Railway Towns: An Overview of Towns That Developed Through Railways

By David Brandon

The railways changed the world. They initiated a revolution in communications which continues to this day, ever more profoundly influencing our lives. They had an enormous economic and social impact in Britain, not least with its demography. Before 1914 places on the railway system felt they were connected to the wider world. Those left off the system often feared for their future.

It was never actually as simple as that. Some places well served by railways prospered, other did not. Some with minimal or no railway connections managed to sustain themselves successfully. Others became complex railway hubs, perhaps with railway-based engineering works, extensive shunting yards and warehouses and a large requirement for labour. Some companies built large numbers of dwellings for their workers and their families. Sometimes they even built churches and parks, for example.

Places of this character have often been described as 'railway towns' but what is actually meant by this term?

In a pioneering attempt in book form to move towards an understanding of what constitutes a railway town, the author considers a wide range of cities, towns, villages and other settlements and asks to what extent they owed their nineteenth and early twentieth century development to the railways.

This book should appeal to students of railway history, British topography and the economic, social and cultural impact of railways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399051095

David Brandon

David Brandon was educated at Manchester University and worked in Adult Education at Further Education Colleges and Universities and later for a major national trade union. Researching and writing since 1997 he has had forty titles published of which he regards the 'flagship' to be a collaborative work published by the National Archives, using their resources to examine the transportation of felons to Australia and other penal colonies. His publications reflect his wide interests which include railways, political and social history, London history, topography, local history and the history of crime.

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Introduction

An acute observer of changing Britain wrote in 1850:

Railways have set all the towns of Britain a-dancing. Reading is coming up to London, Basingstoke is going down to Gosport or Southampton, Dumfries to Liverpool and Glasgow; while at Crewe and other points, I see new ganglions of human population establishing themselves ... Reading, Basingstoke, and the rest, the unfortunate towns, subscribed money to get railways; and it proves to be for cutting their own throats. Their business has gone elsewhither ... They are set a-dancing, confusedly waltzing, in a state of progressive dissolution, towards the four winds; and know not where the end of the death-dance will be for them...

The observer was Thomas Carlyle and for him the railways epitomised so much that he passionately loathed; the evils of unfettered capitalism, the worship of mammon and the dependence upon the cash nexus. Was he right in identifying what he clearly saw as the baleful effect of the railways on Britain’s towns?

Carlyle was not alone in deprecating the advance of Britain’s railways. Earlier, John Bull, first published in 1820 and at that time a Sunday weekly magazine of robustly traditional views, laid in to the railways:

Does anybody mean to say that decent people, passengers who would use their own carriages ... would consent to be hurried along upon a railroad ... or is it to be imagined that women ... would endure the fatigue and misery and danger ... of being dragged through the air at the rate of 20mph, all their lives being at the mercy of a tin pipe, or a copper boiler, or the accidental dropping of a pebble on the line of way? ... Railroads will do incalculable mischief. If they succeed they will give an unnatural impetus to society, destroy all the relations which exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulations, overturn the metropolitan markets, drain the provinces of all their resources, and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress.

One part of the complex activity known as history consists of asking questions. This is easy. Answering them with a sufficiency of solid supporting evidence is frequently difficult. In the current work we will ask what is meant by the phrase ‘railway town’. We probe into odd corners of the socio-economic impact of railways, of urban geography, and topography, for example, as we attempt to reach, if not exactitude, at least some element of a greater understanding of the concept. To do this, we will consider a wide variety of places in mainland Britain where the railways had both a presence and influence.

The concept of a ‘railway town’ is not a simple one. Simmons (1986) argues that on occasions it is possible to say without doubt that the railway caused urban growth, as when it established locomotive or carriage works of its own, importing employees for the purpose thereby creating a new community, a ‘railway town’. He states that, in his opinion, there are not many places that can with certainty be described as ‘railway towns’, partly because of the difficulty of establishing a definitive answer to how far the railways contributed to the growth and changing nature of any specific place. Clearly a complex and unique mix of economic, social, geographical and other factors contributes to the growth of any urban community.

