Chapter Seven
Victoria
The Queen Who Became a Street
Why is Victoria called Victoria?
In brief: Victoria station inherited the royal name already given to the new Westminster street and railway terminus during Queen Victoria’s reign.
Transport context: London Underground, National Rail and coach station.
In 1851, while Queen Victoria walks beneath the glass roof of the Great Exhibition, men are making another monument to her reign with picks, carts and demolition dust.
A mile and a half from Hyde Park, a new road is being driven west from Westminster Abbey. It cuts through courts and alleys where poverty has settled almost within touching distance of power. The Abbey towers over them. The new Palace of Westminster is rising nearby. Between the royal church and the royal palace, families crowd into lodging houses, drains fail, disease travels easily and the lanes have acquired a name more memorable than anything the surveyors will put on a plan.
The Devil’s Acre.
Charles Dickens helps make the name notorious, though he does not invent the conditions. Westminster has long possessed the awkward ability to place ceremony beside destitution and then appear surprised by the contrast. Here are coronations, ministries and parliamentary speeches. Here also are streets in which the splendour of the state is visible above roofs that admit the rain.1
The Victorians call what follows an improvement.
Improvement is one of the century’s most confident words. It may mean air, drainage, movement and light. It may also mean that people with little influence are moved from land required by people with more. A broad street looks cleaner on a map than a tangle of courts. The map does not record where the inhabitants go.
The new road is straight, wide and purposeful. It begins near Broad Sanctuary and advances towards Pimlico, where a railway terminus is expected to bring traffic into the West End. It is constructed in stages through the 1850s and 1860s, forming a route between the station, Parliament Square, Westminster Bridge and the rebuilt Palace of Westminster.
The road is called Victoria Street.
The name is an act of loyalty and an advertisement for the future. The young Queen has been on the throne for fourteen years. Her name already belongs to an age that is still beginning. Now it is attached to a piece of London whose newness is intended to erase what came before.2
This is where the station name begins.
Not at the palace. Not with the railway. Not even, strictly speaking, with the Queen.
Victoria station is named after Victoria Street. Victoria Street is named after Queen Victoria. The distinction is exact and slightly absurd. The sovereign reaches the platform by way of a road.
The name travels at one remove.
Before the railway arrives, there is water.
The Grosvenor Canal opened in 1825, running inland from the Thames along a route close to present-day Buckingham Palace Road. At its northern end lay a broad basin on ground now occupied by the railway station. Barges entered where trains will later stop. Industry gathered along the canal. Goods moved by water through a district that had not yet decided to call itself Victoria.3
The canal does not last long enough to become picturesque.
By the middle of the century it is falling into dereliction. Railways move faster, carry more and attract the kind of investment that makes earlier forms of transport appear suddenly obsolete. The waterway’s reclaimed land offers a convenient alignment for tracks and a large site for a terminus.
The railway promoters need both.
Two companies are competing for entry into the West End: the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. The route they hope to extend already ends at a terminus called West End, but it stands across the Thames at Battersea. Railway companies are capable of considerable optimism in the naming of inconvenient places.
To reach the West End that Londoners would recognise, the rivals support a separate concern, the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway. It will carry their lines over the Thames and into a fourteen-acre site near the new road.
John Fowler designs the crossing. Grosvenor Bridge becomes the first railway bridge over the Thames in London. The tracks pass north from Battersea, follow the old canal corridor and arrive where the basin once held water.4
A route has been transferred from one technology to another.
The canal is not commemorated in the station name. For a time the proposed terminus is referred to as Grosvenor, after the basin and the surrounding estate. But Victoria is the stronger word. It is newer, nearer, more useful. It points towards the street, the palace and the reigning monarch without having to explain which of them it means.
On 1 October 1860, the Brighton company opens its side of the station.
Only its side.
The Chatham and Dover company opens the eastern half on 25 August 1862. The two companies share the site and the name, but little enthusiasm for one another. Victoria is designed from the beginning as two stations. There are separate concourses, separate management and a wall between them.5
The arrangement is not an accident awaiting correction. It is competition made architectural.
The companies have already been forced into an expensive concession. Wealthy and influential residents of Pimlico and Belgravia object to the prospect of steam engines passing their houses with the usual offerings of smoke, soot and noise. The railway approaches are therefore covered from the station back to Eccleston Bridge.
The engines arrive under a roof so that prosperity need not look at them.
The cost leaves less money for the terminus itself. Both companies put up crude wooden buildings for their passengers. These temporary structures remain for about forty years. Victoria has crossed the Thames on an engineering first and entered the West End beneath a vast covered approach, only to welcome travellers in huts.5
The name is grander than the station.
