This pub’s location on the street level concourse of Liverpool Street Station is a clue to the origins of its name.
The Hamilton refers to Lord Claud Hamilton, the chairman of the Great Eastern Railway Company, which originally built Liverpool Street Station (itself named after early 19th century Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool).
The pub itself is actually located in what was the ballroom of the Great Eastern Hotel which originally dates from the 1880s. The now II*-listed hotel – minus its ballroom – still exists in the same location, these days as Andaz London Liverpool Street, part of the Hyatt Group.
The pub features many of the ballroom’s original features and is partly decorated in the 18th century French style.
This establishment in the Cannon Street Station in the City of London is a modern take on the pub but thanks to the name and location comes with built-in history.
Sir John Hawkshaw (1811-1891) was a railway engineer who, importantly given this pub’s location, is recognised for his work on the original Cannon Street railway station – which he designed with JW Barry – as well as the adjoining Cannon Street Railway Bridge over the Thames (it was originally named ‘Alexandra Bridge’ in honour of Princess Alexandra of Denmark, wife of Edward, the Prince of Wales)
The original Cannon Street station, which opened on 1st September, 1866, featured two “Wren-style” towers which stand 135 feet high and faced the Thames (these two towers, now Grade II listed, are still there today). They helped support the station’s single arched iron and glass roof which stretched some 700 feet in length to cover the railway platforms (an adjoining Italianate-style hotel and forecourt designed by Barry opened the following year).
While Hawkshaw’s two towers remain (and it should be noted that the engineer was also famous for his work on other projects including, among others, the Severn Tunnel and Suez Canal), the current Cannon Street Station is a much more modern structure dating originally from the 1980s with some works being completed in the last decade or so.
The site’s known history, meanwhile, goes back much further, however. Prior to Hawkshaw’s station, since 1690 the site had been occupied by the livery hall of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers. Prior to that it was the site of the Steelyard and, much further back in time, the remains of a Roman palace have been found beneath the site which date from the 1st century.
The modern pub, located in the station, is part of the JD Wetherspoon chain.
The National Windrush Monument (right) was unveiled at Waterloo Station on Windrush Day (23rd June). The bronze sculpture – the work of US-based Jamaican artist Basil Watson – memorialises the British West Indian immigrants who came to the UK on board HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 and later ships and who subsequently became known as the Windrush generation. Funded by a £1 million government grant, it depicts a man, woman and child who, dressed in their “Sunday best”, are climbing a pile of suitcases which represent all the possessions they brought with them. The memorial, which is located inside the station through which thousands of the Windrush Generation passed on their way to their new lives in the UK, was unveiled by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Floella Benjamin, chair of the Windrush Commemoration Committee, reportedly said the monument will “act as a symbolic link to our past and a permanent reminder of our shared history and heritage for generations to come“. Meanwhile, a public bronze sculpture was unveiled outside Hackney Town Hall on the same day which also commemorates the Windrush generation. Warm Shores, the work of London artist Thomas J Price, depicts larger than life-sized a man and woman and was based on 3D scans of real-life residents.
Iconic London locations including Tower Bridge, The London Eye, and Marble Arch turned purple last night to mark the opening of the new Elizabeth Line today. Thousands of people are today expected to use the new Tube line which provides faster journeys between Paddington and Abbey Wood via 10 new stations using Class 345 trains that are more and than one-and-a-half times longer than a standard Tube train and able to carry 1,500 passengers. The line’s opening is the latest step in the £18.8 billion Crossrail project which is linking Reading, to the west of London, with Heathrow before travelling through central London to connect with Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said it was an “historic day”. “This is a huge moment, not just for London but the entire country – particularly in this special Jubilee year…This brand new line is the most significant addition to our transport network in decades.” Last week, the Queen and Prince Edward attended Paddington Station to mark the completion of the new line.
Wanstead United Reformed Church. PICTURE: The wub (licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
St Luke’s briefly stood on Euston Road before, thanks to the growing demands of the railways, it was demolished and subsequently rebuilt, brick-by-brick in Wanstead.
