internal migration should have operated in a radically
different way north of the Thames, or in the suburbs of Manchester
and Birmingham.
It follows that it is not essential to postulate improved and cheapened
rail transport to explain the suburban growth of population in the late
nineteenth century. Looking at a series of maps of the rapid growth of
towns it is all too easy to regard the great cities as growing organisms,
rapidly expanding outwards from a central point, and to look upon the
railways as necessary arteries in this organic growth. In fact the great
part of population growth appears to have taken place by accretion at
the periphery, not as the result of outward expansion; and the employ­
ment and travel patterns of the majority of immigrants were dictated
by the requirements of the suburban life into which they had moved.
The second observation concerning housing demand and the railways
concerns the money incomes of those who were to be housed and
transported. As is well known, both money incomes and real incomes
rose in the last third of the nineteenth century by between a third and
a half; and the proportion of individual budgets spent on accommoda­
tion also tended to increase as income levels rose.87 But this still left
the number of would-be owner occupiers who could afford to purchase
sites and houses relatively small.88 Even amongst the middle classes
houses were frequently rented, not bought, and amongst the ranks of
the new suburbanites in the 187O’s and 188O’s only in Birmingham and
London did the numbers of owner-occupied houses excite comment.89
The Royal Commission on Friendly and Benefit Building Societies,
1872, commented upon the rapid spread of facilities for raising mort­
gages, and estimated that perhaps five-sixths of those raised were on
houses of a lower value than £300.90 Yet with advances of only sixty
per cent not uncommon, this still required that the intending house
purchaser would have to save capital equal, possibly, to a year’s salary;
a task no easier to perform then than it is now. There were, besides,
86 H. J. Dyos, The Suburban Development of Greater London, South of the Thames,
1836-1914 (London Ph.D., 1952), 424.
87 Money wages 1860, 1880, 1900 moved 58 to 72 to 94, cost of living 113, to 105,
to 86. Yet average rents (1880-1900) actually increased by 12j%. A. L. Bowley,
Wages and Income in the United Kingdom since 1860. (Cambridge, 1937), 28-32,
119-20.
88 Between 70 % and 85 % of residential property was rented in the last two decades
of the nineteenth century. H. J. Dyos, op. cit. (1961), 90, D. J. Olsen, op. cit. 6.
89 In Birmingham some 13,000 small houses were stated to be owner-occupied
in the early 1870’s. MRL, Report of M.O.H., 19 January 1872, 34 et. seq. In London,
although leasehold was the rule, it was possible to obtain freehold possession in
the less thickly populated areas. H.C., 1887, XIII, QQ.4894, 4975, 5119.
90 H.C., 1872, XXVI, and H. Bellman, The Thrifty Three Millions (1935), 31-40.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

legal obstacles to the extension of the successful Victorian principles

of self-help and co-operation into the sphere of housing.91
As a result the situation was such in the 188O’s that it was possible
to advance, as a serious and plausible argument, the opinion that
effective demand for freehold purchase was so inadequate, even amongst
the tradesmen and better-paid artisans, that the rapid extension of
towns would have been impossible if the whole capital for purchase
and building had had to be advanced by the occupiers.92 By and large,
even at the end of the century, the tenant and the lodger were far more
common than the owner occupier.
The bearing of this upon railway fares and policy is fairly clear. The
residents of the new suburbs of Walthamstow and Edmonton, who
formed the working class commuter traffic of the Great Eastern, could
afford, in addition to the time for travel and the annual expenditure
(in small daily sums) of £2 10s in workmen’s tickets, a rent of approxi­
mately £25 per annum. Even if the train fare had been reduced to
nothing their annual rent paying ability would only have increased to
£27 10s per annum. Altering the rail services to make, for example, the
fare for the seven miles from Waterloo station to Wimbledon equal the
fare for the seven miles from Liverpool Street station to Tottenham
would not have made the working man and his family any more wel­
come in Wimbledon, or enabled him to purchase accommodation there
with £25 per annum. For him there were houses at the right rent in the
marshy lands to the north-east or in the ‘mud and water’ district of
Fulham.93 If he could rise to £30 per annum, West Kensington Park or
Queen’s Park could provide a middling range of rented houses; and if
he had assured, reasonably-paid and respectable employment, and
approached a Building Society, he might raise the mortgage on £300
for a house at Tottenham or Lambeth.94
The third point, arising from the shortage of effective demand for
housing, is that those well-to-do middle class proprietors who had,
perhaps several decades earlier, purchased freeholds or long leases on
villas, often with substantial grounds, tended to exercise, together with

81 Vera Zoond, op. cit. 19. A charter to begin operating as an improved dwellings
company could cost £1,000 in the 1860’s.
92 H.C., 1887, XIII, QQ. 2747-56.
93 The average weekly expenditure on rents of Charles Booth’s classes B, C and D
came to 6s 10|d, to 8s 7|d, and that of his ‘comfortable’ class E to Ils l|d. Charles
Booth, op. cit. I, 133. The specific examples he gives for Walthamstow are mostly
lower—3s 6d per half house per week, or 4s 6d per floor—but those in better employ­
ment rose to £20 or even £30 per year (i.e. 7s 9d to 1 Is 6d per week). Ibid. 1,312-3. For
Fulham see D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 52. Some of the north-eastern suburbs were also
described as ‘marsh places, hardly fit to erect houses on’. H.C., 1904, VII, Q.722.
91 The Survey of London, XXVI (1956), 12, 138. Edwin Course, op. cit. (1962), 202.
D. A. Reeder, op. cit. 48, 54.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

their neighbours and ground landlords, a conservative economic

influence over the district in which they had settled.
In certain areas where the break up of estates and the invasion of
cheap speculative housing had gone too far to be withstood, the older
inhabitants, as Charles Booth observed, ‘by selling their land or dispos­
ing of their leases in this way, have managed to turn to profitable
account the influx which it has been rather fashionable to lament.’95
In general, however, the middle class suburb was more than able to
defend itself against encroachment in the later nineteenth century.
Sometimes the sanctions were very rigorous. The building of houses
below a value of £1,000 or £1,500 could be specifically forbidden in a
bill of sale for land—as in parts of Wimbledon.96 On some Croydon
estates in the last two decades of the century the minimum prime cost
for houses specified in covenants was £600.9 7 At least one other area,
Tunbridge Wells, sent a strongly worded petition against reductions in
train fares, on the grounds that cheap access from London might lower
the district’s social tone.98
Normally such extreme pressures were unnecessary. ‘Houses were
built,’ W. Ashworth concluded from his recent examinations of the
north-eastern suburbs of London, ‘with an eye to the tastes and means
of people in a particular range of social and economic circumstances,
and from the very beginning of rapid suburban development it was
common for most of the houses in one locality to be fairly similar
in quality and cost. If a family’s social condition changed considerably
it was quite likely to want a different type of house, which often did
not exist in its present neighbourhood, and consequently it would have
to move to another district altogether, with a different but not less
homogeneous social character.’99 To any reader familiar with the social
topography of his district the point needs no further elaboration. In
Britain the names of suburbs have precise, though changing, nuances
of meaning; they are not simply place-names but carry distinct social
undertones.
Given this tendency towards social homogeneity in suburban zoning,
the railway’s policy appears no more than an appropriate response to
demand. For some areas the provision of a limited and not particularly
cheap transport service was a positive asset, and part of these areas’
attractiveness to the type of resident they sought. Captain Ross, the
95 Charles Booth, op. cit. I (1892), 297-8.
96 H. J. Dyos, op. cit. (1952), 394.
97 R. C. W. Cox, Some Aspects of the Urban Development of Croydon, 1870-1940
(Leicester M.A. thesis, 1966), 147.
98 Edwin Course, op. cit. (1962), 205. The petition was sent in 1874 to the South
Eastern railway company.
99 W. A. Ashworth, ‘Types of Social and Economic Development in Suburban
Essex’, London, Aspects of Change (ed. R. Glass et al. 1964), 80.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

estate developer in Clapham mentioned earlier, who had been trying

to attract the new clerical lower-middle class resident in 1857, had
spoken of a meeting of proprietors at the Boyer Arms, Manor Street,
Clapham, where ‘several proprietors said they were afraid to interfere
in favour of the railway; that some of the higher order of people in
Clapham, who keep their carriages there, were against it.’100 The
movement of the carriage-folk out to remoter southern suburbs was
referred to later by The Times (1874). ‘The people who can afford to
spend £60 a year in season tickets fly further off and carry Wandsworth
and Clapham into the heart of Surrey.’101 £60 was, of course, more than
twice the combined rent and fare of a Walthamstow or Edmonton
commuter; and the first class season ticket customer was received just
as deferentially at his railway station as at the new West End stores for
‘the carriage trade’.
The movement of fashion can, to a certain extent, be traced with the
aid of suburban Court Directories, but the essential point to be noted
here is that the London and South Western or the London Brighton
and South Coast railway companies were no more responsible for the
emergence of a particular category of housing in Surrey (the so-called
‘stockbrokers’ belt’) than the Great Western was for the emergence of
the villas at Ealing, Barnes, Richmond and Windsor. The areas were
given their character primarily by freely operating market bids for
residential uses, and they only required relatively restricted rail services.

b. Supply
The timing and extent of suburban expansion in late Victorian
Britain was largely determined by the gradual development of effective
demand, through the operation of the population movement, employ­
ment and income factors to which reference has been made above.
Supply factors, however, were perhaps still more critical in determining
the topography of suburban growth. The supply of investment capital,
though important in the long term, played a less immediate part in the
provision of housing than might be supposed. ‘There is no evidence to
show that a building boom was ever terminated because capital was
attracted to other directions,’ S. B. Saul concluded in 1962; and his
conclusion concerning the behaviour of the economy as a whole would
find local application in areas where soundly based schemes were in
progress.102 Indeed it might even be the case that schemes which were

100 BTHR PYB 1/84, 15 June 1857, p. 8.

101 The Times, 25 June 1874, 9.
102 S. B. Saul, ‘House Building in England, 1890-1914’, Ec.HR, XV (1962), 134.
J. Calvert Spensley, loc. cit. 185-97 gives a full account of the factors influencing
supply, including the rate of interest on capital, with examples’of the effect a change
in interest rates might have.

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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

not particularly sound might still be executed, if the local builders,

solicitors and speculators were committed to them. Once an opportun­
ity, or imagined opportunity, had been created, by a change in the local
land market, the operations of the speculative builder and solicitor
showed a sturdy indifference to the finer points of national finance.
Only considerations such as these can explain the wide variations in
the timing of building cycles between one area, or one town, and
another. ‘Building’ as S. B. Saul puts it, ‘was internally and positively
determined for the most part, and was not a residual activity.’103 The
Building Societies' Gazette, reviewing the apparently irrational bursts of
activity in the London area, came to the same conclusion: that houses
were not ‘built in accordance with the rules of supply and demand, but
to develop, as it is called, estates and to create ground rents.’104
The creation of improved ground rents was the primary concern of
the landowner, and—the argument will now be put forward—it was
his influence, above all, which was stamped upon the character of
neighbourhoods, and of the railway services which they would attract,
and were able or willing to support. Time and again the local pro­
prietors’ control of land supply, and their attitude towards the course
of development in the outlying areas they owned, together with the
attitudes of the established residents and builders, determined the type
of service the railway companies could offer. An interesting clash
between James Allport, General Manager of the Midland railway com­
pany, and C. D. Sturge, a local resident who complained to the Royal
Commission of 1867 concerning the Midland’s apathetic suburban
policy near Birmingham, serves to illustrate the strict limits within which
railway policy was confined.
The Great Western railway company, Mr. Sturge pointed out, had
opened stations for local traffic at Acock’s Green, Solihull and Knowle,
4, 7, and 11 miles respectively from Birmingham, and land in those
areas had undergone the profitable conversion from agricultural to
building uses. By comparison, the Midland railway company, Sturge
complained, had only opened one station, at King’s Norton, 7 miles
out, and ran only a lethargic service of five trains a day. There had
therefore been no equivalent rise in the value of land near King’s
Norton.105 Since the further cross questioning, and Allport’s rejoinder,
illustrate the uneasy balance of interests between resident landowner
and railway company which had already emerged clearly by the 1860’s,
they are perhaps worth detailed recapitulation and comment.
‘You do not think,’ Sturge was asked, ‘that it is part of the duty of a
railway company to look after the interests of the owners of land and
103 S. B. Saul, loc. cit. 135.
104 Building Societies' Gazette, 1 January 1909, quoted in Saul loc. cit.
103 H.C., 1867, XXXVIII, QQ.785-8.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

to so regulate their traffic that they shall raise the value of their land ?—
No, but of course the railway takes land compulsorily; it is presumably
on the understanding that the company shall do their best to develop
the trade.’106 The Commissioners put it to Mr. Sturge that the railways
had, in fact, paid generously for any land they had acquired, including
an element of compensation for the forced sale. ‘Does it not follow that
the landowner has no claim upon the company to cultivate traffic in
his particular neighbourhood ?—He has this claim I think that when a
railway is once made no one else is allowed to make another in the
same direction.’107
These were the typical arguments used against the railway company.
Allport, in his reply, denied that land had failed to appreciate at all at
King’s Norton. Mr. Sturge had mentioned £60 to £80 an acre as the
selling price of land; the Midland railway had paid £500 an acre, and
Allport had cause to believe that general values had trebled since the
railway was built. If this increase were not enough, Allport concluded,
‘My answer to him is this, that we run five trains each way per day to
King’s Norton, which is not a large place; and in that neighbourhood
until a recent period there has been a very considerable difficulty in
obtaining land. The Baroness Windsor would not sell any land for
building purposes. I admit that it is a very beautiful district, and if land
could be readily obtained, it would be in the interest of the Midland
company, and I am sure they would avail themselves of it, to encourage
the building of suburban residences; but there has been a very con­
siderable difficulty until recently in getting land at all. There are two
or three landowners who have refused to part with their land, the
Baroness Windsor especially, and she probably has the best for resi­
dences.’108 Here was one instance where the supply of land for resi­
dential development was not forthcoming, and to look at the number of
stations on the Midland line, or count the services and fares would be
irrelevant.
It was a similar story at another Birmingham suburb, Solihull,
where traffic up to the city centre still only amounted to three or four
hundred passengers per day, and receipts at the ticket office averaged
£220 per week, even in 1903.109 ‘The railway is only tolerated at a
distance,’ wrote a contributor to the Birmingham Daily Mail in that
year.110
‘Let a stranger seek the whereabouts of the village as he stands outside the
station and his eye will search in vain, unless perchance it alights on the top
106 Ibid. Q.789.
107 Ibid. Q.798.
w Ibid. Q. 12415.
l09BTHR GW 4/281, 10-11.
110 Birmingham Daily Mail, 19 November 1903.
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 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

of the grey church steeple, which a belt of shady trees only just fails to obli­
terate from view. It is good step to the High Street with its leafy avenue.’
‘Where are the small houses ?’ asks the stranger, emphasising the adjective.
And the answer comes that there are none—except the cottages. The real
explanation is that the landowners do not want them and will not have them.
They mean to keep the place select. So it follows that, save for the needs of
those who live and labour in the village, there are no houses built in Solihull
of what may be termed the common or garden variety. They must cost £500,
at the very least, to put up. Only upon that condition can one obtain the
necessary land.’

