I remember as a child, climbing up the stairs from Liverpool Street Station into Broad Street Station and meeting at very close quarters a very large Steam Engine still puffing away. It must have just arrived. Thanks for reminding me.
As someone who watched the sad demise of Broad Street with a large dose of nostalgia, I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane. With a few brief breaks, I worked in Folgate Street a bit further north from 1982 to 2003 and walked many times each day down into the centre of the city. There was a lovely row of artisans workshops to the north of Broad Street being dying trades like saddle makers and jigsaw die cutters, a company which re-plated British Rail silverware for their dining cars plus a linotype workshop making plates for some of the non-English language newspapers which were still printed until the advent of the internet, in Yiddish, Polish and Urdu. I doubt if anyone thought it worthwhile to take cine/video of these dying activities, so now lost forever.
Last time I was in London I stayed in a hotel on Folgate Street. Fascinating little street, very different from most of the surrounding area, even if modern development was creeping in from the Liverpool Street end.
@@Michael75579 In 1981, my company bought a bomb site in Folgate Street (10-12), which had been hit by a V1 flying bomb in 1944. We also had to buy the derelict house next door and do a historically accurate restoration to its 18th century state, as far as possible. This was a nightmare, as Tower Hamlets council insisted on us repairing rotten pieces of wood with filler, instead of replacing with new but identical materials. We were not allowed to occupy the office next door until the restoration of the house was complete.
@@adonaiyah2196 Yes, a single run-on sentence makes up almost half the paragraph. It's a bit too big to bite off in one go. I found the content worth working for, though. The mental image of all those old trade shops is quite evocative. (Also, writing this made me acutely conscious of my own writing flaws. I don't find it easy to restructure my thoughts into digestible forms. It's often worth the effort, improving my own clarity of thought especially in technical subjects.)
And once more, an epic episode in London's layout of railway routes. Give my regards to this gentleman of our capital's railway history. Yes, i agree, i think Broadstreets buildings should have been kept and incorporated into the new layout. Looking forward to the next railway delight.
Vivid memories of climbing up the rickety stairs into Broad Street Station on many an evening, to fill in time while waiting for the next Cambridge train from Liverpool Street, back in the late 'seventies, and wallowing in the delicious sense of genteel abandonment, desolation, gloom and decline. Thank you for this excellent documentary. James-in-Australia.
Memories of spotting at Liverpool Street in the late fifties and noticing N2 tanks and Oerlikon electric trains up behind the high level wall opposite. I went investigating and discovered Broad Street. A grand station but lacking many passengers, it had been sadly neglected over many years and had an air of impending doom even then. The model locos in glass cases on the concourse were a particular feature of this once busy terminus. RIP Broad Street.
Nice video Jago. I was only a kid when Broad Street was demolished and, like the Crystal Palace, it’s one of those lost London buildings I really wish I could’ve explored.
Alex ~ You’re right. I remember it being headline news in 1968 that St Pancras would close, and the tracks would be diverted into King’s Cross. Years later, a girl working for British Rail ( a manager) denied it.
@@robertweissman4850 Yes, it was definitely on the cards to demolish it back then. Absurd now to think of that. I remember going to the station around 2000, it was really run down with just a few services. The transformation into what it is today is incredible.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense I suppose to have two major terminus stations across the road from each other... but I guess now that they are more or less symbiotic and share a big underground concourse it's not so bad; lovely that I can get from Welwyn to the Eurostar in 29 minutes too.
@Richard Harrold absolutely. Who needs wide open classical arches of train sheds. I love what they did to Cannon Street, for example, get rid of that open glass roofed arch and stick an office block on it instead with a low dark roof. Euston too, look at those awful photos of how it used to look compared to the utopian dream that now sits on the site. Let’s have more anonymous concrete office blocks!
I'm a Beatles fan so I love that Macca Film. Sadly by the time I was old enough to go to London on my own I just missed the last services and the place was a building site.
I started work in the City in the 1970’s and commuted from Gordon Hill to Broad Street. Locomotive-hauled slam door carriages, 6 seats to a side, Ladies Only carriages too. Straight in to Finsbury Park platform 1, then down and into the tunnel that is just above Drayton Park station. Then around the north London line into Broad Street. In the off-peak hours the carriages were replaced by the old diesel rail cars. If I didn’t go to Broad Street I would take the same train and change at Finsbury Park for a Moorgate service. That was via Kings Cross and the Widened Lines and belongs in another of Jago’s videos. Truly Happy Days. The old British Rail at its best (worst ?) with at least 2 drivers to every train (Driver and Fireman, and frequently a young lad too) plus a guard in the rear of the train.
Oh, how I miss slam door corridor carriages, helpful guards who would put your luggage in the baggage van if struggling with it and put it out at the correct station. We all moaned about British Rail(ways) but the modern standard of service is abysmal, with uncomfortable seating and incessant door beeping along with constant announcements, woe betide if trying to read or do the crossword.
@@tonys1636 Indeed. It seems you need to ride an expensive train to be comfortable these days, and perhaps pay a parcel company to take your luggage. ;)
I remember visiting Broad Street, about 1983/4. It was eerie as anything. Nothing was running as it was off-peak, and I clearly remember the undergrowth and actual trees, growing on the disused tracks. Very strange, considering the bustle of Liverpool Street, next door...
A shame it went, remember how well into the mid 1990s you could argue it was the same situation with bustling Kings Cross with the practically derelict half abandoned St Pancreas next door
@@nickbarber9502 And here I thought the few remaining park benches in Los Angeles still bearing the logo of the 1984 Olympics were blasts from the past...
As a callow youth in the early 1960's I worked in Eldon Street, right opposite Broad Street station. (Golly - that's over half a century ago! Where did the time go? Cue song by Sandy Denny) It was already looking very tired and unloved. Neither of which can se said about Mr H's superb videos, which are scintillating, informative, and generally superb. Thank you, Mr H Simon T
I used to lunch in the seventies at the restaurant in the station. The premises were very large and the customers few. The food was good until the latter years when the pate had a touch of Russian Roulette about it. My Watford train would often run alongside a crowded train of possibly NLR articulated carriages. They looked dreadfully uncomfortable with about an inch of upholstery fixed to the flimsy partitions. I presume they were headed into Liverpool Street
I lived in Watford in the 70s and 80s and don't think I ever went to Broad Street. We went through Liverpool Street via Euston many times,principally to visit my aunt,uncle and cousins when they were living in Brentwood. I'm shocked there was a plan to demolish it and replace it with office space!
Pity it couldn't have been refurbished and preserved. I live about 75 miles northeast of New York City and we lost beautiful Penn Station before anyone knew what was happening. Thankfully Grand Central Terminal was saved and refurbished. It is a treasure that I enjoy when in New York.
In 1977 when i was there as a driver the modern building on the platform, on the left was our pay office and class room , our mess and booking on point was behind the ticket office on the station forecourt. On booking on one day at 6am I came up the stairs from the street and found the whole station forecourt covered with chickens running round, the youths had let them out overnight from their transportation boxes which stood empty on the station trolleys, not a sight I ever saw again at a London termini or any other station come to that !
I travelled the Richmond to Broad Street line every day for a year back in the 70's. I would wander onto Broad Street station on many Sundays, heading back to Richmond, and it would be totally deserted. No one anywhere. Had it all to myself apart from an old blue/grey Class 501 ticking away in the platform waiting to take me home. It was such a surreal place at the end. Broad Street and Marylebone have always been my favourite London stations. Brilliant video Jago. Thanks.
I went there one evening in about 1983/84 after a really bad day at work, a ruined evening and just jumped on a train and went to Richmond , then went back to Waterloo and caught a train home just for the hell of it
I remember being taken to Broad Street station in the late 70's and early 80s a few times by my dad. Another enduring memory from that time was just how desolate that part of the city was at the weekend. We would get the 149 down from Enfield and bumped into his brother coming out of Dirty Dicks on a few occasions.
I used to walk past a very shabby and down at heel Broad Street station when I started work in July 1974, I used to walk along the alleyway along the side of the station to Worship Street, just opposite the old goods yard. As always an interesting story about somewhere I used to know. The new development and Liverpool Street station are a major improvement on that area now
I used to walk down that alleyway with the shell of the goods station on one side and a very nice pub on the other. The landlord had a couple of chow-chow dogs. That was when I worked in Sun Street.
I have good memories of Broad Street as I travelled from Stonebridge Park to Broad Street a number of times in the late 1950's early sixties to train-spot at Liverpool Street station. Always a grand terminus and travelling along the North London line was always fascinating.
I visited Broad Street in 1980, just to say I had been there before it closed. It was a gloriously sad relic, mostly derelict and totally deserted at the time. I took a load of photographs, and if I can find them I'll stick a slide show together and upload it.
I worked just round the corner in Bishopsgate during the late 60's. I used the service out of Broad Street a few times. My overall impression a dirty ramshackle place. It had obviously suffered badly from lack of maintenance, when it rained water used to enter the main concourse. In the end it needed demolishing, whilst I am no lover of modern buildings, what is there now is a considerable improvement.
Good Lord! I remember as a kid standing with my Father regularly waiting for a no.11 bus right outside the building. I always wondered what it was, never considering it was another station!