Designed by John Johnson (one of the architects of St Paul’s Church, Camden Square), this church was erected on the corner of Euston and Midland Roads between 1856 and 1861. It replaced a temporary iron church which had been erected on the site in the early 1850s.
But the construction in the mid-1860s of St Pancras railway station by the Midland Railway – and the compulsory acquisition of the land – meant the church had to be removed.
While the congregation, compensated with some £12,500 by the railway company, relocated to Kentish Town, the church building itself was sold to another congregation for £500.
Demolished, it was subsequently transported to Wanstead where it was it was rebuilt in 1866-67, with some alterations by Johnson who oversaw the process.
Now the Wanstead United Reformed Church (it changed denominations), it was designated a Grade II-listed building in 2009, partly due to it being one of few examples of a church which has been moved and substantially reconstructed to its original form by the original architect.
Now situated on the seafront of the town of Swanage in Dorset, the Wellington Clock Tower was originally located at the southern end of London Bridge.
The tower was erected in 1854 as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, who had died two years earlier.
The then proposed Wellington Clock Tower depicted in the London Illustrated News in June, 1854
Its construction was funded through public subscription and contributions of railway companies with the support of the Commissioners for Lighting the West Division of Southwark. It was designed in the Perpendicular Gothic style by Arthur Ashpitel and, after the foundation stone was laid on 17th June, 1854, took six months to build.
The three level structure, which was topped with a tall spire, housed a clock with four faces. The clock was made by Bennett of Blackheath for the 1851 Great Exhibition but the constant rumbling of the carts passing its new location apparently meant the mechanism never kept good time.
There was also small telegraph office in the ground floor room of the tower. A statue of Wellington was intended to be placed within the open top level but funds apparently ran out before it could be commissioned and it never appeared (Wellington’s declining popularity at the time may have also been a factor).
The location of this rather splendid structure meant, however, that it was soon overshadowed by construction of nearby raised railway lines. When the Metropolitan Police condemned the tower as an obstruction to traffic, it was the final straw and having spent little more than a decade in position, the decision was made to demolish the tower.
It was taken down in 1867 but rather than simply being scrapped, Swanage-based contractor George Burt had the building shipped in pieces – they apparently served as ballast during the journey – to his hometown in Dorset where he presented it as a gift to fellow contractor Thomas Docwra. Docwra had the tower reconstructed in a seafront location on the grounds of his property, The Grove, at Peveril Point.
The rebuilt tower lacked the original clock – its faces were replaced with round windows – and in 1904 the spire was also removed and replaced with a small cupola (there’s been various reasons suggested for this, including that the spire was damaged in a storm or because it was felt to be sacrilegious by the religious family which then owned the property).
The tower, which was granted a Grade II heritage listing in 1952, can still be seen on the Swanage waterfront today.
A sculpture created for the 1951 Festival of Britain has returned to Waterloo Station where it was first displayed almost 70 years ago. The work of Hungarian-born artist Peter Laszlo Peri, The Sunbathers features two figures – made from ‘Pericrete’, a special kind of concrete created by the artist as a cheaper alternative to casting in bronze – and was mounted on the wall close to the station’s entrance. It was presumed lost until it was rediscovered in 2016 at the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath and, following restoration, was put on show in 2017 in the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall. Now, thanks to the efforts of Historic England and Network Rail, the sculptures have returned to the station, close to its original site, and will stay there for five years. PICTURES: Courtesy of Network Rail
Queen Victoria was a monarch known for breaking records and, thanks to her rule being in an age when technology was advancing at an incredible pace, performing royal-related “firsts”.
Among the latter is the fact that the Queen was the first British monarch to travel by train – a feat she performed with Prince Albert by her side on 13th June, 1842. It was he, who having first travelled on a train in 1839, had encouraged the rather nervous 23-year-old to make the journey (which she apparently agreed to undertake only two days before she actually did).