Similar attitudes towards the disposal of land, and to the types and
cost of rail service required, can be seen in the Birmingham suburbs
of Acock’s Green or Moseley, the Manchester suburbs of Didsbury or
Knutsford, the Liverpool suburbs of Allerton, Wavertree, Litherland
or Grassendale, or in many of the outer London suburbs. Indeed the
closer and more detailed the study, the more important become the
attitudes and decisions of local landowners, builders, and established
residents, and the less readily does the mere establishment of a rail
linkage seem to provide the dramatic explanation of the course of
suburban growth.
Perhaps the village of Radlett, near St. Albans, of which J. T. Cop­
pock has made a close local study, may serve as an example of a London
suburb far enough out to be totally dependent upon a railway link for
daily communication with the City, but deriving part of its residential
attraction from the fact that the service was restricted and expensive.
In 1868, when Radlett station (on the Midland (St. Pancras) line) was
opened, the whole adjacent area was owned in four blocks; three
mansion houses—Newberries, Aldenham Lodge and Newlands, each
set in extensive park or meadow land; and the large Kendall estate of
farms and woodland, owned by Lord Phillimore. The village itself con­
sisted merely of a few score cottages for local agricultural and domestic
workers.111 For thirty years, the village remained substantially un­
changed, in spite of its rail connection; the principal addition by the
time of the 1896 Ordnance Survey being a school. Between 1894 and
1914, however, the village grew rapidly, the most important reason
being not so much the improvement or cheapening of train services,
as the change in the attitude of local landowners. An estate office was
opened on the Kendall estate, and the land was conveyed by Lord
Phillimore to his son Robert, who was willing both to sell detached
plots and to commission builders; Aldenham Lodge was sold to a
developer from St. Albans, who laid it out in roads and building sites.
Newberries and Newlands came onto the market later, in the inter-war
period. The new houses which arose on the Kendall and Aldenham
111 J. T. Coppock, loc. cit. 279-81.
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 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Lodge estates at the turn of the century were substantial, and built to a
density of four per acre. In marked contrast, a small working class
quarter of crowded terrace houses, ten to the acre, was run up imme­
diately to the west of the railway station for the growing numbers who
found local employment, as domestic servants, tradesmen’s assistants
and in retail and service occupations. The village remained exclusive,
and at least one newcomer mentioned the poor train service as the
reason he had chosen Radlett for residence.112
Of course other late nineteenth century examples could be found,
both in the inner and outer suburbs, in which the situation was the
reverse of that at King’s Norton, Solihull or Radlett, and local land­
owners pressed forward eagerly with land for development at the mere
rumour of a railway linkage. Even so, there was a strong preference
for middle class estate development; and the further out the suburb,
the fewer alternative means of transport there were, and the more
complete the dependence on the railway, the stronger this preference
became.
In general the most important single factor in determining the release
of estates of villas, parkland, and farms onto the market may well have
been simply the fortuitous timing of the landowner’s death. Added to
this were the questions of possible debt burdens, or the financial
circumstances and personal inclinations of the inheritors of the estate;
and sometimes the original landowner’s intentions might extend beyond
his own lifetime, by means of clauses in a will, or by restrictive entails
or settlements. A widow might wish to dispose of part of the estate but
keep the house; an heir might wish to sell the whole property, or
alternatively to develop it energetically himself—by selling freehold
plots under covenant, by leasing to a developer, or by directly engaging
a builder; trustees might wish to postpone any decision for the time
being. R. C. W. Cox, one of the most recent researchers into the
factors affecting the land market in a suburban area, confronted with
these complicated personal and legal factors, has been tempted to
conclude that, in Croydon at any rate, ‘the timing of the process of sale
for building is largely a matter of chance.’113 One 82-acre estate in
Croydon came onto the market because the East India Company’s
training college was closed down after the Indian Mutiny; another
87-acre estate, ripe for residential development, was bought from the
Earl of Eldon by a paper-mill owner from Kent, who proceeded to
ignore its development potential, and merely used the estate for private
residence himself; confining his sales to the detachment of a few parcels
of land (such as the Lodge) and making careful, but uncovenanted
transfers of ownership. At his death the surplus land, surrounded on
112 Ibid 281-4.
113 R. C. W. Cox, op. cit. 144.

416
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

three sides by other buildings, was presented by his daughter to the

public as open parkland.114
Apart from the marked personal influence of landowners, varying
from the orthodox to the status-seeking, or occasionally the bizarre, the
land market was also subjected to further inertia by the provisions of
the legal code. For example, in the rapidly growing residential suburb
of Hampstead the four hundred acre estate belonging to Sir Thomas
Maryon Wilson was withheld from the market until his death, in 1869,
because there was no heir-apparent to agree that the entail should be
broken.115 In this case, again, the critical factor was the original
proprietor’s death. It is impossible, at the moment, to say how common
a cause for the break-up of estates the death of the owner was, com­
pared with other factors—the collapse of banks, the miscarriage of
investments, over-spending and mismanagement of the estate, foolish
business ventures. But it seems reasonable to suggest that personally
owned estates did not respond, within intervals of time which would
constitute reasonable supply lags in other economic fields, to the
opportunities presented from year to year. Even the land Companies
and Building Societies, which purchased land with a view to long-term
speculation, cannot always have found it easy to pursue consistent
policies. Like personal owners, they sometimes suffered from vicissi­
tudes in their internal finances, and did not generally control enough
of the land supply to be free to choose, and adhere to, particular
development policies. The placing of land on the market is not, after
all, a matter which can be executed precipitately without loss; and so
the business firms, and the corporate and the charitable bodies disposing
of land had, in most areas, to take their cue from the decisions of
private landowners.
Between the 1850’s and 1890’s, the supply of land was relatively
plentiful in relation to the numbers of middle-class commuters with the
funds and inclination to live at a distance from the city centre, and a
blank wall was usually presented only by landowners who genuinely
wished to stay in residence themselves, or by those wealthy enough not
to be tempted to break up an asset as valuable and rapidly appreciating
as a well situated estate. All this changed, however, as the numbers able
to travel increased and began, under the cheap fares, to include those
whose means precluded them from purchasing and properly main­
taining property, who were looking for low-rented accommodation,
and whose social tastes and behaviour were considered to depreciate
the value of existing adjacent property in the district. Confronted with
this relative alteration in the conditions of demand to supply, more
landowners near the great cities came under pressure to accept housing
114 Ibid., 138-141.
115 Hugh C. Prince, loc. cit. 130.

P 417
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

standards which might depreciate their own, or their neighbour’s’

holdings.116 In this context it is easy to understand how exclusive
train services might tacitly be welcomed as a means of socially filtering
the growing inflow of residents.117
The attitude could not be carried to extremes, of course, by those
who controlled the supply of land, for even the meanest accommoda­
tion could provide ground rents which showed a substantial improve­
ment over agricultural rents; and there was a tendency, therefore, on
inferior ground, to accept any residential development rather than none.
If any more promising development were in view, however, the owner
tended to wait for the further appreciation which might accrue to him
if he held his land in reserve. The attitude was described by Edgar
Harper, Statistical Officer to the L.C.C. in these words. ‘It may be an
advantage to a landowner to have a large block of small property of
this kind’ (the Walthamstow/Edmonton kind) ‘put upon his land; he
would get an immediate return; but then, on the other hand, if that
small property did not come, years afterwards he might get a better
class of property if he could wait; so that there is something on each
side.’118
Apart from this preparedness to wait for better development prospects
there were also a number of anxieties felt about railway schemes by
landowners which added to their hesitation. What about the landowner
who supported a scheme, had his land intersected and then found he
was ‘left remote from the station ?’, asked J. B. Denton.119 This had been
known to happen not infrequently. What about the scheme which a
landowner originally supported but which went into suspended anima­
tion, tied up his land and made it difficult to get tenants, and was kept
alive indefinitely by five yearly Extension of Powers bills ?120 What about
the land schemes projected with a railway as an essential and integral
part, like those of the Muswell Hill Estate and Alexandra Palace com­
panies, which were let down by a railway abandonment bill ?121 These
doubts frequently added to the considerations already mentioned, to
curb still further the enterprise of estate owners, upon which alone the

116 Examples given before the Town Holdings Select Committee included Hornsey,
where it was ‘impossible to get freehold in consequence of land being held by one
proprietor’, and Finsbury Park where 350 acres were held by three owners. H.C.,
1887, XIII, QQ.9312, 4765.
117 See William Birt’s argument concerning Noel Park in App. 4.
118 H.C., 1904, VII, Q.143.
119 The Builder, XXVII, (1869), 205, 229.
120 For this reason landowners’ counsel sometimes asked the Committees to make
sure that there was an adequate fund to pay their clients in full and without delay
for land scheduled to be taken. BTHR PYB 1/534, 20 July 1871? 9-10.
121 Putting an investment of £650,000 in jeopardy, counsel for the two companies
claimed. BTHR PYB 1/483, 6 April 1869, p. 11 (Merewether).
418
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

railway companies, in the existing state of the law in 1900, could rely
for suburban traffic.

5. Conclusion
The remarkable growth of Britain’s major cities in the nineteenth
century, and the internal processes by which each arranged its expanding
use of land for commerce, industry and housing, is an extremely com­
plex phenomenon, not likely to be explained by any search for single
causes. The growth of the residential suburbs, for instance, was a
process in which social aspirations and prejudices played a part as
important as strictly economic factors; and even within the commercial
world of the city centre movements of fashion took place which could
not always be explained in simple terms of access, floor space and
rentals.
The desire to reduce these confusing and intricate elements of urban
growth to some sort of order has occasionally led writers to seek in the
railways a prime cause which would provide a single major explanation
of the expansion of the great cities and their suburbs by means, almost
literally, of a deus ex machina.
Unfortunately the truth about the railways is by no means as simple
as some would have it.122 It would, indeed, be very convenient if the
railways could provide such a key, and if the growth of a district could
be explained merely by establishing the date of opening of its station.
But, as already pointed out, the railways’ contribution to growth was
shared with other more modest forms of transport to an extent often
overlooked, and loose generalisations about effects should not be made
on the basis of mere physical rail linkage, without consideration of
subsequent services, fares and traffic.
The direct effects of railway building are, after all, considerable
enough in themselves to require no exaggeration. They profoundly
influenced the internal flows of traffic, the choices of site and patterns
of land use, the residential densities and development prospects of the
central and inner districts of the Victorian city in the ways which have
been discussed and illustrated. They manipulated local authorities,
overloaded Parliament, wrecked or evaded attempts at bureaucratic
control, monopolised for specialised uses large areas of urban land
which are only partially being released again in the 1960’s, cut great
swathes through the cities as completely as a blitz. Admittedly the
nature and timing of the outward expansion of residential housing
122 As in Isard’s classic statement of the extreme view. ‘Transport and building
construction, both vital economic activities, represent in a rough manner the begin­
ning and end of the causal relation respectively.’ W. Isard, ‘A Neglected Cycle:
the Transport-Building Cycle’, Review of Economic Statistics, 24 (1942), 149.
419
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

depended partly upon the growth of demand factors in the economy;

the location of that growth depended partly upon land ownership; but
it was the railways which made feasible the widely spaced clusters of
villa residences which provided a Victorian nucleus for the more
intensive development of many a dormitory suburb in the twentieth
century.
Behind these spectacular effects of Victorian railways upon urban
landscapes and society several much older and larger processes can be
perceived. Two to which attention is particularly drawn by the subject
matter of the present enquiry are: the slowly-developing patterns of
land ownership, together with the peculiarly complex superstructure of
law and precedent attached to them in Britain; and the multifarious
and persistent market activities generated within the city itself.
The Land, together with Capital and Labour, constitute the great
factors of production in classical economic theory; and, in a sense, the
whole of economic history can be viewed as no more than the unfolding
of these prime elements. But although very full studies of the role of
capital have exercised some of the most perceptive writers in economic
history in the last two decades, and the study of the role of labour has
traditionally been of great importance for even longer, there has been
a tendency—perhaps because of the agricultural connotations of the
word—to regard land as an element of decreasing importance in the
increasingly urban and industrial economy of the late nineteenth
century; although some writers have attempted to redirect attention to
this most important topic.123 In fact, dwelling house rents consistently
grew faster than the National Income, increasing their share from 5 %
to 7-^%.124 Specifically urban site rents played a large part in this
increase, and an idea of the order of magnitude of the share which fell
to them may be seen from H. W. Singer’s calculations. By 1913 ‘urban
land rent exceeded the profits of railways, or the income from Home,
Colonial and Foreign Government securities, or the total income-tax
yield, all taken for the whole of the United Kingdom.’125 The increase
in the average price paid for housing increased by 85% between 1845
and 1913; an increase which is more remarkable than it may seem at
first glance, since wholesale prices, and even building costs, were not
significantly higher in 1913 than in 1845.126 Part of this cost was
123 F. M. L. Thompson, op. cit. Idem ‘The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century’,
Oxford Economic Papers, IX (1957), 285-308. David Spring, ‘The English Landed
Estate in the Age of Coal and Iron: 1830-1880’, Journal of Economic History, XI
(1951), 3-24.
124 B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, op. cit. 366. The figures are £12,200,000
(in 1801, when the Gross National Income was £232,000,000) to £134,200,000
(1901, Gross National Income £1,642,900,000) or from roughly 5% to 7|%.
125 H. W. Singer, ‘An Index of Urban Land Rents and House Rents in England
and Wales, 1845-1913’, Econometrica, 9 (1941), 228.
126 J. Parry Lewis, op. cit. 156.
420
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

undoubtedly produced by the marked improvement in the average

standard of house—its size, internal space, and amenities. But part was
also produced by the general commercial pressures which gave added
value to the urban sites themselves, and placed an unearned increment
in the pockets of the great and small urban landlord. Whilst house
rents rose by 85% between 1845 and 1914, the actual land, or site,
rents rose by nearly 1200% upon the area built up in 1845.127
Indeed, as will have been implicit in much that has been said earlier,
it is necessary, even in the shadow of one of the most revolutionary
forces of the nineteenth century, to turn away from the technology and
economics of transport to explain the patterns which emerged on the
ground in the great Victorian cities. If cities were featureless checker­
boards, a model for a rail transport could be, and indeed has been,
sketched out; but cities, in August Lbsch’s phrase, ‘are miniature
copies of the economic landscape’.128 At any given moment the precise
ways in which each city absorbs or exploits innovation, and the specific
alterations in the pattern of its land uses, are critically influenced by
pre-existing factors; of which the most important single one, in the
context of the present enquiry, has seemed to be the framework of
land titles.
In many ways urban landowners were the most important single
agents of change; more important than the railway managers, whose
imagination and foresight could often be exercised only within very
strict limits. The landowners profited at all stages of railway building,
and probably exercised the greatest single influence upon the selection
of central sites, upon the location and character of suburbs; and even
exercised a lesser, though still considerable influence, upon the costs of
the service offered.
The antique and cumbersome body of common law regarding
property in England and Scotland served to magnify the influence which
would naturally have attached to land title under any circumstances.
However much the railways may have been free to frustrate or evade
interference by local and central government in the nineteenth century,
no one could for a moment entertain the thought that they were free
of the trammels of common law. And, under the law regarding entail
and settlement, the ideal was that the land should not change hands or
change uses at all; such flexibility as the market might have shown was
still further reduced, and the legally privileged position of the owner
of settled land maintained, often against his will. Railway initiative was
curbed, municipal enterprise reduced to impotence in the late nine­
teenth century because all projects were ‘tainted and paralysed’, as
Joseph Chamberlain complained, ‘by the incurable timidity with which
127 H. W. Singer, loc. cit. 224, 230.
128 August Losch, The Economics of Location (Yale, 1954), 440.
p* 421
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

Parliament is accustomed to deal with the sacred rights of property.’129

Chamberlain’s strictures may partly have been the product of a
moment’s exasperation in a man of action, but they were also, it may
be argued, not an inaccurate comment upon the conduct of Parlia­
mentary business. It is still impossible to look through the Commons’
and Lords’ Journals or Committee Minutes, Hansard, or the Private
and Local Statutes, without experiencing a sense of surprise at the
distribution of Parliamentary attention. The greater part of Parlia­
mentary time seems to be taken up by legislation not to decide how
the country should be governed, but by whom it should be owned. A
random sample of Parliamentary business is as likely to produce
Enclosure Bills, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as
affairs of political or diplomatic moment; and in the mid-nineteenth
century Railway Bills came to occupy a similar proportion of Parlia­
mentary time. Though radically different in nature and content both
Enclosure and Railway Bills shared one characteristic in common.
They were both legislative acts to re-arrange existing property rights
and relations; and, indeed, in some important particulars, such as the
privileges bestowed upon adjacent property owners, they were drafted
in an identical spirit.130
It may seem no more than a natural distortion of perspective that
so great a proportion of Parliamentary time should be occupied by
discussions concerning property in a body which, although it conducted
debates upon Cabinet and executive decisions, was primarily concerned
with making laws. But perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that, in
the view of most of the electorate until 1867, or even 1884, this was the
prime function of Parliament: not to develop positive policies, even
upon such matters of domestic concern as public sanitation, and
certainly not on railway building, but simply to maintain the rule of
common law and to safeguard property. In a country possessing no
open frontier, fortunate enough not to be subjected to pressing military
or strategic considerations, and with an ancient and complex system of
property laws, railway building tended to be strongly influenced by
land ownership titles.
Yet although land ownership exercised such a powerful influence
upon the rapidly evolving cities of the nineteenth century there is, as
yet, no full scale and concerted investigation of urban land ownership
and land enterprise. The deposited solicitors’ papers which could give
a closer insight into the mechanism of urban growth are still largely
unused, and indeed are being dispersed and destroyed at an alarming
129 Fortnightly Review, new series XXXIV (1883), 767. The burden this excessive
regard for property rights placed upon local authorities is described in detail in
W. Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (1965), 101-10.
130 W. Hodges, op. cit. I, 332.