It is also spreading.
On Christmas Eve 1868, the Metropolitan District Railway opens a sub-surface line from South Kensington to Westminster. Victoria is one of the stations in between. Steam trains now pass beneath the district while mainline locomotives arrive above it. The road has lent its name to a terminus; the terminus lends it to an Underground station.6
A passenger can travel from South Kensington, the district created from the profit and ambition of the Great Exhibition, to Victoria, the district created around a road named for the Queen who opened it.
The two chapters of 1851 are connected by rail.
Above ground, Victoria begins to develop its enduring character as a place of departure for pleasure. Trains run south towards Brighton and the Channel ports. From the 1870s, the station becomes associated not only with work and suburban commuting but with seaside holidays and continental journeys. The platform promises escape: salt air, hotel dining rooms, decks, customs halls and countries reached by rail and steamer.
The station stands close to Buckingham Palace, but its true romance lies in leaving London.
Then, in 1901, the name returns to the woman from whom it came.
Queen Victoria dies at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 January. She has reigned for more than sixty-three years. Children have grown old beneath her portrait. The adjective Victorian has expanded to contain architecture, morality, commerce, empire, machinery and contradictions enough for several nations.
On 2 February, her coffin arrives at Victoria station.
The station is not directly named after her. That qualification, so pleasing to the careful historian, becomes meaningless for a moment. The road had taken her name. The railway had taken the road’s. London had shortened the whole surrounding district to a single word. Now the woman called Victoria is brought into the place called Victoria.
Her coffin is placed on a gun carriage and borne in a military procession across London to Paddington. From there it travels by train to Windsor, where she is buried beside Prince Albert at Frogmore.7
The station has received the source of its own name, but she cannot hear it announced.
Soon afterwards, the railway companies finally replace their wooden beginnings.
The Brighton side moves first. Between 1906 and 1908 it is rebuilt behind a red-brick Edwardian Baroque frontage, with stone dressings, an elaborate clock and an entrance reserved for the Royal Family. The architecture does not apologise for being visible. It rises beside the Grosvenor Hotel as if the railway has discovered that arrival itself can be theatre.
The rival company responds.
Its new frontage, opened in 1909, is faced in pale Portland stone and set slightly forward of its neighbour. It does not imitate the red-brick station. It corrects it by contradiction. One half is warm, busy and baroque; the other pale, formal and insistent. Each company gives Victoria a face and makes sure that the faces do not agree.8
They can still be read from the street.
The station’s next great coffin has no name at all.
The Body Chosen in the Dark
The idea begins with a rough grave on the Western Front.
In 1916, the army chaplain David Railton sees a wooden cross bearing the words An Unknown British Soldier. Four years later he proposes that one unidentified serviceman should be brought home and buried among the nation’s honoured dead.9
The power of the plan depends upon an act of deliberate ignorance.
Bodies are exhumed from four battle areas: the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres. They are taken to a chapel at Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise and placed upon stretchers beneath Union Flags. At midnight on 7 November 1920, Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt enters with Colonel Gell. Neither man knows from which battlefield any body has come.
Wyatt chooses one.
There is no test, no name recovered from a button, no final attempt to distinguish officer from private. Selection turns one unidentifiable man into the Unknown Warrior; the other three are reburied. The chosen remains are placed in a coffin of oak from Hampton Court, with a sixteenth-century sword from the Tower of London secured across its lid, and carried to Boulogne. HMS Verdun brings the coffin across the Channel.9
A train from Dover reaches Victoria at 8.32 on the evening of 10 November. The exact minute is now recorded on a plaque between platforms 8 and 9.9
The coffin rests overnight under military guard.
In 1901 the station received a woman whose name had been given to an age. In 1920 it receives a man from whom every name has been removed.
That absence allows millions of private hopes to gather around him. He may be a husband, a son, a brother. He may belong to any regiment, any part of Britain or the empire, any family whose letter stopped arriving. The ceremony does not identify him. It gives national form to the impossibility of identification.
On Armistice Day, six black horses draw the gun carriage from the station through crowd-lined streets. The procession pauses in Whitehall, where King George V unveils the Cenotaph, then continues to Westminster Abbey. The Unknown Warrior is buried among kings, close to the eastern end of the road that created Victoria station’s name.10
The route closes upon itself: Victoria to Westminster, station to street, the unnamed dead carried through a landscape named for monarchy.
Three years later, railway reorganisation achieves what common sense had failed to do. The competing companies become part of the Southern Railway. In 1924 and 1925, large archways are cut through the wall dividing the two stations. The platforms receive continuous numbering across the site.11
Victoria becomes one station by having holes made in it.
