Monday, May 06, 2013

Stamford Water Street station



Stamford has a station on the Leicester to Peterborough line - today it largely houses the railway bookseller Robert Humm & Co. - but the town used to have a second, even grander station. This was Stamford Water Street, as it was known from its opening in 1856 until 1950, or Stamford East, as it was known from then until it was closed to passengers in 1957 and goods four years later.

Its grandeur is out of scale with the two branch lines it served - services to Essendine and Wansford ran from here. That grandeur may have been a tribute to the Marquess of Exeter, who had promoted the Essendine line and lived at the Elizabethan Burghley House. Certainly, the Exeter arms are prominent on the building.

Stamford All Change! How the Railways Came to Stamford by Arthur and Elizabeth Jordan describes the building in its heyday:
Architect William Hurst arranged for the main door to open into a spacious booking-hall above which a gallery, with a wrought-iron balustrade, gave access to the Company's boardroom and offices. A lantern roof provided adequate daylight in the booking-hall.
Today the station house has been divided into two private houses and the trackbed behind it has been taken over by a sheltered housing scheme. A surviving goods shed has been cleverly incorporated into the complex.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This was the goods shed, rather than the engine shed, which was located further away from the station between the running lines and the River Welland. See Peter Paye’s book ‘Great Northern Branches to Stamford’.

Jonathan Calder said...

Thanks, I'll change the post.