422
 RAILWAYS AND THE LAND MARKET

rate. The study of the solicitor as entrepreneur, and the treatment of

surveyors’ or Building Society records, though of absorbing interest,
still await historical presentation.
The second of the larger and older processes upon which some side­
light is thrown by the study of urban railways is that of the city’s market
activities. These activities, measured in modern terms by the incidence
of land values, are in a sense as old as the city itself, and were both a
function and a cause of the Victorian city’s increase in size. The his­
tories of London and the four great provincial cities diverge markedly
in this respect; for London already manifested many of the typical
features of the great city at the time the provincial centres were mere
craft villages. The problems raised by the emigration of the upper
classes to the suburbs, together with the closely associated problem of
defining the boundaries of municipal jurisdiction and taxation—both
of which one might think of as typically Victorian problems—occurred
in London as early as the late seventeenth century. Indeed it was the
tendency of the business classes to earn a living in the central district
whilst shunning the duties of municipal office and the burdens and
taxes of central residence, rather than the ravages of the Great Fire
and Plague, which brought the Corporation of London to the point of
declared bankruptcy in the 1690’s.131
Although the other cities did not demonstrate such mature urban
symptoms two hundred and fifty years before the coming of the railways,
they all began to undergo some fragments of the same experience in
the course of the next hundred years. The impact of the greatly increased
maritime trade of the early and mid-eighteenth century; the shocks to
the urban structure when manufacture lost its dependence on rural
waterpower, and when each city became a reception centre for the rural
population explosion in the late eighteenth century: each of Britain’s
five great cities found its own way of encountering and absorbing these
experiences.
The major adjustments required to come to terms with the loco­
motive in the nineteenth century constituted just another episode. If
the steam locomotive by some chance had not been invented, economic
progress would not have halted—as economists on both sides of the
Atlantic have been at pains to point out recently.132 The process of
capital formation would have continued, as would the processes of
urban growth, and of the evolution of central business, credit and
marketing functions in the five largest Victorian cities; though they

131 John R. Kellett, The Causes and Progress of the Financial Decline of the Cor­
poration of London, 1660-94 (London Ph.D. thesis, 1952) 264-315.
132 R. W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964).
B. R. Mitchell, The Coming of the Railway and United Kingdom Economic
Growth’, Journal of Economic History, XXIV (1964), 315-336.
423
 THE IMPACT OF RAILWAYS ON VICTORIAN CITIES

would have been directed into different moulds. If one bears in mind
the large practical role in urban growth played by orthodox, horse­
drawn transport, and the very broad limits within which growth was
possible without steam locomotion—at least to the two million popula­
tion total achieved by pre-railway London—the railways fall into a
more modest perspective. To stress the subordination of railway build­
ing to these larger processes, and to underline the pre-eminent impor­
tance of property ownership and land value patterns, is not to diminish
the importance of the railways, but rather to attempt to weave them
into the more general texture of urban history.

424
 Appendices
1. Land costs as an element in railway expenditure during the con"
structional phase, 1825-50.

2. Agreement between Brassey, Peto, Betts and others, and the Union
railway company.

3. A note on nineteenth-century compulsory purchase and arbitration

procedures.

4. Evidence by the general manager of the Great Eastern railway

company to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working
Classes, 1884-5.
 Appendix I

Land costs as an element in railway expenditure during the constructional

phase, 1825-50
The table below presents a revised estimate for the various elements of
railway expenditure in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Similar calculations have already been presented before, by Harold
Pollins (‘A Note on Railway Constructional Costs 1825-1850’, Econo­
mica, 19 (1952), 395-406) in an article which, though it has served for
many years as a valuable corrective to the wilder stories of ‘blackmail’
land prices, leans in the direction of understating the quantities of
investment capital consumed in land purchase.
There are, to put it as briefly as possible, two grounds for objection
to the table in Economica. First, although the 27 companies listed do
include most of the major lines, the method of assessment Pollins has
adopted—‘using figures taken from the Accounts at a date within a
short period after the completion of the individual lines’—leads to
anomalous results. For example, the total expenditure of the Liverpool
and Manchester, the Grand Junction, and the London and Birming­
ham railway companies taken from Accounts dated 31.5.30, 30.6.37
and 31.12.38 respectively, comes to £739,165, £1,496,037 and £4,751,135.
At the other end of the scale the Accounts of the Chester and Holyhead,
or the South Wales railway companies are examined for 31.12.50 and
30.6.54, and their total expenditures given as £3,223,062 and £3,546,143.
The proportions spent upon land are stated in each case, and are no
doubt individually accurate. But it makes no statistical or historical
sense to add together these sets of monetary figures, gathered at
intervals spanning twenty four years. At the time the Chester and
Holyhead, and the South Wales companies had spent three to three
and a half millions each, the three constituent companies of the L. &
N.W. amalgamation had spent not seven millions—the weight attached
427
 APPENDIX I

to them in the Economica table—but twenty millions. In other words,

the expenditure of the later, and usually smaller, companies is exag­
gerated by the wide time scale used for the selection of monetary
statements.
This difficulty is represented in the text of the article as a necessary
evil. ‘The ideal of course would be to have figures giving the total
constructional costs of the railways with the proportions spent on the
different components under the headings of land, parliamentary
expenses and permanent way expenditure. But such statistics are not
directly available.’ A table giving this information has come to light
in the course of the present research, giving the constructional and the
land costs separately, the Parliamentary expenses, and the cost of
Railway Plant for a large number of companies, in return to an order
of the House of Lords dated 3 May 1849; and the statistics concerning
the main companies are reproduced below.
Although such a return from a wide range of companies at (as nearly
as possible) the same moment of time escapes the statistical anomalies
referred to above, it is still open to the objection that it depends upon
figures supplied by the companies themselves, and which are, therefore,
subjected to lags of information, or even deliberate distortion. But
although all the items might be subjected to alteration, there is no
reason to suppose that land prices were more likely to be inflated than
other items; indeed quite the reverse, for although the engineering
expenses were occasionally exceeded, with reason, the land estimates
were often grossly exceeded without apparent reason. To deal with
technical problems gave one range of error; but to try to estimate the
land market gave quite another; and the later the project, the more
expensive the compensation charges, and the more elaborate the accom­
modation works tended to become. The Lands Clauses and the Rail­
ways Clauses Consolidation Acts, which exercised an inflationary effect
on railway land prices and compensation charges (as I have argued in
Journal of Transport History, VI (1964), 222-240), did not go onto the
statute books until 1845, and examples have been cited in the present
work of the expenses incurred in subsequent decades under the
procedures laid down in 8 Vic., c. 18, and 8 Vic., c. 20.
The second, less important objection concerns the conclusion,
suggested by a footnote in the Economica article, that the proportion
of land to total costs would gradually fall through time. No doubt,
in its broadest sense, this is perfectly true. In 1900 the land and sites
bought sixty years earlier would seem to be remarkable bargains, if
they were written down at their original cost; and this would apply as
much to railways as to any other long-term land purchasers. On the
other hand, the most spectacular and expensive laird purchases were
not over until the late 1860’s, and it is partly a measure of the high
428
 APPENDIX I

prices then paid that so many decades should elapse before the burden
of land purchase could be said to lie lightly upon the companies con­
cerned. It should also be remembered that even after the main pur­
chases were over, enlargements, ‘easements’, cut-offs and link lines
continued even up to the first decade of the twentieth century in the
major cities and their environs. So the point of interpretation still open
is that of the time at which land purchase began to fall significantly as a
proportion of total railway expenditure. It may well have been in the
late 1860’s or 1870’s; but there is certainly little evidence of it during
the period 1825-1850. Indeed, as may be seen by comparing the per­
centage in the ‘Land as % of total’ column in the table below with
their equivalent in the Economica table, the proportions spent upon
land did not generally decline in the 1840’s, but actually rose (in spite
of their greatly increased capitalisation) for some of the companies
operating from Britain’s larger cities. On the one hand, the London
and Brighton, or the Eastern Counties railway companies—both heavy
spenders on their initial land purchases—dropped one per cent to
18-1 %, and eleven per cent, to 16-6% respectively in the proportions of
their expenditures devoted to land purchase during the course of the
1840’s, whilst their overall expenditures doubled or trebled. The Midland
and Great Western companies maintained a roughly constant propor­
tion. On the other hand large companies could be cited, like the
London and North Western, and London and South Western, in which
land costs rose during the 1840’s, from 14% to 16% and from 17%
to 21-6% respectively upon capitals which had almost trebled.
It does not seem likely, therefore, that land costs fell much below
the proportion of 16|% in the two decades after 1850, and even by the
end of the century it would be surprising if they had fallen below 10 or
11 °/ ’
1 1 /O

429
 TABLE—APPENDIX I

in £000’s
Construc­ Parlia­ Total Land as Land as %
tional Law Land and mentary Engineers’ Expen­ %of of construc­
Railway Company* Cost Charges Property Expenses Charges Plant diture total tional cost

1. Manchester, Sheffield and

Lincolnshire (XVI, 414) 3,334 46 557 321 110 350 4,718 11-81 16-71
2. Glasgow, Paisley and
Greenock (XVI, 312-3) 687 13 123 30 7 73 933 13-18 17-90
3. London and Blackwall
(XVI, 315) 492 21 582 66 11 94 1,266 45-97 118-29
4. Birmingham, Wolverhampton Not
and Dudley (XVI, 294) None — 184 36 11 None Available — —
5. Birmingham, Wolverhampton and
Stour Valley (XVI, 295-6) 291 Nil 310 33 20 None 654 47-40 106-53
6. Lancashire and Yorkshire
(XVI, 237) 6,445 19 1,287 453 136 683 9,023 14-26 19-97
7. Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock
and Ayr (XVI, 80) 1,615 18 268 153 55 235 2,344 11-43 16-59
8. London and North Western
(XVI, 374-5) 13,302 143 3,153 714 290 2,075 19,677 16-02 23-70
9. East and West India Docks and
Birmingham Junction (XVI, 306) 100 16 295 11 6 None 428 68-93 295-00
10. Caledonian (XV, 22) 3,102 1 622 302 25 427 4,479 13-89 20-05
11. East Lancashire (XV, 35) 1,762 20 602 124 41 148 2,697 22-32 34-17
12. Great Western (XV, 106-7) 6,960 105 1,133 245 202 927 9,572 11-84 16-28
13. London and South Western
(XV, 124-5) 2,883 167 1,003 t 64 529 4,646 21-59 34-79
14. Manchester South Junction
(XV, 137) 313 14 200 3 11 34 575 34-78 63-90
15. North Staffordshire
(XV, 142-3) 2,250 33 403 153 48 204 3,091 13-04 17-91
16. South Staffordshire
(XV, 180-1) 341 5 152 69 8 60 635 23-94 44-57
17. East Anglian (XV, 235) 750 4 270 73 23 94 1,214 22-24 36-00
18. Eastern Union (XV, 243-4) 1,158 47 172 62 28 132 1,599 10-76 14-85
19. Edinburgh and Glasgow
(XV, 247) 1,503 13 396 145 39 304 2,400 16-50 26-35
20. Great Northern (XV, 258) 2,292 122 985 t 85 222 3,706 26-58 42-98
21. Midland (XV, 288-9) 9,397 119 1,764 560 288 1,714 13,842 12-74 18-77
22. South Eastern (XV, 314-5) 5,375 138 1,459 420 116 525 8,033 18-16 27-14
23. Eastern Counties (XV, 357) 4,952 162 1,276 251 214 823 7,678 16-62 25-77
24. London, Brighton and South
Coast (XV, 419) 4,002 297 1,097 t 118 552 6,066 18-08 27-41
25. York and North Midland
(XV, 435) 1,998 21 547 72 93 400 3,131 17-47 27-38
26. York, Newcastle and Berwick
(XV, 442-3) 2,505 7 400 93 39 667 3,711 10-78 15-97

GRAND TOTAL 77,809 1,551 19,240 4,389 2,088 11,272 116,349 16-54 24-73

* In brackets, the reference to H.L. Accounts and Papers, 1849, XVI and 1850 XV.
t Included under ‘Law Charges’.
 Appendix II

‘Memorandum of Agreement between the Glasgow and South Western

Railway Company of the first part the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway
Company of the second part the City of Glasgow Union Railway
Company of the third part and Charles Waring Esquire of Victoria
Street Westminster contractor taking burden on himself for Thomas
Brassey messieurs Peto and Betts John Kelk and Messrs. Waring
Brothers all of London Contractors of the fourth part.
‘With reference to the Heads of Arrangement entered into between
and among the parties hereto of the first, second and third parts dated
7th May 1864 of which all the parties hereto approve it is hereby
agreed as follows viz;
T. The fourth party agree to subscribe for and take so much of the
capital of the City of Glasgow Union Railway Company as the Direc­
tors of that Company may be unable to issue to the public.
‘2. The fourth party to have the contract for all the Works and stations
excepting the Edinburgh and Glasgow Company’s goods station at the
College (which that Company are to form at their own cost) on terms
to be hereafter settled by the Engineers of the Glasgow and South
Western, the Edinburgh and Glasgow and the Union Companies.
The prices to be fixed by the Engineers in conjunction with the said
Charles Waring on the basis of yielding a profit to the Contractors of
ten per cent. In the event of any difference of opinion among the
Engineers and the said Charles Waring as to prices the same shall be
referred to Thomas Harrison, C.E. of London.
‘3. The City of Glasgow Union Harbour Tramways Bill to be
withdrawn and in the event of the loss of the Union Railway Bill by
its being rejected by Parliament the Glasgow and South Western and
the Edinburgh and Glasgow Companies each to pay one third of the
432
 APPENDIX II

expenses including the expenses of the Tramways Bill not exceeding

£1,500 to each Company.
4. The fourth party shall bear one-third of the expense of the City of
Glasgow Union Railway and the City of Glasgow Union Harbour
Tramway Bills should the Union Railway Bill be lost but not exceeding
£6,000 sterling.
Tn witness whereof the several parties hereto have subscribed this
Memorandum this 7th day of May 1864
(signed for) Thomas Brassey
Peto and Betts
John Kelk and Waring Brothers
Charles Waring
Jas. B. Stewart
James King
Walter Macfarlane’
HLRO., Min., H.C., 1864, 13 May, p. 275, S.C. on Union Railway.

433
 Appendix III

A note on nineteenth-century compulsory purchase and arbitration

procedures
From the earliest railway projects it was necessary, to prevent any
scheme authorised by Parliament from being indefinitely delayed by
individual owners of plots along the projected route, for compulsory
powers of acquisition to be simultaneously granted. This practice had
already evolved under the Canal Bills, but was systematised in 1845
by the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act and the Railways Clauses
Consolidation Act. Each individual proprietor was carefully listed in
the Books of Reference and a description and topographical record of
his property deposited with the Select Committee minutes, and a
general procedure for purchasing the lands involved was also laid
down. This is where the information from central sources ends.
What the properties might be worth, how adjacent residences or
businesses might be affected, has been left to indirect evidence or to
conjecture.
In practice, of course, the story did not end but began with the
sanctioning of each scheme. The next step was to send a formal printed
notice to each owner informing him that his land would be required,
and inviting him to tender an estimate of the value of the property
affected both directly and by indirect loss, deterioration or inter­
sectional damage (8 Vic., c. 19, clauses 17-19). If this claim was
considered acceptable the deal was settled quickly between the property­
owner and the railway company, and the solicitors’ records merely
note the agreed sum and the conveyancing. If his claim was considered
excessive then, under the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act, arbiters
(usually local builders or valuators) would be appointed by each party
and would submit their cases to a mutually-agreed ‘oversman’ who
would finally decide the award. The oversman was empowered by the
434
 APPENDIX III

Lands Clauses Act to petition the Sheriff Court for writs summoning
necessary witnesses and his Decree Arbitral was legally binding. The
procedures laid down in English and Scottish law by the statutes 8 Vic.,
c. 18, and 8 Vic., c. 19, respectively were virtually identical. The
terminology is slightly different: the ‘oversman’ in Scotland is described
as the ‘umpire’ in England. Clauses restraining municipal corporations
from selling land without the approbation of the T reasury, and specifying
how notice shall be served on them, are included in the English Lands
Clauses Act. Slightly different arrangements are made for expenses.
The basic procedures of arbitration or Jury Trial remain the same in
each country.
To assist the oversman in reaching his valuation each arbiter adduced
opinions and estimates by at least eight or ten builders, valuators,
owners of comparable sites or businesses, etc. By the nature of the case
these all tended to be men with local knowledge, some with railway
claims of their own pending. The method of valuation they adopted
is described by one as follows: ‘After examining the property and
measuring the buildings I made myself acquainted with the sales in the
neighbourhood for the last 10 years. These sales, especially the volun­
tary ones, I consider the best test of the value of ground.’ These sales
of neighbouring property were used as a species of ‘upset’ or ‘reserve’
price, below which the value of the property in question should not
be allowed to descend.
The alternative to arbitration, which the vendors could elect to use
if they wished, was the Jury Trial; a lengthy and expensive procedure
adopted only when the size of the property at issue justified it. On the
other hand Jury Trials could be even more favourable to the vendor,
for the Jurors had the power to decide an award quite arbitrarily, as if
they were awarding damages in a civil case rather than determining
property values (8 Vic., c. 19, clauses 35-54).
The preparation of material for these Jury Trials, or to put before
the arbiters and oversman, was the task of firms of local solicitors;
each firm being employed by the railway company to carry through
all the negotiations for a particular line or section. Their papers there­
fore include ‘precognitions’ or briefings for witnesses, valuators’
reports, sometimes with maps and tables of land prices in a neighbour­
hood over the previous decade or two, reports of mining engineers on
the value of minerals under the site in question, together with other
papers.
It may be helpful to those wishing to use solicitors’ records to identify
and place in sequence the documents likely to be found for each case.
Claim, Answer to Claim, provide a definition of the area, and the type
of business involved and state each party’s point of view. Reports,
Valuations, Maps are the next in sequence; documents by architects,
435
 APPENDIX III

mining engineers, valuators for which a fee was charged. Notes of

Evidence and the more formal Precognitions briefed witnesses. Mis­
cellaneous Searches for property titles, Lists of documents and witnesses
to be summoned by writ, internal Memoranda or summaries of the
case in progress with suggested compromises etc. follow, together with
Memorials for the Opinion of Counsel, and Counsel's Replies, consulting
qualified opinion on the finer points in the case. Printed Memoranda
for the Use of Witnesses may follow, and sometimes Proofs of the
Hearing summarising the course of the arbitration of trial. Finally,
Notes on the Proposed Award give the outcome of each case.

