Battersea’s Victorian infrastructure

Battersea Tangle

Clapham Common station left, New Wandsworth Common Station right

Battersea can claim to be the metropolitan district most mutilated by the arrival of the railways from 1830s onwards. This historic print shows the Battersea Tangle, which has survived to date.

One reason, so many competing companies were able to lay their tracks with little opposition in Battersea, is that most of this land was rural swampy fields, much of it prime market gardening land from the 17th to the mid 19th century.

As a consequence Battersea housing has been built haphazardly around these lines, hence many triangles, dead ends, roads that don't carry through and hidden roads behind railway arches.

In the second map, you will see two stations that were closed down when Clapham Junction was opened in 1868. The one on the left was opened in 1838 as Wandsworth for the London & Brighton Railway line and later renamed Clapham Common in 1846. The one on the right was named New Wandsworth in 1858 and served the West End & Crystal Palace line.

Battersea Pimlico Terminus, woodcut print 1859

You may have figured these stations are both in west Battersea, but just like the naming of Clapham Junction, railway company directors were keen on avoiding using the Battersea name, choosing 'posher' alternatives.

In the third photograph, we have an engraving which shows in the centre left the Pimlico Terminus.

Pimlico Railway Terminus, woodcut print

The station was built by the West End & Crystal Palace Railway Company, which aimed at linking the Crystal Palace, (the venue of the Great Exhibition in 1851, re-erected in Sydenham), with the West End.

The print dates from 1859. Notice Victoria Bridge, completed the year before in 1858. It's design is a lot more similar to Albert Bridge, and just as precariously built, for which is was renamed Chelsea Bridge and completely rebuilt in the 1930s.

Downstream you can see the piers of the Grosvenor Railway Bridge being built. This was the time, massive clearance was taking place of the Dickens's 'Devil's Acre', a massive slum in Westminster, in lieu of building Victoria Station. Some of the displacements created by the railway lines, led to worst overcrowding and suffering of the poor.

Vauxhall and Southwark Water Company

Battersea Park, was also opened the previous year by Queen Victoria, but you will notice its landscaping had not taken place yet. By this time it would have been cleared of encampments, buildings and market gardens, but its amenities were to be built in the next 10 or so years.

In the foreground you can see the heavy industry lining the Nine Elms bank and perhaps more intriguing, rows of Victorian terraced houses, long gone.

Conspicuously missing, is the Battersea Power Station, which would be built about 80 years later. On its site was the Battersea Gas Works. You can make out one gas holder. Later in 1865, one of the two gas holders exploded killing 10 people and injuring many others.

The Gas Works replaced the Vauxhall and Southwark Water Company, which had been moved down to Hampton Court, after the Metropolitan Water Act in 1852, which prohibited water companies in extracting water from the tidal reaches of the River Thames. Many thousands of cholera deaths had been associated with the companies supply of water, contaminated by raw sewage.