Chapter Four
Waterloo
How a Village in Brabant Crossed the Thames
Why is Waterloo called Waterloo?
In brief: Waterloo took its London name from the Belgian battlefield where Napoleon was defeated in 1815. The name passed to Waterloo Bridge, then the railway terminus and Underground station.
Transport context: London Underground and National Rail station.
At dawn on 18 June 1815, Waterloo is not yet a battle.
It is a village on the road to Brussels, in what is now Belgium: a cluster of houses gathered around a church and a coaching inn. The armies are south of it. The ground on which men will die has other names: Mont-Saint-Jean, Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. Rain has fallen through the night. Roads are churned to mud. Wheels sink. Powder must be kept dry.
For the moment, Waterloo is only the place where the Duke of Wellington has slept.
Three months earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte returned from exile on Elba and walked back into power. France sent troops to arrest him; they joined him. The king fled Paris. Europe, which had scarcely finished congratulating itself on Napoleon’s defeat, assembled its armies again.
Napoleon could not wait for them to close around France. He crossed into the southern Netherlands, hoping to drive between two forces gathering there: a Prussian army commanded by Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher and an Anglo-Allied army under Wellington. If he could defeat one before the other arrived, he might still turn a coalition into a collection of frightened governments.1
On 16 June he beat the Prussians at Ligny. On the same day, Wellington held the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Both allied armies retreated. To Napoleon, the plan appeared to be working.
But Blücher’s army was wounded, not destroyed. Its columns moved north and remained in contact with Wellington. The two commanders agreed that, if the Prussians could reach him, Wellington would make a stand on a ridge south of Waterloo.
He does not choose the ridge because it is glorious. He chooses it because it may keep his army alive.
Most of his troops are placed behind the crest, partly hidden from French guns. In front stand three fortified points: Hougoumont to the west, La Haye Sainte in the centre and Papelotte to the east. His army is not simply British. It includes Dutch, Belgian, Hanoverian, Brunswick and Nassau troops, as well as British and German units. The national legend will later become tidier than the army that wins the battle.2
Across the valley, Napoleon waits for the ground to dry enough for his artillery.
At about half past eleven the guns begin.
The first French attack falls upon Hougoumont. It is intended as a diversion, something to draw Wellington’s reserves away from the centre. Instead, the struggle consumes men throughout the day. The farm buildings burn. French soldiers force their way through a gate; the defenders close it behind them and kill almost everyone who entered. The gate becomes one of those small hinges on which historians later hang a continent.
Then the main assault climbs towards the ridge.
French infantry drives back parts of the allied line. British heavy cavalry charges downhill and breaks the advancing columns, then rides too far, loses order and is cut apart in turn. In the afternoon, French cavalry moves against infantry squares. Horses will approach a wall of bayonets, but they will not willingly enter it. Men fire, reload and wait inside the squares while cannon shot passes through them.
The battle becomes repetition under pressure: advance, recoil, reform; smoke, noise, mud; an officer gone, a gap closed, a farmhouse still held.
By mid-afternoon, another army begins to appear on Napoleon’s right.
The Prussians have come.
They arrive tired from defeat and forced marches, but they arrive. Napoleon must turn men away from Wellington to resist them around Plancenoit. At six o’clock the French capture La Haye Sainte and expose the allied centre. For a time Wellington’s position is close to collapse. Marshal Ney asks for reinforcements. Napoleon has too many emergencies and not enough army.
At about seven he sends forward the Imperial Guard.
These are troops accustomed to being the last argument. They climb the ridge through smoke, expecting the line before them to break. It does not. Allied fire stops them; counterattack drives them back. The Guard recoils, and the sight of it releases panic through the French army.
The retreat becomes a rout. Prussian cavalry pursues into the night.
By the end of the day, Napoleon has lost nearly forty thousand men killed, wounded or captured. The allied armies have suffered about twenty-two thousand casualties. Victory does not make the fields less crowded with the dead.3
British memory will gradually place Wellington alone at the centre of the scene. It is a convenient picture and an incomplete one. The arrival of Blücher’s army is decisive. Wellington himself says so in his official dispatch, crediting the result to Prussian assistance that was both timely and wholehearted.4
Late that night, Wellington returns to the inn at Waterloo.