436
 Appendix IV

10,288. While we are on this point I should like to ask you this; when
a new district is opened up, and filled with workmen’s houses, what
conditions do you require before putting on extra workmen’s trains,
or giving them the privilege of a lower payment; do you require that a
certain number of them should avail themselves of it as a rule ?—We
object very strongly to the granting of these workmen’s tickets from
any other districts than those from whence they issue at the present time.
10,289. Do you know that a new district is being formed by the Artisans
Dwellings’ Company at Green Lanes at a place called Noel Park,
close to the Green Lanes Station?—I know it very well.
10,290. You are aware that there is to be a population there eventually
of something like from 18,000 to 20,000 people; will it be probable
that the workmen’s trains will be available from that part?—If the
Great Eastern directors have the settlement of that question, there
certainly will not be workmen’s trains; but of course the Board of
Trade, under the Act passed last session, have got powers to deal with
a case of that kind. At the same time we recognise the importance of
encouraging dwellings like those that have been and are now in course
of erection at Noel Park, and we now issue at that station third-class
monthly season tickets. You will find that a man with one of these
third-class monthly season tickets can get to London at a reduction
of about 25 per cent off the price of an ordinary return ticket.
10,291. Will you tell the Commission what the charge is for a monthly
season ticket; I mean the workmen’s season ticket from Green Lanes.
I suppose it will probably be double the twopenny fare you charge?—
More than double. I have got it here; it is 12s 6d; that is the price for
a third-class monthly season ticket between Green Lanes, which is Noel
Park, and London, and that is equal to a reduction of about 25 per cent
off the ordinary return ticket.
437
 APPENDIX IV

10,292. If you were to give the same privilege from Green Lanes as
you do from Edmonton and Enfield now it would no doubt attract
workmen in greater numbers there; but would it not also by so doing
increase your general traffic as well?—It would do us a very large
amount of injury, and would cause the same public annoyance and
inconvenience upon the Green Lanes line, as exists already upon the
Stamford Hill and Walthamstow lines.
10,293. Do you imagine that by denying to the people in this Noel
Park Estate the same privilege that they have at Edmonton you would
tend to the securing of a better class of people at Noel Park; a higher
class of people?—I have no doubt of that; I imagine that no one living
in Noel Park could desire to possess the same class of neighbours as
the residents of Stamford Hill have in the neighbourhood of St. Anne’s
Road. The reports current in the district of the men residing there are
of a character that would deter anyone from wishing for neighbours of
that kind in any part.
10,294. Do you think that a considerable number of those using your
monthly season tickets from Noel Park would prefer to pay more,
rather than have the rush of the penny train travellers?—I should
think so, and I hope so.

Evidence of William Birt, General Manager of the Great Eastern

railway company to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Working Classes, H.C., 1884-5, XXX, QQ. 10288-94.

438
Index
 Index

Aagesen, Aage, 311 Ardwick, 174, 357

Abandonment, warrants of, 79 Artizan’s Dwelling Inquiry, 134
Accommodation works, 210, 277, Ashford, 35In.
400, 402 Ashley, W. J., 96/z.
Acock’s Green, 363-4, 413, 415 Ashted, 362
Acton, 63 Ashton, 172
Acworth, W. M., 60//., 64, 83//., Ashworth, W., Gin., 323//., 376//.,
84n., 85, 95, 260//., 271//. 387, 411, 422//.
Adam, Robert, 253 Aspinall, James, 175//.
Adderley, James, 133//. Aston, 349, 362-3
Adshead, Joseph, 150, 154//., 155 Auden, G., 131//.
Agar Town, 341-2 Avonmouth, 195
Agar, William, 342
Aigburth, 355-6
Aintree, 291 Bagwell, P. S., Gin., 74//.
Airdrie, 93 Bahnhofstrasse, 306
Albert Buildings, Lambeth, 329 Baines, T., 120/:., 188//., 190//., 204,
Alderley Edge, 357 319n., 355, 356//.
Alexander, H. C., 352//. Baker, H., 158//., 323//., 325//., 338//.
Alexandra Palace Estate Company, Baker, J. C. Y., 263
418 Balsall Heath, 362
Allan, C. M., 69//. Bancroft, James, 107, 111, 114-15
Allen, Cecil J., 260/:., 263 Banfield, Frank, 247//., 254//.
Allen, G. C., 348//. Bannatyne, A. & D. J., 212, 225,
Allerton, 415 231//.
Altrincham, 156 Banning, C. B., 305
Amalgamation, 6, 10, 64, 142, Barber, Robert, 114
161-3, 222, 228, 278-9, 399 Barker, T. C., In., 46//., 50//., 51//.,
Amersham, 397 73/?., 75, 80, 116//., 250//., 255//.,
Ancoats, 338, 341, 343-4, 408//. 257//., 261//., 263, 265//., 267//.,
Anderston, 293 275//., 279//., 281//., 288//., 292//.,
Arbitration awards, 126, 132, 184-6, 313//., 317-18, 360//., 365//., 372//.
214-15, 232, 391, 393, 435 374//., 379, 398//.

Q 441
 INDEX

Barman, Christian, 5n., 14m. Birmin gham—continued

Barnes, E. G., 136m., 263, 266m., 134; Bull Ring and High St,
268m., 277m., 321m. 139; the Froggeries, Peck
Barnet, 367 Lane, the Inkleys, the
Barrow, 3, 195 Gullett, 140-1
Bartholomew, Harland, 290 Birmingham Omnibus Company,
Bastow, Richard, 150, 339-40 362
Bateman, J., 151m., 153m., 179m., Birmingham Small Arms, 348
247m. Blackburn, 297m.
Bateman, J. F., 307-9, 346m. Blackfriars Bridge, 279
Battersea, 274 Blackie, John, 118
‘Battersea tangle’, the, 265, 294 Bloomsbury, 250-2, 319
Baxendale, Joseph, 39 Blythswood, 301-3, 308, 361
Bayswater, 319 Board of Health, 106
Bazalgette, J. W., 33, 49, 51 Board of Trade, 55, 144, 227m., 329,
Bazeley, Thomas, 18 331, 374, 387, 399m.
Beale, Samuel, 120, 138m. correspondence with, 82m.,
Beattock, 222 239-40
Beeching, Dr., 62 evidence by, 53-4, 78, 87
Beesley, M. E., 32 meetings with, 99
Belgravia, 125 memorials to, 18m., 70
Bellahouston, 405 Railway Department of, 103,
Bellamy, C. R., 360 105-7, 181, 272-3, 280
Bellman, H., 409m. Reports by, 9-10, 30, 172-3
Bennett, Aiderman, 205 Bolton, 94, 172, 296
Bennison, Jonathan, 175, 177m., Bond, Maurice, xvi
350m. Boodle, H. T., 258
Berwick, 222 Books of Reference, 28, 127-9, 145,
Besant, W., 253m., 254m., 256m., 152, 183, 198, 211, 238, 249, 262,
257m., 259m., 261m., 278m. 268, 271, 333, 434, see also Plans
Best, G. F. A., 258m. and Sections
Bexleyheath, 402
Booth, Charles, 55m., 56, 95, 282,
Beyer, Peacock & Co., 346-7
288m., 293, 337-9, 344m„ 353, 373,
Binnie, Thomas, 210, 236, 302m. 399-400, 410m., 411
Birkenhead, 202-3, 234 Booth, James, 49, 280m.
Birmingham, 1, 3, 11-13, 19, 94,
Booth, William, councillor, 113, 115
107-9, 120-1, 125-49, 287, 291,
Bootle, 179, 355
302-3, 347-50, 360-5, 413-15
Bordesley, 349
Corporation, 10, 120, 137
Botwood, H. A., 363m.
Public Works Committee, 128
Street Commissioners, 12, 120, Boult, Joseph, 305
139, 303 Boundary Question, Birmingham,
Livery St, New Hall, Bell’s 133, 362
Barn, and Birmingham Bourne, John, 250, 258
Heath, 128; Paradise and Bournville, 352/363
Navigation St, 130; Curzon Bowden, 357
St, 132-3; Adderley Park, Box, C. E., 201m.
442
 INDEX

Bramley-Moore, Mr., 107//., 191 Canal companies—continued

Bribery, see Influence Grosvenor, 15, 274
Bridge approaches, 111, 225 Hertford Union, 350
Bridgeton, 354 Leeds and Liverpool, 131//.,
Briggs, Asa, 1//., 3/2., 69/2. 188, 350
Bright, John, 273 Old River, 171
Brighton, 365, 384 Regent’s, 350, 351/2.
Bristol, 135, 233 Rochdale, 15, 156, 167-8, 350
British Association, 128/2., 203/2., Union, 231
296/z., 303/z., 320/2., 348, 356/z., Worcester and Birmingham,
361/2., 363 131-2, 351/2.
British Railways as Business Enter­ Canning, Lord, 237
prises, 96 Cantelows, prebendal manor of,
Britton, John, 256/2. 246-7
Brixton junction, 86 Capital, 420
Broad gauge, 19, 63, 120, 135-6, destroyed as well as created, 31
138, 203 for building, 340, 412-13
Brodrick, G. C., 403/2. see also Railway capital
Broughton, 357 Cardiff, 205
Buchanan, Walter, M.P., 117 Carlisle, 3, 221-2
Buchanan Report, the, xv, 57 Carriages, see Private carriages
Building cycles, 360, 407-8, 412-13, Carrick, John, 216/t., 225, 229
419/2. Carter, E. F., 3/2.
Bull, G. B. G., 249/z. Carting, 196, 232, 252, 279-80,
Bunce, J. T., 140 288-9, 307-18, 313-5, 321, 346,
Burchell, William, 73, 317-18 349, 351, 371, 388, see also
Burdett-Coutts, W., 61 Omnibus and carting businesses
Burns, John, 396 Cash, C. G., and Mitchell, A., 238/z.
Burton, James, 250 Cashmore, H. M., 127/2.
Bury, 172 Casual labour, market for, 94, 293,
330, 338-40, 343, 366
Catalogue of the Norton Papers, 133
Cabs, 16, 252, 282, 287-8, 312, 315 Cellar-dwellings, 5, 7-8, 152
congestion caused by, 40, 360 Central business districts, see
Cadbury, Richard, 352 Districts
Cairncross, A. K., 407/2., 408/2. Chadwick, Edwin, 53, 371, 390/z.
Calcroft, H. G., 54 Chaloner, W. H., 3/2.
Camberwell, 344, 366 Chamberlain, Joseph, 54, 69, 109/?.,
Camden Town, 5, 125, 248, 268, 329, 421-2
313, 321, 342, 366 Chandler, George, 175/z., 204/2.
Campbell, R. H., 26/2. Channel Tunnel, 279
Canal companies, 15, 26, 31, 130-2, Chaplin and Horne, 39, 280, 314
155 6, 187-8, 349-51 Chaplin, W. J., 39
Ardrossan, 210, 216 Charitable trusts, 125, 129-30, 158,
Ashton, 156, 350 168, 187, see also under names
Birmingham and Wolver­ of Trusts
hampton, 130-1, 350 Cheap ticket travel, 18, 52, 55,
Bridgewater, 156, 190 70-2, 87-99, 149, 260, 324, 331,
443
 INDEX

Cheap ticket travel—continued Clyde Trustees, 109, 214-15, 225,

342, 352, 367, 374, 376, 379-82, 226, 233-4
389, 395, 406, 417 Coal merchants, 33-4
Cheap travel pressure groups, 56, Coal trade, 82-3, 233, 321, 388
358, 375 Coatbridge, 93, 353, 355
Checkland, S. G., xvi, 213n., 349/?. Coatbridge, Iron Works, 353
Cheetham Hill, 357 Cobb, H. S., xvi, 28/?.
Chelmsford, 388 Cobbett, William, 365
Chesshire, John, 126 Cobden Treaty, the, 279
Childe-Pemberton, W., 134/?. Coddington, Captain, 105
Childwall, 356-7 Coleman, Terry, 72/?.
Chorley, 172 Collection and storage, 15-16, 82-5,
Cities, 314, 320-1, 339
and differences in traffic, 148 Commerce, Chambers of, 53, 63
and land values, 323 Manchester, 18
and railway ‘influence’, 121-2 Liverpool, 18, 190, 192
and schemes, 145 Birmingham, 32/?., 131, 351/?.
and tram services, 359-60 Commissioners, of Railways, 82, 83,
an entrepot, 203-4 84/?., 240, 375
as organisms, 300, 409 Common Law, 27-8, 53, 403, 420-2,
a system of cities, 172 see also Railway law cases
comparisons between, 1, 10, ‘Commonsense’, 139
18-19, 148, 173, 204, 244-5, Commuters, 46, 63, 92-5, 149, 251,
265 260, 301, 354-5, 357, 364-6,
economic basis of, 1,3 368, 370, 373-4, 379, 383, 400,
effect of railway decisions upon, 410, 417, see also Season tickets
64-5 Compensation, to owners of Real
food supply to, 2, 320-1 Property, 28, 37, 109/?, 126, 262,
resemblance between, 295-6 277, 334. 400, 414, 434-5, see
City, the European, xv also Tenants, Arbitration
Clapham, 366, 401, 412 awards
Clapham, J. H., 29/?., 91 Competition, see Railway
Clapham Junction, 86/?., 344/?. companies
Clark, Colin, 323/?., 349 Compulsory purchase, 17, 26-8,
Clark, P. L., 148/?. 126, 130-1, 138, 215, 254, 261-2,
Clayton, R., 300/?., 383/?. 331-3, 353, 391-2, 395/?., 397,
Clearing House, 81-3 403, 414, 434
Clegg, Herbert, 158/?. Conzen, M. R. G., 311
Clerks, 94, 252, 257, 288, 301, 353, Cooney, E. W., 407/?.
357-8, 366, 372-4, 379-80, 401 Copenhagen tunnel, 96
Clerk of Public Bills, 329 Coppock, D. J., 407/?.
Clinker, C. R., 135/?. Coppock, J. T., 247/?., 248/?., 250/?.,
Clouston, Peter, 115-16 253/?., 263/?., 300/?., 319/?., 348/?.,
Clutton, John, 28, 403 350/?., 371/?., 385/?., 397/?., 415-16
Clutton, Ralph, 258/?. Costelloe, B. F..£., 293/?., 384, 386
Clydebank, 93, 355 Cost-benefit analysis, see Social
Clyde, river crossing, 68, 227 costs and benefits
444
 INDEX

Costs, comparative, of rail and Dickson Poynder, Sir John, 396

road, 39-40, 196 Didsbury, 357
‘Cotton famine’, the, 194 Districts,
Course, Edwin, 16n., 242n., 255/?., central business, 10, 155, 167-8,
256m., 257/?., 259m., 263, 269/?., 290-1, 295-311, 323, 346,
271n., 274//., 275/?., 294, 332/7., 353, 369, 373, 419
370/7., 373/7., 383, 397n„ 402, central business, movement of,
410/7., 411/7. 299, 301, 305, 307, 311
Cox, R. C. W., 411/7., 416-17 central business, subdivisions
Craft workshops, 147-8, 299, 346, within, 299-300, 303, 305
349 central business, traffic within,
Crawford, G., 219/z. 312-16, 323, 346, 353, 369,
Crewe, 3, 137, 159, 347, 351//., 397 373, 419
Crosby, 357 inner, 337-9, 342-3, 358, 381
Cross, Richard, 240, 328/7. zoning of, 133-4, 258, 274,
Croston, James, 155/z., 160 293, 338-40, 342, 384-5
Croxteth, 180 Docks,
Croydon, 370, 411, 416 Glasgow, 214, 232-3, 314
Crumpsail, 94 Liverpool, 190-1, 203-7, 314
Crystal Palace, 273 Railway sponsored, 195, 206-7,
Cubitt, Lewis, 6, 13 399
Cubitt, Thomas, 250-1, 254 West India and London, 26
Cumnock, 221 Dore, Gustav, and Jerrold,
Cunnison, J., 290/7. Blanchard, 345
Cut-and-cover, 252, 281, 289/7. Dover, 279
Dow, G., 69/?., 77/?., 162/?., 163/?.,
263
Dalhousie, Lord, 105-6, 237 Dreghorn, David, 118, 225-6
Davies, H. D., 327/?., 335, 392, Duddeston viaduct, 19, 133, 143
394-5 Dukinfield, 172
Deane, Phyllis, 60/7., 79/?., 81/?., Dumbarton, 93
420/7. Dumfries, 221
Demolition, 54-5, 68-9, 72, 115, Duncan, John, 259
229, 236, 309-10, 324-36, 339 Dundee, 205
Dent, Robert K., 362/7. Dyos, H. J., 54, 55/?., 68, 93/?., 263,
Denton, J. B., 400-1, 418 325, 326/?., 327, 331/?., 332/?., 335,
Denton, William, 54, 309, 329, 366, 369/?., 377/?., 408-9, 41 In.
332-3, 352-3
Depression,
the ‘Great Depression’, 17 Ealing, 63, 412
Derby, 3, 137, 350 Eastleigh, 351/?.
Derby, Lord, 330-1, see also Eccles, 357
Landowners Edge, Charles, 139
Derby papers, 152, 179 Edgbaston, 12, 125, 132, 360-1,
Dew, George, 381 408/7.
Diamond, D. R., 301n. Edgehill, 292
Dickens, Charles, 26, 248, 282, 289, Edmonton, 371, 376-7, 387-8,390/?.,
331, 340-1, 366 410, 412, 418, 437

