Windsor to Didcot Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.

His name was George Bradshaw and his railway guides inspired

the Victorians to take to the tracks.

Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,

what to see and where to stay.

Now, 170 years later, I'm making a series of journeys

across the length and breadth of the country

to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

Before setting out today,

I'd already explored half the country, using my Bradshaw's guide.

I found it so enlightening

that I can't wait to discover the second half.

Now I embark on a route that lured Queen Victoria herself

to risk her royal dignity,

by climbing aboard a train.

Today, I'll be visiting a Victorian station fit for a queen.

-This is where the Queen would sit and wait for her train.

-Oh!

Here is the seat of power!

Examining an engineering triumph of the railway age.

It has the most fabulous echo, which is caused by its elliptical shape.

Brunel!

-ECHOING

-Oh, very good.

And using a Victorian invention that revolutionised

the postal service.

Using my Bradshaw's guide, I'm following in Queen Victoria's

footsteps, travelling through Berkshire and Hampshire,

towards her beloved home on the Isle of Wight.

Then I'll follow the coast, through the seaside resorts of

Bournemouth and Weymouth, finishing up on the Isle of Portland.

Today's stretch begins in Royal Windsor, then takes me west,

through Maidenhead and on to Didcot.

Writing of Windsor, my first stop, Bradshaw's tells me the chief attractions are

the Castle and Park, the seat of her Majesty the Queen.

PA: Our next station is Windsor & Eton Central.

The advent of the train enabled Queen Victoria,

much more quickly than any of her predecessors, to visit her realm,

to view her subjects and to vary her residences.

This is Windsor, a town of great significance to royals and rails.

Arriving into Windsor & Eton Central,

the station makes a rather modest first impression.

But, in Bradshaw's day, this was one of Britain's grandest.

I'm meeting local historian Brigitta Mitchell to explore

the terminus built on Queen Victoria's doorstep.

-Hello, Brigitta.

-Oh, hello, Michael. Welcome to Windsor Royal Station.

-It's a fantastic station, I absolutely love it.

-It is wonderful, yes.

-We're standing in front of a beautiful locomotive.

-Yes.

Obviously with the Queen's coat of arms.

Well, this is a replica of the locomotive that pulled the train

to Windsor at her Diamond Jubilee.

It was built in 1894.

The whole station was rebuilt for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

That's why we've got the Jubilee arch outside the station.

Which explains the size of the station.

I mean, now, it's just one little platform, one tiny train,

and it comes into this vast area.

It had six platforms. It was huge.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837,

passenger railways were already spreading fast across the country.

But it was some years before she braved the trains.

Initially, she had the same fear that a lot of people had,

that if you go faster than a horse could carry you,

your body would disintegrate.

Eventually, she was persuaded by Albert that she would accept

train journeys and get round her kingdom a little bit faster.

The young Queen took the plunge in 1842 and, before long,

she had fully embraced rail travel.

This was one of two stations built in Windsor,

both used extensively by the Queen.

And over the course of her reign, a number of royal trains,

complete with luxurious private carriages,

were built especially for her.

One of the things that strikes me is that the great period

of railway-building coincides almost exactly with the Queen's life.

It does. The Queen, in later life, used trains extensively.

She went from here every time she came to Windsor,

or when she left Windsor, she used the trains.

And, of course, her last journey was by train to Windsor, in her coffin.

It's remarkable to think that by the time Queen Victoria died,

the technology she'd initially feared had become

so respectable that it was employed in her state funeral.

Nowadays, most of the station

has been converted into a shopping centre,

but traces can still be seen of the luxurious facilities

provided for Bradshaw's Queen.

Brigitta, it's not easy for me

to orient myself inside this modern bar. Where are we?

-Well, you're standing on the railway line.

-Ha!

I'm on the platform.

And, of course, the Queen would just step out of her waiting room

there, straight onto her train here.

-And this is the magnificent waiting room.

-Over there.

So this has been quite nicely preserved, hasn't it?

It's beautiful, yes. It's still almost as it was.

This is where the Queen would sit and wait for her train.

I don't think she would be sitting here very long!

