eastlondonhistory.com

So what do ‘canaries’ and ‘herons’ have to do with the docks? What exactly was the ‘poplar’ or the ‘mudchute’. The London Underground and DLR have some pretty curious station names, and in the East End we have some of the more bizarre.

Aldgate Station was opened on 18 November 1876, and is named after one of the four original gates in the wall of the City, built by the Saxons, rebuilt in 1609 but finally taken down in 1761. The gate which once spanned the road between Dukes Place and Jewry Street, was once thought to derive its name from ‘old gate’, though the Saxon root is ‘Aelgate’, meaning ‘open to all gate’ or free in other words). The derivation of Aldgate East station is fairly obvious, though the halt, opened on 6 October 1884, was originally to be called Commercial Road. The station was moved a short way east in 1938.

There are some arguments about the derivation of the name Bethnal Green. The green is obvious enough (though there is little of that left) and the area was known as Blithehale during the 13th century. There was a family named Blida here during the early middle ages and the Bythe stream once flowed through the area. Before the station was opened as part of the Central Line extension on 4 December 1946 there was some debate as to whether it should be called simply ‘Bethnal’ to distinguish it from the LNER station a few minutes away.

On the same day, the new Mile End station opened with Central Line trains; the station had first opened in June 1902 as part of the Whitchapel and Bow Railway (W&BR), one of the many midget operations that abounded in London at the time. Mile End is so called because of its position on the main London-Colchester road (the main thoroughfare from Roman times). ‘La Mile ende’, as it was recorded in 1288, was a hamlet a mile east of Aldgate.

The only other stops on the W&BR were Whitchapel, Stepney Green, Bow Road and Bromley. Stepney is recorded as Stibenhede in the Domesday Book, coming from Stebbing (a family name) and hithe (meaning ‘landing place’, think Rotherhithe). Stepney remains though the green is much reduced. Whitechapel owes its name to the white stone chapel of St Mary Matfelon, which dated from 1329. After several rebuildings and World War 2 bomb damage, it was eventually demolished in 1952. This station predates the W&BR, opening in 1876 with the extension of the East London Railway north from Wapping to Liverpool Street.

The W&BR eventually joined up with the District Railway and ran into Tower Hill station (which of course gets its name from the rise next to the Tower of London). To inject a dash of the confusion so beloved of London Underground, the station has been renamed (originally Seething Lane was an option before it was opened as Mark Lane in 1884). It got the name Tower Hill in 1946, and was then moved in 1967 to the site of the old Tower of London station (open for just two years in the 1880s). Clear enough? Good.

The district of Bow, of course, owes its name to the arched or bowed bridge built over the River Lea in the 12th century. The main road east out of the City thus became the Bow Road. The current Bow Road tube station opened in 1902 but was one of only three stations within a few yards of each other. There was also a Bow Road station on the Great Eastern Line (the old station building is between the Ferrodo rail bridge and the Little Driver pub), and Bow station on the North London Railway (now the site of Bow Church DLR station).

Just down the line from Bow, Bromley station was opened on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (the modern Fenchurch Street Line) in 1858. It was taken over by the London Underground in 1902 and renamed Bromley-by-Bow in 1968. Records from the year 1000 have Bromley as Braembelege, from the Old English broom (tree) and leah (forest).

The new Docklands tube and DLR stations tend to hark back to the days when these were docks proper. Canary Wharf station dates from 1987, but the original Canary Wharf was built in 1936, a nod to the Canary Island imports which were a mainstay of the area’s trade. West India Quay was once the West India Dock. This seems to follow a post-industrial naming tradition in London - just as Surrey Docks became Surrey Quays, so the southern part of the West India Dock became South Quay, and a nesting place for Herons became Heron Quays. A neat theory that breaks down once we get to the old East India Docks: the station is plain East India.

