User:Verbarson/Railway arches in London

The London and Greenwich Railway viaduct at London Bridge station.

Many railways in London were built on viaducts composed of a succession of brick arches. The space under these arches has been used for almost everything any other building could be used for, from residential accommodation to aircraft manufacture.

In 2019, Network Rail sold its portfolio of railway arch properties to Telereal Trillium and Blackstone Property Partners, together trading as The Arch Company. A tenants' organisation, Guardians of the Arches, was formed to coordinate responses to this.

See also

• London Bridge – Greenwich Railway Viaduct 1836
• Nine Elms to Waterloo Viaduct 1848
• Short Brothers 1903 (balloon manufacture, prior to the official founding of the aircraft company)
• "The railway arch where A.V. Roe in 1909 built and achieved the first all-British powered flight still stands in the Lee Valley Park in Hackney. " 1909
• Turbine Theatre 2019

Sources

• "Network Rail's sale of railway arches - National Audit Office (NAO) report". National Audit Office (NAO). National Audit Office. 2 May 2019. Retrieved 21 December 2023.
• Hedger, Tony (22 May 2019). "Brewery news – May 2019 – London Drinker". The London Drinker. CAMRA. Retrieved 29 December 2023.

External links

• "Aviation History at Battersea Power Station". batterseapowerstation.co.uk. Battersea Power Station. 29 July 2017. Retrieved 5 September 2024. Balloon and aircraft manufacturing in Battersea railway arches
• Davis; Emanuel (20 October 1866). "Provision of Dwellings by Appropriation of Railway Arches". The Builder. Covent Garden, London: George Godwin. p. 772. Retrieved 5 September 2024. In and about London there are thousands of railway arches belonging to the various companies. Some few of these are used as shops, a few more as warehouses and workshops; but the great majority are, at the present moment, totally unoccupied and unproductive...
• Dwyer, Emma (2009). "Underneath the Arches: The Afterlife of a Railway Viaduct". In Horning, Audrey; Palmer, Marilyn (eds.). Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks? Future Directions in the Archaeological Study of post-1550 Britain and Ireland. Society for Post Medieval Archaeology Monograph Series. Vol. 5. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84615-710-3.
• Froy, Francesca; Davis, Howard (2 November 2017). "Pragmatic urbanism: London's railway arches and small-scale enterprise". European Planning Studies. 25 (11): 2076–2096. doi:10.1080/09654313.2017.1367141.
• Froy, Francesca (2017). "Railway Arches: A Refuge for London Businesses in the Context of Rising Property Prices" (PDF). MoveableType. 9: 41–48. doi:10.14324/111.1755-4527.075. Retrieved 5 September 2024.
• "September 1906: An interior of Short Brother's workshop under railway arches in Battersea, London, where hot air balloons are manufactured". Getty Images. 9 April 2004. Retrieved 5 September 2024.
• Holyoak, Joe (2018). "Underneath the Arches". Urban Design Journal. 148: 49. ISSN 1750-712X. OCLC 786287330. Retrieved 4 September 2024.
• "AIR RAID SHELTER UNDER THE RAILWAY ARCHES, SOUTH EAST LONDON, ENGLAND, 1940". Imperial War Museums. Retrieved 5 September 2024.
• Kellett, John R. (2014) [1969]. The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. London: Routledge. p. 345. ISBN 978-0-415-37984-7. Retrieved 5 September 2024. The railway arch was, of course, a functional necessity for many of the approach routes, if they were to avoid the wholesale street closures and level crossings, against which Parliament had set its face. All the early hopes that arches might be turned to advantage miscarried, however, and within a few years they became symbols of all that was shabby and down-at-heel ...
• Historic England. "Whittington Lodge, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home (Grade II) (1418208)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 5 September 2024. "The need to up-date and improve the facilities at Battersea was becoming ever more apparent and in 1906-7, Clough Williams-Ellis was employed ... and he oversaw ... the construction of new kennels in five of the railway arches to the west of the site."
• Usborne, Simon (11 November 2023). "'It was a case study for what not to do': the regeneration project that became a £100m luxury ghost town". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 September 2024.

===Relevant websites?

• The Arch Co
• Guardians of the Arches Organisation of railway arch tenants
• Guardians of the Arches - more up-to-date?
• The London Drinker CAMRA publication - many small breweries occupy arches