-Roaring fire.

-Beautiful fireplace. And the old mirror's there.

-And a beautiful dome up there.

-Beautiful dome.

It's very, very lovely.

And in here, you've got the royal loo and the royal handwash basin.

Oh! And here is the seat of power!

And this, I suppose, the royal flush!

This station couldn't be more convenient for the royal castle,

which has dominated the town for 900 years.

Bradshaw says of Windsor Castle,

"Its history is the history of our country.

"Some of its brightest and blackest pages are inseparably linked

"with the towers that arrest the eye of the traveller.

"No Briton can view unmoved the stately towers of Windsor's castle keep."

This isn't a guidebook, it's literature.

It was Queen Victoria who first opened the castle to the public in 1845.

And my Bradshaw's guide also tells Victorian tourists

where to buy tickets and even provides a suggested tour.

The castle is still hugely popular today,

receiving one million visitors a year.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-So how is the tourist trade?

-It's picking up now. Picking up.

My guidebook, which is from the 19th century,

says that the history of England is the history of the castle

and that no Englishman could look at this castle unmoved.

-Do you agree with that?

-I agree with that totally, yeah.

-How does it move you?

-Well, it's, it's so big, you know. It's vast.

You could spend a week in there and not see everything.

And, strangely enough, there's people that actually

live in Windsor that haven't even been in.

And people all round the world come to see it.

Do you still go inside?

-Well, if I get the time.

-Have a great day.

-Thank you, sir.

Enjoy the sunshine. Bye-bye.

The new railways allowed tourists to flock to Windsor in unprecedented numbers.

But just across the river, there was an institution which

strongly disapproved of this invasion.

Even after Prince Albert had persuaded Queen Victoria

to give her royal seal of approval to the railways,

there remained one part of the British establishment,

almost as powerful as the monarchy itself,

that maintained its objection - Eton College.

Eton's reputation as one of Britain's elite schools

was already firmly established in Bradshaw's day.

And its old-boy network was a formidable force in public life.

My guide directs me to the Quadrangle,

where I'll find the founder's bronze statue, the chapel and Upper School.

And it's where I'm meeting the headmaster, Tony Little.

I'm following a 19th-century guidebook.

Can you give me any idea of what Eton College was like in the 19th century?

Well, certainly in the early 19th century, at the time of the development of the railways,

it was a robust and physical place.

In the beginning of the century, my predecessor was a man called Dr Keate,

who was infamous, rather splendid, in a grotesque kind of way.

He was known as the Great Flogger, and there are a couple of wonderful stories about him.

My favourite, I think, is that on one afternoon, he became so fed up with the boys

that he decided to flog the whole lot, and he did.

At the beginning, boys were howling and jeering.

By the end, they were cheering him, for the physical effort...

-Ha-ha!

-..of managing to beat all these characters.

19th-century Eton was a conservative institution,

steeped in tradition, but the changes brought by

the Industrial Revolution threatened the status quo.

Now, I've heard that the college was very much opposed to

the railways when they were first mooted back in the 1830s.

I think that's something of an understatement.

There seemed to be a vehemence about the way they approached

the awful prospect of this new technology invading their lives.

Why? What was so worrying about a railway?

Well, you know, when I first heard about this, I'd assumed it would be

the school authorities exercised about the invasion of immorality and vice from the outside world,

but it doesn't seem to have been that, one jot.

It appears that the school were terrified about what the boys would get up to.

In the late 1830s, the headmaster was a Dr Hawtrey.

He ran a passionate anti-railway campaign,

highlighting the dangers to pupils and public alike.

In his deposition to the House of Lords Commission in 1835,

Dr Hawtrey cites that boys, being boys,

will inevitably throw stones at railway carriages

and pick fights with navvies, and all kinds of other things.

It's the most unflattering picture of the relationship between schoolmasters and boys,

in the sense that there appears to be no trust in them whatsoever.

Eton couldn't resist progress forever.

But even once the railway companies had won the right to build,

the school maintained its opposition.

By this time, the Great Western Railway is a fact.

Slough station is a fact.

The issue at stake here is the line to link Slough to Windsor.

