CHAPTER XXVIII.
AGAR TOWN, AND THE MIDLAND RAILWAY.
Origin of the Midland Railway—Agar Town as it was—A Good Clearance—Underground Operations for the Construction of the Midland
Railway and Terminus—Re-interment of a Roman Catholic Dignitary—The Midland Railway—Mr. William Agar—Tom Sayers, the
Pugilist—The English "Connemara"—A Monster Hotel—The Midland Terminus: Vast Size of the Roof of the Station—A Railway
Goods Bank—The Imperial Gas Works—York Road.
The Midland Railway, unlike most other long
lines, was commenced, not in London, but in the
provinces, having been originated in 1832 at a
village inn on the borders of Leicestershire and
Nottinghamshire, in the necessities of a few coalowners—not of the richest and most influential
class. It has, however, gradually found its way
from the provinces into London, and has spread
out its paths of iron, like a net-work, north and
south, east and west, through half the counties of
England, till they stretch from the Severn to the
Humber, from the Wash to the Mersey, from the
Thames to the Solway Firth. Its construction
has cost fifty millions of money, bringing in an
income of five millions a year; and it has before
it an almost unlimited future. We do not intend
here to attempt an account of the entire Midland
line; but as we have already given some details
about the London and North-Western line in our
account of Euston Square, so our description of
St. Pancras will not be complete without a few
particulars about this railway. When this line was
brought into London, in 1866, it wrought a mighty
revolution in the neighbourhood where we now are.
"For its passenger station alone it swept away a
church and seven streets of three thousand houses,"
writes Mr. F. Williams, in his "History of the
Midland Railway: a Narrative of Modern Enterprise." "Old St. Pancras churchyard was invaded,
and Agar Town almost demolished. Yet those
who knew this district at that time have no regret
at the change. Time was when the wealthy owner
of a large estate had lived here in his mansion;
but after his departure the place became a very
'abomination of desolation.' In its centre was
what was termed La Belle Isle, a dreary and unsavoury locality, abandoned to mountains of refuse
from the metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what
once had been fish, or occupied by knackers'-yards
and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap-manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and
brick-kilns. At the broken doors of multilated
houses canaries still sang, and dogs lay basking in
the sun, as if to remind one of the vast colonies of
bird-fanciers and dog-fanciers who formerly made
Agar Town their abode; and from these dwellings
came out wretched creatures in rags and dirt, and
searched amid the far-extending refuse for the
filthy treasure by the aid of which they eked out a
miserable livelihood; whilst over the whole neighbourhood the gas-works poured forth their mephitic
vapours, and the canal gave forth its rheumatic
dampness, extracting in return some of the more
poisonous ingredients in the atmosphere, and
spreading them upon the surface of the water in a
thick scum of various and ominous hues. Such
was Agar Town before the Midland Railway came
into the midst of it."
The above sketch is slightly—but only slightly—overdrawn; for the canal still flows where it did,
and it is known that gas-works, though unsightly,
are not really unhealthy neighbours. Be this, however, as it may, a mighty clearance of houses was
made, and a population equal to that of ten small
boroughs was swept away, as the first step towards
a new order of things. The neighbourhood for
many months presented the appearance of an utter
chaos, with mounds of earth, the débris of houses
and tunnels in the course of being dug. By the
side of the Euston Road, close under the front of
the Midland Railway Hotel, was dug a large trench
in which was built a tunnel for the use of the
Metropolitan Company whenever it shall need to
double its present traffic-lines. Further to the
north came sweeping round another large cutting
in which was to be made the actual junction of
the Metropolitan and the Midland lines. "So vast,
indeed, were these subterranean operations," writes
Mr. Williams, "that the St. Pancras Station became
like an iceberg, the greater portion of it being
below the surface; indeed, remarkable as is the
engineering skill displayed in the large building
which towers so majestically above all its neighbours, it is as nothing compared with the works
concealed below ground. For right underneath
the monster railway station are two other separate
constructions, one above the other, none the less
wonderful because they will never see the light of
day, but are irrevocably doomed
'To waste their sweetness on the desert air.'"
These works are the Underground Railway and
the Fleet Sewer, while the branch of the Metropolitan that joins the Midland not only crosses it
at the southern extremity, but thence runs up
under the western side of the station, to re-cross
at its northern end to the eastern side, where it
gradually rises to its junction about a mile down
the line.
