Bishopsgate Railway Station

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West facade of the station (1851)

The station Bishopsgate was a railway station in the British capital London . It was on Shoreditch High Street in the Bethnal Green neighborhood (now in the Hackney and Tower Hamlets boroughs ), on the western edge of the East End and just outside the City of London . The station was opened in 1840 and was in operation for passenger traffic until 1875. After that it was used for freight traffic until it was destroyed by fire in 1964. Shoreditch High Street Station is now on the site .

history

The station was opened on July 1, 1840 by the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) and served as the new terminus of the Great Eastern Main Line . It replaced the temporary station on Devonshire Road at Mile End that had opened the year before . First it was called Shoreditch, the name was changed to Bishopsgate on July 27, 1847. The ECR merged in 1862 with several other railway companies in East Anglia to form the Great Eastern Railway (GER). For a while she also used Fenchurch Street Station as the terminus. The lack of capacity prompted GER to build a new terminus on Liverpool Street, which is closer to the city center, and put it into operation in 1874. Bishopsgate Station was closed to passenger traffic in November 1875 and converted into a freight yard from 1878 to 1880 .

In 1881 the new freight station began to operate, which was laid out on three levels. Bishopsgate handled very large quantities of goods from the ports to the east. Turntables and winches made maneuvering easier. Incoming goods could be stored in goods sheds or reloaded directly onto road vehicles. A major fire destroyed the freight yard on December 5, 1964. The fire was so intense and extensive that the London Fire Brigade had to use 40 fire engines, 12 turntable ladder trucks and 235 fire fighters. Two customs officers were killed; several hundred freight cars, dozens of motor vehicles and goods valued at several million pounds were destroyed.

The station was then closed and the buildings on the upper level demolished. Over the next four decades, the rest of the facility was left to decay. After a long planning period, the site was completely cleared in 2003/04, with the exception of a number of listed elements: Ornate gates on Shoreditch High Street and a 260 m long remaining section of the viaduct designed by John Braithwaite (the second oldest railway structure in London) . The demolition of the former Bishopsgate station created the space necessary for the construction of Shoreditch High Street station , part of the extension of the East London Line opened in 2010 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Bishopsgate Railway Terminus. In: Survey of London: Volume 27. British History Online, 1957, accessed April 1, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Bishopsgate Goods Yard Interim Planning Guidance 2010. (PDF, 4.6 MB) (No longer available online.) London Borough of Hackney, 2010, p. 9 , archived from the original on March 17, 2016 ; accessed on April 1, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hackney.gov.uk
  3. ^ Bishopsgate Goods Depot Fire. (No longer available online.) Fireservice.co.uk, 2014, archived from the original on March 26, 2016 ; accessed on April 1, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fireservice.co.uk
  4. ↑ Bishopsgate. Disused stations site record, August 23, 2015, accessed April 1, 2016 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 31 '24.2 "  N , 0 ° 4' 36.5"  W.