I used it a couple of times in the 1960s, and was clearly beyond its sell by date when I visited it I also worked with a guy who was a clerk at Broad Street Goods; I can't remember if he started there and then went to the Provender Mill at Camden, or if it was the other way round, but by his age he would have started working on the railway when they were still owned by the LMS
That moment of joy experienced when you find a Jago Hazzard film you haven't seen before... I used Broad Street on its last ever day, and the short lived Liverpool Street replacement version on its first day, and then the first day and last days of the short lived diversion to Stratford.
It's amazing that broad st station was on that site from 1865 - 1986, 121 years. The offices that replaced it made it just 30 years from 1989 to about 2019 before being pulled down and redeveloped again. I wonder how long the current structure will last.
Modern architects still think their work is too simple to wind up looking old. They still have this misconception that it's the details that make a building look dated.
It is sad to see the fall of Broad Street, but it sounds like it was kind of inevitable. It had its time in the sun, but times change. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen a station, or even a whole mode of transport get outmoded once something better came along; how many Londoners commuted in by steamboat once the railways reach Southend? By the by, about that Princess Alice episode you said you were looking into awhile back... One bit that I've read made operations into Broad Street rather awkward was the large but relatively tight S curve on the immediate approach to the station, allowing the line to bypass Liverpool Street. While visually impressive from above, I've read that this curve also posed something of a bottleneck to the station, restricting the number of trains that could come in and out at any given time. Is there any truth to this, or is that why you didn't mention it? Finally, while realistically it does seem to me that Broad Street's fate was sealed as a station, I can think of probably the ultimate alternative use for it had the building been preserved: The London Railway Museum. Think of it: a whole, large, historic station, its platforms now stocked with trains that tell the story of the railway's impact on the capital, from the Eastern Counties to the London Necropolis. They even have the lower goods level for historic trams and motor vehicles. The London Transport Museum wouldn't have to keep half their collection shut away in Acton. And you could still have a couple platforms open for the Overground, disgorging right there into the museum. And how do you like the sound of Jago Hazzard: Curator of Broad Street Railway Museum?
I remember taking a look at Broad Street out of curiosity it was very dark empty and looked like it had been abandon befor it closed. A complete opposite to Liverpool St next door which was rammed. Fascinating to hear its rise and fall, this has filled another gap in my understanding on how London has evolved. Thanks Jago. Could you do some thing similar on the goods depo at Fenchurch St.
I miss Broad Street as much as I miss Woolworths. 😢 My late father used to take myself and my younger brother there, when we were going to the seaside in Essex via Liverpool Street Station, in the seventies and eighties. He was a deputy headteacher at Peckham High School, who had been head of Latin at St Clements Dane in Hammersmith, so he would have appreciated your quote. Thank you for making a video about the lost terminus, but I have always wondered how they managed to demolish, the huge abandon derelict signal box, at the junction with the branch to Broad Street, where it split from the Liverpool Street lines. Nobody seems to know. I remember that the concourse of the station, had an uneven floor, during the end of its life. The trains had B2 on their front boards. I have a Kodak Box Brownie Camera, that belonged to my late father that I took a photograph of one leaving Wembley Central Station with, from a view that is no longer available. I was standing on a service bridge at the back of the station, that is now private, but was a public route in 1979, when I took the picture. The McCartney film does have good music sequences in it. The station is used very little in the film, it's just a plot device. Personally I love that film because I'm a Beatles fan, having first heard their music in 1963, when I was two and a half, and Paul McCartney is my favourite Beatles. But it is a very lightweight film and was just using the location because of the plot. The beautiful Romansh arched staircase at the side of the station decayed badly towards the end of its life, so much so you couldn't use it, in spite of people wanting to save it. The ticket office currently survives as a restaurant in the Broadgate Centre, but they want to rebuild, so it might go. The underground taxi rank of Liverpool Street Station, that had an entrance between the two terminus stations, is also incorporated into the same area. I have a facsimile of an early 1900s tourist guide to London that mentions all the lost places, that existed in London at that time, including Broad Street Station. I also have a secondhand 50s A to Z and a secondhand 70s A to Z which show the station, plus a 1999 book of aerial photographs of London that show an emergency halt up next to Liverpool Street where the station had been. If it's still there it's probably buried under the tower blocks. The road outside is the road, the station took its name from. The Broadgate Centre is named after a city gate that was in that area, just like there's Aldersgate, now Aldgate and Bishopsgate, etc. There are actually a very large file on the internet of Broad Street photographs, just ask Google. The roof was demolished because it was damaged in both World Wars. It was attacked by zeppelin bombing in the First World War and attacked by the Luftwaffe in the Second. Liverpool Street was redeveloped not only with Broadgate, but the removal of the ludicrous maze of footbridges inside the station, that were used in film The Elephant Man and an early episode of Waking The Dead, where Trevor Eve plays opposite his wife Sharon Maughan, who was guest starring. There is a Thames Television film of Margaret Thatcher using a bulldozer on the station demolition, as a political publicity stunt, which can be found on You Tube. The real trouble with Broad Street was that it was always slightly surplus, to the area it was built in. The buildings that were shut down in the 50s were totally derelict inside, at the time. The goods terminal was used for carrying coal for steam trains using Liverpool Street Station, so probably combustible coal dust caused the fire. There are countless beautiful old buildings that have been left to decay, then torn down and replaced with tower blocks. The modernist brutalist architects of the twentieth century have a lot of aesthetic crimes to answer for. St Pancras had a luck escape, compared to poor Broad Street.
I do think this is one of the more fascinating aspects of London railways, perhaps in a parallel universe it remains a thriving station. I think you've done a great job of talking about the old station and the old route with lots of great footage all the while not getting too bogged down in the minutiae (the goods yard itself is a story worth looking into, reading up on). Thank you!
It’s nice to see you talk about this, after seeing a video by Ruairidh MacVeigh about this old lost station and how it all went desolate in the 80’s and this is very interesting from your perspective, as well as the other one, as I have been in Liverpool Street many times, and never heard of until I saw the videos, including yours.
I well remember Broad Street Station from when I began commuting into Liverpool Street Station from the mid-1970s. It was far more impressive than the entrance to Liverpool Street, but I had no idea who used it or where the trains went. I did go up there a few times to look at the platforms, and it was sad to see it decline in use, which was hardly surprising as they kept closing platforms and then made passengers walk a mile down the platform to catch the few trains that were still using the Station. I later worked in the new Broadgate development which replaced Broad Street Station in the mid-1980s; I understand that has now suffered a decline in occupancy, so perhaps there is a curse from the original Bedlam hospital and its occupants.
My favourite youtuber atm, has everything from dark humour to interesting facts. Looking forward to more episodes ( currently binge watching everything on the channel )
I never made it to Broad street, but it has always had an appeal to me, it does make you wonder what might have happened had the over ground come along 25 years earlier though.
The Dr Beeching report wasn't just aimed at closing railways, but also revolutionising how freight is transported on the railway. Before his report, mixed freight trains were commonplace and after, they moved to dedicated freight trains and continental "container" cargo because it was seen as more efficient. If the railways had done both mixed freight and container cargo, then Broad Street's freight operations would have had a reprieve, and might have kept the passenger service running.
Yes but they were right to shift rail freight in that direction because that was the direction freight was going. This was also the time when containerisation was coming and London’s docks were facing closure. Beaching has become a convenient scapegoat and bogeyman for British rail fans. But he’s really not to blame, he did his job of salvaging Britain’s railways after over a decade of gross mismanagement from the state owned British railways. He certainly wasn’t this anti-Railways corporatist that he’s too often portrayed as; he was this number-crunching boffin who liked trains and who ironically would’ve had a lot in common with the people who now despise him. The only big criticism that can be laid his way is that many of his models were insufficient and didn’t properly account for the slip-on effect that closing some branches would have on the profitability of the trunk routes. But if it wasn’t for Beeching then something far more devastating could befallen the black hole that was British Railways. Yes it’s a shame that Broad St was lost, I have often wondered how it could’ve become useful again in the era’s of privatisation and then TfL overground and with the emergence of office towers in the old east end. Don’t forget that it was also a victim of the times, the 1980s was when old buildings were making way for shiny new office space. No doubt BR made a tonne of money from selling the land it had stood on.
@@danieleyre8913 actually I think you'll find he sat on the board for motorway builders and had no real interest in saving the railway as would eat into his companies profits. That being said the railway was/is/will always be a financial mess. Its strange working in a industry with so much potential but always struggles to move forward (pun intended)
@@deanbrown29 No I won’t find that and you think wrong because that is complete fiction. Beeching ran the econometrics and linear programming department of the ICI company and had nothing whatsoever to do with motorways (which were a government initiative). He privately thought that automobile dependency wasn’t a good thing and that railways could work and should be given another chance. He SAVED British rail, it had been leaking big money due to continual mismanagement after it was nationalised with most of the staff of the previous “big 4” had resigned due to bumbling ministers and civil servants forcing bad ideas and because of the absolutely rushed and botched Dieselisation and because of the absolute failure to adapt to and incorporate the advancements in lorries and trucks and road haulage in general. Britain’s railways were nothing close to “a mess” before the Second World War they were some of the biggest and most profitable in the world. What ruined them was never being compensated for wartime press-ganging and then forced nationalisation with ministers and public servants who had no clue what they were doing overruling experienced railway men and forcing them into retirement. It was either Beaching’s axe or losing even more of the railways. And Beeching also brought in many initiatives that set British railways into overdue modernisation and more efficient operations that had many positive legacies. It is simply simplistic, reactionary, ignorant, irrational and PATHETIC how some people have made Beeching the big scapegoat for the decline in British railways.
