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class) to one of two Woking Necropolis stations at Brookwood in Surrey. Brookwood cemetery, the largest in the British Empire, opened in 1854 to provide a burial place for Londoners, the two stations being necessary to provide separate accommodation for Anglicans and others. The last train ran in April 1941 when bombs damaged the funeral train but the elegant façade of the Necropolis station may still be seen at Westminster House, 121, Westminster Bridge Road, SE1. The cemetery at Brookwood contains a separate burial ground for Muslims, the nearby town of Woking having Britain’s oldest mosque.

    The Euston Arch
    Great Scott
    The Euston Arch is another feature of railway history that has almost disappeared from the records. This massive arch, in the Doric style, was built as an imposing entrance to Euston station in 1837 and demolished in 1961 when the station was redeveloped, This caused much controversy, with criticism led by the poet John Betjeman. The remains of the arch were discovered, well preserved, by the architectural historian Dan Cruickshank in 1994, in the bed of the River Lea. There is a proposal to have it re-erected close to its original site.
    John Betjeman was more successful in his attempts to preserve the Midland Grand Hotel, built by George Gilbert Scott (1811–78) in the Victorian Gothic style which he also employed in the Albert Memorial. This has now been refurbished and brought back into use as a luxury hotel adjacent to St Pancras International, the terminus for Eurostar trains since 2007. At the same time the main train shed was restored. Completed in 1868 by the engineer William Henry Barlow, it was the largest single-span structure ever designed at that time and its magnificent glass roof has been returned to its former glory, a fine testimony to its Victorian origins, providing an impressive entrance to London for passengers arriving from the Continent.

    The Midland Grand Hotel

Dr Cuming’s ‘Infernal Regions’
London’s Underground railways
    B y the 1840s London’s transport problem was dire. Streets were so congested by horse-drawn traffic that it was usually quicker to walk than ride anywhere. The situation was made worse when the ring of mainline stations began to decant their commuters to the north of the present Marylebone Road-Euston Road-Pentonville Road highway, leaving them to find their own way to the City and Westminster where they wanted to go. A proposal to build a railway beneath the streets from Paddington to Farringdon, linking mainline stations, was frustrated by difficulties in raising the money, partly because of the activities of Leopold Redpath, an officer of the Great Northern railway, who misappropriated £170,000 set aside by the Great Northern to invest in the new railway. He spent the money on ‘magnificent houses and objects of vertu’ and was one of the last convicts to be transported to Australia. Despite this, and the warnings of a Dr Cuming that ‘The forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil’, construction went ahead and the world’s first Underground railway, the Metropolitan, was opened in January 1863.

    The Metropolitan Railway
    Most of the spoil created by building the Metropolitan Railway was taken to the banks of the Thames where it was used to create the Victoria Embankment. But some of it was taken to the fringe of the built-up area and dumped at Stamford Bridge. In 1904 the site was bought by two brothers, Gus and Joseph Mears, who adopted it as a home for their new football club, Chelsea, the mounds of spoil being used to form the first terraces. The son of Joseph, also known as Jo Mears (1905-66), was chairman of Chelsea FC and of the Football Association and helped secure the World Cup for England in 1966. The ground was extensively redeveloped in the 1990s and new all-seater stands replaced the old terraces.
    ONE-WAY