Travelling in a specially adapted “royal saloon” decorated with flowers, the royal couple travelled on the Great Western Railway, leaving Slough, which they had travelled to from Windsor Castle, at noon and arriving at London’s Paddington Station some 25 minutes later. Queen Victoria later wrote that there was no dust or great heat during the journey which, in fact, was “delightful and so quick”.
The train – which was pulled by the Firefly-class steam engine Phlegethon – was driven by Sir Daniel Gooch who was assisted by engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the railway. The Queen’s carriage was sandwiched in between six other carriages and trucks to act as a buffer in case of an accident.
On arriving at Paddington (at a temporary building which had been opened in 1838 and which would be replaced in 1854), the Queen was greeted by railway officials and their families along with a detachment of hussars on a platform covered with a red carpet. Crowds quickly grew and the royal couple were then escorted to Buckingham Palace.
The Queen would go on to regularly use railways as she travelled about Britain and even had a special signal installed on the roof of the royal carriage so the driver could be instructed to slow down as required.
Interestingly, the current Queen – Elizabeth II – and Prince Philip re-enacted the journey in 2017 to mark its 175th anniversary. They were accompanied by Isambard Thomas, the great, great, great grandson of Brunel and Gillian White, great, great grand-daughter of Gooch.
This major London thoroughfare (and ward of the City of London) owes its name to one of the eight former gates of the City of London – that’s right, Bishopsgate.
Located at what’s now the junction with Wormwood Street (and marked by a mitre which appears on a building there), the gate was the departure point for Ermine Street which ran from London to Lincoln and York.
The gate and hence the road – which runs northward from the intersection of Gracechurch Street and Cornhill to where it becomes Norton Folgate Street (which links into Shoreditch High Street) – is believed to have been named for the 7th century Bishop Erkenwald (Earconwald). It was he who apparently first ordered its reconstruction on the site of a former Roman gate.
By Tudor times, the street had become known for the mansions of rich merchants – among those who had their homes here were Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir John Crosby and Sir Paul Pindar (Crosby Hall was later re-erected in Chelsea and the facade of Sir Paul Pindar’s house, is in the V&A). The street also become known for its many great coaching inns, all of which were eventually demolished.
Bishopsgate was the first street in London to have gas lighting when it was introduced about 1810 and, about 1932, became the first in Europe to have automated traffic lights (at the junction with Cornhill).
The City of London ward straddles the site of the old London wall and gate and is accordingly divided into “within” and “without” sections.
While there are a number of churches associated with the street – St Ethelburga Bishopsgate, St Helen’s Bishopsgate and St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, these days it is largely lined by office buildings including the former NatWest Tower. Other notable buildings include that of the Bishopsgate Institute and the busy Liverpool Street Station is also accessible from Bishopsgate.
The name Bishopsgate is also synonymous with an IRA truck bombing which took place in the street on 24th April, 1993, in which one man was killed and 44 injured.
PICTURE: Top – Looking southward along Bishopsgate in 2014. (stevekeiretsu; licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0); Right – The Bishop’s mitre marking the location of the former gate (Eluveitie/ licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0).
With just 11 months to go until the launch of London’s Elizabeth line, new purple roundels have been rolled out at stations including Tottenham Court Road (above), Farringdon and Custom House (below). They all feature the iconic Johnston typeface, first commissioned in 1913 and designed by Edward Johnston (with updates made in 2016). Construction of the Elizabeth line, being carried out by Crossrail Ltd, has now entered its final stages and the line will go live from December when 10 new state-of-the-art stations, all step-free, will open. The line, which will enable a journey from Paddington to Canary Wharf in just 17 minutes, will initially offer three services: from Paddington (Elizabeth line station) to Abbey Wood via central London; from Paddington (mainline station) to Heathrow (Terminals 2 & 3 and 4); and, from Liverpool Street (mainline station) to Shenfield. The full route, which will run out to Reading in the east, opens in 2019. For more information on the line, see Transport for London’s page here.
PICTURES: Courtesy of Crossrail: top – Monica Wells; below – James O Jenkins.
This name – now only usually used in reference to several buildings and landmarks around the Kings Cross area including churches, a road, hotel and railway stations – was originally that of a separate village.