@@deanbrown29 . I think you are confusing him with Ernest Marples, (the Minister of Transport at the time). Marples Construction Ltd virtually had a monopoly on road building. Funny that!
Liverpool Limestreet had a similar loop configuration for trains to Southport from Lime Street Station, on a now defunct line that went Via Maghull to the North of Liverpool. Pretty much the same thing happened. Going East to eventually go North on what is the Freight Line today. It went the same way as the one you're discussing.
There were two lines to Southport from Liverpool, one via Aintree which is now closed. Both terminated at Exchange in the north of the city centre. When Merseyrail metro was being built in the 1970s, the Southport trains that terminated at Exchange in the north of the city centre were diverted to Lime St using the Canada Dock Branch line (Bootle Branch). The trains came in from the north from Southport then onto the Canada Docks branch at Bootle heading east then curving around at Edge Hill entering Lime St from the east. The line is now a 100% freight line, the only line left of nine serving the large dock complex. Why TfN wants a new line into Liverpool, as part of NPR. There was all sorts of services around Liverpool, at various times. There was one from Birkenhead Woodside terminal to Liverpool Central via Runcorn, doing a U of the Mersey estuary.
I visted Broad Street twice, once in 1985, with the main building looking shabby, but still intact, just before the Richmond service was converted to 2-EPB (imagine those on the line today!!) and diverted to North Woolwich, and again a year later, with only the rush hour service to and from Watford Junction remaining, and most of the ststion already gone, with just a single stretch of platform left for trains to run into, and a temporary staircase to reach the street, surrounded by plasterboard. What a come down!!😢
I loved Broad Street. Travelling by cycle from Reading to Basildon, as I regularly did, I could get on the North London from the old LSWR, go round to Broad St & only have a short (if scary) ride to Fenchurch St. Such an atmospheric station was a joy to pass through. RIP.
"....to my declining terminus", yes happy Friday to Jago and everyone else with that happy thought. Not that it gave me the image of someone dying having the shits, or errr, anything like that. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!
I'd love to see a film about that too. I've got a vague recollection of the station before it was converted. This movie clip gives a flavour of what it was like, from The Elephant Man th-cam.com/video/sF19L00KbAI/w-d-xo.html
Some mixed memories of Broad Street. In 1974 , a friend and I got back to St Pancras after a weekend's trainspotting in Manchester and Sheffield. He suggested taking the North London line to Richmond, then home to Bracknell. The summer evening saw Broad Street deserted apart from the dismal Class 501 emu which would take us to Richmond through the grim pre gentrification North London. A bit of a downer to our trip. My next visit was December 1978. I was on the way to Cambridge for an interview. I took the chance to travel the North London line again, un am even more run down Class 501. I think I just hurried out of the station on arrival and straight to Liverpool Street. My journey home a couple if days later missed out Broad Street, and sadly I did not get a place to study at Cambridge. Could Broad Street have survived ? Maybe if they tried reinstating peak hour trains from the Great Northern line, ans given the station some TLC, renovated the surviving part of the roof, opened some cafes and eateries in the station building, made it a more attractive place? No, what sealed its fate was the 1980s finance boom. Rather than attracting more commuters, British Rail realised that they could make more money from selling the site than they ever could from rumming rail services.
Why would they reinstate trains from the GN? The line to Moorgate is self contained does not have freight and serves a more convienient Terminus. Plus Liverpool Street would not have been modernised. Best outcome was for Broad Street to be demolished.
Memory barely serves but I think that I went on a steam special from Broad Street in the '70s organised by the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway Society. The 'star' loco was the B12 which the Society subsequently bought. Much of the day was spent bumbling around lines now lifted south of Northampton/Rugby. We did not return to Broad Street because it was closed in the evening on Saturdays. Jago I look forward to your next on Bricklayers Arms.
Well done Jago. I went inside the old BSS building with an BR engineering / permenant way supervisor in the mid 1980s . Amazing stain glass windows in the Director's room . What about a mention of the well advanced Camden High Line project over North London disused tracks Camden Town to North Kings Cross ( disused Underground station at York Way)? All for the price of Bojo's ill fated Garden Bridge .😜
I remember Broad Street, occasionally used it to … simply use it. As for keeping the station , it might have been nice but to be honest even if it was redeveloped you couldn’t use it as an entry to CrossLizPurp . The N London line continues to be a fascinating part of the capital’s railways
As a child I would occasionally accompany my Father to Broad st when he had to visit the office at the weekend from West Hampstead. It was a great ride, always a good chance of riding with the driver on the empty train, and then the fascination of the station. Everything was shuttered, you couldn't use the external stairs anymore, it was filthy, and what with the vegetation, looked bomb-damaged. Then off into the deserted streets of Broadgate. It felt like having London to yourself and has left me with a lifelong fascination with pictures of Broadgate station, similar to those of Bury Knowsley St, Tottington, Summerseat station, Minffordd, and Dolgellau.
In the mid 60's I was a trainee accountant working in a 3rd floor office in Bishopsgate. I glanced out of the window to see a plume of steam on the the bridge over the road and realised something special was heading towards Broad Street. As it was almost lunch break time I dashed out of the building and sprinted the few hundred yards to the station. There was an exhibition about some aspect of modernising the railways on one of the platforms. I ran through this and from the platform end saw, in the sidings on the west side, a gleaming Britannia with a few old wagons. I think the loco was named Western Star (70025). Needless to say, I returned to the office a bit late!
Late to this channel but how informative and entertaining it is. Worth pointing out that the glassy office block that replaced Broad Street is actually the second building that stands on the former Broad Street site. The first one in the late '80s being the UBS building - Broadgate - which itself was replaced in the last couple of years. (2020-2022.) Maybe this has been mentioned in dispatches already, but this makes this former London station possibly the first to have the building that replaced it to itself have already been torn down in favour of something else.
Jago - An excellent presentation, and really well-informed. I saw Broad Street Station as a youngster in 1963, and although quiet, it was complete; all of the overall roofs were intact. Later, in the mid 1970s, I had to use it regularly, and it was an ugly wasteland by then. I think that, as the railway routes from the station have survived, albeit with modifications, this is one of the very few railway closures that were justified.
I had an office in that glass office block for a short time. Nice to look out over Liverpool street station roof. Didn't even know about Broad Street station.
I always remember using Broad Street station with my mum & dad, we used to go to Gospel oak for the open air Lido.. I'm sure that would have been late 70s.. great video
I can recall going to Broad Street with my late father, late 70's early 80's to take a train to North Woolwich, even now, 25 years later I can still recall how decrepitate and run down it had become.
In the '90s I used to work at Broadgate Circle, right on top of the Broad Street Station site. Often tried to picture exactly where in relation to the old station I was, though I'd never seen it. Ironically the building where I worked has been flattened now as well, to make way for the UBS building.
I used to live in Wood Green, which also had a station (Palace Gates) which used to have services starting or ending at Broad Street. As I was only a young child when Palace Gates was closed and the lines lifted I never got the chance to travel from that station.
I visited Broad Street station shortly before closure in 1986 when I used to visit a friend in London and enjoy the delights of a concessionary travel card for about a fiver for 6 zones I believe. It was such a joy to visit a city with an extensive, convenient and integrated transport network from somewhere that didn't.
I remember playing the Give My Regards To Broad Street game on my old Spectrum. Can't remember anything about it other than it was in a big box and had a fold-out map.
I played this game. The premise was that the recording for his new song had been stolen. Driving a car round London. You had to get to certain stations at a particular time. If you did you get a piece of the song back. It came with a huge road map of London. It was a terrible game. It was like GTA 1, but with out the violence.
The film was a vanity project by Paul McCartney, who fancied having another go at acting. It's basically a dream sequence as he dozes in the back of a taxi. It's a bit thin on plot but the master tape of his next record is recently completed and entrusted to a friend who happens to be an ex-con being given a second chance to deliver to the recording studio. However he fails to turn up and the assumption is that he's stolen the tape for his own profit. There's a Yerkesesque baddie who stands to gain control of the recording studio if the missing tape isn't found by midnight. But, of course, Paul finds it in the nick of time abandoned on a bench in its eerily glowing case, on the platform of Broad Street station with its hapless courier locked in a room where he'd wandered in his search for a toilet. So all's well that ends well. I watched it at the time in the cinema to see Broad Street station, which had just closed. It's dark, it's derelict and it's raining. You see more of it in this video.
We used Broad Street occasionally in the 70s and 80s up until it was closed. It was grim. So much so that you rather cheered to hear that it was to be redeveloped. But now, looking back at what it had been in its heyday one really rather regrets the loss.
Great vid Jago. Used to see the BR trains going into Broad Street on my walk to school in the early 80's. Brilliant that the overground is using the old line. No mention of the Graham Road curve which was the final nail in the Broad Street coffin though!!!