Of the difficulty experienced in carrying the
railway through the graveyard of Old St. Pancras
Church, and also through that of St. Giles's parish
which adjoins it, without any unavoidable disturbance of the dead, we have spoken in a previous
chapter; (fn. 1) but we may add here, that, though every
precaution was taken by the agents of the Midland Railway Company, a most serio-comic incident occurred during the process. The company
had purchased a new piece of ground in which to
re-inter the human remains discovered in the part
which they required. Among them was the corpse
of a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church
in France. Orders were received for the transshipment of the remains to his native land, and the
delicate work of exhuming the corpse was entrusted
to some clever gravediggers. On opening the
ground they were surprised to find the bones, not
of one man, but of several. Three skulls and three
sets of bones were yielded up by the soil in which
they had lain mouldering. The difficulty was how
to identify the bones of a French ecclesiastic amid
so many. After much discussion, the shrewdest
of the gravediggers suggested that, as he was a
foreigner, the darkest-coloured skull must be his.
Acting upon this idea, the blackest bones were
sorted and put together, until the requisite number
of lefts and rights were obtained. These were
reverently screwed up in a new coffin, conveyed to
France, and buried again with all the "pomp and
circumstance" of the Roman Catholic Church.
Shortly after passing the churchyard of Old St.
Pancras the line crosses the Regent's Canal, and
then passes under the North London Railway,
which is carried above it by a bridge of three
arches. "Their construction," Mr. Jackson tells
us, "was a matter of no ordinary difficulty on
account of the ceaseless traffic on the line overhead; it was, however, accomplished without the
interruption of a single hour." The Midland line
is here joined by the branch which comes up from
the Metropolitan at King's Cross, as mentioned
above. The lines actually converge near the Camden covered-way; but the transfer of passengers
usually takes place at Kentish Town Station, half
a mile further from the London Terminus. At
Kentish Town a line branches off to Holloway
and Tottenham, while the main line is carried by
a long tunnel under Haverstock Hill, whence,
emerging into open daylight, the trains run on to
Hendon and St. Albans, and thence northwards
through the "midland" counties.
We have spoken above of the great clearance of
houses which was effected in this locality by the
formation of the Midland Railway. The district,
which is—or was—known as Agar Town, consisted
mostly of small tenements of the lowest class,
named after one Mr. William Agar—or, as he was
commonly called, "Councillor Agar," an eccentric
and miserly lawyer—to whom the site was let on a
short lease for building purposes, about the year
1840.
Twenty years later the fee-simple of the greater
part of this locality was transferred by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, to whom it had reverted,
to the Midland Railway Company for a considerable sum, and most of the houses have been
swept away to form ale and coal stores and other
warehouses in connection with the terminus of the
Midland Railway, about which we shall speak
presently. Much of the vacant ground not required
for the company's use has been laid out for building warehouses, and has raised, as it were, another
town in the place of this already overcrowded
neighbourhood.
It can hardly be expected that such a district as
this can have any historical associations worth
recording; but still the place has not been without
its "celebrities," for here lived for many years the
well-known pugilist, Tom Sayers. His notoriety
arose from his accepting the challenge of Heenan,
the American champion, in 1860, to fight for the
champion belt of the world. Sayers was comparatively small in stature, whilst Heenan was much
above the ordinary height; and it is said that when
Sayers met his monster opponent for the first time
he felt a little daunted. The fight, nevertheless,
came off, and in the first round Sayers's right arm
was broken; but still, with this fractured limb, he
continued the encounter for some time, and in the
end, if he did not obtain the victory, he made it a
drawn battle, and received with Heenan the honour
of a double belt. Henceforth Tom Sayers was
everywhere greeted as a hero; and at the Stock
Exchange a purse of £1,000 was handed to him
for his "gallant conduct," on the understanding
that he at once retired from the Ring. For a time
Sayers was the topic of general conversation; but
he did not long survive his triumph, if such it may
be called. He died soon afterwards from pulmonary consumption, and was buried, with considerable ceremony, in the Highgate Cemetery, his
profile and a portrait of his dog being the only
memorials on his tombstone to mark the place of
his interment.
If the Midland Railway had conferred no other
benefit on London and Londoners, our thanks
would be due to it for having cleared away the
whole, or nearly the whole, of the above-mentioned
miserable district of mud and hovels, and given us
something better to look upon. So dreary and
dirty indeed was the place—though its creation
was only of so recent date—that it was styled by
Charles Dickens our "English Connemara." It
was mainly occupied by costermongers, and by dog
and bird fanciers.
