Monopoly Challenge Fenchurch Street Station

There aren’t many London Monopoly Board properties that I have ever visited in real life. In fact Fenchurch Street station is the only one.

The world’s first railway linking two cities, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830. The railways reached London in 1836, with the opening of London Bridge station. By the middle of the 1830s new railways were booming and would go on booming for 10 years until the crash of 1845. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie and although he majority of planned railways in his period were never even built, a large number of companies had their eyes on London.

Fenchurch Street Station was built in 1841, for the London and Blackwall Railway. Through acquisitions and mergers it served a number of different railway companies. When the vast majority of Britain’s railways were rationalised into four companies in the 1920s,Fenchurch served the LMS (London, Midland and Scottish Railway) and the LNER (London North Eastern Railway). This is why it’s included on the London Monopoly board, as an LNER terminus.

Fenchurch Street is the only London terminus which is not also a London Underground station. In the 90s it was planned to either connect Fenchurch Street with the Jubilee Line or to extend the Docklands Light Railway a few hundred yards to Fenchurch Street, which would put it onto the network, but neither of these plans came to fruition. Fenchurch Street largely connects the City of London with Essex. The current building dates back to 1854.