The village was named for the church in its midst which had been dedicated to St Pancras. The church – which has been dated back to at least the Norman era – is said to have been built on one of the earliest sites of Christian worship in the UK and was dedicated to a Roman-era boy martyr, St Pancras (in Latin, St Pancratius).
Tradition holds that St Pancras was a citizen of Rome who converted to Christianity and was beheaded for his faith during the Diocletian persecution in the early 4th century when aged just 14. When Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine on his mission to England in the late 6th century, he sent relics of the saint with him, hence why many English churches are dedicated to St Pancras.
The village which had been based around the church was apparently largely abandoned in the Middle Ages – possibly due to flooding – and the area was only resettled in the late 18th century with the development of Camden Town and Somers Town.
While the church – now known as St Pancras Old Church – was restored in the mid-19th century, a new parish church – known as St Pancras New Church – which built about a kilometre away on Euston Road.
King’s Cross railway station, the western concourse. Designed by John McAslan, the semi-circular building – which opened in 2012 – features a steel roof engineered by Arup, claimed to be the longer single-span station structure in Europe. The image was taken with a fisheye lens. PICTURE: Colin/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
The name Euston first makes an appearance in London in the Georgian era when Euston Square was laid out north of the City.
The moniker came from the square’s landlord, the Duke of Grafton, who owned a country seat called Euston Hall near Thetford in Suffolk, and apparently derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Efe’s Tun’ meaning the ‘farmstead of a man called Efe’.
The now much altered square (the gardens of which are pictured) was originally developed in the 1820s; in the 1850s the New Road – which had been developed by the second Duke of Grafton, Charles Fitzroy, in the 1730s to take farm traffic off Oxford Street and Holborn – was renamed Euston Road.
It only makes sense then that when the mainline station on that road was developed in the 1830s (it opened in 1837, exactly a month after Queen Victoria became the monarch), it too was named Euston (as was the now long-gone Euston Arch – see our earlier post here).
Euston Underground Station opened in 1907 while Euston Square Underground station, which originally opened as Gower Street in 1863, was renamed Euston Square in 1909.
Interestingly the area around Euston Road also features numerous references to Grafton in honour of the duke – Grafton Street, Grafton Place and Grafton Way among them – while other streets also have links to the names of the dukes’ family – Warren Street (which also lends its name to a Tube station), for example, is named for Anne Warren, the wife of the second duke’s grandson.
• The London Festival of Architecture kicked off this week with more than 200 events planned for the capital across the month of June. Highlights include “open studios” in which 50 architectural practices across London open their doors to the public, a series of film showing at the BFI concerning the portrayal of the built environment in documentaries and hosted tours through some of London council estate’s green spaces and private gardens. The festival, which centres around three key themes – housing renewal and regeneration, creative workspaces and community engagement, also features a range of exhibitions, installations, talks and workshops including the Archio Plantotype Workshop on 25th June in which participants are asked to help design and build model prototype planters to grow compact and hybrid plants (pictured). For the full programme, check out www.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org.
• The design of London’s transport system – from posters, maps and signage to the styling of trains and stations – is the subject of a new exhibition at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.Designology – Shaping London explores the role design has played in London’s public transportation systems, spanning the period from the system’s Victorian origins to today. Among the objects on display are an 1834 Shillibeer Woolwich Omnibus timetable, original architectural drawings by Charles Holden of Arnos Grove and Sudbury art deco stations, and a 1994 magnetic ticket hall station model. There are also case studies on key design features found across the transport network such as the New Johnston typeface and the design of Moquette fabric used on the Underground and buses. Visitors are also encouraged to design their own bus stop sign (and share it on social media with the hashtag #pimpmybusstop) and visit a pop-up design studio to find out more about contemporary design innovation. There’s an accompanying programme of events. Admission charges apply. For more, see www.ltmuseum.co.uk. PICTURE: The Passenger’s Guide to London Transport, issued by London Transport, March, 1962./The London Transport Museum.