Perhaps a start could be made with places like Swindon or Crewe. Swindon was an old and small country town. It stood on an eminence overlooking an area of flattish land on which the Great Western Railway (GWR) chose to build what became an enormous industrial complex. This required a large workforce and the GWR built housing and the amenities of a not inconsiderable town in order to attract, accommodate and retain the workers and their families who mostly migrated from elsewhere. Crewe, prior to the coming of the railway, consisted of little more than a smattering of farms and hamlets. It became a major railway junction and had large engineering workshops. It became a key hub of the mighty London & North Western Railway (L&NWR) and, as with the GWR at Swindon, the L&NWR had to build the infrastructure of a town to supply many of the needs of what became a very large workforce, again moving there from elsewhere.

Swindon and Crewe satisfy any proposed criteria for defining the term ‘railway town’. A small number of other places, on what could be described as ‘green field sites’, might qualify similarly. Wolverton, Horwich and Shildon come to mind. All the five places mentioned grew enough to be regarded as towns, if not large ones. At all of them there had been limited human habitation before the railway came. The railway was the major employer, its physical presence was immediately obvious as was its influence on the social and cultural life of the town. There were other smaller settlements, not usually described as towns, which met the same criteria. Melton Constable, Woodford Halse and Hellifield spring to mind. Perhaps they could be described as ‘railway villages’. That might take us into the murky waters of attempting to define what distinguishes a town from a village.

Did a place qualify as a railway town simply because it was the meeting point of several lines, had a large passenger station, extensive sidings, goods depots and other infrastructure, and provided much employment locally? By such a yardstick, Preston, for example, would certainly be a railway town. So would its near neighbour Wigan. This had three significant passenger stations in the town centre, three engine sheds, extensive marshalling yards and a web of interlinked lines of quite amazing complexity. The railway would have employed much local labour. Preston and Wigan have rarely, if ever, been described as railway towns. Ely, never a large town, was the meeting place of lines converging from six directions. It even had an avoiding line! There was considerable passenger interchange business there but little in the way of sorting and shunting activity. It would never have been a major local employer. Railway hub it might have been. Railway town it was not.

Another category of railway-associated towns includes Peterborough, York and Carlisle. These were all ancient ecclesiastical centres which had developed before the railways into places of importance even though small by today’s standards. All were cathedral cities and market towns, all stood on rivers which were navigable, and all were the focus of many roads. York had great importance as an administrative and judicial centre as well as hosting lively activities for Yorkshire’s social elite. It began to develop something of an industrial character in the nineteenth century as well as becoming a major railway junction with engineering workshops, engine sheds and extensive shunting and marshalling yards. Carlisle’s strategic position had provided it with a troubled history. It became a major railway hub served by no fewer than seven important pre-grouping railway companies. The railway had a huge presence in the city with each of the companies tending jealously to have their own locomotive facilities and goods depots. Other industries developed in the city, but the railways remained major local employers. Neither York nor Carlisle have generally been considered as railway towns, but Peterborough has frequently been put in that category. This was a small cathedral city and market centre on which seven lines eventually converged. It had two stations, several engine sheds and numerous shunting yards. The Great Northern Railway (GNR) occupied vast siding space where the sorting of coal trains from Yorkshire and the East Midlands took place before their contents were despatched largely to supply London’s huge demand for fuel from both domestic and industrial consumers.

What for convenience will be called ‘railway clusters’ need to be considered. These were districts, usually on the fringe of large cities, where railway activity in the broadest sense set an indelible stamp on their appearance and character. This may just have been a spaghetti of through lines with associated junctions and sidings dense enough to preclude much else in the way of land use in the area involved. Something similar and more modern can be seen today at some motorway and trunk road intersections where there are often tracts of underused or virtually unusable land. Examples of such clusters were in south-east London around New Cross and Bricklayers Arms and around Selhurst and Norwood Junction where there was a complicated web of lines and junctions formerly belonging to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR). Glasgow had a similar district around Shields Road to the south-west of the city and Birmingham likewise with the Saltley and Bromford Bridge area.

Another kind of urban area greatly influenced by the presence of railways was what could be described as an ‘industrial suburb’. These adjuncts to cities had a complex network of lines, engine sheds and railway engineering works requiring large workforces tending to be housed nearby. In such areas much or most employment would have been related to the railways. Sometimes the tradition they developed encouraged other engineering and heavy industries to locate close by. Examples of such industrial suburbs were the Gorton and Openshaw district of Manchester and the Springburn area of Glasgow. Battersea in south-west London had railway-related engineering works, large engine sheds and a convoluted network of railway lines.