445
 INDEX

Edwards, P. J., 69/?., 28In., 306/?. Engineers—continued

Egg, Augustus, 345 Vignoles, Charles, 2, 7, 13/?.,
Ellis, C. Hamilton, 68/?., 321 165, 271/?.
Ellis, Michael, 178 Entail, see Settled estates
Elrington, C. R., 363/?. Epsom, 370
Elrington, C. R. and Tillott, P. M., Epstein, Bart J., 290
303 Erdington, 362-3
Employment, offered by railways, 3, Estate Bills, 247, 250/?., 257
288, 340 Estate developers, 2, 125-6, 132-3,
Employment patterns, 204, 242, 153-5, 176-80, 209-15, 245,
353, 368, 409, 412, 416 247-55, 257-8, 261-2, 333, 363,
Enclosure awards, 127, 132/z. 394, 396, 398-9, 402-4, 413
Enclosure Bills, 244, 257, 422 Estate Maps, 127-8, 150, 153/7.,
Enclosure Bill procedure, 158, 393 155/?., 158/?., 214
Enclosure and Tithe Commissioners, Everitt, Allan E., 132/?.
403-4 Eversley, D. E. C., 3/?., 347/?., 348/?.,
Engineers, 408/?.
Baker, Benjamin, 59 Everton, 175, 305, 356
Blair, James Ferrie, 76-7, 222 Eviction and rehousing, 55, 115-16,
Brunel, I. K., 12, 256 168, 201, 325, 327, 330-1, 334-5,
Brydone, Walter M., 77, 193, 397
201 Excursion trains, 88-90, 221, 358/?.,
Cunningham, George, 216, 377, 384
228/?., 236, 333 Extension of Powers bills, 418
Fowler, John, 2, 14, 49, 59, 73, Eyes, Charles, 175
76-7, 201-2, 221-2, 265,
273-4, 317
Gilbert, Francis, 398 Factories, 346-50, 352-3
Gooch, Thomas, 151 Failsworth, 94
Hawkshaw, John, 2, 14, 49, Falkner, Robert, 113
52/?., 76, 81, 103/7., 157, 216, Fares policy, 53, 133, 136, 148-9,
259, 280, 292, 294-5 192, 240-1, 267, 324, 359, 363,
Locke, Joseph, 13, 16, 78/?., 367, 372-6, 386-8, 395, 399, 411,
186, 200, 222 see also Cheap ticket travel
Martin, Henry, 261 Farnie, D. A., 296/?., 307/?., 310/?.
Miller, John, 210, 215-16, 225 Farrer, T. H., 53, 105/?., 106
Niddell, Charles, 277-8 Faucher, Leon, 171-2, 298/?., 358
Rastrick, J. U., 159, 165 Finchley, 367, 374
Sacre, Charles, 2, 168/7., 169 Finnieston, 214
Sinclair, Robert, 260 Finsbury Park, 418/?.
Stephenson, George, 2, 7-8, Fleet river, 317
131, 159, 164, 186, 197-8 Fleetwood, 195, 399
Stephenson, Robert, 2, 5, 12, Fleming, Peter, 349/?.
138/7., 141/7., 142, 247, 260-1, Fogel, R. W., 423/?.
332/?. Folkestone, 386
Thomson, James, 200 Forsyth, W., xv\ 301/?.
Tite, William, 42, 44, 49/7., 276, Forwood, W. B., 192, 195-6, 203
323-4 Foster, C. D., 32

446
 INDEX

Fowler, Robinson, 114 G1 asgo w—continued

Franchise, 54, 102, 332, 384, 422 Stobcross, 216; Vennel &
Francis, J., 29//. Havannah, 218; Kelvinbank,
Frangopulo, N. J., 350//. 220; Wynds, 228; Shields Rd,
Fraud, 29-30 Saltmarket, Gallowgate, 235;
Fraudulent prospectus, 117 Wynds, 238; West End,
Fraudulent subscription contracts, 301-3; Gallowgate, Tron-
76-8 gate, Jamaica St, Port
Freeman, T. W., 296/2., 310//., 357/2. Dundas, 314; Argyle St,
Free Trade, 204-7, 279 315-16
Friendly and Benefit Building Glass, R., 347/2., 366/?., 376/2., 383/7.,
Societies, 409-10, 417, 423 41 In.
Frontages, street, 47, 152, 229, 236 Gloucester, 135, 205
Fulham, 398, 405, 410 Goole, 195
Fuller, Francis, 276 Gorbals, 218, 220, 292
Gordon, H. H., 360
Gorton, 346-7
Gains, J. F., 234/z. Gourvish, T. R., 62/z.
Galt, William, 53, 90 Govan, 93
Garston, 195, 292 Grafton, Duke of, 246, 247//.
Gatty, Charles T., 254/?. Graham, Sir James, 156
General Post Office, Grainger, Henry, 18/z.
Birmingham, 140, 302 Grantham, John, 200-1, 204-5
Liverpool, 305-6 Grassendale, 356, 415
London, 33 Graunt, John, 299
Manchester, 311 Gray, Charles, 233
Gibson, Rev. T., 37 Green, W., 150, 155/2.
Gibson, T. Milner, 18/z. Grenfell, C. P., 180-2
Gilfillan, J. B. S., 290/z. Greville, M. D., 161/z., 189/2., 197/z.,
Gill, Conrad, 303 201/2., 202
Gladstone, Mr. 18, 105 Griffiths, R. P., 194/2., 202/2.
Glasgow, 1, 3, 6, 19, 68, 76-7, 79, Grimsby, 166, 399
93, 101, 107-9, 115-19, 208-44, Grinling, C. H., 96, 251//., 263, 372,
288, 290-3, 296, 301-2, 308, 326, 373n., 374
354-5
Corporation, 13, 101, 115-19,
217-18, 225, 229, 239-40 Habbakuk, H. J., 407/2.
Dean of Guild Court, 315-16 Hackney, 373
see also Town clerks Hackwood, F. W., 362/2.
Wynds, 115; High St, 116; Hadfield, Charles, 351/z.
Gilmorehill, 116; George Sq, Haedy, Christopher, 250-1
117; Town Moor, 209; Halifax, 172
Abbotsford Place, Plantation, Hall, Peter, 263, 348-9, 385/2.
212; Mavisbank, Greenbank, Hamilton, 93, 228
Broomhill, 213; Yorkhill, Hammersmith, 366, 402
Thornbank, 214; Broomie- Hampstead, 417
law, Blythswood Sq, 215; Handsworth, 347, 362-4
Wellington St, High St, Harborne, 362-3
447
 INDEX

Hardwicke, Earl, 404 House rents—continued

Harper, Edgar, 370, 377-80, 390ra., 390, 401, 409//., 410
418 system of renting, 177-8
Harpurhey, 357 Hovenden, T. H., 333//.
Harrison, Michael, 254n. Hoylake, 355
Hastings, 386 Hoyt, Homer, 393//.
Hayes, 63 Hudson, George, 318
Hayes, Charles, 392-3 Hull, 166, 205, 233
Hayward, James, 156 Hunt, B. C., 26//.
Hayward, Joseph, 39 Hunt’s Bank station, Manchester,
Haywood, William, 49-50 see Stations, Victoria station,
Heaton Park, 94 Manchester
Helps, Arthur, 78 Hutton, William, 128//
Hennock, E. P., 102n. Huyton, 389
Heron, Joseph, 110-13 Hyde, 172
Higgins, J. W., 36-8
Higson, John, 347
Hill, Octavia, 54, 329 Ilford, 369
Hill, Rowland, 53, 7In. Improvement schemes, 33-5, 43, 325
Hill, Thomas, 289 Improvement Trust, Glasgow, 69,
H. M. Woods and Forests, Com­ 109, 118, 217
missioners of, 35-6 Income levels, 242, 373, 377, 383,
Hodges, W., 32//., 82n., 393, 422/z. 386, 401, 407, 409, 412, see also
Hoggan, Andrew, 217 Standards of living
Hole, James, 91, 92//., 95//., 104//. Industry,
Hollingshead, J., 29//., 90//., 281-2, and dispersion, 352-3
287//., 294, 313, 317, 341//. and land use, 290-1
Holloway, 366 and location, 303, 324, 346-53
Holme, James, 185 and railway facilities, 141-2
Holme, Samuel, 205, 306 and railway linkages, 148,171-2
Holt, G. O., 161//., 189//., 197//., and railway taxation, 389
201//., 202 and the central business dis­
Holyhead, 195, 399 trict, 298
Horne, Benjamin, 39-40 an industrialist’s view of rail­
Horne, William, 33 ways, 212
Hornsey, 373-4, 418//. heavy industry and rail access,
Hosking, William, 36-8, 41 16, 148, 351
Hoskins, W. G., 248//. manufacturing and service, 3
Hotels, 140, 165, 248, 252, 302, 305, savings to, 40
310-11, 319-20 size of unit, 26, 346
Hough, Henry T., 175//., 176//. Industry, cyclical depression and,
Houghton, C., 133//., 363//. 147-8
Houldsworth, Henry, 107//., 115, 170 ‘Influence’,
Hours of work, 91, 377, 407 and landowners, 180-3
Households, 368-70, 372-3 and M.P.s, 103-4, 106
heads of, 365, 377 and Municipal Corporations,
House rents, 36, 42, 54, 56-7, 63, 102, 107-22
95, 251, 331, 335, 352, 361, 371, see also Railway lobby
448
 I N DEX

Innkeepers, 31, 139, 314, 319 Journals and Newspapers—continued

Institute of Surveyors, 401 Herapath’s Railway Magazine,
Insurance companies, 16, 26, 312 72
Isard, W., 419/z. Illustrated London News, 65, 68,
Islington (Birmingham), 360 324m, 330, 345m.
Islington (Liverpool), 306 Liberal Review, Liverpool,
Islington (London), 272, 366, 373 195-6
Liverpool Mercury, 120, 177m.,
197-9
London Echo, 375m
James, James, 140 Manchester City News, 159/z.,
Jensen, Alec G., 362m. 161m., 163m, 170m., 295m.,
Johnson, James H., 368, 383/z., 385 347m.
Johnson, John, 237, 253 Manchester Guardian, 70, 109m.,
Joint purse agreements, 66, 68, 163, 110, 174, 194, 347m,
226-7 Morning Herald, 27
Joint-stock undertakings, 26-7 Penny Magazine, 313
Jones, Richard, 41 The Property Advertiser, 361m.
Jordanhill, 211 Punch, 26, 292, 331
Journal of Transport History, 54 Quarterly Review, 95, 313
Journals and Newspapers, con­ Railway Times, 129m.
temporary, The Times, 294, 330, 334, 396,
Birmingham Daily Mail, 133, 412
361m., 363-4, 414-15 Wolverhampton Herald, 144
Birmingham Mail, 348m.
Birmingham Weekly Post, 127m., Kansas City, 290
141m Keen, P. A., 395m.
Bradshaw’s Shareholders' Guide, Kellett, John R., 67m., 108m., 183m.,
79/z. 212m., 292m., 394m., 423m.
The Builder, 297m., 298m., 392m., Kelsey, Richard, 38-40
395??., 401m., 404/?., 418/?. Kelvinside, 125, 354
Building Societies' Gazette, the, Kennedy, Gilbert, 213
413 Kensington, 398, 402, 410
Burke's Peerage, 254 King’s Norton, 348, 363, 413-14,416
Citizen, the Glasgow, 234-5 Kingston, 370
Contemporary Review, 407m. Kirkdale, 93, 175-6, 179, 291, 356
Daily Courier, Liverpool, 185-6 Knight, Charles, 31/z., 49m, 269/z.,
Daily Post, Liverpool, 185/?., 271m.
206/z. Knowle, 413
Dumfries Courier, 221 Knowsley, 178-9, 180, 356
The Economist, 27, 29-30, 49/?., Knutsford, 357, 415
71, 78, 83m., 84m., 104-5, 196,
397, 402m. Laing, Samuel, 104, 105-6, 273, 383
Edinburgh Review, 26 Lambeth, 15, 35, 257, 344, 410
Fortnightly Review, 26, 104/z., Land, central, 2, 10, 15, 27, 86, 99,
109m., 422m. 128, 140, 145-6, 167-8, 184, 229,
Grand Junction Railway Guide, 244-5, 251, 265, 283, 296-8, 323,
139m. 327, 392

q* 449
 INDEX

Land—continued Landowners—continued
central, availability of, 301-2, Brassey, Thomas, 186
305 Brewers’ Company, the, 248-9,
central, competition for, 299, 403
302, 305, 308-9 Bridgewater, Duke of, 178
see also Districts Byron, Eleanora, 154—5, 164
Land costs, 4, 8-9, 267, 269, 278 Calthorpe, Lord, 132, 209, 249,
burden of acquisition, 64, 80-1, 360
272, 275, 277-8 Camden, Earl, 247-8, 261
compared with constructional Campbell, James of Possil, 231
costs, 11, 427-31 Campbells, the, of Blythswood,
offset, 41 208-10, 212, 215-16
see also Land, surplus to rail­ Canterbury, Archbishop of, 15,
way requirements 257
Land hunger, railway, 7, 11, 131, Catell, Thomas, 145-6/?.
289-95 Clowes, Rev. John, 157
Land Improvement companies, 404 Cocks, Charles, see Somers,
Land market, xv, 11, 65, 145, 322, Lord
391, 399, 405-19, 421 Colmore, Caroline, 128-9, 360
Landowners, Crawfurd, W. S. S., 209, 212-13
attitudes of, 126, 130, 152, Cregoe, Frind, 128
156-60, 178-9, 211-13, 232, Croft-Dickensons, the, 154
250, 257-8, 261, 406-7, Crown, the, 250, 253-4, 403
410-18, 421-3 Denistoun, James and Alex­
benefits, apart from land sales, ander, 211
181-3 Derby, Earl of, 8, 119, 151-3,
investment principles, 219-20 157-8, 175-9, 181, 186, 188,
see also Canal companies, 199, 357/?.
Charitable trusts de Trafford, Sir Humphrey and
Adderley, Charles Bowyer, Sir Thomas, 150, 154, 169
132-3 Dixon, William, 212, 224
Andersons, the, of Stobcross, Ducie, Lord, 8, 153, 155, 157
208 Durning, Robert, 184
Atherton, Henry and Ann, Dyer, Joseph, 7
154-5, 164 Earle, Richard, 119, 152, 177
Aytoun, Roger, 154 Ecclesiastical Commissioners,
Bannatyne, Dugald, 211-12 146/?., 258/?., 342, 403
Bedford, Dukes of, 245, 247-8, Egerton, Lord Francis, 151, 154
250-3, 321 Egerton, Wilbraham, 158-60
Bellhouse, David, 168 Eldon, Earl of, 416
Bells, the, of Cowcaddens, Eton College, 250
208-9 Eyre family, 253
Bentinck, William, see Portland, Fairclough, Mrs., 185-6
Earl of Fitzroy, Charles, see South­
Boileau, Major-General, 398 ampton, Lord
Booth Charities, 168 Fleming, John, 73, 211
Bowers, Isabella, 169 Fox, Captain J. W. and Sarah
Brandfield, Benjamin, 198 Holland, 157
450
 INDEX

