Monopoly 12: Marylebone Station

 

Marylebone Station was the last of the London Railway termini to be built. In many ways it is the poor relation amongst them, having nothing like the grandeur of Kings Cross, St. Pancras, Paddington and the original Euston to name but a few but nevertheless I do have a wee bit of a soft spot for it.  One reason is because its the station the Beatles are chased through in their first and best film, A Hard Day’s Night. Another reason is that it was a project pushed through by one of my favourite crusty old Victorian/Edwardian curmudgeons, Sir Edward Watkins.

Sir Edward was chairman of several railways, most notably the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first Underground railway. Watkin did not like the fact that another of his railways, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, had no line into London, and thus lost valuable traffic to the Great Northern from King’s Cross. He eventually obtained permission to extend the MSLR – now called the Great Central Railway – into London, at Marylebone. The station opened to traffic in 1898. The Great Central Railway became part of the London North Eastern Railway in the 1923 rationalisation of most of the railways in Britain into four large companies – the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), the Great Western Railway (GWR), the Southern Railway and the LNER. Which is why Marylebone was chosen by Vic and Marjorie for a Monopoly Station – all four they chose were LNER termini.

By the 1980s Marylebone was a serious candidate for closure. This was due to its quietness compared with other large London stations. This is what has made it so popular with film makers over the last few decades – Marylebone has probably been a named or unnamed location for filming than any other mainline station in London.

Coming back to the great curmudgeon Edward Watkin, he delayed the building of London’s Circle Line, which would link the Metropolitan with the District Railway. He made Londoners wait for a good couple of decades just because he didn’t like the chairman of the Metropolitan District Railway – James StaatsForbes. This despite the fact that it would have increased revenue for both railways.

He's probably best remembered for attempting to build London’s answer to the Eiffel Tower on the site where Wembley Stadium now stands. The Tower only reached its first stage before it was found that changes to the original design meant that the legs were unstable. Work was stopped for good shortly before Watkins’ death in 1901 and the whole thing was dynamited and demolished by 1907. Aerial photographs of the building of the original Wembley Stadium in the 1920s clearly show where one of the footings had been on the area where the pitch was laid.