Railways contributed to the growth of suburbs close to many cities and large towns. It may be convenient to call these ‘railway suburbs’. Some served by railways grew into substantial towns even with populations over 100,000. Ealing could be taken as an example, developing many of the services and amenities expected of large established towns. Before the railway era, Ealing had numerous large country houses enjoying the attraction of rural seclusion as well as proximity to London. In the nineteenth century, Ealing became a favoured residential outlier of London. Acton, close by, had ancient origins and drew wealthy residents for the same reasons as Ealing. It grew very rapidly in the nineteenth century from a population of 3,000 in 1861 to 38,000 in 1891 by which time it had excellent canal, road and railway links to central London. Unlike Ealing, however, it became highly industrialised location with a large working-class population. Although both Ealing and Acton came to be well served by railways it would be simplistic to ascribe their rapid growth in the nineteenth century simply to railway development. Historical causation is a complicated process.

There are, however, residential suburbs that almost certainly do owe their growth primarily to the intervention of railways in the historical process. Perhaps the place most often mentioned in this connection is Surbiton which was once known tentatively and fortunately not for long as ‘Kingston-on-Railway’.

Some larger provincial cities have suburbs where undoubtedly railways contributed substantially to their growth. To the south of Manchester, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Sale, Altrincham and Bowdon experienced significant growth as fashionable outer suburbs in the nineteenth century. Similarly, just north of Manchester the growth of Heaton Park, Prestwich and Whitefield was greatly encouraged and aided by the Lancashire and Yorkshire (L&Y) line to and from Manchester Victoria. North of Glasgow, Bearsden and Milngavie owe much to the North British Railway (NBR) into Glasgow, passenger services commencing in August 1863. South of Birmingham the GWR built stations along its lines to Stratford-upon-Avon and Leamington Spa which encouraged the spread of desirable speculative residential development in more countryfied areas than were to be found north and east of the city. Care needs to be taken when considering what contribution, if any, railways made to the development of Edinburgh’s suburbs. In the second half of the nineteenth century there was intense largely high-quality residential development south of the city centre in such districts as Merchiston, Morningside and Grange. The former was catered for by the Caledonian Railway’s (CR) line to Edinburgh to Edinburgh Princes Street Station while the latter districts were served by the South Suburban Line of the NBR to and from Waverley but much more directly and quickly to Edinburgh’s city centre by what became a formidable network of tram services. The presence of a railway intended to provide passenger facilities for suburbs was no guarantee that the citizenry would not prefer alternative forms of transport. These suburbs in south Edinburgh cannot be described as railway suburbs.

Britain was the nineteenth-century export and trading nation par excellence and the period 1830 to 1914 saw the expansion of many earlier ports and the development of some entirely new ones. Railway companies had a major physical presence in, and contributed significantly to, the economic development of many of these. At the risk of over-simplification, some ports can be described as handling imports and exports and a few, such as Barry, concerned almost entirely with exports, in this case, of coal. Some ports were engaged mainly in servicing ferries to and from the Continent and Harwich, Dover and Newhaven fall into such a category. Others such as Southampton and Liverpool were involved in servicing long-haul voyages and handled both passengers and cargo. Hull, Fleetwood, Grimsby and Lowestoft may be thought of as archetypical fishing ports but the first two also acted as ferry ports. Immingham was a major exporter of coal but also served European ferries. Weymouth acted as a ferry port and doubled as a seaside watering place as did Folkestone. Railways served all these places and unquestionably contributed to their growth and yet it is by no means easy to decide which, if any, could usefully be described as railway towns.