A book of photos of London's termini, with typically enthusiastic text by Betjemann, induced me to visit Broad Street. It was near the end of a holiday in UK. I started at Richmond and was intrigued by the nature of the line and its stations. Broad Street was just as those later photos show, faded decrepititude under that glorious mansard roof. I remember studying the war memorial. Thanks, Jago, for reminding me to find that book.
I remember it well in the late 1970s. I used to go to Petticoat Lane and Brick Lane most Sundays. I got the North London Line from West Hampstead to Broad Street. It was a dark and depressing place at that time.
Give my Regards to Broad Street - I vaguely remember that Paul McCartney movie (I'd forgotten about it completely until you mentioned Paul). I think the reason my friends and I went to see it was because Paul was in it. Thanks for the video - I'll now have to track down that movie so I can remember what I watched many years ago.
Excellent video, I learnt quite a bit. I never did get to see Broad Street before it's demise, when really I should have, since my route into London at the time, when I was a young teenager, was well Liverpool Street ! I can't remember going out of Liverpool Street station and walking on the surface, I'd always end up getting the Met, Circle or Central Lines to somewhere else !
There is an ammeter shot film uploaded to TH-cam called Last night of Broad Street Station that shows some insight as to just how run down the station was at the end.
I used Broad Street several times in the early 1980s commuting in from Harrow & Wealdstone on the Watford Junction line. Sadly, I never paid much attention to it but I do remember the expanse of land that opened up near Primrose Hill. Thanks again Jago!
I approve of Broad Street. I am contemplating building a model railway imagining what would have happened if Broad Street station (or something very much like it) had stayed open into the later 1980s and been used instead of the widened lines for Bedford trains running into the city (i.e. Broad Street instead of Moorgate, the services joining the North London line at the junction near West Hampstead) and instead of the North City line for Hertford North/Stevenage trains running into the city (perhaps also assuming that the Northern Heights project had been completed and thus that the North City Line had remained part of the Northern Line, with trains running to Bushey Heath), perhaps also with some services to North Woolwich.
I used Broad Street a lot in the 1970s. It had a dystopian feel as the station was pretty much derelict. However, I once saw some discarded destination boards, which brought to my attention the large number of suburban stations it once served - Richmond, Watford, Potters Bar, Alexandra Palace, Mill Hill, Edward, Stratford...
Visited inside Broad St building.In mid 1980s with a Kiwi BR engineering / permanent way supervisor. Incredible Board Room , with stain glass windows and paneling. Just before demolition ,all went pity nothing saved / preserved. The whole NLR was pretty grim , but at least not closed under Beeching. . North Woolwich was a brilliant museum , and then across the Thames in the ferry named after Ernie Bevin. Thanks Jago. Talking of NLR , how about a film on Willesden Junction, rare station with High and Low levels ( latter into Euston) the 'Harlequin line ' , under BR Network South East runs through Harlesden & Queen's Park - gediit?😀
In the late 1970s I used the car park which occupied the old goods yard and, occasionally, Broad Street Station. Since then, when I have walked through the Broadgate development, I have felt like a ghost from the past.
I made a point of travelling the whole line from Richmond to Broad Street in the early 1970's; even then, the intermediate stations between Dalston Junction and the terminus were long gone apart from mortal remains - the Overground revitalisation of these was timely and passenger numbers immediately exceeded three times the estimates. Had Broad Street still stood, I fear it would only have served to spoil and confuse the vision which eventually led to today's rather wonderful service.
@@mjcats2011 or maybe it could have been converted to service a bit like the DLR and the western pair could be of the DLR and eastern pair for the London Overground. The London Overground route would not go into broad Street and the DLR would only have 3 platforms with them being built all over but the old broad Street station building would become flats and a smaller area to by tickets for trains.
@@mjcats2011 I would link the ELL and the Watford DC line together with broad Street staying open as part of the DLR services would continue from tower gateway via broad station to Ralston Junction.
It was a sad tail for Broad Street Station, I use to get the train from Acton Central to Dalston Junction to visit my aunt in Hackney in the 70s and 80s.... Boy that was a gloomy station.... Well both Acton and Dalston were gloomy.... One plan was to close the line completely and make it into a road, connecting west and east... Thank goodness that never went ahead.... Great video as usual on a line that should have been more....
I heard that as well about lifting the line and turning it into a road, a lot of MPs used the North London line so stopped it from being closed and lifted.
As a relative local to Haggerston Station, I am delighted that our Overground has been so successful. Fun fact - the site of the new Shoreditch High Street Station is right over the Central Line. So why didn't they connect the two (apart from the appalling cost, of course)? I read somewhere that George Bernard Shaw rode the Broad Street Line to Stratford East when he was a theatre critic, presumably turning right on the Dalston East Curve that is no longer there. 'Who would want to live in awful places called Haggerston and Dalston?' quoth he. Keep up the great work.
I had completely forgotten about that movie until you brought it up here. One second-run movie house near my boarding school in SE Pennsylvania in the 80's seemed to have a 'thing' for odd quirky British movies. (They also ran the utterly confusing "Britannia Hospital" at some point.)
Jago. You always make videos about the exact things I want to know about as I look out of the train window and wonder about the ruins, dead ends and clues that pepper London's rail network. Keep it up!
I love the implication that the film “Give My Regards to Broad Street” somehow compounded the problems of Broad Street Station. That truly was a dismal, dismal film. Only worth watching for the 3 minutes of footage of the station itself.
I reckon Fancy New Terminus on a map would appeal to Boris Johnson whether there was a need for it or not. Perhaps it could be at one end of his Scotland/Northern Ireland bridge...
There was an extremely useful bar in one of the arches under the front on Broad Street in the early 1980s. Can't recall it's name but it sold Grolsch. Of course it closed and was replaced by the much less useful (imho) Broadgate, of which my then employers were one of the first tenants, which seemed like fate blowing a raspberry.
Had the Northern City line not converted to NR use the Welvyn Garden City service might find its way to Broad Street instead. Still, I have to say for the approach line, and the community around, the current situation might be the happiest possible outcome.
It does seem rather sad that this one magnificent, all-conquering London terminus is no more, that it met such a sad end - but ultimately, it was inevitable from the sounds of it. It just wasn't needed anymore really, and short of a reconfiguration of the railways to give it a new purpose (akin to Marylebone or St. Pancras) I don't think it could have found a new purpose as a railway station really, let alone one of that size. Great video!
That 'glassy office block' you show is actually the second building constructed on the Broad Street station site. It's all part of the redevelopment of the Broadgate site: the last bits to change will be that along Bishopsgate and show what the first incarnation looked like.
When I began working in the City in the 60s, a colleague used to commute into Broad Street on a steam-hauled rush-hour service from Hemel Hempstead. I would sometimes use the station, when I had time to spare, taking the train to Richmond then back home to Clapham Junction. There was a useful Red Arrow bus service from Broad Street to Waterloo, the 502, a good alternative to the Drain.
I started work in 1964 and used to commute from New Barnet to Broad Street. Can't remember whether this was a through service or whether I changed at Finsbury Park.
"The two companies had a good relationship." We can't have this sort of thing, it just isn't done. Call Charles Tyson Yerkes to do something about it.
Call Besos.
Absolutely!
Sending out the Charles Tyson Yerkes bat signal...
"There was a change of management, to... YOU TWO AGAIN!"
I remember as a child, climbing up the stairs from Liverpool Street Station into Broad Street Station and meeting at very close quarters a very large Steam Engine still puffing away. It must have just arrived. Thanks for reminding me.
As someone who watched the sad demise of Broad Street with a large dose of nostalgia, I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane. With a few brief breaks, I worked in Folgate Street a bit further north from 1982 to 2003 and walked many times each day down into the centre of the city. There was a lovely row of artisans workshops to the north of Broad Street being dying trades like saddle makers and jigsaw die cutters, a company which re-plated British Rail silverware for their dining cars plus a linotype workshop making plates for some of the non-English language newspapers which were still printed until the advent of the internet, in Yiddish, Polish and Urdu. I doubt if anyone thought it worthwhile to take cine/video of these dying activities, so now lost forever.
This is in perfect English but i found it very hard to read
Well, you just painted that picture for us, and you put it quite eloquently even. It at least exists in my mind now. Thank you for that!
Last time I was in London I stayed in a hotel on Folgate Street. Fascinating little street, very different from most of the surrounding area, even if modern development was creeping in from the Liverpool Street end.
@@Michael75579 In 1981, my company bought a bomb site in Folgate Street (10-12), which had been hit by a V1 flying bomb in 1944. We also had to buy the derelict house next door and do a historically accurate restoration to its 18th century state, as far as possible. This was a nightmare, as Tower Hamlets council insisted on us repairing rotten pieces of wood with filler, instead of replacing with new but identical materials. We were not allowed to occupy the office next door until the restoration of the house was complete.
@@adonaiyah2196 Yes, a single run-on sentence makes up almost half the paragraph. It's a bit too big to bite off in one go. I found the content worth working for, though. The mental image of all those old trade shops is quite evocative.
(Also, writing this made me acutely conscious of my own writing flaws. I don't find it easy to restructure my thoughts into digestible forms. It's often worth the effort, improving my own clarity of thought especially in technical subjects.)
