Did you know there used to be a station
at the junction of Wood Vale and Lordship Lane? And another at the other end of
Wood Vale, where it meets Forest Hill Road?
We asked local historian, Steve Grindlay, to take us on a journey down
the line.
Like
much else in this area, the Crystal Palace High Level Line was a direct result
of the opening of the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill in 1854. The building was
designed by Joseph Paxton as a temporary structure to house the Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (to give it its full title)
in Hyde Park. By the time the Great Exhibition closed, on 11th October 1851, plans were already afoot
to rebuild a much larger version of Paxton’s iconic building, already dubbed
“the Crystal Palace”. To achieve this, the Crystal Palace Company was formed
with a board of nine directors. One of their first objectives was to find a
suitable site for the new building.
It
may not be coincidence that four of the nine directors of the CP Co had lived
in Sydenham or Forest Hill since the mid-1840s, long before the original
building in Hyde Park had even been proposed. One of them, Samuel Laing, lived
in a large house near Mayow Road from 1847. He was chairman not only of the
Crystal Palace Company but also of the London, Brighton & South Coast
Railway, which ran from London Bridge through Forest Hill and Sydenham to
Croydon and beyond.
The
railway companies had done very well out of transporting visitors across the
country to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and were keen to have a say in
where the new Crystal Palace should be built. Another local resident, Leo
Shuster, was deputy chairman of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway
Company (he took over as chairman when Samuel Laing retired in 1855). He was
also one of the directors of the Crystal Palace Co. Furthermore he owned a very
large estate called Penge Place, conveniently situated between what is now
Crystal Palace Parade and Thicket Road, which he was prepared to sell to the
Crystal Palace Company.
By
August 1852 work had begun on erecting the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill. The
building was formally opened by Queen Victoria on 10th June 1854. On the same day, thanks to
the efforts of Laing and Schuster, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway
opened a branch line from Sydenham to Crystal Palace, extended to Victoria by
1860. This allowed visitors to travel from London Bridge through Forest Hill
and Sydenham to the present Crystal Palace station. The Palace proved highly
popular and, from the outset, the railway struggled to cope with some 10,000
visitors daily (on one occasion 112,000 visitors arrived by this route) coming
to enjoy the music, exhibitions, festivals and other events that were on offer.
In
order to control this vast volume of traffic, and to make the line safer, the
LB&SC railway decided to install an “electronic railway telegraph”. This
consisted of an electric cable suspended from posts alongside the line with
sensors that could detect the passage of trains. This information was relayed
to the signal boxes, allowing signalmen to control the movement of trains. This
was presumably quite a significant feature because a new public house opened in
Forest Hill, at the junction of Sunderland Road and Stanstead Road, called the
Railway Telegraph.
By
1860 the branch line from Sydenham to Crystal Palace had been extended to
Victoria but it was still having difficulty coping with the large number of
visitors. Several proposals were made for a second line to the Palace. By 1862
agreement had been reached on a branch line from Nunhead to Crystal Palace,
terminating at a grand station on the west side of Crystal Palace Parade. There
were several challenges, not least the steep incline from Nunhead to the height
of Sydenham Hill and the need for two tunnels.
Eventually,
on 1st August 1865, the Crystal Palace High
Level Line was opened. The intermediate stations between Nunhead and Crystal
Palace weren’t yet ready for the formal opening. Lordship Lane opened on
1st September 1865 and Honor Oak station
opened on 1st December 1865 while Upper Sydenham
station didn’t open until 1st
August 1884.
The High Level station was considered London’s most imposing branch line
railway station, outshone only by mainline stations such as St Pancras and
Euston. It was designed by Edward Barry and situated on the western side of
Crystal Palace Parade, between the parade and Farquhar Road. The site is now
occupied by Bowley Close. The entrance to the Paxton Tunnel still survives at
the northern end of the site as does part of the long, arched retaining wall
below Crystal Palace Parade.
The
finest survival of the High Level station is the arched, brick-lined subway
which allowed 1st class ticket holders direct access
from the station to the Palace. Others had to come out of the station and walk
across the road.
On
leaving the High Level station on the train back to London passengers would
almost immediately enter the Paxton Tunnel, emerging in what is now the
Hillcrest Estate. At the far end of this estate is the site of Upper Sydenham
Station and the entrance to the Crescent Wood Road tunnel. Above the tunnel, in
Wells Park Road, the station building still survives and is converted to flats.
The
train emerged from the Crescent Wood tunnel into what is now Sydenham Hill
Woods. You can follow the track through the woods, over the Cox’s Walk
footbridge and continue in the same direction through the Sydenham Hill Estate
towards Lordship Lane.
The station at Lordship Lane was built on land owned by the Dulwich College
estate and, as with other bridges and stations on their land, they insisted on
high quality buildings. In this case it was an elaborate Gothic style building
of red brick and stone. Nothing, apart from sections of the embankment, now
survives.
The
track continued along what is now the Horniman Nature Trail, under a bridge at
Langton Rise, and on towards Forest Hill Road.
Honor
Oak station was near the junction of Forest Hill Road and Wood Vale, opposite
Brenchley Gardens. Again, there are signs of the embankment in Buckley Close
and the Woodvale Estate.
Of
course, the main purpose of the High Level Line was to offer quick and easy
access to all the events and exhibitions that the Crystal Palace had to offer.
The fate of the line was finally sealed on 30th
November 1936 when the Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire. Although the line
struggled on, closing briefly during World War 2, the inevitable happened and
it was finally closed on 20th
September 1954.
Much
of the line is now woodland and nature trails, with bats roosting in the tunnel
underneath Sydenham Hill, while other sections of the line became housing.