Landowners—continued. Landowners—continued
Free Grammar School, Bir­ Middleton, Sir W. F. F., 262
mingham, 129-30, 141, 146/z. Molyneux, Thomas, 184
Gilbert, Mrs. Graham, 212-15, Mosleys, the, 151, 155
392/z. Norfolk, Duke of, 178
Gilmorehill Land Company, Northampton, Marquis of, 249
116, 216, 218 Norton, Lord, 132, 134
Glasgow Building Company, Orr, Andrew, 236
211, 216 Oswald, J. G., 209-11
Gomme, Sir William, 257 Philips, Sir George, 169
Gooch, Sir Alfred S., 129, 146/z. Phillimore, Lord, 415-16
Gooch, Sir Thomas, 129, 141 Plumbe-Tempest, Colonel, 183,
Gore, Sir Booth, 154, 164 188, 199
Gough, Sir Richard, 132 Portland, Earl of, 253
Grammar School, Manchester, Portman, Edward Berkeley, 253
155 Portman, Viscount, 246
Grey Coat School, 274-5 Pratt, Charles, see Camden,
Grosvenor family, 244, 254-5 Earl
Harter, John, Collier, 168 Rochester, Bishop of, 258
Heriot’s Hospital, 219 Ross, Captain Thomas, 401,
Hesketh, Sir Thomas, 199 411-12
Houghton, Sir Henry, 155 Russell family, 244-5
Houldsworth, John, 222 Salisbury, Marquis of, 178
Houldsworth, Henry, 211-12 Sefton, Earl of, 107/?., 175,
Howe, Earl, 132-3 179-83, 186, 199, 357/z.
Hozier, James, 211 Skinners’ Company, the, 249
Hutcheson’s Hospital, 216-18 Slatter, Robert, 152, 178-9
Inge, William, 12, 128-9 Somers, Lord, 247-8, 261
Keck, George, 272 Southampton, Lord, 246-7, 261,
Laurie, David and James, 212 322, 401
Legge, Heneage, 132 Stamford, Earl of, 150
Leigh, John, 176-7 Stanley, William, 274, 327
Leigh, John Shaw, 120, 126, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital,
176-8, 181, 186, 199 248-9, 272
Lench’s Charity, 129-30, 141, St. Paul’s, Dean and Chapter
146/z. of, 247
Lloyd, George, 158/z. St. Quintin, Colonel, 398
London, Bishops of, 258 St. Thomas’s Hospital, 276
Lunatic Asylum, 231 Stephens, Charles, 344
Manchester Real Property Tatlock, Rev. H., 184
Company, 168 Taylor, Mary and Sarah, 157
Martin, Rev. Samuel, 128 Tipping, Thomas, 155
Maryon Wilson, Sir Thomas, Trades House, the Glasgow,
417 216, 218-20
Maxwell, Sir John and Sir Tufnell, Henry, 272
William Stirling-Maxwell, Tyssen-Amherst, family, 261-2
209-10 Westminster, Dean and Chapter
Methodists, Society of, 231 of, 256

451
 INDEX

Landowners—continued Land values, 254, 256, 259, 277,297,

Westminster, Duke of, 251,253 299, 302, 304, 308, 311, 321, 334,
Westminster, Marquis of, 15, 337, 346, 392-4, 399-405, 423^1
254, 273-4, 327 development values, 183, 214,
Wilson, Dr. Rae, 220 232, 391
Winchester, Bishop of, 15, 257 effects of railways upon, 7, 17,
Windsor, Baroness, 414 158, 179, 184-6, 199, 306,
Landownership, 4n., 27-8, 128-34, 322-3, 337, 343, 363, 370,
150-60, 175-88, 208-20, 244-62, 390, 392-4, 399, 404
265, 276, 301-2, 357, 422 factors influencing, 298, 323
Landownership patterns, 9, 15, 63, see also Property
86, 125-34, 150-60, 175-8, 183-4, Latimer, Digby, 128-9
186-8, 199-200, 208-20, 244-5, Laurent, C., 150
256-7, 262, 264, 302, 307-8, Laurieston, 292-3, 341
310-11, 333-4, 420-1, 424 Lawrence, Charles, 119-20, 197
Land prices, 28, 119, 139, 152, 158zz., Lawrence, G. M., 120
164, 168, 170, 177, 179, 184-5, Lawson, W. R., 61n., 387n.
213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 229, 232, Lawton, R., 408
259-60, 270, 297, 323, 371zz., Lea Valley, 376
392-3, 394zz„ 405, 414 Leases, 155-7, 176-7, 245, 247, 257,
confidential nature of, 217 260, 325, 333^4, 341-2, 393,
409-10
Land purchase, by railway
Ledger, R., 180-1
companies,
Lee, Charles, 259
considerations, 156-7, 270-1
Lee, Charles E., 92zz., 263, 275/7.
in advance, 145n., 169, 328-9
Lee, Rev. Charles, 130
methods, 153, 164, 231, 260,
Legal charges, lln., 73, 156, 270,
322, 332, 391-400
430-1
Land Clauses and Railways Clauses
Leigh, John, 109zz., 326, 338, 343
Consolidation Acts, 28, 158, 164,
Lethaby, Dr., 327
391-2, 394, 434
Lewin, H. G., 29zz.
Land speculation, 7, 120, 417, see Lewis, J. Parry, 360, 370zz., 407zz.,
also Property 420zz.
Land, surplus to railway require­ Lewis, W. A., 407n.
ments, 17, 80, 322, 393-6 Lewisham, 344
Land uses, 16-18, 33, 86, 109, 125, Liberal government of 1906, 396
164, 169, 176-7, 186-7,198,200-1, Lichfield, 137
209, 213-14, 229, 235-6, 247-50, Lichfield, Nathaniel, 32zz., 48zz., 298
252, 256-8, 271, 289-91, 293-4, Limits of Deviation, 17, 27, 215, 291
296, 299, 303, 305-7, 311-12, Linford, 369
218-24, 337, 339, 341-2, 412, 419, Lingard, John, 73, 112n.
421 Litherland, 415
see also Canal companies, Liverpool, 1, 3, 6, 10, 13, 18, 69,
Cellar-dwellings, Craft 76-9, 93—4, 107-9, 119-20,
workshops, Factories, Hotels, 175-207, 290-2, 296, 300, 304-6,
Innkeepers, Markets, Market­ 309, 319-20, 355-7, 408
gardens, Offices, Shopkeepers, Borough engineer, 101n., 205,
Slums, Warehouses, Villas 321
452
 I N DEX

Liverpool—continued London—continued
Corporation, 13, 101//., 108//., Corporation of, 100, 121,
119-20, 175-6, 178, 186-7, 259-60, 262, 423
190//., 192-3, 195-6, 198, County Council, 56, 92-3, 99,
200, 206, 305-6 100, 109, 369-70, 374, 380-1,
see also Medical Officers of 384, 396, 418
Health, Town Clerks see also Medical Officers of
The Tower and Castle, 175; Health
the Pool, Lime St, William Cheapside, Cornhill, Ludgate
Brown St, London Rd, Hill, Fleet St, Charing Cross,
Crown St, Parliament St, 176; 40-1; Oxford St, Holborn,
Lovat, Troughton, Cardwell Piccadilly, Strand, 45; New
St, Dale St, Old Hall and Rd, Camden and Somers
Sandhills, 177; Edgehill, 178; Town, 247; Regent’s Park
Ranelagh St, 184-5; Cropper and Hampstead Heath, 248;
St, 186; Parliament St, 193; Skinner St, Brewer St, Gray’s
Crown St and Dale St, 197; Inn Rd, Pentonville Rd, 249;
Borough Gaol, 200; Princes’ Ludgate Hill and Farringdon
Dock, 205; Pier Head and St, Covent Garden, Blooms­
Castle St, 304; Lord St, Bold bury, 250; Belgrave Sq, 251;
St, Renshaw St, 305; Victoria Figs Mead and Ampthill Sq,
St, Dale St, 306; Bold St, Tottenham Court Rd,
Church St, Lord St, Castle Holborn, 252; Baker St,
St, North John St, 356 Marylebone, St. John’s
Liverpool Association of Land and Wood, 253; Mayfair, Hyde
Warehouse Owners, 204 and Green Parks, 254;
Liverpool Corn Dealers, 192 Westminster Hospital,
Liverpool Dock Committee, 191, Sloane Sq, Tothill St, 255;
205-6 Paddington, Southwark, 256;
Liverpool Polytechnic Society, 191, Old Kent Rd, 257; Finsbury
200-1, 204-5, 305//., 306//. Circus, 259; Kingsland Rd,
Liverpool Town Dues, 206 261; Victoria St, Horseferry
Lloyd George, David, 396 Rd, 274; Seven Dials and
Local authorities, 69, 382, 391//., High St St. Giles, Tottenham
395, 419 Court Rd and Embankment,
approbation of, 13 281; St. Paul’s, 282;
problems of, 390 Exchange, Cornhill, King
see also Municipal authorities, William St, 297; the City
Parish authorities and West End, 299-301;
Local taxation, 37, 388-91 London Bridge, 312; Clink
Loch, James, 178 St, Blackfriars Rd, 344;
Lockhart, James, M.P., 222 Minories, Bethnal Green,
London, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 19, 33-44, 345; Clapham, Tottenham
68, 244-83, 292-3, 309, 312-14, Court Rd, 401
316-18, 327, 329-31, 341-2, London General Omnibus Com­
365-82, 423 pany, 80, 315, 318
City Companies of, 121, 259, Losch, August, 147//., 421
262 Low, S. J., 407

453
 INDEX

Lucas, B. Keith, 102/z. Markets, 140, 306, 312, 320-1

Lumsden, James, 115-17 Marr, T. R., 337/?., 338
Lynde, James, 17, 308 Marriner, Sheila, 356/?
Marshall, C. F. Dendy, 79/?., 263,
271/?.
MacAdam, W., 234/?. Marshall, John, councillor, 113, 115
McCallum, Andrew, 209//., 210 Marshall, J. D., 3/?.
Macclesfield, 94 Martin, George, 209/?., 213/?., 349/?.
McCord, Norman, 112/?. Martin, J. E., 348/?., 350/?., 376/?.
MacDermot, E. T., 120/?., 135, 136/?., Martin, W. A. Gibson, 191/?.
138n., 142-4/?., 256/?., 263 Martineau, Harriet, 206
McDermott, F., 75/?., 86/?. Marwick, J. D., 239
McElroy, John M., 360 Marwick, W. H., 216/?.
Mcllwraith, W., 221/?. Marybone, 305
McKean, R. N., 32 Maryhill, 354
MacMillan, J., 130/?. Matthew Boulton & Co., 347
McMillan, T. E., Jnr„ 348/?. Matthews, R. C. O., 29/?.
Malins, Daniel, 12, 139-40 Matthews, William, 120, 142
Manchester, 1, 3, 7-10, 13, 18-19, May, Erskine, 103
68-9, 94, 107-15, 150-74, 291, Meyhew, Henry, 316-17, 318/?.
296-8, 306-10, 320-1, 323/?., Mears, R. P., 146/?.
338-40, 343 Medhurst, Franklin, 312/?.
Corporation, 13, 108/?., 109-15, Medical Officers of Health,
173-4, 320, 353, 359 Liverpool, 305, 326
Commissioner of Police, 7 London, 45, 327, 329, 335
General Purposes Committee, Manchester, 109/?., 326, 338,
110-13 343, 358, 409/?.
see also Medical Officers of Meek, Carrol L. V., 14/?.
Health, Town Clerks Meier, Richard L., 298//.
Lees St, Piccadilly and Ducie ‘Men of Straw’, 78
St, 111; Deansgate, Oxford Mersey Dock and Harbour Board,
St, 112; Ordsail Lane, 152; 109, 206
Cathedral, 153; River Med­ Mersey railway tunnel, 109
lock, Grosvenor St, etc, 154; Metropolitan Board of Works, 48,
River Irwell, 164; Oxford, 51-2, 69, 329
David, Portland St, Piccadilly, Metropolitan Buildings, referees of,
168; Cannon, Mosley, 35
Portland St, 307; King St, Metropolitan Carriage Works, 134
Spring Gardens, St. Ann’s Middlesborough, 3
Sq, Market St, 310; Hanover Midland Omnibus Company, 362
and Mills St, 340/?. Miles Platting, 94, 291, 339-40
Manchester and Salford Sanitary Miller, R., xvi
Association, 338 Mill Hill, 367
Margate, 386 Milne, T., 249
Market functions, 296-300, 420, Mitchell, A. and Cash C. G., 238/?.
423-4 Mitchell, B. R., fjO/?., 79/?., 81/?.,
Market-gardens, 5, 17, 125, 154, 420/?., 423//
177, 213, 254, 342 Mitchell, J. O., 208/?.
454
 INDEX

Molyneux papers, 179-83 Notting Hill, 394m., 402

Moore, M. L., 366/?.
Moore, Stuart A., 179m.
Morrison, James, 29/z. O’Brien, Captain, 105
Mortality rates, 343, 352, 358, 408 Offices, 229, 297, 300-2, 304, 310,
Moseley, 363, 415 312, 325, 353, 357
Mosley, Sir Oswald, 311 Oldham, 94, 172, 357
Muir, G. W„ 117, 238 O’Leary, P. J., 407m.
Muir, Ramsay, 300, 356, 357m. Olsen, Donald J., 247m., 248m.,
Municipal authorities, 13,101 249m., 250m., 251, 252m., 258m.,
their powers to order railway 261m.
companies, 240 Omnibus and carting businesses, 1,
their powers to sponsor cheap 15-16, 35-6, 38, 50, 288, 314-15,
services, 359 362
their principal interests, 102 see also Omnibuses, Tramcars
their relations with railway Omnibuses, 288-9
companies, 107-22, 135, 174 Birmingham, 139, 361-2
Municipal Corporations Reform Glasgow, 315
Act, 102 Liverpool, 193, 197-8, 356
Murphy, Raymond E., 290 London, 44-5, 50, 52, 282,
Murphy, S. F„ 329 287-8, 312-13, 318, 365-6
Musgrove, A., 130m. Manchester, 257-8
Muswell Hill Estate Company, 418 Operation, methods of,
and peak-hour travel, 87-8,374
cable engine, 4, 197-8, 202
Napier, William, 404 categories of independence,
Napoleon III, 264 294-5
Nash, C. de L., 389m. interlocking of telegraph with
Nash, John, 247, 250 signals, 86
National income, related to railway pneumatic, 50-1
expenditure, 79 rolling stock, 68
to urban house and site rents, speed, 67
420-1 steam engine, 9m., 62-3
to urban site rents, 323 transfer costs, 280
Neasden, 386 trans-shipment, 70, 399
Nechells, 362 underground, 318
Neele, George P., 171m. with mixed cargoes, 205
Neild, Aiderman, 110 working expenses, 87-8, 90,
Neilson, Daniel, 389 96-7, 226, 275
Neilston, 93 see also Amalgamation, Bridge
Newcastle, 311 approaches, Broad gauge,
‘New Cross tangle’, the, 294 Cut and cover, Excursions,
New Hall, 128, 360-1 Joint purse agreements,
Newlands, James, 101m., 205, 321m. Railway services, Running
Newton Heath, 346-7, 357 powers, Tunnel approaches,
New York, 59, 323 Underground railways,
Nock, O. S., 67m., 243m., 263, 265, Viaducts, railway
278m., 294, 295m. Orr, Andrew, 117

455
 INDEX

Ottley, G., 135/?., 136/7., 263 Pimlott, J. A. R., 91/7.