The medieval ‘Bleak wall’ was a shipyard from the 16th century, and became the entrance to the West India Docks in the 1800s. Today the ships are gone and we have Blackwall station. Crossharbour, meanwhile, was the functional name invented for the new development at the centre of the Isle of Dogs, the station losing its ‘London Arena’ appendage in 2007 after the arena was demolished. The name Mudchute is similarly prosaic - lying next to an artificial hill created by the dredging of mud from the Millwall dock down the years. Island Gardens, meanwhile, lies next to the formal gardens laid out on former wasteland at the tip of the Isle of Dogs in 1895 by the London County Council.

And Poplar? Well, in the absence of documentary proof, historians have to fall back on that reliable mainstay … guesswork and a bit of cheating. Many sources have it as ‘probably’ a poplar tree that served as a meeting place for local folk.

For more (loads more) see ‘What’s in a name’ by Cyril M Harris, which documents the origins of the names of all current stations on the Tube and DLR. A London Transport Museum publication, ISBN 9781854142412, £4.95.

The growth of the East End has been intertwined with the railways for over a century and a half.
Nowadays the emerging metropolis of Canary Wharf is fed by the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and the Jubilee Line extension – soon the East End will be linked up with the Millennium Dome site in Greenwich.
Back in the last century, steam trains carried the goods from the docks and met the huge demand for passenger transport as people began to move around the country for the first time.
Railway companies sprung up almost overnight and huge amounts of venture capital were poured into the new business. It meant that there was often over-capacity – in addition to Bow Road Tube station there were another two Bow stations which have since closed.
The platforms of one are still visible above the Ferodo Bridge on Bow Road, though the line is now simply a spur connecting the Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street lines.
The London and Blackwall Railway was the company covering most of the East End in early Victorian times, but its lines into the City terminated at the Minories.
In 1841, the company won the race to build the first rail terminus in the City of London.
Bizarrely though, until 1849, they didn’t use steam engines. Trains were dragged from Blackwall to the Minories by cable and had to reach Fenchurch Street by their own momentum. The return trip relied on gravity, needing just “a slight push by platform staff to get them started”!
Liverpool Street is the other surviving terminus. In 1862, the newly-formed Great Eastern Railway began looking for a site for a new City station, to extend from the existing terminus at Shoreditch.
The ground they chose had a notorious history in itself, standing on the site occupied by the Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) till the late 17th century.

Ornate terminus
In typical Victorian style, the various companies competed to build the biggest, grandest and most ornate terminus – and Liverpool Street had to be better than Fenchurch Street.
The original plan was to build a huge edifice standing as high as the neighbouring Broad Street Station and stretching to London Wall. The authorities said no, which is why you will find Edward Wilson’s Victorian Gothic redbrick pile tucked down, its platforms well below ground level.
It opened in 1874, and was extended in 1891 to have more platforms than any other station in the world – until Victoria Station was enlarged in 1908.
Many of us will recall how dismal Liverpool Street was before the refurbishment of the eighties. That refit was a long time coming. During the winter of 1944, Labour MP Tom Driberg described it as “almost completely squalid”.
Poet Laureate John Betjeman had a different view, calling it “the most picturesque and interesting of London termini”.
The third great terminus was Broad Street Station. Immortal- ised in the title of the Paul McCartney movie nobody saw, Give My Regards To Broad Street, the station has become quickly forgotten since its demolition in 1984.
Yet in its day, it was London’s third busiest station, and was planned as the hub of a network linking London with the Midlands.
French design
Broad Street was built in 1865 as the North London Railway terminus – the design, by William Baker, made it look like a French town hall.
The original idea was that Broad Street would be the starting point for goods from the docks on their journey to the heart of England. But by the time the station was finished, it had moved from freight to people.
At the turn of the century, it ranked only behind Liverpool Street and Victoria in passenger volume, but its proximity to the former proved its downfall.
Broad Street lost its passengers to buses, trams and the Tube. The main station was shut in 1950 and spent its last years in sad dereliction. It was demolished in 1984 and replaced by the Broadgate development.