Woking to Clapham Junction Great British Railway Journeys

In 1840, one man transformed travel in the British Isles.

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 these isles

to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.

Armed with my Bradshaw's guide, I'm now on the second instalment

of my journey from the Solent to the Humber,

with Portsmouth behind me and the ports of London and Grimsby ahead.

On today's journey, I'll get close to some precious Victorian botany.

So, here you can see a lovely specimen of a maidenhair fern

collected by Charles Darwin on the famous voyage of The Beagle.

-It's quite moving to see this stuff.

-Yeah.

I'll play croquet. You cannot be serious!

This is where I get a hammering.

Ha!

And in Surrey, I'll visit a surprising 19th century place of worship.

But it's not only the first UK mosque,

it's the first mosque to be built in the whole of Northern Europe.

Using my Bradshaw's Guide,

I began on the Hampshire coast in Portsmouth,

and travelled up through Surrey.

I'll push on to London, and northeast to Cambridgeshire,

alighting finally in Grimsby on the Humber.

This second leg of my journey starts in Woking,

heads northeast to Kew and Richmond upon Thames,

then Wimbledon and finally Clapham Junction.

As I approach Woking, my Bradshaw's continues to dwell on

the rural charms of Surrey - "On both sides of the line, Woking Common is seen to extend for miles,

"only broken by the windings of the Basingstoke Canal."

And then it notes that the station is a mile away.

For old Woking was just a small village.

The big Woking that we know today is only there because of the railway.

The line into Waterloo from Southampton via Woking

opened in 1840, and 19 years later the line via Guildford to Portsmouth followed.

Victorian missionaries must have travelled these lines to the south coast ports

on the first leg of their journeys to spread the Christian word to the far reaches of the empire,

but in Woking, religion from the far reaches of the empire came to the mother country.

I'm meeting Asad Jamil and Khalil Martin

who both worship at the town's Shah Jahan Mosque,

an important landmark, not only in Woking but for all British Muslims.

-Hi, Asad.

-Hi, Michael. Welcome to the Shah Jahan Mosque.

It's a wonderful building. What's its history? When was it built?

It was built in 1889 by someone called William Gottleib Lietner,

of Hungarian origin.

Actually, his family were Jewish, they converted to Anglicanism.

What was his interest in Islam, then?

He was an Orientalist, and he spent most of his life out in India.

He built institutions out there - universities, schools,

he published magazines,

and then he returned to England and he wanted to establish an Oriental institute,

and it just happened that there was a building available in Woking that suited his purposes.

In 1884, Arabic scholar William Lietner bought the disused Royal Dramatic College

and turned it into an Oriental institute.

He intended to satisfy the spiritual needs of all his students,

and anyone who lived within reach, by building a synagogue, a church, a Hindu temple and a mosque,

but managed to complete only the Shah Jahan.

With Windsor Castle just 20 miles away,

its most frequent early worshippers were Queen Victoria's Muslim staff.

So, I imagine this Victorian building must be the first purpose-built mosque in the UK?

Yes, that is our claim to fame. But it's not only the first UK mosque,

it's the first mosque to be built in the whole of Northern Europe.

With such a beautiful and historic mosque, is it quite well known in the Islamic world?

It's world famous, because part of its history was

there was a Muslim mission established here,

and they published a journal called The Islamic Review, which was sent throughout the world.

So, yes, it was very famous.

You're very close here to Woking station. Do people actually come to this mosque from far and wide?

Absolutely. We get people from London coming all the time,

and they quite often say, "We've just come off the train and we saw this building

"and we've come in and come to have a look."

I find the interesting thing is so many people that come here

say it's so peaceful here, and yet as we stand here there are planes going overhead and trains.

It's actually very noisy, but despite that it has a real sense of peace. Do you feel that?

I absolutely do. But, of course, I have very special feelings about train noise,

-to me it's not a pollution.

-THEY LAUGH

So, Michael, it's time for prayers. Would you like to come and join us?

It would be a great privilege, thank you very much.

IMAM LEADS PRAYER

ALL PRAY

Thank you very much for letting us be here.

Thanks. Thank you for coming. It is so...

A great thing whenever somebody comes, especially our guest.