And once more, an epic episode in London's layout of railway routes. Give my regards to this gentleman of our capital's railway history. Yes, i agree, i think Broadstreets buildings should have been kept and incorporated into the new layout. Looking forward to the next railway delight.
Vivid memories of climbing up the rickety stairs into Broad Street Station on many an evening, to fill in time while waiting for the next Cambridge train from Liverpool Street, back in the late 'seventies, and wallowing in the delicious sense of genteel abandonment, desolation, gloom and decline. Thank you for this excellent documentary. James-in-Australia.
Memories of spotting at Liverpool Street in the late fifties and noticing N2 tanks and Oerlikon electric trains up behind the high level wall opposite. I went investigating and discovered Broad Street. A grand station but lacking many passengers, it had been sadly neglected over many years and had an air of impending doom even then. The model locos in glass cases on the concourse were a particular feature of this once busy terminus. RIP Broad Street.
Nice video Jago. I was only a kid when Broad Street was demolished and, like the Crystal Palace, it’s one of those lost London buildings I really wish I could’ve explored.
Scary to think how close we got to St. Pancras having the same fate.
Alex ~ You’re right. I remember it being headline news in 1968 that St Pancras would close, and the tracks would be diverted into King’s Cross. Years later, a girl working for British Rail ( a manager) denied it.
@@robertweissman4850 Yes, it was definitely on the cards to demolish it back then. Absurd now to think of that. I remember going to the station around 2000, it was really run down with just a few services. The transformation into what it is today is incredible.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense I suppose to have two major terminus stations across the road from each other... but I guess now that they are more or less symbiotic and share a big underground concourse it's not so bad; lovely that I can get from Welwyn to the Eurostar in 29 minutes too.
@Richard Harrold absolutely. Who needs wide open classical arches of train sheds. I love what they did to Cannon Street, for example, get rid of that open glass roofed arch and stick an office block on it instead with a low dark roof. Euston too, look at those awful photos of how it used to look compared to the utopian dream that now sits on the site. Let’s have more anonymous concrete office blocks!
@@a1white welcome to the viewpoint of the 1960s!
Yes I remember Broad Street Station in the 1970s. The old empty station with the 501 out to Watford Junction.
I'm a Beatles fan so I love that Macca Film. Sadly by the time I was old enough to go to London on my own I just missed the last services and the place was a building site.
I started work in the City in the 1970’s and commuted from Gordon Hill to Broad Street. Locomotive-hauled slam door carriages, 6 seats to a side, Ladies Only carriages too. Straight in to Finsbury Park platform 1, then down and into the tunnel that is just above Drayton Park station. Then around the north London line into Broad Street. In the off-peak hours the carriages were replaced by the old diesel rail cars.
If I didn’t go to Broad Street I would take the same train and change at Finsbury Park for a Moorgate service. That was via Kings Cross and the Widened Lines and belongs in another of Jago’s videos. Truly Happy Days. The old British Rail at its best (worst ?) with at least 2 drivers to every train (Driver and Fireman, and frequently a young lad too) plus a guard in the rear of the train.
Oh, how I miss slam door corridor carriages, helpful guards who would put your luggage in the baggage van if struggling with it and put it out at the correct station. We all moaned about British Rail(ways) but the modern standard of service is abysmal, with uncomfortable seating and incessant door beeping along with constant announcements, woe betide if trying to read or do the crossword.
@@tonys1636 Indeed. It seems you need to ride an expensive train to be comfortable these days, and perhaps pay a parcel company to take your luggage. ;)
I remember visiting Broad Street, about 1983/4. It was eerie as anything. Nothing was running as it was off-peak, and I clearly remember the undergrowth and actual trees, growing on the disused tracks. Very strange, considering the bustle of Liverpool Street, next door...
A shame it went, remember how well into the mid 1990s you could argue it was the same situation with bustling Kings Cross with the practically derelict half abandoned St Pancreas next door
Yes,I went there in the late 70s and it was like that then.
The cafe still had "Festival of Britain" logos on display....
I can remember my dad taking me there about the same time and that is the same image I have. I was amazed that such a place existed.
@@nickbarber9502 And here I thought the few remaining park benches in Los Angeles still bearing the logo of the 1984 Olympics were blasts from the past...
@@Maxibon2007 Yes, it’s unbelievable to think how derelict St Pancras once looked.
As a callow youth in the early 1960's I worked in Eldon Street, right opposite Broad Street station. (Golly - that's over half a century ago! Where did the time go? Cue song by Sandy Denny) It was already looking very tired and unloved. Neither of which can se said about Mr H's superb videos, which are scintillating, informative, and generally superb. Thank you, Mr H Simon T
I used to lunch in the seventies at the restaurant in the station. The premises were very large and the customers few. The food was good until the latter years when the pate had a touch of Russian Roulette about it.
My Watford train would often run alongside a crowded train of possibly NLR articulated carriages. They looked dreadfully uncomfortable with about an inch of upholstery fixed to the flimsy partitions. I presume they were headed into Liverpool Street
I lived in Watford in the 70s and 80s and don't think I ever went to Broad Street. We went through Liverpool Street via Euston many times,principally to visit my aunt,uncle and cousins when they were living in Brentwood. I'm shocked there was a plan to demolish it and replace it with office space!
Pity it couldn't have been refurbished and preserved. I live about 75 miles northeast of New York City and we lost beautiful Penn Station before anyone knew what was happening. Thankfully Grand Central Terminal was saved and refurbished. It is a treasure that I enjoy when in New York.
Just the building. Not the rail station. Alas, BR needed the cash.
Penn Station was far more beautiful than Broad Street Station.
In 1977 when i was there as a driver the modern building on the platform, on the left was our pay office and class room , our mess and booking on point was behind the ticket office on the station forecourt. On booking on one day at 6am I came up the stairs from the street and found the whole station forecourt covered with chickens running round, the youths had let them out overnight from their transportation boxes which stood empty on the station trolleys, not a sight I ever saw again at a London termini or any other station come to that !
I travelled the Richmond to Broad Street line every day for a year back in the 70's. I would wander onto Broad Street station on many Sundays, heading back to Richmond, and it would be totally deserted. No one anywhere. Had it all to myself apart from an old blue/grey Class 501 ticking away in the platform waiting to take me home. It was such a surreal place at the end. Broad Street and Marylebone have always been my favourite London stations. Brilliant video Jago. Thanks.
I went there one evening in about 1983/84 after a really bad day at work, a ruined evening and just jumped on a train and went to Richmond , then went back to Waterloo and caught a train home just for the hell of it
I remember being taken to Broad Street station in the late 70's and early 80s a few times by my dad. Another enduring memory from that time was just how desolate that part of the city was at the weekend. We would get the 149 down from Enfield and bumped into his brother coming out of Dirty Dicks on a few occasions.
I used to walk past a very shabby and down at heel Broad Street station when I started work in July 1974, I used to walk along the alleyway along the side of the station to Worship Street, just opposite the old goods yard. As always an interesting story about somewhere I used to know. The new development and Liverpool Street station are a major improvement on that area now
I used to walk down that alleyway with the shell of the goods station on one side and a very nice pub on the other. The landlord had a couple of chow-chow dogs. That was when I worked in Sun Street.
I have good memories of Broad Street as I travelled from Stonebridge Park to Broad Street a number of times in the late 1950's early sixties to train-spot at Liverpool Street station. Always a grand terminus and travelling along the North London line was always fascinating.
I visited Broad Street in 1980, just to say I had been there before it closed. It was a gloriously sad relic, mostly derelict and totally deserted at the time. I took a load of photographs, and if I can find them I'll stick a slide show together and upload it.
Would love to see that
Me too! My mother took me there for the same reason (let's see it before they tear it down), but she didn't take photos.
Cool stuff, any luck with those photos?
+1 on those photos - I would love to see them!
Any joy with finding the photos?
Tragic going from this beauty to the glass eyesore :(
I worked just round the corner in Bishopsgate during the late 60's. I used the service out of Broad Street a few times. My overall impression a dirty ramshackle place. It had obviously suffered badly from lack of maintenance, when it rained water used to enter the main concourse. In the end it needed demolishing, whilst I am no lover of modern buildings, what is there now is a considerable improvement.
Good Lord! I remember as a kid standing with my Father regularly waiting for a no.11 bus right outside the building. I always wondered what it was, never considering it was another station!
Thank you Jago. Another gem as usual
My favourite former station followed by Holborn viaduct! Excellent video Mr Jago.
I used it a couple of times in the 1960s, and was clearly beyond its sell by date when I visited it
I also worked with a guy who was a clerk at Broad Street Goods; I can't remember if he started there and then went to the Provender Mill at Camden, or if it was the other way round, but by his age he would have started working on the railway when they were still owned by the LMS
After 5 years as a second man at old oak common, I got my train drivers job at broad street, so happy memories, thanks for posting.
That moment of joy experienced when you find a Jago Hazzard film you haven't seen before...
I used Broad Street on its last ever day, and the short lived Liverpool Street replacement version on its first day, and then the first day and last days of the short lived diversion to Stratford.
Thank you Jago, I love watching vids about closed/redundant railway lines and stations. Very interesting they are.
It's amazing that broad st station was on that site from 1865 - 1986, 121 years. The offices that replaced it made it just 30 years from 1989 to about 2019 before being pulled down and redeveloped again. I wonder how long the current structure will last.