The old rivalry does not disappear. It remains in brick and stone, in the alignment of the façades and in the sense that the concourse has more than one centre. A passenger crossing the station may not know that a company boundary once stood there, but the building remembers through asymmetry.
Now the age of glamorous departure reaches its height.
In the 1930s, the Brighton Belle carries passengers south in electric Pullman cars. Overnight boat trains leave for Channel steamers and connections to France and Belgium. Porters move luggage beneath destination boards. Victoria becomes a threshold not only between London and the coast but between Britain and the Continent.12
The Second World War interrupts the performance. Afterwards, another form of international travel enters the station’s story. Gatwick Airport opens in 1958. Victoria acquires a rail-air terminal where passengers can check in before taking the train to the airport. In 1984 the dedicated Gatwick Express begins operating.
The railway that had replaced a canal now feeds an airport.
Names accumulate around it. In 1932, Victoria Coach Station opens nearby. Theatres use Victoria in their addresses. Shops, hotels and offices do the same.13 What began as a royal street name becomes the accepted name of an entire quarter, although no ancient village of Victoria ever existed there.
The district is an effect of transport.
Beneath it, London prepares another line.
The first section of the Victoria line opens in 1968, but the line reaches the station whose name it carries the following year. On 7 March 1969, Queen Elizabeth II performs the formal opening at Victoria. She starts the first train and travels on the Underground, becoming the first reigning British monarch to do so.14
The family connection has become almost too neat.
A line named after Queen Victoria and the mainline station is opened by her great-great-granddaughter beneath a district that exists because a street was named after the earlier Queen.
On the Victoria line platforms, Edward Bawden’s tile motif shows Victoria’s head in profile. The monarch has been reduced—not disrespectfully, but efficiently—to a visual sign that can be recognised through a train window. Crown, face, name, station. London compresses a reign into a repeated image.15
The new line is technologically ambitious, an early automated passenger railway with automatic train operation, barriers and ticketing innovations. Yet the ancient problem of Victoria remains unchanged: too many people must decide where they are going at the same time.16
Stand in the station today and the decisions are visible.
Airport passengers pull suitcases towards the Gatwick platforms. Commuters study departure boards. Visitors arrive for Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the theatres of the West End. Coach travellers emerge uncertain of which Victoria station they have reached. School groups gather, divide and are counted again. People stop at the mouth of an escalator to consult a telephone, creating behind them a brief society united by irritation.
Victoria is not a single station so much as a machine for sorting intentions.
It receives the seaside traveller, the civil servant, the pilgrim to the palace, the musical audience and the newly arrived tourist who believes that Buckingham Palace ought to be visible from every exit. The station sends them towards one another through passages formed by a century and a half of additions.
Begin above ground.
Stand first on Buckingham Palace Road and look at the station rather than entering it. The red-brick façade with its clock belongs to the Brighton side. The pale Portland-stone front belongs to the old South Eastern and Chatham side. They bear one name and retain two personalities.
Then walk east along Victoria Street.
The road still performs the work for which it was made. It points directly towards Westminster. Modern offices have replaced much of the Victorian streetscape, but the line of movement remains: station behind, Abbey ahead, Parliament beyond. Near Old Pye Street and the streets south of the route, look for the smaller scale of the older Westminster that redevelopment did not entirely remove. The Devil’s Acre has not survived as a picturesque quarter. Its absence is part of the history. Improvement seldom leaves a ruin for visitors to admire.
Continue until the towers of Westminster Abbey fill the end of the street.
Here the name’s journey becomes visible. Behind you is the station. Beneath you is the road. Ahead is the institution whose crowded neighbourhood the road was driven through. Nearby lies the Unknown Warrior, carried from Victoria on the morning of 11 November 1920.
Return by Underground and look for Bawden’s tiled profile on the Victoria line platform.
The face is repeated because passengers move quickly. It asks for no knowledge of the woman, the street, the canal, the rival companies or the wall. It needs only to say: this is Victoria.
Strictly speaking, Victoria station is named after Victoria Street.
That is the correct answer.
It is not the whole story.
A queen became a street. The street became a station. The station’s name spread across a district and down a Tube line. Along the way the place absorbed a canal basin, two rival termini, a royal funeral, an unknown soldier, boat trains, airport luggage and millions of journeys whose passengers rarely consider the chain of borrowing beneath the word.
Queen Victoria died in 1901.
The canal vanished.
The dividing wall was opened.
The name kept travelling.