Overcrowding, 47, 55, 94-5, 108, Plans and Sections, 127-8, 130,
116, 293, 305, 324, 330, 334-7, 145, 165, 198, 229, 235, 238, 262,
342-3, 352-3, 358, 381, see 268, 327, 331, see also Books of
also Demolition Reference
Overend, Gurney & Co., 75/7., 265 Pollard, S., 3/7.
Pollins, H., 5/7., 11, 72/7., 75-6, 78/7.,
Paish, G., 60/7. 279, 366/7., 383, 387, 397/7., 427-9
Paisley, 93, 365, 405 Pollokshields, 209-10, 354, 405
Parish authorities, 35, 100, 258, 344, Poole, Braithwaite, 190-1, 205
389 Poor, 337, 339-42
Parliament, 19, 422 Population movement, 325-6, 355-6
critical timing of Bills, 182-3, internal migration, 376, 408-9,
332 412
criticism of Select Committee overspill, 330-1, 342-3
procedure, 102-5 Porter, G. R., 105-6
members of, 27, 74, 103-4, 165 Portsmouth, 311
Parliamentary authorisation, Potters and Norris, 307
64, 114, 142-3 Powell, W„ 127/7.
Private Bills, 17, 103
Prest, A. R., 40/7., 47, 53/7.
Select Committee procedure,
Preston, 172
30-2, 35, 51-2, 100, 158
Prince, Hugh C., 247/7., 248/7., 250/z.,
Standing Orders, 28, 30, 54-5,
253/7., 263/7., 277/7., 300/7., 319/7.,
318, 325, 327, 329-30, 334
Parris, Henry, 105/7., 106/7. 341/7., 348/7., 350/7., 366/7., 385/7.,
Parrott, George, 45 397/7., 417/7.
Partick, 354 Private carriages, 132, 318, 355-6,
Pasley, Major-General, 105-6 357, 360-1, 412
Patmore, J. A., 161/7., 162/z., 203/7. Probyn, J. W., 403/7.
Pavements and Sewers, Surveyors Profits, see Railway profits
of, 35 Property,
Paving and Improvement, 26, 28, age of, 339-41
32, 33-5 respect for, 27, 109/z., 422
Paxton, Joseph, 44, 50, 273/7. notions concerning, 105
Payne, P. L., 26/7. speculation in, on railway
Pearson, Charles, 33, 36-8, 44-6, routes, 78, 118, 126, 157,
52, 91, 238, 293, 312, 314, 316-17, 262, 322, 398, 405
324, 366-7, 372, 394,399 titles, 125-6, 244, 421-2
Peel, C. S., 370/7. valuable, 210, 353
Peel, Sir Robert, 106 Property valuers, see Valuers
Pendleton, 94, 357 Property values,
Pendleton, John, 147, 307 failure to estimate realistically,
Pennethorne, James, 33, 36-8, 41,44 5-6, 260-1, 277-8
Perkin, H. J., xvii Proprietors, types of, 125-6, 141,
Perry Barr, 363 156-8, 170, 183, 198, 235/z., 244-5,
Pickfords, 18, 39-40, 280, 313-15 271-2, 277, 333-4, 340, 409-10
Picton, J. A., 120/z., 177, 178/7., 185, see also LeaseS, Tenants
187/7., 193/7., 356/7. Pugin, Augustus, 5, 235
456
 IN DEX

Queen’s Bench, court of, 82-4 Railway companies—continued

Queen’s counsels, monopoly, 18, 188-96, 202-7,
Mr. Aspinall, 77-8, 220-1 222, 399
Mr. Austin, 225 powers, 394-5
Mr. Denison, 113-14, 116, 167, rivalry between, 4, 6, 18-19,
309, 353 65-7, 78, 140, 162, 166, 170
Mr. Forsyth, 225 see also Amalgamation, Com­
Mr. Hildyard, 8/7. pulsory purchase, Fares
Mr. Hope, 225 policy, Operation, methods
Mr. Hope Scott, 168, 266zz. of, Railway company
Mr. Mundell, 76-7 managers
Mr. Rickards, 31 Birkenhead and Liverpool, 77
Mr. Rodwell, 401 Birmingham and Derby, 137
Mr. Talbot, 27, 225 Birmingham and Gloucester,
Mr. Venables, 101 137
Mr. Vernon Harcourt, 112,167 Birmingham and Oxford Junc­
Queen’s Park, 410 tion, 12zz., 129/z., 135-6,
Queen’s serjeants, 141-3
Mr. Merewether, 159-60, 418zz. Birmingham, North Warwick­
Mr. Sargood, 294 shire and Stratford upon
Mr. Wrangham, 27, 160, 225 Avon, 145-6
Questions, prompted by the arrival Birmingham West Suburban,
of the railways, xv, 4 126/z., 132, 146, 363
Birmingham, Wolverhampton
Radlett, 415-16 and Dudley, 10zz., 12/7., 129zz.,
Railway capital, 2 142-3, 138-9
and dividend performance, Birmingham, Wolverhampton
79-80 and Stour Valley, 129/?., 131,
amount of, 269, 271-2 143-4
insufficiency of, 216, 229 Caledonian, 18-19, 65, 67, 68,
method of raising, 72-9 93, 117-18, 210, 212, 216-17,
power to raise, 27-30, 381 220-30, 236, 239^1-3, 278,
proportionate capital deployed 291-2, 315, 332-3, 354-5, 381
on railways, 79, 86 Cathcart District (Caledonian),
return on, 25-6, 60-1 354
sources of, 159zz., 169, 222, 265, Central London, 281, 401
401-5 Cheshire Lines Committee, 18,
spent on terminals, 80-1 69, 85, 93, 161, 169, 179,
union of, 10 184-8, 194, 199, 203, 295,
see also Railway mania 338, 340, 356
Railway companies, Chester and Crewe, 189
conditions of competition Chicago, Burlington and
between, 134-7, 149, 160-3, Quincy, 392-3
188-90, 192, 220-4, 264, Clydesdale Junction, 212, 223
266-8, 281-2 East and West India Docks and
deadlock, 220, 224, 226, 236-7 Birmingham Junction, 261-2
demolition policy, 326, 328-9, Eastern Counties, 6, 28, 39, 41,
331-5 269, 271-2, 345

457
 I NDEX

Railway companies—continued Railway companies—continued

Eastern Union, 11 280-2, 364, 372, 382, 412-13,
East Kent, 265 414//.
East Lancashire, 182, 189, 192 Great Western, Brentford and
East London, 281, 292 Central Junction Terminus,
Edinburgh and Glasgow, 65, 255
211//., 213, 216, 222-3, 224//., Harborne, Birmingham and
226, 230-2, 239, 241 Henley in Arden, 146, 363
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leith, Lancashire and Yorkshire, 18,
215 82, 89, 93-4, 111-12, 152,
Garston and Liverpool, 77, 193 156-7, 170-1, 179, 188-95,
General Terminus and Glasgow 199, 203, 291, 309, 320, 338,
Harbour, 210, 212, 223, 225, 340, 357
233-4 Liverpool and Bury, 120, 177//.,
Glasgow, Airdrie and Monk­ 179, 181, 189, 199
lands Junction, 212, 218, 224 Liverpool and Manchester, 6,
Glasgow and Garnkirk, 213, 8, 109, 119, 155, 160-2,
223 164-5, 188, 203, 338
Glasgow and South-Western, Liverpool, Bolton and Wigan,
19, 67, 68, 93, 116-18,216-17, 180-2, 189
220-4, 226-8, 236, 239, 241, Liverpool, Crosby and South­
278, 292, 315, 333
port, 189
Glasgow, Barrhead and Neil-
Liverpool, Ormskirk and
ston, 210, 225
Preston, 177, 179-83, 189
Glasgow Central, 354
Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock, London and Birmingham, 5,
11-12, 39-10, 120, 129//.,
6, 209, 219, 223, 239, 241
Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock 130//., 133, 137-8, 141,
and Ayr, 6, 209-10, 216, 219, 246-8, 250, 252
221, 225, 230-2, 241 London and Blackwall, 39,
Grand Junction, 6, 120, 133, 40-1, 259-60, 267, 269-72,
137-8, 159-60, 188-9, 203, 345
222 London and Brighton, 264
Great Central, 61, 80, 94, 246, London and Croydon, 5, 264,
250, 253, 263, 278-9, 381 269
Great Eastern, 49, 52, 61, 68, London and Greenwich, 254,
79, 82, 93, 96, 98-9, 260-3, 257, 264, 267, 269, 271, 345
267, 277, 281, 326//., 342, London and North Western, 6,
372, 376-81, 384, 386-7, 410, 10, 14, 19, 61, 65. 68, 77, 80,
437-8 82, 85, 93—4, 110-12, 134-8,
Great Northern, 18, 61, 63, 65, 141-4, 152, 156-7, 161-3,
82, 114, 161, 163, 193, 195, 166-70, 179, 188-95, 200,
248-53, 263, 265-6, 278-80, 205, 263, 266-8, 278, 280-2,
282, 301, 313, 320, 338, 291, 295, 301, 313, 320, 322,
341-2, 367, 372-4 341, 372, 382, 388, 406-7
Great Western, 12, 19, 39, 62-3, London and Southampton, 5
80, 88, 94, 134-6, 143-4, 166, London and South Western,
203, 206, 255-6, 263, 265-8, 255, 259, 263-5, 266-8, 271,
458
 INDEX

Railway companies—continued Railway companies—continued

276, 281-2, 344-5, 375, 389, 214-16, 218, 222-3, 239, 241,
412 278, 315, 353
London, Brighton and South North London, 52//., 261-2,
Coast, 49, 65, 76n., 82-4, 96, 267-8, 292, 330/7.
263-5, 273, 280-2, 375, 377, North London Junction, 250
412 Oxford, Worcester and
London, Chatham and Dover, Wolverhampton, 106
67, 75, 79, 82-3, 86, 97/?., Pollok and Govan, 212, 223
250, 263, 279-82, 295/?., 402 Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne
London, Tilbury and Southend, and Manchester, 7/7., 161, 165
97, 282 Shrewsbury and Birmingham,
Manchester and Birmingham 143-4
Direct, 159, 161, 165 South Eastern, 28, 49, 65, 67-8,
Manchester and Bolton, 161 79, 82, 97/z., 99, 259, 263-7,
Manchester and Cheshire 269, 272-3, 279-82, 288, 375,
Junction, In., 159, 165 387, 400, 402
Manchester and Leeds, 7, 109, Stafford and Rugby, 159
151-2, 161-2, 164-5 Trent Valley, 159
Manchester and Southampton, Union, 19, 76-7, 115, 117-19,
27 218, 221, 227-8, 234, 238
Manchester, Sheffield and Victoria Station and Pimlico,
Lincolnshire, 7, 16/7., 18, 55, 15, 68, 76/?., 265-7, 273-5
65, 68, 77-8, 80, 82, 85, West End and Crystal Palace,
112-15, 156, 161-3, 166-70, 75
179, 192-3, 195, 265, 277-9, West London Extension, 268,
295, 308-9, 327, 356 280-1, 292
Manchester South Junction, Westminster Terminus, 274
10-11, 16-17, 110, 153-4, West of Scotland Junction,
156, 161, 295, 307-8 216, 225-6
Manchester South Union, 159 Railway company chairmen, 195
Metropolitan, 48, 50, 52, 62, Joseph Baxendale, 39
73, 80, 104/7., 250, 253, 265, Henry Bosanquet, 6
268, 279, 301, 317-18, 322, W. J. Chaplin, 39
334-5, 352. 372, 386-7, 393, Peter Clouston, 116, 117/7.
395, 397 George Carr Glyn, 14, 67, 142,
Metropolitan District, 75, 80, 321-2
255, 317, 395, 405 Daniel Gooch, 91
Midland, 18, 63-6, 68, 80, 82, W. E. Hutchinson, 277, 322/7.
94, 114, 120, 132, 134-6, 146, Charles Lawrence, 119-20,
155, 161, 163, 168, 195, 197-8
248-9, 263, 265-8, 277-8, James Lumsden, 116
280-2, 313, 322, 328, 338, William Malins, 318
342, 372, 382, 413-15 Richard Moon, 167, 195
Monkland and Coltness, 223 John Moxon, 5, 6//.
Monkland and Kirkintilloch, Henry Oakley, 98, 374-5
223 Andrew Orr, 117//.
North British, 70/?., 93, 117-18, R. W. Perks, 395-6

459
 INDEX

Railway company chairmen— Railway company secretaries—

continued continued
William Routh, 260 Archibald Gibson, 221
Edward Watkin, 49, 65, 73, J. F. Nicol, 144m.
162, 166-7, 169, 193-4, 279, William Reed, 5
309, 318, 330, 334-5, 386-8, Samuel Smiles, 275
397 J. G. Wood, 221
George Wilson, 112 Railway construction and,
Railway company managers, amenity, 37, 198, 303, 343
policy of, 25, 60-2, 87-99, ‘barrier effect’, 17, 133, 155,
134-5, 148-9, 381, 386-8, 292-3, 302-3, 337-46
406, 421 development prospects, 214-15,
James Allport, 66-8, 80-1, 252, 339-40
84-5, 136, 148, 163, 169, dilapidation, xv, 17, 154, 248,
201, 266, 279, 294, 356, 257, 309, 337
413-14 sanitary benefits, 225, 238,
John Bell, 279 335-6, 343
G. P. Bidder, 49-50, 57, 84, severance, 247, 302-3
259-60, 322m. see also Demolition, Districts,
William Birt, 49, 64, 96, 97n., Eviction and rehousing, Land
98, 371, 376-7, 386-8, 437-8 values, Overcrowding, Rail­
William Cawkwell, 80, 91, 148, way services, Slums, Social
167, 194, 295m. class, Suburbs, Viaducts
Seymour Clarke, 161, 266, Railway contractors, 72-9
279-80 Edward Betts, 14, 72, 75-6,117,
Cornelius Eborall, 49, 82, 280 265, 273, 318, 433
Myles Fenton, 98-9, 318 Thomas Brassey, 72, 78, 117,
George Findlay, 61, 85, 91m. 201, 275m., 342, 433
J. S. Forbes, 83, 280 James Falshaw, 72
William Forbes, 96 Joseph Firbank, 75m.
J. F. S. Gooday, 377, 390m. Charles Fox, 72, 404
James Grierson, 80, 88, 148, John Kelk, 72, 75, 76m., 273,
382 433
Frederick Harrison, 388 Lucas Bros., 292
Mark Huish, 62m., 135, 143, Morton Peto, 14, 72, 75-7, 117,
223m. 222, 265, 273-4, 275m., 318,
William Johnstone, 227, 241 397m., 433
Robert Millar, 98, 355 Thomas and Solomon Tredwell,
Henry Partington, 382, 406 318
John Parson, 50, 57, 398 Waring Bros, 14, 72, 75-7, 201,
Charles Saunders, 143 433
Charles Scotter, 85, 375 Railway fares, 53-4, 56-7, 65-6,
Frederick Slight, 49, 280 87-8, 90-5, 136, 192-6, 226, 242,
James Smithells, 89 261, 271, 359, 367, 374, 379-80,
George Underdown, 356 406, 410, 412
Railway company secretaries, Railway law cases, 82-4, 141, 389,
Henry Booth, 152, 222 see also Common Law
Richard Creed, 5 Railway lobby, 72-8
460
 INDEX

‘Railway mania’, 10, 29, 74, 183, Ridley, George, 403

226 River bridges, 16, 33-4, 314, 316
Railway profits, 9, 25-6, 52, 60-86, Road approaches to stations, 41,
191, 221, 256, 261, 400, 405, 420 139-40, 142, 173, 280, 313, 316
and cheap ticket travel, 87-90, Robbins, Michael, In., 46/?., 50/?.,
96, 98-9, 374-5, 380, 387, 51/?., 73/?., 75, 79/?., 80, 86/?., 116/7.,
390 250/1., 255/1., 257/1., 261/1., 263,
and the establishment of urban 265/1., 267/1., 275/1., 279/1., 281/?.,
terminals, 9, 14, 42, 79-81, 288/1., 292ii., 31311., 317-18, 360/?.,
277-8 36511., 37217., 3741?., 398/?.
Railway services, Robin, G. H., 354/?.
provision of, 4, 240-1, 243, Robinson, G. T., 340/?.
383-8, 399, 406, 410-11 Rochdale, 94, 172, 357
space required for goods and Rocque, John, 254
passenger, 18 Routh, William, 34
Railway shareholders, 27, 29, 73, Royal Commissions,
273, 276-7, 397-8 Housing of Working Classes,
committees of, 61, 222, 271 1884-5, 54, 293, 326, 352,
guide to, 79 387
public meetings of, 107, 389 Improvement of Metropolis,
‘the poor shareholder’, 99,166 1842, 34
Railway shares, Livery Companies of London,
prices, 142-3 1884, 121
purchase of, 199, 210, 223, London Traffic, 1903-5, 56-7,
401-4 59, 282-3, 377, 395-6, 399
see also Railway mania, Rail­ Metropolis Railway Termini,
way shareholders 1846, 35^13, 47, 237, 258,
Railway statistics, 60-3, 90-2, 190, 317, 344
see also Traffic, railway Railway Communication in
Ramsgate, 386 Glasgow, 1846, 100, 232,
Rayners Lane, 397 237-8
Redford, A., 207/?. Railways of Great Britain,
Redhill, 3, 365 1867, 82-4, 413
Reeder, D. A., 256/?., 394/?., 398/?., Royal Exchange, Manchester, 296-8
402, 405/?., 410/?. Running powers, 11, 64,143-4, 161,
Rees, Henry, 350/?. 163, 166, 189, 193, 227, 278, 295,
Rees, Merlyn, 25In., 373/?. 372
Reigate, 365 Rusholme, 357
Reilly, John, 153/2. Russell, Lord John, 324
Rendel, J. M., 204, 206
Renfrew, 93
Renwick, Robert, 215n. Saintsbury, G., 296/?.
Restrictive clauses, 247, 250, 253 St. Helens, 365
Reynolds, Graham, 345/?. St. Rollox, 291
Ribblesdale, Lord, 396 Salford, 152
Richards, P., 3n. Salt, Samuel, 67/?., 314/?., 322/?.
Richmond, 370-1, 412 Saltley, 125, 132-3, 341, 343, 362
Rickmansworth, 397 Saltonsmoor, 176