Modern architects still think their work is too simple to wind up looking old. They still have this misconception that it's the details that make a building look dated.
It is sad to see the fall of Broad Street, but it sounds like it was kind of inevitable. It had its time in the sun, but times change. It wouldn't be the first time we've seen a station, or even a whole mode of transport get outmoded once something better came along; how many Londoners commuted in by steamboat once the railways reach Southend? By the by, about that Princess Alice episode you said you were looking into awhile back...
One bit that I've read made operations into Broad Street rather awkward was the large but relatively tight S curve on the immediate approach to the station, allowing the line to bypass Liverpool Street. While visually impressive from above, I've read that this curve also posed something of a bottleneck to the station, restricting the number of trains that could come in and out at any given time. Is there any truth to this, or is that why you didn't mention it?
Finally, while realistically it does seem to me that Broad Street's fate was sealed as a station, I can think of probably the ultimate alternative use for it had the building been preserved: The London Railway Museum. Think of it: a whole, large, historic station, its platforms now stocked with trains that tell the story of the railway's impact on the capital, from the Eastern Counties to the London Necropolis. They even have the lower goods level for historic trams and motor vehicles. The London Transport Museum wouldn't have to keep half their collection shut away in Acton. And you could still have a couple platforms open for the Overground, disgorging right there into the museum. And how do you like the sound of Jago Hazzard: Curator of Broad Street Railway Museum?
god damn that is an alternative history I really like the sound of
They could have used Watford if the Croxly link had went ahead. mabye they could do something at Charing Cross Jubilee line station?
Another historical gem.
I think broad street is quite overlooked i wonder what it would've looked like
I remember taking a look at Broad Street out of curiosity it was very dark empty and looked like it had been abandon befor it closed. A complete opposite to Liverpool St next door which was rammed. Fascinating to hear its rise and fall, this has filled another gap in my understanding on how London has evolved. Thanks Jago. Could you do some thing similar on the goods depo at Fenchurch St.
I miss Broad Street as much as I miss Woolworths. 😢
My late father used to take myself and my younger brother there, when we were going to the seaside in Essex via Liverpool Street Station, in the seventies and eighties. He was a deputy headteacher at Peckham High School, who had been head of Latin at St Clements Dane in Hammersmith, so he would have appreciated your quote.
Thank you for making a video about the lost terminus, but I have always wondered how they managed to demolish, the huge abandon derelict signal box, at the junction with the branch to Broad Street, where it split from the Liverpool Street lines. Nobody seems to know.
I remember that the concourse of the station, had an uneven floor, during the end of its life. The trains had B2 on their front boards. I have a Kodak Box Brownie Camera, that belonged to my late father that I took a photograph of one leaving Wembley Central Station with, from a view that is no longer available. I was standing on a service bridge at the back of the station, that is now private, but was a public route in 1979, when I took the picture.
The McCartney film does have good music sequences in it. The station is used very little in the film, it's just a plot device. Personally I love that film because I'm a Beatles fan, having first heard their music in 1963, when I was two and a half, and Paul McCartney is my favourite Beatles. But it is a very lightweight film and was just using the location because of the plot.
The beautiful Romansh arched staircase at the side of the station decayed badly towards the end of its life, so much so you couldn't use it, in spite of people wanting to save it. The ticket office currently survives as a restaurant in the Broadgate Centre, but they want to rebuild, so it might go. The underground taxi rank of Liverpool Street Station, that had an entrance between the two terminus stations, is also incorporated into the same area.
I have a facsimile of an early 1900s tourist guide to London that mentions all the lost places, that existed in London at that time, including Broad Street Station. I also have a secondhand 50s A to Z and a secondhand 70s A to Z which show the station, plus a 1999 book of aerial photographs of London that show an emergency halt up next to Liverpool Street where the station had been. If it's still there it's probably buried under the tower blocks.
The road outside is the road, the station took its name from. The Broadgate Centre is named after a city gate that was in that area, just like there's Aldersgate, now Aldgate and Bishopsgate, etc.
There are actually a very large file on the internet of Broad Street photographs, just ask Google.
The roof was demolished because it was damaged in both World Wars. It was attacked by zeppelin bombing in the First World War and attacked by the Luftwaffe in the Second.
Liverpool Street was redeveloped not only with Broadgate, but the removal of the ludicrous maze of footbridges inside the station, that were used in film The Elephant Man and an early episode of Waking The Dead, where Trevor Eve plays opposite his wife Sharon Maughan, who was guest starring.
There is a Thames Television film of Margaret Thatcher using a bulldozer on the station demolition, as a political publicity stunt, which can be found on You Tube.
The real trouble with Broad Street was that it was always slightly surplus, to the area it was built in. The buildings that were shut down in the 50s were totally derelict inside, at the time. The goods terminal was used for carrying coal for steam trains using Liverpool Street Station, so probably combustible coal dust caused the fire.
There are countless beautiful old buildings that have been left to decay, then torn down and replaced with tower blocks. The modernist brutalist architects of the twentieth century have a lot of aesthetic crimes to answer for. St Pancras had a luck escape, compared to poor Broad Street.
I do think this is one of the more fascinating aspects of London railways, perhaps in a parallel universe it remains a thriving station. I think you've done a great job of talking about the old station and the old route with lots of great footage all the while not getting too bogged down in the minutiae (the goods yard itself is a story worth looking into, reading up on). Thank you!
It’s nice to see you talk about this, after seeing a video by Ruairidh MacVeigh about this old lost station and how it all went desolate in the 80’s and this is very interesting from your perspective, as well as the other one, as I have been in Liverpool Street many times, and never heard of until I saw the videos, including yours.
I well remember Broad Street Station from when I began commuting into Liverpool Street Station from the mid-1970s.
It was far more impressive than the entrance to Liverpool Street, but I had no idea who used it or where the trains went. I did go up there a few times to look at the platforms, and it was sad to see it decline in use, which was hardly surprising as they kept closing platforms and then made passengers walk a mile down the platform to catch the few trains that were still using the Station.
I later worked in the new Broadgate development which replaced Broad Street Station in the mid-1980s; I understand that has now suffered a decline in occupancy, so perhaps there is a curse from the original Bedlam hospital and its occupants.
The only London terminus that I never visited while I lived in England. Shame as if I had known that it was to close I would have gone there.
Ah... Broad Street...finally. Great video. Thank you..
My favourite youtuber atm, has everything from dark humour to interesting facts. Looking forward to more episodes ( currently binge watching everything on the channel )
I never made it to Broad street, but it has always had an appeal to me, it does make you wonder what might have happened had the over ground come along 25 years earlier though.
Meh. Broad Street was a crumbling ruin. In any case Central London Termini are useless for Orbital Rail routes.
The Dr Beeching report wasn't just aimed at closing railways, but also revolutionising how freight is transported on the railway. Before his report, mixed freight trains were commonplace and after, they moved to dedicated freight trains and continental "container" cargo because it was seen as more efficient. If the railways had done both mixed freight and container cargo, then Broad Street's freight operations would have had a reprieve, and might have kept the passenger service running.
Yes but they were right to shift rail freight in that direction because that was the direction freight was going. This was also the time when containerisation was coming and London’s docks were facing closure.
Beaching has become a convenient scapegoat and bogeyman for British rail fans.
But he’s really not to blame, he did his job of salvaging Britain’s railways after over a decade of gross mismanagement from the state owned British railways. He certainly wasn’t this anti-Railways corporatist that he’s too often portrayed as; he was this number-crunching boffin who liked trains and who ironically would’ve had a lot in common with the people who now despise him. The only big criticism that can be laid his way is that many of his models were insufficient and didn’t properly account for the slip-on effect that closing some branches would have on the profitability of the trunk routes. But if it wasn’t for Beeching then something far more devastating could befallen the black hole that was British Railways.
Yes it’s a shame that Broad St was lost, I have often wondered how it could’ve become useful again in the era’s of privatisation and then TfL overground and with the emergence of office towers in the old east end. Don’t forget that it was also a victim of the times, the 1980s was when old buildings were making way for shiny new office space. No doubt BR made a tonne of money from selling the land it had stood on.
@@danieleyre8913 actually I think you'll find he sat on the board for motorway builders and had no real interest in saving the railway as would eat into his companies profits. That being said the railway was/is/will always be a financial mess. Its strange working in a industry with so much potential but always struggles to move forward (pun intended)
@@deanbrown29 No I won’t find that and you think wrong because that is complete fiction.
Beeching ran the econometrics and linear programming department of the ICI company and had nothing whatsoever to do with motorways (which were a government initiative). He privately thought that automobile dependency wasn’t a good thing and that railways could work and should be given another chance.
He SAVED British rail, it had been leaking big money due to continual mismanagement after it was nationalised with most of the staff of the previous “big 4” had resigned due to bumbling ministers and civil servants forcing bad ideas and because of the absolutely rushed and botched Dieselisation and because of the absolute failure to adapt to and incorporate the advancements in lorries and trucks and road haulage in general. Britain’s railways were nothing close to “a mess” before the Second World War they were some of the biggest and most profitable in the world. What ruined them was never being compensated for wartime press-ganging and then forced nationalisation with ministers and public servants who had no clue what they were doing overruling experienced railway men and forcing them into retirement. It was either Beaching’s axe or losing even more of the railways. And Beeching also brought in many initiatives that set British railways into overdue modernisation and more efficient operations that had many positive legacies. It is simply simplistic, reactionary, ignorant, irrational and PATHETIC how some people have made Beeching the big scapegoat for the decline in British railways.