Mention of seaside watering places leads on naturally to a consideration of the relationship between railways and coastal resorts. Given the vagaries of the British climate, the classic British seaside resort could be seen as an unlikely development, but those climatic vagaries favoured Britain’s transformation into a pioneering industrial society and eventually generated a demand by working people for an escape from their everyday drudgery. People living near the sea were used to dipping in the briny, often naked, but the idea of the health-giving effects of bathing in and drinking seawater only caught on, at first among the well-to-do, in the later part of the eighteenth century. Places like Brighton and Scarborough attracted a well-heeled clientele before the age of the railway. It was only from around the middle of the nineteenth century that towns came into existence largely to cater for what we would now call the leisure market and began to attract a more demotic type of visitor and in larger numbers. Some of these towns grew with extraordinary rapidity to provide an escape for the better-off workers from the grim mining and industrial settlements inland. Blackpool and Southport were early northern examples. Southend-on-Sea and Margate catered for ‘escapees’ from the metropolis. The seaside resorts that grew into large towns in the nineteenth century, often from almost virgin sites, were served by railways which provided the efficient means for transporting the masses who wanted sea, sand and, where possible, a bit of sin, at first just on day trips. It is always risky trying to quantify the exact impact of the railways on such towns given the frequent paucity of concrete evidence. It would be possible to argue that Blackpool was a railway town, every bit as much an industrial town in its own way as one manufacturing textiles or metal goods. Its prime purpose was to provide services, on an industrial scale, for working people and their families. Blackpool depended on the railways for bringing these leisure consumers in their tens of thousands and would not have developed in the way it did without the railways. It could be argued Skegness and Cleethorpes, for example, can be regarded as railway towns because their function as resorts was for decades dependent on railways bringing them the visitors, and railway companies had invested large amounts of money in making them what they became.

The habit of ‘taking the waters’ in locations where there were mineral springs with supposedly therapeutic properties, is ancient. The springs at Bath, for example, have certainly been used for bathing since at least Roman times. Bath’s popularity as what we would now call a spa, dates from the eighteenth century when the rich and powerful, often synonymous with the lazy, over-indulgent and hypochondriacal, converged in large numbers on the town for the ‘season’. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Devonshire developed Buxton as a northern rival to Bath. Britain’s spas were losing their fashionable character by the time railways were spreading across the country and some found a new function as sedate, select inland resorts and residential towns for gentlefolk of comfortable but not unlimited resources. Many of them also became the locations of prestigious schools and later played hosts to events such as conferences. The railways played a role in facilitating this modified function by providing easy access.

Towns such as Swindon and Crewe which were virtually created by the railways and dominated by their need for engineering and support services, have already been mentioned. Railways played a major role in assisting the growth of many other towns with heavy industries. They often brought in the raw materials and fuel required by the local industries and carried away what was produced. Sometimes the transportation of the raw materials by rail may have been over long distances as, for example, coal and coke from the Durham mining districts to ironworks in Cumberland and around Barrow-in-Furness. Another example was iron ore imported through Tyne Dock to supply ironmaking at Consett. Unquestionably, such towns would have developed differently had railways not played a crucial role in assisting their industrial development. Do such places merit being described as railway towns? Burton-on-Trent is another highly specialised industrial town which benefitted greatly by the railways bringing in its raw materials and fuel and taking away its beery products often to distant markets, especially that of London. It brewed beer long before the railways arrived but was at the forefront of the move to concentrate the brewing industry in the hands of ever fewer highly capitalised, high-output industries marketing their products not just locally but across the country, particularly through the possession of large numbers of tied houses. It was impossible to be in the centre of Burton-on-Trent and not beware of the dominating presence of the brewing and ancillary industries. Is there a case, then, for regarding Burton-on-Trent as a railway town?

Something should be said about the navvy settlements erected as temporary headquarters and accommodation during the construction of Britain’s railways. Where construction work was likely to be prolonged, as, for example, at Woodhead where the barrier of the Pennines had to be penetrated by a long tunnel, these settlements could be large and, although frequently highly squalid, also sophisticated given their essentially temporary nature. They were created by the requirements of railway building. Is there a case for saying that they were a particularly specialised type of railway settlement?

It would be easy to fall for an assertion that railways caused economic growth and that places that had railways grew faster than those that did not. The railways were both products of economic growth and generators of that growth, but their influence was uneven. We could state that the population of place X grew by 25 per cent in the twenty years after the railway arrived, implying that this growth was the result of the coming of the railway and its beneficial effect on wealth generation in the town. Certainly, the transport facilities afforded by the railway were likely to attract new business and a booming town encouraged inward migration because of the jobs that were created. However, this apparent ‘win-win’ situation was not inevitable. Some individual case studies would support the assertion and others call it into question.

