KENNINGTON CROSS
During the 1970s, I took a great interest in the London buses that I rode on during my teenage years, while travelling to school in Romford. Later, I discovered more of the history of London Transport, learning about trams, trolleybuses and Underground trains.
In 2002, I built a home-based Underground layout with scratch-built Plastikard surface stock. I was considering building a portable version of this but chose instead to build a model of the Kingsway Tram Subway. A model of the four-tracked Dog Kennel Hill tramway followed. Both of these were exhibited at a number of shows until 2010. Having enjoyed the research for both of these projects, I designed a card kit of the well-loved Kingston Bus Station. This led to my range of uncut building card kits.
My wife, Jenny, and I moved to Buxton, in the Peak District, in 2013. Since then, I experimented with a home-based tram layout giving me several ideas, which, with further refinement and compression, led to ‘Kennington Cross’.
Creative freedom
After building layouts based on real locations, the freedom of a fictional one at first seemed too great – I could build whatever I wished. Instead of the unique tramway features of the previous places that I had modelled, my aim this time was to show the more ‘typical face’ of London’s tramways; in particular, a double-track junction. The constraints of the practicality of being able to fit the layout into a car set the shape and footprint of the layout.
The layout was designed to show a