Having made these general remarks about the
line, and of the site which it occupies, we will
proceed with a few details concerning the station
and the "grand hotel" which adjoins it. The
latter building, which abuts upon the Euston Road,
facing Judd Street, was opened in 1873, and completed in the spring of 1876. It was erected from
the designs of Sir Gilbert Scott, and is constructed
chiefly of red brick, with dressings of Bath stone,
in the most ornate style of Gothic art. It must
be owned that towering as it does into mid air, it
is a most beautiful structure; indeed, to quote the
words of the "Tourist's Guide," "it stands without
a rival in the hotel line, for palatial beauty, comfort,
and convenience." The style of architecture is
a combination of various mediæval features, the
inspection of which recall to mind the Lombardic
and Venetian brick Gothic or Gothic-Italian types,
while the critical eye of the student will observe
touches of Milan and other Italian terra-cotta
buildings, interlaced with good reproductions of
details from Winchester and Salisbury Cathedrals,
Westminster Abbey, &c.; while in the interior and
exterior may be seen the ornaments of Amiens,
Laon, and other French edifices, which, though a
conglomerate, must have required great pains and
skill to properly harmonise in order to produce so
attractive a result. The designs of the interior, as
well as the apartments (some of which are embellished with almost regal splendour), were the
production of Sir Gilbert Scott, afterwards assisted
by Mr. Sang. The colouring is rich and almost
faultlessly pleasing and harmonious, producing a
marked mediæval character. The ceiling of the
reading-room glows in an atmosphere of gold and
colour, yet free and graceful in its figures and
ornaments, designed by Mr. Sang. The large
and magnificent coffee-room, the "grand saloon,"
together with the adjoining "state" and reception
rooms, probably have no equal in point of design
or finish in any building of the kind; while
the corridors and staircases throughout are all
decorated in a rich style, at once tasteful and
beautiful.
A broad terraced carriage-drive, 400 feet in
length, separates the hotel from the roadway, and
leads by various entrances to the building and
archways to the station. Altogether, the hotel has
a frontage of about 600 feet; and it is very lofty,
consisting of seven storeys, including attics in the
sloping roofs. At the south-east corner of the
building is a clock-tower 240 feet high, nearly forty
feet higher than the Monument at London Bridge.
There are bedrooms for upwards of 500 guests, all
most luxuriously furnished; and an uniformly mild
temperature is maintained in all seasons. The
cost of the hotel, with its fittings and furniture, is
said to have been not less than half a million
pounds sterling. The whole of the arrangements
for conducting the business of the hotel, it need
hardly be added, are most complete. There are
speaking-tubes, electric bells, lifts, and dust-shafts;
and an apparatus for the extinction of fire is laid
on at every floor. In the basement are spacious
and extensive cellars, and a laundry; and it may
be added that the whole of the washing and drying
is done by steam power.
It was found necessary to raise the level of the
terminus about fifteen feet higher than the Euston
Road, in order to secure good gradients and proper
levels for some of the suburban stations. The
space underneath was then utilised as a cellarage
for the Burton and other ale traffic, and thus the
entire station may be said, seriously as well as
jestingly, to rest on a substratum of beer. The
roof of part of the cellarage forms the flooring of
the terminus and platform of the station, and is so
constructed as to bear the immense weight of
many locomotive engines at the same time.
The roof is of glass, supported by huge iron
girders, "not unlike lobster's claws, from which
the shorter nippers have been broken," and forming
a Gothic arch, not resting on piers, but embedded
in the ground. It is 100 feet high, 700 feet in
length, and its width about 240 feet. The span of
the roof covers four platforms, eleven lines of rails,
and a cab-stand twenty-five feet wide; altogether
the station occupies a site of nearly ten acres.
There are twenty-five principal ribs in the roof,
and the weight of each is about fifty tons. The
very scaffolding, by the help of which the roof
was raised into its position, contained eight miles
of massive timber, 1,000 tons in weight, besides
about 25,000 cubic feet of wood, and eighty tons
of ironwork. No other roof of so vast a span has
been attempted. It is double the width of the
Agricultural Hall at Islington, and ten yards wider
than the two arches of the neighbouring terminus
of the Great Northern Railway, which, when first
built, were considered a triumph of engineering
skill. Some idea may be formed of the vast
expanse of the roof of the Midland Terminus when
we state that it contains no less than two acres and
a half of glass. The gigantic main ribs cost a
thousand pounds apiece. These and the other
interior portions of the framework are painted a
sky-blue, and by this means the roof is made to
look particularly light and airy. We may add that
in the station and its approaches were absorbed
about sixty millions of bricks, nine thousand tons
of iron, and eighty thousand cubic feet of dressed
stone. The consulting engineer was Mr. Barlow.
The opening of the St. Pancras Station in the
year 1868, and its connection with the Metropolitan
and other lines, gave the Midland Company, for the
first time, a London terminus. Up to this period
the Midland trains travelled on the Great Northern
line from King's Cross as far as Hitchin, and thence
by a branch line to Bedford and other portions of
the Midland Railway system.