Here the battle acquires the name by which the world will know it.
Blücher favours La Belle Alliance, the name of the inn near which the two commanders meet after the fighting. It would commemorate the coalition. Wellington objects that La Belle Alliance had been Napoleon’s command post. He proposes the village where his own headquarters stood.
Waterloo.
Most of the fighting has taken place outside the village. Geography alone does not name a battle. Authority does.
At a table in the inn, Wellington writes his report to the British government. He dates it from Waterloo. The word leaves the village on paper.5
The Messenger Who Carried Waterloo
By midday on 19 June, the dispatch is ready.
The man chosen to carry it is Major Henry Percy, one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp, who has passed through the battle without a wound. He is given the report and two captured French imperial eagles. The paper tells London that Napoleon has been defeated. The metal standards allow London to see it.6
Percy travels north through a country still crowded with armies and wounded men. He crosses the Channel and lands at Broadstairs on the afternoon of 21 June. By about ten that night he reaches St James’s Square, where the Prince Regent is dining at the house of Mrs Boehm.
Victories do not always arrive to trumpets. Sometimes they interrupt dinner.
Percy enters with the dispatch and lays the captured eagles before the Prince. The journey has carried more than military news. At the head of Wellington’s report is the place from which he writes: Waterloo. A village name enters the room with the trophies and leaves it as the official name of a European battle.6
The Prince Regent promotes Percy to colonel. Wellington later gives him a watch made by Abraham-Louis Breguet, one of the most celebrated makers in Europe. The reward is almost too neat: a machine for measuring time given to the man whose urgent journey has divided history into before the news and after it.6
The dispatch appears in a special edition of The London Gazette on 22 June. Crowds gather. Parliament offers thanks. Wellington becomes the hero required by a country that has spent more than twenty years at war.
The report also admits the price. The losses, it says, are immense.
London reads the victory before it can count the missing. Celebration fills the streets, while soldiers return to a nation burdened by debt and poorly prepared to employ or feed them. Triumph and hardship enter the peace together.7
The name travels faster than the armies can come home.
Waterloo appears on medals, taverns, streets and public buildings. It enters ordinary speech as the point at which success ends: a final, crushing defeat. A small place in Brabant becomes a word understood by people who could not find it on a map.8
Then London gives it a bridge.
Work on a new Thames crossing had begun in 1811, four years before the battle. John Rennie designed it to carry traffic between the Strand and the south bank. Its natural name was Strand Bridge. Stone piers rose from the river while Napoleon was still emperor and Europe was still at war.
After the victory, Strand was no longer grand enough.
Parliament renamed the unfinished structure Waterloo Bridge in 1816, declaring that it should preserve the memory of the allied victory. On 18 June 1817, exactly two years after the battle, the Prince Regent opened it in the company of Wellington and military representatives.9
The battle has crossed the Channel.
Now it crosses the Thames.
Rennie’s bridge is elegant and severe, carried on nine granite arches. It is a war memorial disguised as infrastructure. Londoners pay a toll to pass across a victory. From the bridge they see the river bend beneath them, St Paul’s in one direction, Westminster in the other.
In time the military meaning softens. The bridge becomes a view, a route, a weather station for the eye. Constable paints its opening. Nearly a century later, Claude Monet paints it again and again, dissolving the British memorial into French light and London fog. The name that once announced Napoleon’s defeat becomes part of a French artist’s beauty.10
The first bridge does not survive.
Its foundations deteriorate, and arguments over repair continue until demolition begins in the 1930s. Giles Gilbert Scott designs a replacement, broader and plainer. Construction continues through the Second World War, when labour is scarce and women perform skilled as well as unskilled work on the site. The evidence is sufficient for the bridge to acquire another name, unofficial but affectionate: the Ladies’ Bridge.11
It opens formally in 1945.
One bridge commemorates a victory over France. Its successor is completed during another European war. The stone changes. The name remains.
By then, Waterloo has long since moved inland.