-You're always welcome.

-Thank you very much indeed.

During the First World War,

over 800,000 Indian troops fought in The British Army.

They were posted to most theatres of war including Flanders, Gallipoli and North and East Africa.

Over 50,000 were classed as killed or missing in action.

A large number were Muslim.

This is another very tranquil spot, what's the history of this?

This was built during the First World War, in 1915, actually,

And the reason it was built is that the Germans were putting out

propaganda that the Muslim soldiers weren't being given proper burial rights,

they were actually being burned as Hindus,

and that would have been very alarming to a Muslim soldier,

and the idea was to try and encourage desertion.

And the war office took it so seriously that they wanted to put out the message

that this wasn't true, so they created this Muslim burial ground.

And it's, of course, because it was adjacent to the mosque that this site was chosen.

We have to remind ourselves that if the Indian army had been led to mutiny or desertion,

this would have been incredibly serious for the British Empire.

-Oh, absolutely.

-And where were these bodies coming from?

Injured soldiers coming back from the war were being treated in Brighton Pavilion.

It's interesting - part of the counter-propaganda

was that they turned the Brighton Pavilion into an infirmary

because they thought the Indian soldiers would feel more at home

in a pastiche Indian architectural building, and also what they did,

they put out the message that the King had actually given up

his personal residence as an infirmary for these Indian soldiers,

and this went down a treat in India. As a counter-propaganda, it was hugely successful.

Leaving Woking and the first mosque in Britain behind,

my journey takes me towards the capital,

and to what was in Bradshaw's time a Thames-side village.

My Bradshaw's can sometimes be delightfully half-hearted.

About my next destination it writes,

"The gardens are the principal objects of attraction.

"They're not very large nor is their situation advantageous

"as it is low and commands no prospects,

"but they contain the finest collection of plants in this country

"and various ornamental buildings."

Yes, I am on my way to Kew.

On this journey I have to change, and if you've got to change train, where better than Clapham Junction,

cos it gives you more choice than probably any other station I can think of.

The Royal Botanic Gardens transferred from the Crown to public ownership in 1840.

Nine years later the railways arrived, and people visited in droves.

-Bill!

-Welcome.

-Smart set of wheels.

-Yeah, very nice.

-Off you go.

'Dr Bill Baker is going to show me around.'

As I came in the gates just now, I noticed "VR" over the gates, "Victoria Regina",

does that mean these are Victorian gardens?

The landscape is full of Victorian buildings and Victorian heritage,

but actually the gardens' history goes back a lot further than that.

Fundamentally, it's really a Georgian history the gardens has.

Originally it was two gardens.

The first of the gardens was Richmond Garden on that side,

it's a Capability Brown landscape that was part of the work that George III commissioned

when he was living occasionally at Richmond Lodge.

And then on the other side, you have the garden of the Prince And Princess Of Wales.

Frederick Prince Of Wales died young, but his wife, Princess Augusta,

she was very interested in plants.

She appointed the first official gardener to Kew,

and that's kind of where we date our official start.

My Bradshaw's guide is quite interested in the buildings here.

It mentions the orangery, the pagoda, and the palm house.

-Are they all still here?

-They are, absolutely. We're just coming up onto the orangery shortly.

You can see the palm house behind us.

The pagoda is the building in the long vista beyond the palm house,

Yeah, they are the really iconic features of our landscape.

On my railway journeys, I come across again and again

this mania that there was in Victorian times

-for the collecting of plants from all around the world.

-Yes.

Presumably Kew was a beneficiary, played a big part in this, as well.

Well, yes, I mean, much more than a beneficiary.

Yes, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, it was headquarters for that kind of thing.

Since its Georgian inception, The Royal Botanic Gardens

has collected specimens of flora from all over the world,

and Dr Baker has promised to show me some of his Victorian favourites.

You're probably wondering what's in these cupboards.

Well, here you can see just a small sample of our eight million specimens of plants and fungi

-that we hold here at Kew.

-May I see them?

Of course. In the cupboards here we have specimens of pressed dried plant material.

The methods are not rocket science.

So, here you can see just one example -

a specimen of a plant that was collected in the wild in Bolivia.