At the Midland Railway Goods Station alone
some 1,300 men are employed, and at the Coal
Depôt in York Road, close by, there are from
150 to 200 coal porters and carters. From the
"Report of the London City Mission," which gives
an account of the work that is being done by the
society's agents among the labourers employed here,
we quote the following description of a "Goods
Bank:"—"The 'Goods Banks,' as they are called,
are three in number. But does the reader know
what a 'Goods Bank' is? Let me attempt a description. Suppose a building of adequate length
to receive a tolerably long goods train, and about
sixty or eighty feet wide, with a platform raised
just high enough to load a cart at, or to unload
a train of trucks without the toil of raising the
goods. Fancy this platform running the whole
length of the edifice, and more than half its width,
packed up with every conceivable sort of merchandise, with little passages between leading to
the carts, trucks, and various parts of the platform.
Then imagine these carts, trucks, and passages all
alive with men, some in uniform, some without,
some with caps that tell you they are foremen, &c.,
and all variously employed. Here is a string of
them, with handbarrows loaded; there another
with the same articles empty; here are men at the
cranes raising the goods to the height required,
while there are men receiving them; then, again,
over there are the officials with long papers in
their hands, that make you wonder where all that
writing is done, and how they manage to get rid
of the goods described on them. But just look
around on the goods. You will no longer wonder
that Webster's Dictionary is such a thick volume,
but rather stand wondering where the English
language gets names from to describe the multiplicity of articles before you, and you go away
with a much better idea of the intelligence of the
railway official who knows how to describe the
items in such a miscellaneous collection. Amongst
this endless array I have seen sewing machines,
reaping machines, pianos, harmoniums, holly and
mistletoe, bags and sacks that you could not
imagine what was inside, and bags and sacks that
from their peculiar colour and odour, as well as
from the appearance of the men handling them,
you know at once to be soot. On one occasion an
official said to me, 'Do you smell anything particular this morning?' On my replying negatively,
he said, 'We have just had a large arrival of cats'
meat in a bad condition;' and I learnt that this
article sometimes came up by tons from Scotland—our friends out north being too canny to waste
anything. At another time I saw the dead carcase
of a horse swinging high in the air, as it was about
to be delivered to a waiting cart or van. But,"
adds the missionary, "this terrible bustle of business
makes the 'Bank' in itself an unfavourable place
for religious work."
Between the Midland and the Great Northern
lines a large space of ground is covered partly by
the Imperial Gas Works, and partly by a coal depôt
and the Great Northern Railway Goods Depôt.
On the east side of these various centres of
industry runs northwards the road which forms the
boundary between the parishes of St. Pancras and
Islington. This thoroughfare, as we have stated
in a previous volume, (fn. 2) was, till recently, called
Maiden Lane, and it is one of the most ancient
roads in the north of London. The historian
Camden says, "It was opened to the public in the
year 1300, and was then the principal road for all
travellers proceeding to Highgate and the north."
It was formerly called "Longwich Lane," and was
generally kept in such a dirty, disreputable state
as to be almost impassable in winter, and was
so often complained of that the Bishop of London
was induced to lay out a new road to Highgate
Hill, so that a carrier might get to the north by
avoiding Longwich Lane. But of this we shall
have more to say when we reach Highgate.
"The old and anciente highwaye to High
Barnet, from Gray's Inn and Clerkenwell," writes
John Norden, in his "Speculum Britanniæ," "was
through a lane to the east of Pancras Church,
called Longwich Lane, from whence, leaving Highgate on the west, it passed through Tallingdon
Lane, and so on to Crouche Ende, thence through
Hornsey Great Park to Muswell Hill, Coanie
Hatch, Fryene Barnete, and so on to Whetstone.
This anciente waye, by reason of the deepness and
dirtieness of the passage in the winter season, was
refused by wayfaring men, carriers, and travellers,
in regard, whereof, it is agreed between the Bishop
of London and the countrie, that a new waye shall
be laide forthe through Bishop's Park, beginning
at Highgate Hill, to leade directe to Whetstone, for
which a certain tole should be paid to the Bishop,
and for that purpose has a gate been erected
on the hill, that through the same all travellers
should pass, and be the more aptly staide for the
tole."
THE DUST-HEAPS, SOMERS TOWN, IN 1836.
Before quitting Maiden Lane, we may here mention the fact that for some few months previous
to the erection of the Great Northern Terminus at
King's Cross, which occupies the site of the Smallpox Hospital, the trains of that company started
from a temporary station in Maiden Lane.
From King's Cross as far as Camden Road this
thoroughfare was some years ago named York Road,
on account of the contiguity of the London and
York (now the Great Northern) Railway; and from
the "Brecknock Arms," at the north-east corner of
Camden Town, to the foot of Highgate Hill, it
was, a few years ago, re-named the Brecknock
Road, by order of the Metropolitan Board of Works.
By this road we will now proceed leisurely on our
way northwards.