In 1848 the London and South Western Railway extends its line from Nine Elms towards the City and opens a terminus near the southern approach to the bridge. The station has six platforms and is called Waterloo Bridge. Its opening is brought forward so that racegoers can travel to the Epsom Derby.
War lends the name. Leisure brings the first crowds.12
In time, the final word falls away. Waterloo Bridge becomes Waterloo.
The station grows without first deciding what it wishes to become. A new set of platforms appears on one side, then another on the other. There is a central station, a Windsor station, a south station and a north station. Platform numbering is obscure. Concourses compete. Passengers arriving in haste discover that the railway has built a puzzle and sold them a ticket into it.
This confusion is eventually replaced by a larger design. From 1899, the railway rebuilds Waterloo over more than twenty years, gathering its separate parts beneath a vast roof and around a broad concourse. The station becomes less like a collection of sheds and more like a city under glass.13
Yet one of its strangest departures takes place apart from ordinary travel.
From 1854 the London Necropolis Company operates a private station at Waterloo for funeral trains to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Mourners wait in separate rooms. Coffins are loaded for the journey out of crowded London to a cemetery created on an almost industrial scale.
At Waterloo, departure is occasionally literal.14
The original necropolis building is demolished when the main station expands. Its replacement is damaged beyond use in an air raid in 1941. The service does not return.
Other wars enter the station.
During the First World War, servicemen pass through Waterloo in enormous numbers. Volunteers run a buffet day and night. When the rebuilding nears completion, the railway company creates a main entrance that is also a memorial.
The Victory Arch rises over the approach from York Road. On one side stands War, dated 1914. On the other stands Peace, dated 1918. Britannia holds a torch above them. Bronze plaques record the names of 585 employees of the London and South Western Railway who did not return.15
A station named after one battle becomes a memorial to another.
The word victory remains above the entrance, but the names beneath it correct the abstraction.
Below the mainline concourse, the railways continue to multiply.
The Waterloo & City Railway opens in 1898 to carry commuters directly between the terminus and the financial district. It is a short line with a practical purpose: to complete journeys the mainline railway cannot. In 1906 the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway arrives. London immediately compresses its cumbersome title into Bakerloo—a nickname so successful that the railway adopts it officially.
Waterloo has now produced another London name.
The Northern line reaches the station in the 1920s. The Jubilee line follows with its eastward extension in 1999. Four Underground routes meet beneath the great terminus, along with mainline trains and the neighbouring Waterloo East. The Belgian village has become an instruction repeated across the capital: change here, leave here, meet me here.16
For thirteen years, it also becomes Britain’s railway departure point for France.
Waterloo International opens in 1994 for Eurostar trains through the Channel Tunnel. Passengers bound for Paris pass beneath a name commemorating Napoleon’s final defeat. The irony is obvious, but railway timetables have little use for wounded national pride. In 2007 the international services move to St Pancras, and the platforms wait for another purpose.17
Today, most visitors do not come to Waterloo in search of Napoleon.
They come for the London Eye, the South Bank, the National Theatre, the Royal Festival Hall, the river and the view towards Westminster. Waterloo is one of the principal gateways to a district shaped by culture, tourism and the daily migration of commuters. The battlefield seems very far away.18
But begin inside the station.
Stand beneath the great clock on the concourse, where generations have arranged to meet. Then walk towards the Victory Arch. Do not pass under it as though it were merely an exit. Look up at War and Peace. Read some of the names. The architecture is trying to turn death into order, as memorial architecture often does.
Outside, continue towards the river.
Waterloo Bridge gives one of London’s broadest views. To the east, the dome of St Paul’s rises above the City. To the west are Westminster and the curve of the Thames. Below, boats pass between piers built by people who worked through another war. The bridge no longer feels like a trophy. It belongs to pedestrians, buses, cyclists, lovers, office workers and tourists raising phones into the wind.
This is what London does to history. It does not preserve the original meaning intact. It puts the name to work.
The journey from Waterloo in Belgium to Waterloo in London is not direct. A village lends its name to a battle. The battle lends its name to a bridge. The bridge lends its name to a station. The station lends part of its name to a Tube line.