These maps reveal how the college had the branch line rerouted.

And this is the original intention, the original map.

From Windsor, tracing through Eton, quite close to the High Street,

then kinking and on its way to Slough.

-Is this what happened?

-No.

What happened, as you can see on this map here, is altogether different.

There's a vast loop, taking it as far as possible from Eton,

before it then joins the original line.

That is a very remarkable curve, isn't it, the Eton kink?

It's certainly distinctive.

The line still follows the same curving path today.

It's extraordinary to think that the Eton establishment was

powerful enough to send Queen Victoria herself out of her way

when she took the train to London.

I'm back at Windsor station.

In the 1880s, this was the scene of a desperate act

by one of her more unfortunate subjects.

Queen Victoria might never have warmed to the railways

had she known that, one day,

a man called Roderick McLean would fire a gun at her at this station.

McLean would spend the next 50 years in Broadmoor because,

clearly, to shoot at such a lovely monarch,

in such a beautiful railway station, was a sign of complete insanity.

I'm now on my way to Slough, where the Windsor branch meets the Great Western mainline.

In the early 1800s, Slough was barely more than a village.

But within 50 years of the arrival of the railways, the population had trebled.

By the 20th century, though,

ugly development had given Slough a bad name.

The poet John Betjeman once wrote,

"Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough.

"It isn't fit for humans now."

There's an irony there, because John Betjeman was a great lover

of railways and the man who saved St Pancras station.

If he'd had his way and those bombs had fallen,

we would have lost this magnificent red-brick version of a French chateau.

The new railway fuelled a building boom in Slough.

One of the most ambitious developments

was a luxury housing estate, Upton Park.

Local builder and entrepreneur James Bedborough realised that

Slough's fast rail links made it an ideal spot for wealthy Londoners

looking to escape the city, and a suburban paradise was created.

Local historian Elias Kaufman has been researching the story.

So, people found it convenient and prestigious to live here?

Very, very convenient, as can be seen from this advert,

where it says here you could get to London within 35 minutes.

"Messrs Daniel Smith and Son beg to announce to capitalists, spirited builders

"and anyone desirous of securing a site for a residence

"in one of the most treasured spots now within 35 minutes' journey of London."

-Now within 35 minutes, the railway clearly had just arrived.

-Yes.

Those who lived at Upton Park were a far cry from today's suburban commuters.

Bedborough's vision was for an exclusive retreat

for the Victorian A-list, complete with its own pleasure grounds,

but just half an hour by train from the capital.

The houses were built by Benjamin Baud,

who was an architect to Windsor Castle.

These houses were 11-bedroom houses

and they had a whole retinue of servants.

These are not necessarily merchants or city workers,

these are people able to afford a fine house...

-Yes.

-..but who would like to be able to attend the metropolis from time to time.

In the 20th century, most of the grand houses were converted into flats

and the grounds became a public park, falling into decline.

But thanks to Elias and other local volunteers,

it's now been restored to its former elegance.

What we're trying to do is get the park back to what it was like in the Victorian period.

We even went as far as bringing in archaeologists to find the

original pathways which you see today.

So, really, what I see from my bedroom window now is

glimpses of the Victorian park.

-Mm, a Victorian view.

-Yes.

If this beautiful green park wasn't your idea of Slough -

and, I confess, it wasn't mine -

then we should be ashamed of ourselves.

We have done an injustice to this fine Berkshire town.

At the time my guidebook was written,

the area around Slough was still predominantly rural.

And Bradshaw's writes of, "the lofty and luxuriant

"foliage of Stoke Park, about two miles to the right of Slough."

As so often, I've turned to Bradshaw's for a recommendation for where to stay.

"In Stoke Park, the seat of the Penns,

"descended from the founder of Pennsylvania,

"are some remains of an old house which belonged to Coke, the great lawyer.

"Portraits et cetera are in the present mansion."

Edward Coke famously tried Guy Fawkes

and the Gunpowder Plotters and, apparently,

also coined the phrase, 'an Englishman's home is his castle'.

And that sounds suitably luxurious for me.

-Good evening, Mr Portillo.

