One of the most unusual and remarkable sights in London can be seen from the south bank of the Thames, from the stretch of Bankside between Southwark Bridge and Cannon Street Railway Bridge. From here one can see and follow the very severe line of the railway bridge across the river to Cannon Street Station, where a pair of Victorian brick towers rise high and defiant, even though they are strangely imbedded in modern building, like a partly exposed fossil in the conglomerate of the City of London. Visually stunning as this view is, there is a sense that something is wrong, that past glory has not quite made it through to the modern world.
View of Cannon Street Bridge and Station from the south bank of the river, 1994.
The view from the south bank is towards the ancient City of London wards of Dowgate and Candelwick. It was in this area that the Duke of Buckingham had his house, his more famous country villa being further west on the site of the present Buckingham Palace. It was also here that Dick Wittington lived and died. His house was directly opposite that of the Duke of Buckingham in College Hill, and the site of his burial is marked in the Wren Church of St. Michael Paternoster just to the left of the station.
Little, however, is left of the medieval ward, but through time the area was to become the location of a special combination of urban elements, linking the medieval to the Victorian, to the modern.
Cannon Street was originally known as Candlewick Street. It runs parallel to the Thames, and, just like the Charing Cross site in West London, it was on high ground and had a series of small side roads running downhill to the river bank. These side roads are the present Laurence Poultney, Bush Lane, Dowgate, College Hill and Queen Street. By the mid-nineteenth century it was seen that the lie of the land made it a good location for a much-needed City railway terminus.
With space for a fronting hotel on Cannon Street itself, there was a hundred yards or so of land behind sloping down to the river, giving space for high-level station platforms and tracks that would lead directly onto a bridge across the river. The aim was to link The City north of the Thames to London Bridge Station in the south, thus providing direct access to The City for commuters from Kent and the south-east. At the same time, an additional line branched off to the west, going from London Bridge to Waterloo East and Charing Cross stations. This meant that quick access to and from Kent was becoming a reality. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was all very much like a Victorian vision of a technologically sound, utterly positive and morally certain modern world overlaying a corner of the old medieval City.
But bit by bit the vision was lost. The hotel has vanished without trace. It had never been a great commercial success, and, after being converted into offices, was finally demolished during the 1960s. Its former status as part of the great railway hotel tradition is recorded in a brief mention by T. S. Elliot in The Wasteland:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants...
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel...
This rather obscure mention indicates they way the hotel was a known popular meeting place. Also, many conferences and annual general meetings were held there, including the surprising and incongruous fact that in 1920, just three years after the Russian Revolution, it was the venue for the founding meeting of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Postcard showing the front of the Cannon Street Station and Hotel, c1910. Photo from Wikipedia.
The bridge, originally called Alexandra Bridge, after Alexandra of Denmark, wife of the future Edward V11, was the work of John Wolfe-Barry and John Hawkshaw. Built between 1863 and 1866, and widened in 1893, it is supported by a series of huge Doric columns which rise from the water "like a sunken Temple", as Derek Jarman described it. Arranged in lines of six, these columns were once magnificent. But they have since been partially encased in massive concrete blocks, only short stretches of the shaft fluting remaining visible to suggest the original classical Doric style. The concrete was part of the bridge strengthening that was undertaken in 1981, when all architectural decoration was removed. The bridge also lost its footbridge, which once allowed pedestrians to cross to the south bank.
The station itself faired even worse. Because of the redevelopment and demolition of the hotel in the 1960s, the main entrance is now little more than a couple of undistinguished gaps in a facade of shops. The magnificent twin towers and side walls which still survive once flanked an enormous high-arching train-shed roof, spanning and enclosing a vast airy void that gave space for the steam engines entering the City. Opened on 1st September 1861, this was the City Terminus, the only station that led directly to the heart of the City of London from the south-east. But the mortal blow for the station came during the Second World War, when bomb damage eventually caused the demolition of the train shed roof. Demolition happened in the 1950s, and for many years the station had no roof at all and was open the elements.
Postcard showing the train shed with side towers as seen from the approach bridge, c1910. Photo from Wikipedia.
Then, during the 1980s, the value of air space above ground in the commercial heart of the city was discovered. Because modern electric trains did not need the high air space required by old steam engines belching smoke, the void was free to be exploited. It was, therefore, filled with an extraordinary office development that crushes the station space beneath a lava flow of white concrete, bursting outwards towards the bridge and making the platform area claustrophobic and oppressive. A similar thing, on an even grander scale, has happened at Charing Cross Station.