It's got flowers on it, it's got notes here all about exactly

where the plant was collected, who collected it. It's got information about the features of the plant.

These are important bits of information for a botanist.

And what did the Victorians ever do for Kew?

Well, the quick answer to that is that they did everything for Kew.

They laid the foundations for modern Kew,

and for the way that we botanists work today,

-and I've got a whole set of material out to try and illustrate that for you.

-Thank you.

Some of Kew's most precious specimens

were donated by the most celebrated botanists and explorers of Victorian Britain.

So, just to give you an idea as to the kind of riches that we have here,

I've pulled out some particularly special things.

So, here you can see a lovely specimen of a maidenhair fern

collected by Charles Darwin on the famous voyage of The Beagle.

-It's quite moving to see this stuff.

-Yeah, totally, absolutely.

And then underneath, one also rather romantic specimen

collected on one of the Livingstone expeditions.

And this is apparently potentially the first plant collection.

It's a collection of a mangrove made by the plant collector Kirk,

who was quite a talented artist, as well.

A lot of our material is accompanied by these lovely little

illustrations by the botanists themselves.

Considered by many to be the most important surviving Victorian iron and glass structure in the world,

Kew's Palm House was completed in 1848.

I'm used to being in awe of Victorian architecture,

but this building with its great heights, this must have been an iconic building in its day.

Absolutely. It was a complete sensation.

The building was designed to show palms off to their best possible extent,

and it needed a collaboration between an architect and an engineer

of the sort that had never happened before to achieve this.

by using technology from ship building, we have these fantastic spans brought about

by the use of wrought-iron deck beams, and it just gives this wonderful clarity

as well as the completely perfect arcs in the ironwork.

I mean, it's spine-tingling stuff, really, the Palm House.

And how did the Victorians heat it?

Well, there were boilers in the basement here,

and they were fuelled by coke which was ferried over

from a yard just across the pond, there, by our own underground railway.

A railway. I love it.

As I leave the lush palms of Kew, I'm reminded of the huge mark left by so many Victorian Britons,

just as I'm confronted by a miniscule one of my own.

This plaque commemorates

that when I was a member of the government

I reopened the rebuilt Kew Gardens Station,

and that was on 7th of October 1989.

You understand I was a child minister.

Originally opened in 1869, the station is now

part of the London Underground and the new London Overground network.

I'm bound for Richmond, which my Bradshaw's says "is a delightful town in Surrey,

"on the South Western Railway and the River Thames,

"in the midst of scenery which, though often praised and admired, never grows old or wearisome."

And I never grow tired of messing about in boats.

Richmond was originally the site of royal palaces,

but the train brought ordinary people.

Their favourite pursuits?

To promenade along the riverside and then to row on the waters.

An important local industry grew up to facilitate that Victorian pleasure.

Bill Collie is one of the last remaining boat builders in Richmond.

-Bill.

-Good afternoon, sir.

-May I come in?

-Welcome, please do.

-Thank you very much.

-Bill, how long have you been building boats?

-About 60 years.

And when you started, was there a lot of boat building going on here?

-Oh, yes.

-This boat here, what is it and did you make it?

It's called a sculling boat, but I didn't make it.

-Boats are built, not made.

-I stand corrected.

Is this typical of boats that were built here?

Yes, yes. I think only I, blowing my own trumpet here,

I'm the only one who built sculling boats in Richmond.

I get the impression that at the time of my Bradshaw's guide in Victorian times,

-coming down to go out on the river was very popular.

-Oh, yes, yes.

The trains made it easier to get to Richmond, and they all went and hired a boat.

Some of the old fellas, who are all dead unfortunately,

I'm the only one left, but they would tell me

10 o'clock in the morning, everything was out.

Every boat they had and then they had a queue waiting for them to come back.

It's not so very hot today, but I do feel like going on the river, any chance of that?

-There'll be a man waiting for you down there.

-Thank you.

I've had a fascinating but long day, and it's time to get my head down.

My hotel for the night is on the river.

What better way to arrive than being sculled?

Thank you very much.

After a good night's rest, I'm up early for the next leg of my journey.

Back on the mainline, I'm heading to a South London suburb.

My next destination has long been associated with physical prowess.