461
 INDEX

Sandhills, 291 Smith, Piggott, 120, 127m., 132, 139

Sanford, J. L., and Townsend, Smith, Seth, 254
Meredith, 178 Smithells, James, 193
Saul, S. B., 407«., 412-13 Social class,
Scholler, Peter, 311 and railway travel, 18, 37, 65-6,
School boards, 325 87-99, 327-9, 365, 367-70,
Scott, Sir Gilbert, 319 377, 380-1, 383-8, 395,
Scott Thomson, Gladys, 245 417-18, 437-8
Searle, Mark, 35//., 252». complexities of, 97
Season tickets, 63, 92, 297, 354, see also Cheap ticket travel,
357, 372, 384, 399, 412 Clerks, Excursions, Poor,
Sekon, G. A., 143n„ 263 Suburbs, social composition
Selly Oak, 132, 363 of, Working class
Settled estates, 211, 213, 214, 215, Social costs and benefits, 4, 12,
402-4, 416, 421 25-59
Seyfried, Warren R., 300 Social sets, 175, 208
Shaftesbury, Lord, 54, 325, 330». Soho (Birmingham), 347-8, 363-4
Shannon, H. A., 26m. Soho (London), 293
Sharp, Stewart & Co., 347, 353 Solicitors, 29, 35, 48, 69, 72-3, 76n„
Shaw, Charles, 138, 145 77-8, 126, 141, 153, 176-7, 181-2,
Shelford, Adam, 312 184, 198, 211, 215, 225, 244, 259,
Sheppard, F. W. H., 255«., 257 262, 270-1, 394, 397, 399, 404,
Ship Canal, the Manchester, 196, 413, 423
206-7, 351 Solicitors’ papers, 127m., 141, 184-6,
the Birmingham, 35In. 211, 214-15, 353m., 392m., 405m.,
Shopkeepers, retail, 16, 139, 175, 422, 435-6
299-300, 302, 305-6, 319, 321 Solihull, 413-16
Shoreditch, 242, 282 Somers Town, 125, 247-8, 325,
Simmons, Jack, 67m., 80m., 259m., 341-2, 366
266m., 319m., 320m. Southgate, 373
Simon, Sheena, 102m. Southport, 355-6
Singer, H. W., 420-1 Southwark, 15, 33, 35
Singers, 93, 355 Sparkbrook, 361, 364
Slums, 12, 15, 37, 68, 115, 133-4, Spencer, Herbert, 26
140-1, 217-18, 228, 248, 293, 305, Spengler, E. M., 323m.
322, 338, 388 Spensley, J. Calvert, 360m., 412m.
Smailes, A. E., 300m., 311, 350m. Spoon and Attwood’s Bank, 302
Small Heath, 348, 361-2, 364 Spooner, Richard, M.P., 120
Smeed, R. J., 287m. Spring, David, 178m., 420m.
Smellie, K. B., 102m. Springbum, 93, 291, 346-7
Smellie, Thomas, 405 Stabling, 279, 289
Smith, Wilfred, 203, 320m., 350//., Stalybridge, 172, 296
356m. Standards of living, 91-2, 95
Smethwick, 350, 362, 364 see also Income levels
Smiles, Samuel, 76, 259, 275 Standen, J. D., 3m.
Smith and Doughty, omnibus Stations, •,
operators, 361 and street traffic generated,
Smith, John Towers, 77-8 312-13, 315-16, 321
462
 INDEX

Stations—continued Stations—continued
architecture, 14 114, 161, 163, 169-70, 326//.,
compared with road improve­ 338, 343
ments, 37-8 Central station (projected),
costs, 10, 80-1, 85-6, 195, 271-8 Manchester, 15, 112-15, 156,
early, 4-5 167-9, 325, 353
‘secessionist’, 6, 17, 157, 171, Charing Cross station, London,
264,279 14-15, 68, 76, 79, 99, 243,
significance of, 289 252, 258-9, 264-6, 268,
temporary and inadequate, 164, 275-6, 278-81, 300
229, 232 College Goods station, Glas­
see also Road approaches, gow, 116-17, 224, 227-8,
Traffic, urban, street 234, 237, 328h.
Ancoats Goods station, Cook Street Goods station,
Manchester, 163, 168, 338 Glasgow, 209, 221, 232, 314
Bishopsgate Street station, Crown Street station, Liver­
London, 6, 99, 242, 259-60, pool, 197, 320
269, 271-2, 277, 282, 327 Curzon Street station, Bir­
Blackfriars Goods station, mingham, 12, 133, 137, 140,
London, 83 143
Blythswood Holme station Dunlop Street station (pro­
(projected), Glasgow, 216, jected), Glasgow, 225/z., 235,
228-9, 302 237, 303
Bricklayers’ Arms station, Euston station, London, 5, 135,
London, 6, 257, 264, 271-2, 242, 251-2, 266, 269, 278,
294 301, 313, 319. 321, 327, 341-2
Bridge Street station, Glasgow, Exchange station, Liverpool,
221, 229, 232, 239, 242, 301, 13, 93, 183—4, 188-9, 194,
332 199-200, 309, 326, 357
Broad Street station (projected), Exchange station, Manchester,
Birmingham, 145 18, 157, 171, 338
Broad Street station, London, Farringdon Street station, Lon­
259-62, 267-8, 330/z. don, 265-6, 268, 282
Brunswick station, Liverpool, Fenchurch Street station,
193, 201 London, 242, 259-61, 269-72
Buchanan Street station, 301, 327, 365/?.
Glasgow, 213, 232, 234, 239, General Terminus station,
301, 315 Glasgow, 233
Cannon Street station, London, Great Howard Street Goods
14-15, 68, 76, 79, 99, 243, station, Liverpool, 194, 320
258, 264-6, 278 Hockley Goods station, Bir­
Central station, Glasgow, 14, mingham, 82
18, 210, 216, 228-9, 236, Holborn Viaduct station,
242-3, 325 London, 15, 281-2
Central station, Liverpool, 14, Huskisson Goods station,
69, 76-8, 184-7, 193-4, Liverpool, 85, 193—4, 202
201-2, 325, 327-8 King’s Cross station, London,
Central station, Manchester, 13, 242, 249-51, 265-6, 272,

463
 INDEX

Stations—continued. Stations—continued
278, 301, 313, 319-20, 341-2 South Side station, Glasgow,
Lawley Street station, Bir­ 212, 217, 228, 232, 234, 239
mingham, 137 St. Enoch station, Glasgow,
Lime Street station, Liverpool, 14, 19, 68, 76-7, 116, 118-19,
13, 119, 186, 190, 191, 197-8, 217, 220, 225, 227-8, 234,
200, 202, 305-6, 319, 326 236, 238, 315, 325, 328m.
Liverpool Road station, Man­ Stobcross Goods station,
chester, 109, 153, 155, 160-1, Glasgow, 214-15, 218
164 338 St. Paul’s station, London, 268
Liverpool Street station, St. Pancras station, London,
London, 52, 64, 68, 79, 94, 68, 76, 81, 249, 251-2, 266,
234, 259-60, 267-8, 277-8, 277-8, 321, 342, 415
301, 326m., 342, 376-7, 382, Strand Street station (pro­
387, 410 jected), Liverpool, 204-5
London Bridge station, London, Victoria station, London, 14-15,
6, 94, 242, 257-9, 264, 268, 62, 75, 96, 243, 255, 264-6,
301, 327, 365m. 273-5, 280, 294, 300, 319, 327
London Road station, Man­ Victoria station, Manchester,
chester, 7, 68-9, 109-12, 153, 7, 9, 14, 109-12, 153, 157,
155, 160-3, 165, 307, 310-11, 161-2, 307, 310-11, 338
338 Wapping Goods station, Liver­
Marylebone station, London, pool, 190, 200, 202
55, 250, 275, 277-9 Waterloo Goods station,
Moorgate station, London, 265, Liverpool, 190, 200, 202
268 Waterloo station, London, 13,
Moor Street station, Birming­ 242-3, 255, 258-9, 264, 268,
ham, 145-6 271, 282, 327, 344, 410
New Street station, Birming­ Station sharing, 6-8, 63, 110, 135,
ham, 11-12, 19, 120, 128-9, 138, 160-2, 166, 171, 189, 224,
133, 136, 140-1, 145-7, 149, 227-8, 264-8
326 Steamboat services, 189, 224, 230
Nine Elms station, London, Stechford, 363-4
255, 258-9, 268, 271, 313 Steel, W. L., 14m., 135, 137m., 263
Oldham Road station, Man­ Stevens, D. F., 300m., 319m.
chester, 109, 152, 157, 161, Stevens, J. H., 33, 44, 46-7
165, 320, 338 Stewart, C., 307m.
Oxford Road station, Man­ Stockport, 94, 159-60, 172, 296,
chester, 153 357-8, 365
Paddington station, London, Store Street station, Manchester,
88m., 242, 256, 266-7, 269, see Stations, London Road
282, 313, 319, 321, 327 station, Manchester
Queen Street station, Glasgow, Stratford, 347m., 387
213, 223, 229, 231, 301, 315 Streets, cutting of, 287, 306
Snow Hill station, Birmingham, Stretton, C. E., 137m., 143-4m.,
12, 82, 120, 128-9, 133, 136, 363m.
141-4, 326, 364 Sturge, C. D., 413-14
464
 I N DEX

Suburbs, 354-82 Thornton, Samuel, 107//.

growth of, xv, 4, 87, 367, 376 Thwaites, John, 51
inner, 338-40, 342-3, 360, 366, Tickets, free, 251, 355, see also
369, 379 Season tickets, Cheap ticket
middle class, 354, 357-8, 363, travel, Fares policy
370-1, 384-7, 390, 397, 416 Time,
services to, 93-4, 133, 149, 354, alteration to railway, 174
357, 364, 370-1, 374-5, saving evaluated, 40, 47, 57-8
378-80, 383-8, 411, 413-18 Timmins, S., 136/z.
social composition of, 18, 52, Tithe Maps, 127, 130//.
95, 132, 373, 396, 407,410-11 Toll-gates, 252, 357, 362
working class, 354, 358, 384-7, Tolls,
390, 410// at stations, 228, 264, 266, 271
Summerson, John, 253/1. on Waterloo and Southwark
Survey of London, the, 247/1., 249//., bridges, 33-4
257, 259/z., 269/1., 274/1., 344, supplementary, 5
410/1. Tootal, Henry, 112, 159//.
Swindon, 3, 347, 351/1. Torrens and Cross Acts, 55, 69, 335
Sydenham, 274 Tottenham, 371, 410
Touzeau, James, 120//.
Town Clerks,
Tait, James, 296/1. Glasgow, 70, 239-40
Tangye & Co., 347-8 Liverpool, 320/z.
Tax concessions to railways, 90, 380 Manchester, 110-13, 114, 162-3,
Telegraph, 86, 109 167, 206, 346
Tenants, 141, 211, 236, 249, 252, Toxteth, 175, 356
260, 271-2, 276-7, 329-32, 333/1., Tradeston, 125, 292
334, 340, 389, 397, 410 Traffic, railway,
Tennant, Charles and John, 117 analysed, 221
Terminal charges, 18, 81-6, 195-6, at the different stations, 240-3,
349 269, 275, 278-9, 364-5
Terminal facilities, 16, 39, 95-6, 99, cheap fare in major cities, 93-5
164, 171, 191, 194, 197 competitive advantages in, 227
Terminals, see Stations creation of, 87
Terminus companies, 14, 25, 79, deliberately limited or diverted,
142-4, 146, 186, 189, 221, 227, 192-5
265 freight compared with passen­
Teulon, Seymour, 288, 370-1, 392 ger, 351-2
Thames Embankment, 48 growth of the different classes
The Working and Management of an of passenger traffic, 90-2
English Railway, 61 handling capacity, 86, 138
Thomas, Brinley, 407/z. increase of, 66-7, 319, 372-3
Thomas, J. A., 74//. irregular demand, 148
Thompson, F. M. L., 403//., 420//. methods of estimating, 230
Thompson, Wilbur R., 360//. new traffic generated by
Thomson, Poulett, 204 suburbs, 388, 413-15
Thornley, Samuel, 142 pressure of, 239
Thornton, Richard, 150 questions concerning, 61

465
 INDEX

Traffic, railway—continued Underground railways—continued

seasonal variation in, 88-9 51, 59, 68, 256, 268, 281, 316-18,
short distance, 11, 242 368, 396
tables of, 42, 45-6, 190, 240-1, University of Glasgow, 116, 216-18,
378 235
traffic agreements, 66, 68, 144, Urban History, xvii, 1, 424
163, 278
Traffic, urban, street, 311-20, 419 Valuers, 35-7, 165, 184-6, 210, 229,
compared with railway, 287-9, 259, 276-7, 323-4, 403-5, 435
318 Vance, J. E., Jnr., 290
congestion and speed of, 32, 38, Viaducts, railway, 16-17, 37, 137,
50, 191, 287, 307-8, 315-17, 143, 154, 157, 159, 161, 165, 168,
321, 324, 360 171, 259, 262, 264, 269, 272,
cross-town, 40, 279 308-10, 344-6
feeder services, 314-15, 395 Victoria County History, 151/z.,
generating points for, 1, 15-16, 154/z., 303/z., 347/z., 363/z.
252, 312, 316, 321 Villas, 132, 209, 212-13, 250-1,
inter-station, 313 355-6, 384, 412, 416, 420
inter-urban, 230, 319
industrial, 349 Walker, John, 315
surveys of, 45-6, 313 Walking, 305, 340, 343, 352, 354,
see also Cabs, Carting, Collec­ 363, 365-6, 401
tion and Storage, Omnibus Walthamstow, 376-7, 387-8, 390,
and Carting businesses, 410, 412, 418, 437
Omnibuses, Private carriages, Walton, 179-80, 356
Stabling, Toll-gates, Tram­ Wandsworth, 412
cars and horse-drawn Ward Perkins, C. N., 29zz., 183/z.
omnibuses Warehouses, 16, 141, 173, 204-5,
Tramcars, xv, 133, 359-60, 390, 396 229, 257, 297-8, 302, 306-10,
and horse-drawn omnibuses, 314, 320, 331
94-5, 282, 288-9, 362-4, Warner, Sam B., 360/z.
375-6, 379, 401, 424 Waterlow, Sir Sidney, 328/z.
see also Omnibuses, Omnibus Wavertree, 415
and carting businesses Warrington, 172
Transport system, Washwood, 132
rational, xv, 147 Weber, A. F., In.
Trench, William, 305, 326 Weber, B., 407/z.
Tunbridge Wells, 411 Wellington, Duke of, 91
Tunnel approaches, 4, 37, 95-6, 114, Wendt, Paul F,, 323
144-7, 165, 170, 193, 197, 200, West Bromwich, 362
202, 250, 253, 324, 354 West Derby, 175, 305, 356
Turton, B. J., 3/z., 351/z, West Drayton, 255
Turvey, R., 40/z., 47, 53/z., 297/z., Westergaard, John, 368, 384, 385
298 Westminster, 254-5, 299
Tyler, Captain, 53, 78, 87, 239 Wharfe, L,, 350/z.
Whately, George, 129
Whitbread’s Brfewery, 352
Underground railways, 15, 45, 48, White, B. D., 206
466
 INDEX

White, H. P., 242//., 255//., 256//., Wood, G. H., 92//., 366//.

263, 265//., 267//., 268//., 372//., Wood Green, 367, 373
373//., 397//. Woodlands, 235
White, John, 247 Woolton, 356-7
Wigan, 172 Working class, the, 54, 97-8, 250,
Wightman, Arthur, 41-2 324-5, 331, 358, 379, 380-1,
Williams, F. S„ 136//., 231//., 263, 384-7, 390, 399, 406, 410, 416
291//. see also Casual labour, market
Williams, O. C., 30, 31//., 32//., 54//. for
Wilmot, G. F. A., 373//. Work-journeys, 242, 365-9, 378-9
Wilmslow, 357 Workmen’s trains, see Cheap ticket
Wimbledon, 410-11 travel
Windsor, 63, 412 Wyatt, Digby, 13, 256
Wise, M. J., 128//.
Wise, M. J., and Thorpe, P. O’N., Yardley, 362^4
303//., 348//., 361//., 363/z. Yolland, Colonel, 49, 280
Wolfe-Barry, Sir John, 58 Young, G. M., 370//.
Wolverhampton, 143, 347-8, 362, York, 337
364-5
Wolverton, 3 Zoond, Vera, 403//., 410//.
THE OUTLAWS OF MEDIEVAL LEGEND Maurice Keen
RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN ENGLAND, 1787-1833
Ursula Henriques
LEARNING AND LIVING, 1790-1960: A Study in the History
of the English Adult Education Movement J. F. C. Harrison

HEAVENS BELOW : Utopian Experiments in England,

1560-1960 W. H. G. Armytage

FROM CHARITY TO SOCIAL WORK in England and the

United States Kathleen Woodroofe

ENGLISH LANDED SOCIETY

in the Eighteenth Century G. E. Mingay

ENGLISH LANDED SOCIETY

in the Nineteenth Century F. M. L. Thompson

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Norman Hampson

CHURCHES AND THE WORKING CLASSES IN

VICTORIAN ENGLAND K. S. Inglis

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH MUSIC E. D. Mackerness

THE PROFESSION OF ENGLISH LETTERS J. W. Saunders

EDUCATION IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Kenneth Charlton

A HISTORY OF SHOPPING Dorothy Davis

THE RISE OF THE TECHNOCRATS : A Social History

W. H. G. Armytage

ANCIENT CRETE: A Social History from Early Times until the

Roman Occupation R- F. Willetts

PACKHORSE, WAGGON AND POST: Land Carriage and

Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts J- Crofts
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