At each stage, something is forgotten.
The Prussians become less visible. The battlefield moves closer to the village than it really was. The bridge ceases to be understood as a war memorial. The station becomes simply a place from which a train may or may not leave on time.
Yet the chain remains unbroken.
When the recorded voice says Waterloo, it contains rain on a Belgian road; infantry hidden behind a ridge; Blücher’s columns approaching from the east; Wellington writing at a table after midnight; Parliament renaming an unfinished bridge; racegoers hurrying towards six new platforms; funeral trains leaving for Surrey; railwaymen passing beneath an arch that will later bear their names; and tourists stepping out towards the Thames.
The battlefield is in Belgium.
The bridge is on the river.
The station is beneath London.
The name has travelled farther than any of them.
Notes and Sources
National Army Museum, “Battle of Waterloo”, sections on Napoleon’s return, Ligny, Quatre Bras and the allied retreat.↩
National Army Museum, “Battle of Waterloo”, sections on Wellington’s position at Mont-Saint-Jean and the composition of the Anglo-Allied and Prussian forces.↩
National Army Museum, “Battle of Waterloo”, sections on the Prussian arrival, defeat of the Imperial Guard and casualty estimates.↩
British Library, Susan Reed, “Waterloo’s Prussian Hero: Blücher and the British”. The article reproduces Wellington’s acknowledgement in his dispatch that Prussian assistance was decisive.↩
Musée Wellington, official museum history; National Army Museum, “Meeting of Wellington and Blücher, at La Belle Alliance, 1815”. Wellington wrote his victory report at his Waterloo headquarters; Blücher preferred the name La Belle Alliance, while Wellington recommended Waterloo.↩
Age of Revolution / Waterloo 200, “Waterloo Dispatch” and “Breguet Watch of Major Henry Percy”. Percy carried Wellington’s dispatch and two captured French eagles, landed at Broadstairs on 21 June, reached St James’s Square at about 10 p.m. and presented the news to the Prince Regent. He was promoted and later received a Breguet watch from Wellington.↩ ↩ ↩
The Gazette, “The Battle of Waterloo”. Wellington’s dispatch arrived in London on the night of 21 June and appeared in The London Gazette Extraordinary on 22 June 1815. The same source discusses the immense losses and the difficult economic aftermath of the war.↩
National Army Museum, “Battle of Waterloo”, legacy section on the use of Waterloo for streets, stations, bridges and the expression “meet one’s Waterloo”.↩
London Museum, “Waterloo Bridge”; UK Parliament, Hansard, debate of 30 May 1934. Construction began in 1811; Parliament formally named the bridge in 1816, and it opened on 18 June 1817.↩
London Museum, “Waterloo Bridge”. Constable depicted the opening of the original bridge, and Monet produced a large series of Waterloo Bridge paintings between 1900 and 1904.↩
London Museum, “Waterloo Bridge”. The current bridge was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, completed during the Second World War and formally opened in 1945; research has confirmed women’s participation in its construction.↩
Network Rail, “Happy 170th anniversary London Waterloo”, and “The history of London Waterloo station”. The first station on the present site opened in 1848 with six platforms, and its opening was advanced for Epsom Derby traffic.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Waterloo station”, sections on the ad hoc nineteenth-century extensions and the rebuilding begun in 1899.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Waterloo station”, section on the London Necropolis Company terminus and funeral trains to Brookwood Cemetery.↩
Historic England, “Waterloo Station (Victory Arch)”, National Heritage List for England entry 1063898. The arch was built in 1919–22 and its plaques carry the names of 585 LSWR employees killed in the First World War.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, A Brief History of the Waterloo & City Line; London Transport Museum, “The Bakerloo line”; Transport for London, “TfL celebrates 25 years since the Jubilee line extension connected the West End and London Docklands”.↩
Network Rail, “The history of London Waterloo station”. Waterloo International served Eurostar from 1994 until the services moved to St Pancras in 2007.↩
Visit London, “South Bank and Waterloo”, on the area’s principal visitor attractions, including the London Eye, National Theatre and Southbank Centre.↩