As my Bradshaw's says, "Wimbledon was formally celebrated in the annals of duelling,

"a practice which has now become synonymous with our notions of such killing being murder

"and therefore like many other customs and habits of uncivilised beings."

Well, as we all know, Wimbledon subsequently became associated

with a sport of the utmost refinement.

By the 18th century, Wimbledon was fast becoming a highly fashionable,

albeit isolated village, where wealthy Londoners sought country retreats.

The railway arrived in 1838, but it wasn't until improvements in the service in the 1850s

that Wimbledon became a significant suburb.

I'm here to visit the spiritual home of British tennis,

and to meet Mike Hann, who wants to put right the common misconception

of the origins of Wimbledon's place as a centre of sporting excellence.

These are the great tennis trophies, are they?

Yes, here's the men's singles trophy,

and here is the roll of the ladies' singles,

here are the winners going back, from 1884 and Miss Kvitova

who won the title in 2011.

Interestingly, they had the transfer up just when she was coming off the court.

-So they'd prepared two names?

-Exactly.

You may be surprised that I won't be watching tennis today.

But then, this is the All England Lawn Tennis And CROQUET Club.

Mike, there's no mention of your illustrious club in my Bradshaw's.

When was it founded?

Well, the club was founded in about 1869.

It was founded as the All England Croquet Club, then it became

the All England Croquet And Lawn Tennis Club,

and then the All England Lawn Tennis Club,

and finally in 1899 it was settled on the All England Lawn Tennis And Croquet Club.

And it's stayed the same ever since, thank goodness.

The precise origin of croquet is unknown,

but some historians believe that the game evolved as a high society recreation

in Ireland during the first half of the 19th century,

taking England by storm in the 1860s since it provided men and women, young and old

with an opportunity to compete outdoors on equal terms.

The mechanical lawn mower, invented by Edwin Beard Budding in 1830

allowed the maintenance of fine turf, and the growing railway network

enabled players to travel easily to tournaments.

So, Michael, choose your weapon.

-OK?

-Very good.

-Well, you haven't chosen mine. I'm pleased about that.

-Do you think my life in politics equips me for this vicious game?

-Spot on.

This is where I get a hammering.

THEY CHEER

OK.

Ha!

You've got tremendous potential.

You've got a good eye, natural eye, which is...

and you kept your head down, and that's very, very important.

I have not. That was 100% a fluke.

THEY LAUGH

Until today, I associated croquet with Alice In Wonderland,

but now I see it as a game of tactics and skill.

Leaving behind the lush lawns of Wimbledon,

I'm heading to my final destination - Clapham Junction.

Opened in 1863 and situated, perversely, in the heart of Battersea.

I'm keen to find out how the coming of the railways affected the area.

Ruth MacLeod is a heritage officer at Battersea Library.

This is the 1838 tithe map which shows the whole of Battersea.

It's got the railway line, there.

It starts up at Nine Elms, and runs all the way to here,

and Clapham Junction station, as we know it today, is round here.

-But at this point in 1838, Clapham Junction doesn't exist at all?

-No.

And the railway line running down to Southampton,

-actually, it just ends. This is, what, Nine Elms?

-Yes, that's right, Nine Elms.

-And all of this is, what, just fields? Just agriculture?

-Just fields.

There are a few houses there.

I had no idea that it was so rural as late as 1838.

And can you show me, then, how the railways changed south London?

Yes, we've got Ordnance Survey maps from the 1860s and the 1890s which show a real difference.

So, this is the 1865 Ordinance Survey map. As you can see it's still

not terribly built up. The area around here is actually market gardens.

I find this map particularly interesting, because 1865

is the same date as my Bradshaw's guide,

and talking about the line coming down from Vauxhall,

he says that it enters upon an embankment

which indeed I can see here,

and travels through spacious market gardens.

So, this is an exact transcription of what I am seeing on the map, isn't it?

Yes, that is absolutely right.

And then if we move to the 1890s map, you can see there's quite a change.

-Another transformation.

-It's a lot more built up.

-The area round here is actually the Shaftsbury Park Estate.

-And what is that?

An estate built in the 1870s by what is called the Artisans And General Labourers Society

specifically for working people to move into.