@@deanbrown29 . I think you are confusing him with Ernest Marples, (the Minister of Transport at the time). Marples Construction Ltd virtually had a monopoly on road building. Funny that!
@@edwardoleyba3075 that's correct I believe they was good friends and obviously shared interests. Usual level of corruption anyway
Liverpool Limestreet had a similar loop configuration for trains to Southport from Lime Street Station, on a now defunct line that went Via Maghull to the North of Liverpool. Pretty much the same thing happened. Going East to eventually go North on what is the Freight Line today. It went the same way as the one you're discussing.
So you mean the Gateacre Loop? That would have been Liverpool Central surface station, now demolished.
There were two lines to Southport from Liverpool, one via Aintree which is now closed. Both terminated at Exchange in the north of the city centre. When Merseyrail metro was being built in the 1970s, the Southport trains that terminated at Exchange in the north of the city centre were diverted to Lime St using the Canada Dock Branch line (Bootle Branch). The trains came in from the north from Southport then onto the Canada Docks branch at Bootle heading east then curving around at Edge Hill entering Lime St from the east. The line is now a 100% freight line, the only line left of nine serving the large dock complex. Why TfN wants a new line into Liverpool, as part of NPR.
There was all sorts of services around Liverpool, at various times. There was one from Birkenhead Woodside terminal to Liverpool Central via Runcorn, doing a U of the Mersey estuary.
@@lordmuntague
Not the Gateace line.
I visted Broad Street twice, once in 1985, with the main building looking shabby, but still intact, just before the Richmond service was converted to 2-EPB (imagine those on the line today!!) and diverted to North Woolwich, and again a year later, with only the rush hour service to and from Watford Junction remaining, and most of the ststion already gone, with just a single stretch of platform left for trains to run into, and a temporary staircase to reach the street, surrounded by plasterboard. What a come down!!😢
I loved Broad Street. Travelling by cycle from Reading to Basildon, as I regularly did, I could get on the North London from the old LSWR, go round to Broad St & only have a short (if scary) ride to Fenchurch St. Such an atmospheric station was a joy to pass through. RIP.
"....to my declining terminus", yes happy Friday to Jago and everyone else with that happy thought. Not that it gave me the image of someone dying having the shits, or errr, anything like that. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!
A history of the refurbishment of Liverpool St in the 80s would be a nice topic Jago (although I'm sure you've got it on the list)
I'd love to see a film about that too. I've got a vague recollection of the station before it was converted. This movie clip gives a flavour of what it was like, from The Elephant Man th-cam.com/video/sF19L00KbAI/w-d-xo.html
Some mixed memories of Broad Street.
In 1974 , a friend and I got back to St Pancras after a weekend's trainspotting in Manchester and Sheffield. He suggested taking the North London line to Richmond, then home to Bracknell. The summer evening saw Broad Street deserted apart from the dismal Class 501 emu which would take us to Richmond through the grim pre gentrification North London. A bit of a downer to our trip.
My next visit was December 1978. I was on the way to Cambridge for an interview. I took the chance to travel the North London line again, un am even more run down Class 501. I think I just hurried out of the station on arrival and straight to Liverpool Street.
My journey home a couple if days later missed out Broad Street, and sadly I did not get a place to study at Cambridge.
Could Broad Street have survived ? Maybe if they tried reinstating peak hour trains from the Great Northern line, ans given the station some TLC, renovated the surviving part of the roof, opened some cafes and eateries in the station building, made it a more attractive place?
No, what sealed its fate was the 1980s finance boom. Rather than attracting more commuters, British Rail realised that they could make more money from selling the site than they ever could from rumming rail services.
Why would they reinstate trains from the GN? The line to Moorgate is self contained does not have freight and serves a more convienient Terminus. Plus Liverpool Street would not have been modernised.
Best outcome was for Broad Street to be demolished.
Memory barely serves but I think that I went on a steam special from Broad Street in the '70s organised by the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway Society. The 'star' loco was the B12 which the Society subsequently bought. Much of the day was spent bumbling around lines now lifted south of Northampton/Rugby. We did not return to Broad Street because it was closed in the evening on Saturdays.
Jago I look forward to your next on Bricklayers Arms.
Pretty much addicted to this channel. Superb as always
Well done Jago. I went inside the old BSS building with an BR engineering / permenant way supervisor in the mid 1980s . Amazing stain glass windows in the Director's room . What about a mention of the well advanced Camden High Line project over North London disused tracks Camden Town to North Kings Cross ( disused Underground station at York Way)? All for the price of Bojo's ill fated Garden Bridge .😜
I remember Broad Street, occasionally used it to … simply use it. As for keeping the station , it might have been nice but to be honest even if it was redeveloped you couldn’t use it as an entry to CrossLizPurp .
The N London line continues to be a fascinating part of the capital’s railways
Nothing to do with the station, but one of my mates and his dad and my mates wife all worked on the film of Give my regards to Broad Street
As a child I would occasionally accompany my Father to Broad st when he had to visit the office at the weekend from West Hampstead. It was a great ride, always a good chance of riding with the driver on the empty train, and then the fascination of the station. Everything was shuttered, you couldn't use the external stairs anymore, it was filthy, and what with the vegetation, looked bomb-damaged. Then off into the deserted streets of Broadgate. It felt like having London to yourself and has left me with a lifelong fascination with pictures of Broadgate station, similar to those of Bury Knowsley St, Tottington, Summerseat station, Minffordd, and Dolgellau.
I remember, once climbing up those stairs at the side of the station but where I was going and why, I have absolutely no idea.
In the mid 60's I was a trainee accountant working in a 3rd floor office in Bishopsgate. I glanced out of the window to see a plume of steam on the the bridge over the road and realised something special was heading towards Broad Street. As it was almost lunch break time I dashed out of the building and sprinted the few hundred yards to the station. There was an exhibition about some aspect of modernising the railways on one of the platforms. I ran through this and from the platform end saw, in the sidings on the west side, a gleaming Britannia with a few old wagons. I think the loco was named Western Star (70025). Needless to say, I returned to the office a bit late!
Late to this channel but how informative and entertaining it is. Worth pointing out that the glassy office block that replaced Broad Street is actually the second building that stands on the former Broad Street site. The first one in the late '80s being the UBS building - Broadgate - which itself was replaced in the last couple of years. (2020-2022.) Maybe this has been mentioned in dispatches already, but this makes this former London station possibly the first to have the building that replaced it to itself have already been torn down in favour of something else.
Jago - An excellent presentation, and really well-informed. I saw Broad Street Station as a youngster in 1963, and although quiet, it was complete; all of the overall roofs were intact. Later, in the mid 1970s, I had to use it regularly, and it was an ugly wasteland by then. I think that, as the railway routes from the station have survived, albeit with modifications, this is one of the very few railway closures that were justified.
Totally agree.
If I ever see my old history teacher, I'll tell him that the second world war was not caused by the reduction of fares in 1930, as he had taught us.
🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍
Great video, London has lot of very interesting stories about his railways and subways.
I had an office in that glass office block for a short time. Nice to look out over Liverpool street station roof. Didn't even know about Broad Street station.
I always remember using Broad Street station with my mum & dad, we used to go to Gospel oak for the open air Lido.. I'm sure that would have been late 70s.. great video
I can recall going to Broad Street with my late father, late 70's early 80's to take a train to North Woolwich, even now, 25 years later I can still recall how decrepitate and run down it had become.
They really should've stuck with the name "fancy new terminus".
Even when it had deteriorated into anything but.
In the '90s I used to work at Broadgate Circle, right on top of the Broad Street Station site. Often tried to picture exactly where in relation to the old station I was, though I'd never seen it. Ironically the building where I worked has been flattened now as well, to make way for the UBS building.
Go through Liverpool St every day and often wonder what the street and track layout were like before demolition
The North London railway must have been prosperous at some stage, look at bow, and Highbury and Islington stations in their heyday.
I used to live in Wood Green, which also had a station (Palace Gates) which used to have services starting or ending at Broad Street. As I was only a young child when Palace Gates was closed and the lines lifted I never got the chance to travel from that station.
I visited Broad Street station shortly before closure in 1986 when I used to visit a friend in London and enjoy the delights of a concessionary travel card for about a fiver for 6 zones I believe.
It was such a joy to visit a city with an extensive, convenient and integrated transport network from somewhere that didn't.
I remember playing the Give My Regards To Broad Street game on my old Spectrum. Can't remember anything about it other than it was in a big box and had a fold-out map.
I played this game. The premise was that the recording for his new song had been stolen. Driving a car round London. You had to get to certain stations at a particular time. If you did you get a piece of the song back. It came with a huge road map of London. It was a terrible game. It was like GTA 1, but with out the violence.