• The “worst day” in the history of the British Army – 1st July, 1916, when almost 60,000 died during the Battle of the Somme – is being commemorated in an exhibition marking the battle’s centenary in Guildhall Yard.Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace: Somme 1916, features a series of evocative photographs by Michael St Maur Sheil of the battlefields as they look today contrasted with images taken at the time. The outdoor exhibition is being accompanied by a display of Somme-related artefacts in the City of London Heritage Gallery at the Guildhall Art Gallery. Admission to the display is free. Runs until 5th July.
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This is one of a series of works by renowned photographer Henry Reichhold which features in the exhibition Thames – Heart of London, currently on show at Blackfriars Thameslink railway station. Thameslink and JCDecaux have provided 49 platform advertising sites for the display, part of the Totally Thames celebrations taking place throughout September. The photographs, which measure 2.5 metres long, are an attempt to capture the character of the Thames as it winds its way through the city and were taken from a series of notable vantage points including the Shard, City Hall, OXO Tower, One Canada Square, Southbank Tower and the Houses of Parliament. As well as the river itself, they also capture some of the many events which have taken place upon it – from the Diamond Jubilee Pageant to New Year’s Day celebrations. Each image has taken between one and three weeks to create from up to 100 separate photographs – selected out of more than 800 taken on a single day – which have then been put together in a stunning panorama. New York-born Reichhold says the process of “extracting” the final image is “never the same”. “The camera is very stubborn about creating a ‘mechanical’ view and it is the reinterpretation of these files to in some way reflect what the human eye sees that I find so troublesome and fascinating.” The exhibition is at Blackfriars Station, 179 Queen Victoria Street, London, and runs until 30th September. Entry is free to passengers with a valid GTR train ticket and to holders of a 10p platform ticket.
Unveiled earlier this month at Waterloo Station to mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, the memorial features a supersized solid bronze replica of the obverse side of the Waterloo Campaign medal depicting Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
The memorial, which was installed on a balcony above the main concourse by The London Mint Office on behalf of Waterloo200 – the organisation overseeing bicentenary commemorations, is dedicated to the 4,700 members of the allied armies who were killed in the battle on 18th June, 1815 (which also left 14,600 wounded and 4,700 missing).
The upsized medal, which has a diameter of 65 centimetres, is a replica of one which was the first to be commissioned for every soldier who fought in the battle, regardless of their rank.
Designed by London-based artist Jason Brooks, the memorial also features a famous quote from the Duke of Wellington on granite: “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
It was unveiled on 10th June by the 9th Duke of Wellington (pictured with the memorial) in a ceremony attended by some of the descendants of those who fought and died in the battle.
Waterloo Station was itself, of course, named in commemoration of the battle (well, indirectly – it, like the surrounding district itself, took its name from nearby Waterloo Bridge which was in fact named after the battle).
Fresh from the success of designing The Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (see our earlier post here), in 1855 Sir Joseph Paxton came up with the idea of building a covered elevated railway “girdle” which would circle parts of central and west London and alleviate traffic congestion.
The proposed 10 mile long, eight track railway – which would feature trains propelled by air pressure (an “atmospheric” system) rather than conventional steam engines and included “express” trains which would only stop at select stations – was to be constructed inside a vast, 108 foot high glass covered arcade which would also contain a road, shopping and even housing.
The trains would travel at such a speed that to get from any one point on the “girdle” to its opposite point would only take 15 minutes.
Paxton presented his proposal to a Parliamentary Select Committee in June 1855 – he had already shown it to Prince Albert whom, he said, “gives it his approval”.
He estimated the cost of his proposal – which he thought would carry some 105,000 passengers every day – at some £34 million – a figure which parliament, which had initially been supportive of the idea, found a little hard to stomach.
This was especially thanks to the fact they were already dealing with the costs of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s vast sewer system (see our earlier post here), created as a result of the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858 when the smell of untreated human excrement and other waste in the Thames became so strong, parliament had to act.
As a result, the project – which would have crossed the Thames three times, once with a spur line that ended near Piccadilly Circus – never eventuated but the Underground’s Circle Line today follows roughly the same route Paxton’s railway would have.
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