Skilled working class to come and live here,

maybe out of central London and into somewhere slightly more rural, as it maybe then was.

Ruth has not only maps of Battersea's Shaftesbury Park Estate.

She also has personal information about its residents.

This is the 1881 census.

It's from one of the streets in the Shaftesbury Park estate.

On the right-hand column here it says where people are born,

so we've got somebody who was born in Derbyshire,

a whole family from Kent, Berkshire, somebody from Ireland, Oxfordshire.

And then here we've got their rank, profession or occupation.

There's a cloth damper, there's a milliner apprentice,

school master, engine driver at a factory

and telegraph clerk.

So, we're talking here about artisans, we're talking about people of some quality.

-The upper working class, as it were.

-Yes, the skilled workers.

People who have gone out and learnt a trade, or in the case of the apprentice are learning one.

Built in the 1870s, the Shaftesbury Park Estate is laid out in wide tree-lined streets,

and each of the 1,200 two-storey homes has a front and back garden.

They were the antithesis of the squalor and deprivation

to which many of the skilled workers who lived here were accustomed.

With just £170, you could buy one. And Joan Rawson's grandfather did just that.

Joan and her friend Doreen still live on the estate.

Doreen, how long have you lived on the Shaftesbury Park Estate?

-30 years now.

-And you, Joan?

I've lived here 83 years. I was born in the bedroom upstairs.

You were born in this house?

-I certainly was, yes.

-Well, how have you found living here?

-You must have liked it.

-Well, lots of things have changed, obviously, over the years.

You know, as a child we had great fun.

Constructed with the philanthropic assistance of Lord Shaftesbury,

and later managed by the Peabody Trust, Battersea's Shaftesbury Park Estate

was a model of affordable social housing, offering security to workers who'd been forced out

of their central London homes to make way for the railways.

Was it a neighbourly place?

Yes, very. Everybody knew everybody else, you could go out and leave your door open.

We were all contented as children.

Although we didn't have a lot in those days, as you can imagine.

Like so many outer London suburbs, Battersea underwent a 19th century metamorphosis,

much of it driven by the coming of the railways.

To carry on my journey, I'm heading back to Clapham Junction station.

Opened in 1863, with its spaghetti of lines emanating from Victoria and Waterloo,

and 20 million passengers changing trains here annually, it's Britain's busiest station.

But local activist Philip Beddows wants to see a big change.

Now, I understand you think that Clapham Junction is misnamed?

It is. Back in the 1860s when they built this station,

Battersea was expanding from its river location out here,

and they thought, "How could we get people to come and use this station

"and make this place seem a rather nice place to come and live?"

So they gave it the name Clapham Junction in order to attract people to this higher-branded area.

-Clapham was a better name?

-Yes, in those days it was very, very smart,

and Battersea was looked down on as industrial, poor,

full of radical politics and not really such a great place to be living.

So, if this is Battersea, where is Clapham?

Well, Clapham's about one and a half to two miles away.

Back in the 19th century,

when Bradshaw did his railway timetable,

he actually recorded a note to warn travellers that when they arrived in Clapham Junction,

they were right in the middle of Battersea, not in Clapham.

And what do you want to rename this station?

We'd like Clapham Junction to be "Clapham Junction (Battersea)".

I can see in the future there are going to be shoals of confused

foreign tourists scratching their heads as they try and work out where they are.

Maybe, but they are going to be less confused than they are today.

Victorian Britain is evoked by the croquet lawns of Wimbledon

and the conservatories of Kew, but for the working class life was no bed of roses,

and the philanthropy of Shaftesbury and Peabody also typify the age.

Bradshaw's Britain was as grimy as it was green.

On the next leg of my journey,

I'll learn that volunteer Victorian firefighters liked a tipple.

To encourage people to come and help pump the fire engine,

insurance brigades would either take kegs of beer with them to a fire,

or they would take beer tokens with them.

I'll discover how even 19th century sewage pumps were a celebration of design.

Open this valve, here.

And I'll put in a shift at the oldest fish market in Britain.

Thank you, Michael. Let's get them boxed up.

-The man wants his fish today, not the weekend.

-MICHAEL CHUCKLES

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