The first national census of the British population took place in 1801 since when the normal pattern has been for them to be carried out every ten years. Those held from 1841 to 1921 are available for public scrutiny. There are some concerns about the accuracy of the early returns but with that reservation they provide useful evidence for historians, not least because the growth of any specific place can easily be traced over the years. The censuses also provide information about the occupations of those who are enumerated although not, unfortunately, details of their employers. Therefore, descriptions like ‘labourer’ are not necessarily very helpful in determining whether the person was employed on the railway. The railways of the nineteenth century were extremely labour-intensive. Where the population of a town grew very fast between, say, 1850 and 1914, and we know from other information that the railway had a significant presence, it may be reasonable to assume that a substantial proportion of the increased population consisted of railway employees and their families. We do know of course even without reference to census returns that in some places which were built on green field sites, the railways created communities from scratch in which, at least initially, virtually the whole of the local economy and society was orientated around railways.

Some deeply researched monographs on specific localities can provide detailed information about the impact of the railway in terms, for example, of its social, economic, cultural, political and environmental impact. Within the confines of this book, probing the question of what we understand by the term ‘railway towns’, we are restricted largely to more general observations and conclusions albeit sometimes with more specific detail where it is available.

Only individual studies can help to determine whether this or that place was decisively shaped as a result of railways. Examples can be given of places well-served by railways which grew and prospered after the railways arrived. This does not necessarily mean that they qualify as railway towns. Conversely, there are places which expanded rapidly in the nineteenth century but only became rail-connected at a later stage. An infinite number of factors influence urban development of which railways may be only one. In a few places, Swindon and Crewe for example, what happened to them in the nineteenth century was clearly dependent on them becoming centres of railway activity. They are correctly recognised as railway towns and the prosperity they experienced in the nineteenth century was greatly expedited by the railways. While being served by a railway could bring added prosperity and growth to a place, it did not necessarily bring either. It might even have a damaging effect. The ancient town of Horncastle, for example, was harmed by the opening of railway connections to Lincoln in 1855. Local shopkeepers and the market quickly noticed trade falling as townspeople took themselves off to sample the greater retail choices offered in the county town.

Some established towns found their populations falling after they gained a place on main line railways. Examples are Cambridge and Bath. Clearly this fall was not due the coming of the railway but to factors peculiar to each of these towns. The population of Britain’s towns in the pre-railway age sometimes fluctuated considerably over time for reasons unique to the specific location or, of course, sometimes caused by such factors as visitations of epidemic disease. When the railways began to spread across the country, we can safely say that most towns wanted to be connected, many believing that an age of far greater prosperity would follow. Not to have a railway was thought to be the path to stagnation or decline. Prosperity did not necessarily follow. Faringdon in Berkshire desperately wanted to be placed on a railway but was loftily avoided when the GWR was building its line from London to Swindon, Bath and Bristol. It became the terminus of a short branch from that line in 1864 by which time the town’s population was in decline. It continued this pattern until the end of the century. It seems that the railway’s presence failed to provide a hoped-for boost. Westerham in Kent was another small town which fruitlessly agitated for years to be put on the railway map. It eventually succeeded in 1881 but the town experienced no significant growth before the First World War.

The cases of Kendal and Frome are interesting. These towns were deemed important enough to gain their own representation in Parliament under the 1832 Reform Act. When the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway opened throughout in 1846, Kendal, to its great chagrin, found itself on the end of a 2-mile-long branch line from Oxenholme rather than on what became the West Coast Main Line. It therefore had to bear the consequences of being a railway backwater even after the line from Oxenholme was extended to Windermere. Frome was on the line from Bath to Weymouth which came under the thrall of the GWR and gained its station in 1850. This was a classic rambling secondary line. What Frome wanted was quick access to London and it finally gained this in 1906 when the GWR opened its line from Taunton via Westbury to Reading and Paddington. Now firmly on a main line, Frome found itself relegated once more to secondary status when the GWR built a short avoiding line to the south of the town in 1921. Even if both these towns did not stagnate, they remained small and their relatively lowly position on the railway system was probably at least partly responsible.

Tewkesbury was another old country town prospering from its role as a market centre with some rural industry and being a coaching centre of importance. When the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway received parliamentary authority in 1836, there were two towns situated close to each other which