The film was a vanity project by Paul McCartney, who fancied having another go at acting. It's basically a dream sequence as he dozes in the back of a taxi. It's a bit thin on plot but the master tape of his next record is recently completed and entrusted to a friend who happens to be an ex-con being given a second chance to deliver to the recording studio. However he fails to turn up and the assumption is that he's stolen the tape for his own profit. There's a Yerkesesque baddie who stands to gain control of the recording studio if the missing tape isn't found by midnight. But, of course, Paul finds it in the nick of time abandoned on a bench in its eerily glowing case, on the platform of Broad Street station with its hapless courier locked in a room where he'd wandered in his search for a toilet. So all's well that ends well. I watched it at the time in the cinema to see Broad Street station, which had just closed. It's dark, it's derelict and it's raining. You see more of it in this video.
@@johnm2012 The only good thing about the film was its lovely theme song, 'No More Lonely Nights'.
Ah yes, I remember now. That would explain the map. I remember Giant Haystacks being in the film.
We used Broad Street occasionally in the 70s and 80s up until it was closed. It was grim. So much so that you rather cheered to hear that it was to be redeveloped. But now, looking back at what it had been in its heyday one really rather regrets the loss.
Great vid Jago. Used to see the BR trains going into Broad Street on my walk to school in the early 80's. Brilliant that the overground is using the old line. No mention of the Graham Road curve which was the final nail in the Broad Street coffin though!!!
A book of photos of London's termini, with typically enthusiastic text by Betjemann, induced me to visit Broad Street. It was near the end of a holiday in UK. I started at Richmond and was intrigued by the nature of the line and its stations. Broad Street was just as those later photos show, faded decrepititude under that glorious mansard roof. I remember studying the war memorial. Thanks, Jago, for reminding me to find that book.
I remember it well in the late 1970s. I used to go to Petticoat Lane and Brick Lane most Sundays. I got the North London Line from West Hampstead to Broad Street. It was a dark and depressing place at that time.
Give my Regards to Broad Street - I vaguely remember that Paul McCartney movie (I'd forgotten about it completely until you mentioned Paul). I think the reason my friends and I went to see it was because Paul was in it. Thanks for the video - I'll now have to track down that movie so I can remember what I watched many years ago.
Excellent video, I learnt quite a bit.
I never did get to see Broad Street before it's demise, when really I should have, since my route into London at the time, when I was a young teenager, was well Liverpool Street !
I can't remember going out of Liverpool Street station and walking on the surface, I'd always end up getting the Met, Circle or Central Lines to somewhere else !
There is an ammeter shot film uploaded to TH-cam called Last night of Broad Street Station that shows some insight as to just how run down the station was at the end.
I used Broad Street several times in the early 1980s commuting in from Harrow & Wealdstone on the Watford Junction line. Sadly, I never paid much attention to it but I do remember the expanse of land that opened up near Primrose Hill. Thanks again Jago!
I approve of Broad Street.
I am contemplating building a model railway imagining what would have happened if Broad Street station (or something very much like it) had stayed open into the later 1980s and been used instead of the widened lines for Bedford trains running into the city (i.e. Broad Street instead of Moorgate, the services joining the North London line at the junction near West Hampstead) and instead of the North City line for Hertford North/Stevenage trains running into the city (perhaps also assuming that the Northern Heights project had been completed and thus that the North City Line had remained part of the Northern Line, with trains running to Bushey Heath), perhaps also with some services to North Woolwich.
Makes me wonder, how you even find that stuff! Absolutely love the videos 👏👏
I used Broad Street a lot in the 1970s. It had a dystopian feel as the station was pretty much derelict. However, I once saw some discarded destination boards, which brought to my attention the large number of suburban stations it once served - Richmond, Watford, Potters Bar, Alexandra Palace, Mill Hill, Edward, Stratford...
Visited inside Broad St building.In mid 1980s with a Kiwi BR engineering / permanent way supervisor. Incredible Board Room , with stain glass windows and paneling. Just before demolition ,all went pity nothing saved / preserved. The whole NLR was pretty grim , but at least not closed under Beeching. . North Woolwich was a brilliant museum , and then across the Thames in the ferry named after Ernie Bevin. Thanks Jago. Talking of NLR , how about a film on Willesden Junction, rare station with High and Low levels ( latter into Euston) the 'Harlequin line ' , under BR Network South East runs through Harlesden & Queen's Park - gediit?😀
In the late 1970s I used the car park which occupied the old goods yard and, occasionally, Broad Street Station. Since then, when I have walked through the Broadgate development, I have felt like a ghost from the past.
I made a point of travelling the whole line from Richmond to Broad Street in the early 1970's; even then, the intermediate stations between Dalston Junction and the terminus were long gone apart from mortal remains - the Overground revitalisation of these was timely and passenger numbers immediately exceeded three times the estimates. Had Broad Street still stood, I fear it would only have served to spoil and confuse the vision which eventually led to today's rather wonderful service.
Absolutely agree. The NLL and ELL has given the good people of the LB of Hackney decent rail access.
@@mjcats2011 or maybe it could have been converted to service a bit like the DLR and the western pair could be of the DLR and eastern pair for the London Overground. The London Overground route would not go into broad Street and the DLR would only have 3 platforms with them being built all over but the old broad Street station building would become flats and a smaller area to by tickets for trains.
@@joshuaritchie3836 The current situation of the ELL and NLL and Broad Street gone is the best outcome.
@@mjcats2011 I would link the ELL and the Watford DC line together with broad Street staying open as part of the DLR services would continue from tower gateway via broad station to Ralston Junction.
@@joshuaritchie3836 That makes no sense, at all.
It was a sad tail for Broad Street Station, I use to get the train from Acton Central to Dalston Junction to visit my aunt in Hackney in the 70s and 80s.... Boy that was a gloomy station.... Well both Acton and Dalston were gloomy.... One plan was to close the line completely and make it into a road, connecting west and east... Thank goodness that never went ahead.... Great video as usual on a line that should have been more....
Tail?
I heard that as well about lifting the line and turning it into a road, a lot of MPs used the North London line so stopped it from being closed and lifted.
The road was to be Ringway1, or north cross route. Thought it was meant to run alongside the railway and not replace it, but I may be wrong.
Fascinating part of British transport history. Sometimes there are too many facts ! great video
Another great video jago thanks. Former abandoned vanished stations are so interesting. This one seems one of the best.
As a relative local to Haggerston Station, I am delighted that our Overground has been so successful. Fun fact - the site of the new Shoreditch High Street Station is right over the Central Line. So why didn't they connect the two (apart from the appalling cost, of course)? I read somewhere that George Bernard Shaw rode the Broad Street Line to Stratford East when he was a theatre critic, presumably turning right on the Dalston East Curve that is no longer there. 'Who would want to live in awful places called Haggerston and Dalston?' quoth he.
Keep up the great work.
I had completely forgotten about that movie until you brought it up here. One second-run movie house near my boarding school in SE Pennsylvania in the 80's seemed to have a 'thing' for odd quirky British movies. (They also ran the utterly confusing "Britannia Hospital" at some point.)
Jago. You always make videos about the exact things I want to know about as I look out of the train window and wonder about the ruins, dead ends and clues that pepper London's rail network. Keep it up!
I love the implication that the film “Give My Regards to Broad Street” somehow compounded the problems of Broad Street Station. That truly was a dismal, dismal film. Only worth watching for the 3 minutes of footage of the station itself.
I reckon Fancy New Terminus on a map would appeal to Boris Johnson whether there was a need for it or not. Perhaps it could be at one end of his Scotland/Northern Ireland bridge...
Or his HS2.
There was an extremely useful bar in one of the arches under the front on Broad Street in the early 1980s. Can't recall it's name but it sold Grolsch. Of course it closed and was replaced by the much less useful (imho) Broadgate, of which my then employers were one of the first tenants, which seemed like fate blowing a raspberry.
Did Grolsch have a sort of bent wire coat hanger contraption holding a rubber bung in place?
@@caw25sha that's the one.
@@caw25sha Bros wore shoes which had said bent wire coat hanger contraption holding a rubber bung in place
Had the Northern City line not converted to NR use the Welvyn Garden City service might find its way to Broad Street instead.
Still, I have to say for the approach line, and the community around, the current situation might be the happiest possible outcome.
It is the happiest, without a doubt. There is no way the Canonbury link would have been able to handle 8 trains an hour.
It does seem rather sad that this one magnificent, all-conquering London terminus is no more, that it met such a sad end - but ultimately, it was inevitable from the sounds of it. It just wasn't needed anymore really, and short of a reconfiguration of the railways to give it a new purpose (akin to Marylebone or St. Pancras) I don't think it could have found a new purpose as a railway station really, let alone one of that size.
Great video!
That 'glassy office block' you show is actually the second building constructed on the Broad Street station site. It's all part of the redevelopment of the Broadgate site: the last bits to change will be that along Bishopsgate and show what the first incarnation looked like.
Sorry to hear about your declining terminus 😃
I hear that doctors can prescribe pills to help with that.
When I began working in the City in the 60s, a colleague used to commute into Broad Street on a steam-hauled rush-hour service from Hemel Hempstead.
I would sometimes use the station, when I had time to spare, taking the train to Richmond then back home to Clapham Junction.
There was a useful Red Arrow bus service from Broad Street to Waterloo, the 502, a good alternative to the Drain.
I started work in 1964 and used to commute from New Barnet to Broad Street. Can't remember whether this was a through service or whether I changed at Finsbury Park.