-Good evening.

-Welcome to Stoke Park.

-Thank you very much.

-You're in the Coke Suite, and that's upstairs on the first floor.

-Thank you. Named after the great lawyer.

-It certainly is.

-Enjoy your stay.

-I'm sure I will, thank you.

A beautiful morning, and the allure of Slough station has beckoned me back,

and now it's on to the wonders of Maidenhead and Didcot.

I'm now heading west, along a line which, in Bradshaw's day,

was part of the Great Western Railway.

And I'm excited about the route ahead.

My Bradshaw's guide mentions that,

"The railway spans by a bridge of ten arches the River Thames."

Like much else on the Great Western Railway,

it's a piece of work by Brunel.

And you and I have probably been over it countless times

without realising what a beautiful bridge it is.

The spectacular red-brick bridge spans the Thames

just before Maidenhead station, where I'm leaving the train.

To the river.

Richard Poad, from the local heritage centre,

has invited me on to a boat to take a closer look at Brunel's bridge.

Good morning, Michael. Welcome to Riverside, Maidenhead.

-Thank you very much, Richard. Permission to come aboard?

-Certainly, sir.

-Thank you very much.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed Chief Engineer

of the Great Western Railway in 1833, when he was just 27 years old.

One of his greatest achievements was finding a way to cross the Thames.

Richard, what strikes me, having crossed the bridge,

is that it's not so much beautiful, but very impressive.

Huge, huge spans.

The biggest spans ever made in brick, certainly in Britain

and probably in the world.

And a really daring feat of engineering.

It's fabulous.

Brunel's bold design was initially inspired by necessity.

The local authorities imposed strict restrictions

on the kind of bridge that they would allow.

We have to remember that the Thames was a trading highway, before the railway came.

And they said to him, "You cannot block up the navigation channel with traditional little arches."

So he had to leap across the river in two bounds.

No-one had ever constructed arches so wide before.

And while Brunel was confident of his skill, not everyone was so convinced.

His critics just bashed away, saying, "It will not stand up.

"It's impossible. You cannot build a structure like this out of tiddly little bricks."

Even once the bridge was complete, the Great Western Railway

feared that it might not withstand the weight of a train

and ordered Brunel to keep the scaffolding in place, just in case.

Brunel decided to play a little trick on them.

He left the wooden scaffolding in position,

but he lowered it ever so slightly so it wasn't doing any work at all,

and he left it there through a winter.

That was the intention. But in the middle of the winter, there was a horrendous storm and, one night,

all this wooden scaffolding blew out from under the bridge and floated down the river to Bray.

And the bridge has been here for 170 years, perfect!

The bridge was a vital link on the new Great Western mainline,

transforming life for the people of Maidenhead.

Like many towns on the Bath Road, it was a coaching town,

totally dependent on coaches and horses.

And suddenly, the railway arrived and the town went bust.

So it had to reinvent itself.

And it reinvented itself in the second half of the 19th century

as an elegant and ultimately fashionable riverside resort,

where all the beautiful people came.

And all the hoi polloi came to look at the beautiful people.

And it was such a scene that, in fact, the ordinary people used to

come on excursion trains on Brunel's railway from London to stand on

the banks of the river in Maidenhead and look at all the beautiful people.

So, the effect actually was the making of Maidenhead.

The population went up five times in the second half of the 19th century,

on the basis of rapid communication to London.

The river's still crowded with rowers and pleasure boats today.

And many stop beneath the bridge to check out a quirk of Brunel's design.

Brunel's bridge is known locally as The Sounding Arch.

It has the most fabulous echo which is caused by its elliptical shape.

And if we sit here in the middle of the river and shout,

you should get quite a good echo.

-Go on, have a go.

-What shall we shout?

Brunel!

ECHOING

Yeah, very good. Well done.

With Brunel's name ringing in my ears, it's back to the station to continue my journey.

I'm travelling west, in pursuit of an invention that changed

communications in Victorian Britain.

Of course, the coming of the train didn't just make it easier for the monarch to get about.

It also made it quicker for freight and her subjects,

and for newspapers and letters, too.

