Monday, 26 October 2026

Innings, Outings And Stackings (1)

 It Started With A Picture ...

... and a Google Earth view of the same area ...
... and a closer view.
Can you spot those red cuboids opposite the terrace and adjacent to the former Granada cinema. They be London buses. And there they are now, courtesy of StreetView.
So, the challenging question is what are these buses doing in the front garden of a small terrace of Edwardian houses?

It's A Long Story

To find out, we needs to take an eastbound walk along St John's Hill. In so doing we cross the bridge over just part of this busy "junction" which isn't.

Two railway companies each provided a share of the traffic. 
Up a ramp off St John's Hill was the London Brighton and South Coast Railway office. 
Readers may amuse themselves by working out where the L B & S C trains went! These approached Clapham Junction from Londo Victoria ...
... crossed the lines from Waterloo before joining, then leaving the wider tracks. Those ran from Waterloo and were owned by the London & South Western Railway.

LSWR had two chunks of the station, one for trains to Portsmouth, Southampton and Exeter, and a northern section for the "Windsor Lines" leading eventually to Reading.

So where is the LSWR Station building?

There were TWO!  One was down a road off St John's Hill ...
... with an obvious 'proper' station at the bottom.
You can spot where part of it stood, even today. The clue is in the blank wall, the greenery ...
... and the lavish skylights on the footbridge.

With the development of the station in the early 1900s, extra tracks were added and there was no room for the original edifice. So it was moved on to  St Johns Hill, just west of the overbridge.

And there it is, opposite the terrace and in front the Edwardian block that we met above.
From here there was a footbridge and covered walkway ...
... which led across the newly added tracks (bottom right) and along to the entrance and footbridge, top left.

Or, from the opposites e direction, possibly a slightly less f0uzzy extract ...
... from Granada top left, ove8rbthe t9rack and along the platform to the footbridge skylights bottom right.

This entrance was closed as a wartime economy measure in the early 1940s.

But you can see where it was from street level ...
...  and if you know where to look, some remaining ironwork ...
... can be seen via a telephoto lens from the LBSC station yard. St John's Hill is left, the Edwardian block is upper right and the former Granada looms in the background.

So the station has three entrances now. In addition to the former LBSCR building ...
... there is an entrance via a shopping arcade a little further east along St John's Hill ...
... and in the north of the tracks, an entrance on Grant Road. 
These latter two are joined by a pedestrian tunnel ...
.... with steps up to the platforms.
Also crossing the station is the footbridge spotted earlier.
This has been progressively equipped with lifts ...
... to add to the stairs: these days increasingly helpful to fbb.

The footbridge has an escape to the outside world only via the LBSCR station building.
But we need to get back to those parked buses.

 Next Clapham Junction blog : Tues 27 Oct 

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