Notes and Sources
City of Westminster, Victoria Neighbourhood Plan, and University College London, “Victoria Street, mansion flats and model dwellings”. The overcrowded district west of Westminster Abbey became widely known as the Devil’s Acre. The Westminster Improvement Act 1845 and later schemes preceded the clearance and redevelopment associated with Victoria Street; contemporary “improvement” displaced as well as rehoused residents.↩
City of Westminster, Victoria Area Planning Brief, sections 1.1.8–1.1.10. Westminster records that Victoria Street was carved through the slums west of Westminster Abbey in 1851, named after the young Queen and built in phases during the 1850s and 1860s to connect the new terminus with Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge.↩
City of Westminster, Victoria Area Planning Brief, sections 1.1.8–1.1.10; London Museum, “Canals: the Grosvenor Canal, Chelsea, in April 1927”. The Grosvenor Canal opened in 1825, ran along the later railway alignment and terminated in a basin beneath the site of the present station. Its decline and the reclamation of the land made the railway approach and terminus possible.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Victoria station”. The rival railway companies backed the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway, purchased fourteen acres for the terminus and entered central London over John Fowler’s Grosvenor Bridge, the first railway bridge across the Thames in London.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Victoria station”; Historic England, “Victoria Railway Station: former London Brighton and South Coast Railway station”, National Heritage List entry 1389322. The Brighton side opened on 1 October 1860 and the eastern, or Kent, side on 25 August 1862. The stations were conceived as separate facilities. Covering the approaches to protect nearby residents from noise, soot and smoke consumed funds that might otherwise have been spent on permanent passenger buildings.↩ ↩
Transport for London, Key Dates in the History of London Transport, and London Museum, “Victoria Station: to the south and beyond”. The Metropolitan District Railway opened its South Kensington–Westminster section, including Victoria, on 24 December 1868.↩
National Army Museum, “Funeral procession of Queen Victoria, February 1901”. Victoria died at Osborne House on 22 January 1901. After her coffin arrived at Victoria station, a gun carriage conveyed it to Paddington for the onward journey to Windsor; she was buried beside Prince Albert at Frogmore after the state funeral on 2 February.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Victoria station”; Historic England, “Victoria Railway Station: former London Brighton and South Coast Railway station”, and “Former London, Chatham and Dover Railway station”. The Brighton side was rebuilt in 1906–08 in red-brick Edwardian Baroque, with a large clock and royal entrance. The rival South Eastern and Chatham frontage followed in 1909–10 in Portland stone.↩
Westminster Abbey, “Unknown Warrior” and “Buried among the kings”; Imperial War Museums, “Arrival of the body of the Unknown Warrior at Victoria Railway Station”. Four unidentified bodies were brought from different battle areas and one was selected without its origin being known. The coffin arrived at Victoria’s platform 8 at 8.32 p.m. on 10 November 1920 and remained overnight before the Westminster Abbey burial.↩ ↩ ↩
Westminster Abbey, “Buried among the kings” and “Unknown Warrior”. The Unknown Warrior arrived at Victoria on the evening of 10 November 1920 and rested there under military guard. The next morning the coffin travelled by gun carriage to the Cenotaph and Westminster Abbey.↩
Historic England, “Victoria Railway Station: former London Brighton and South Coast Railway station”. After the 1923 grouping placed both halves under the Southern Railway, double archways were opened through the party wall in 1924–25 and the platforms were numbered continuously.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Victoria station”. Holiday and continental travel had become part of Victoria’s identity by the 1870s. The 1930s brought the Brighton Belle and overnight boat trains to France and Belgium; the post-war connection to Gatwick developed through a rail-air terminal and, from 1984, the Gatwick Express.↩
Transport for London, “Victoria Coach Station celebrates its heritage with 85th Anniversary Festival”, and London Transport Museum, “Linking London and country: Victoria Coach Station”. The Art Deco coach station opened on Buckingham Palace Road in 1932 and reinforced Victoria’s role as a departure point for journeys across Britain and continental Europe.↩
Transport for London, “Victoria line celebrates 50 years of serving London”, and “16 photos of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II visiting TfL”. Queen Elizabeth II formally opened the extension to Victoria on 7 March 1969, started the first train and became the first reigning British monarch to travel on the Underground.↩
Royal Collection Trust, “Victoria Line Underground station platform”, and London Transport Museum, “The Victoria line”. Edward Bawden designed Victoria station’s platform motif as a tiled profile of Queen Victoria. The line’s name refers both to the monarch and to the mainline station beneath which it passes.↩
London Museum, “Victoria Station: to the south and beyond”, and Transport for London, “New trains mark progress on the Victoria line”. The Victoria line pioneered automatic passenger operation and introduced early automatic barriers and ticket machines.↩
Underground Culture: A 1940 shelter photograph near Victoria helps test the realism of Henry Moore’s Underground drawings.