It was transformatory. And I understand that a good place

to learn more about that revolution in data is Didcot.

Today, Didcot's a busy junction station,

but that's not what I'm here to see.

I'm under Didcot Parkway station

and this is the one way through to one of Britain's largest

railway heritage sites, a sort of railway preservation paradise.

In the age of steam,

Didcot housed engine sheds where locomotives were made ready.

When they fell into disuse in the 20th century,

the site was taken over by the Great Western Society.

And it's now home to their remarkable collection.

It feels to me like walking into the books that I read

when I was a child, Thomas The Tank Engine and all that sort of thing.

Here is all the infrastructure and the paraphernalia of the world of railways,

as it used to be.

In Bradshaw's day, all this was cutting-edge technology

and it was soon to change the postal service radically.

Before the railways, post was conveyed by horse-drawn mail coach.

Travelling at just ten miles an hour,

it could take days for a letter to reach the other end of the country.

It was obvious that the railways could speed up the post

and an invention of 1838 revolutionised the mail.

Centre manager Roger Orchard is going to show me how.

-Roger.

-Michael.

-Nice to see you.

-Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Now, I think this is the bit of kit I've come to see, isn't it?

It very much is, yep.

This is the travelling post office mail exchange apparatus.

So that means that, as a train whooshes by,

-a mailbag is delivered into it?

-Yeah, that's right.

And how does the train grab it, is it a kind of big metal hook?

Yeah, it's basically a big mesh netting that swings out.

The postal men inside the carriages will throw the mail apparatus out,

ready to collect the bags up.

This ingenious system meant that mail could be dropped off

and picked up at speeds of up to 70mph.

It saves, obviously, the trains having to stop at each of the stations

and the mailbags being exchanged.

So the trains could travel at high speed throughout their journey,

collecting the mailbags, and the mail being sorted en route,

and so the overall journey time and the delivery time of the letters was greatly reduced.

Soon, travelling Post Office trains were criss-crossing the country,

carrying postal workers who sorted the mail on the move.

Harry, send to Tiverton.

The Victorian apparatus continued to be used

until 1971 and mail trains survived into the 21st century.

Sadly, they are now a thing of the past,

but Didcot volunteer Oliver Collins is going to show me one in action.

-So this is the apparatus?

-Yep.

You have two types of apparatus on the coach.

-You have the drop-off and the pick-up.

-Very good.

-So we're going to have a go at this, aren't we?

-Yep.

-Er, what's my role?

I'll get you to do the net, a nice and simple job.

Oh, yeah.

-Stand here.

-Yes.

-Like this.

-Yes.

-On there.

-Yes.

-In one motion...

-Woah! Oh, my goodness!

-And put your foot on the back.

-The net comes out.

-Right, OK. The net is, indeed, out.

Once the exchange has happened,

somebody will clear the bags out of the net,

shout 'net' as in net clear, and then it's on there to release it...

and up in one movement.

And if I get this wrong, what are the dangers attached to this?

If you get this wrong, mailbags might not be collected.

If you don't bring it in in time, you could rip the side of the coach off.

-Ah. So there's not much hanging on this(?)

-No, not really(!)

It's time for me to step into the shoes of a Victorian postal worker.

Net!

-That was pretty exciting! Did it work?

-Yep.

All three bags in, nice and safe.

-Fantastic! And all the train is still intact?

-Yep.

Throwing my weight into working the mail train has brought home

just how exciting and shocking are the speed and power of steam locomotives.

This is the night mail crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order.

Ever since I learnt that poem as a kid,

I've known something about travelling post offices,

but I didn't know the history of Queen Victoria and the trains.

The railways changed so much, for both the royals and the mails.

On the next leg of my journey, I'll be tasting a Victorian superfood.

We've got a basket of the stuff here.

Mm, that lovely, tangy, mustardy taste.

Discovering an industrial process unchanged since Bradshaw's day.

So all of that is happening by a process that started with the waterwheel?

-Yes.

-Brilliant.

And experiencing life as a 19th-century train driver.

-I love that rhythm of the steam engine.

-The engine's talking to you!

-Absolutely.

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