What in the heck is a Lullingstone Airfield? Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/jagohazzard Patreon: / jagohazzard Just Watching Trains (2nd channel): / @justwatchingtrains-ji4ps Threads: www.threads.net/@jagohazzard Instagram: jagohazzard?igs...
Is it not just a quaint London tradition for there always to be a plan to extend the Bakerloo Line? Everyone knows they will never happen, but like the Tower of London ravens, London will fall if there is ever a time without such a plan
@@caw25shaThat's not really surprising as it has shrunk quite a bit from it's heyday, losing the Stanmore branch to the Jubilee line and, as featured in a recent video, most of the Watford one to the Overground.
Your aerial photo at 2:50 confirms that the German war ministry (whose reconaissance it is) was already onto the phoney airfield ruse ("Schein-Flugplatz").
I just thought I’d mention that Heston Airport was also the first home of British aerial reconnaissance. Just before World War II got started, an Australian pilot and entrepreneur named Sidney Cotton pioneered high-altitude photoreconnaissance, giving the Allies a huge advantage during the war. Heston was their first home base, since it was thought the enemy wouldn’t suspect a civilian airport was home to a strategic asset. I do enjoy your videos, and one of these days I want to get across the pond to ride some of these trains myself.
Speaking of brown colored lines extensions, Paris Line 11 extension will open in less than 12 hours from now. An extension that was awaited for at least 50 years if not a century...
I've always been intrigued by the remains of Lullingstone station since I first noticed them while travelling on the half-hourly service to Holborn Viaduct station (to see Gamages model railway for Christmas). I suppose a quiz question could be devised about Kent having not only an actual station for an airport which never existed, but also for many years an actual airport (Manston) for which no station existed on the close-by railway (until Thanet Parkway - built after the airport closed),
RAF Manston Camp did have a light railway connection/interchange to the North Kent line (just before Birchington station in the downwards direction) during/after WW1 (up until the end of the 1920s?). Little information is available online and there's no trace of it on modern OS maps (at any scale) but the RAF Manston museum has a large diorama and pictures showing the buildings and track layout from that time. You can also find hints of it on 1920s 1inch OS maps.
Nice video of the remains of Camberwell Station. I still remember a ludicous scheme to send Eurostars north via there (having past the 20mph turn off at Herne Hill North Junction) and dive underground somewhere along the Walworth Road!!!1
The only thing I know about 'Lullingstone' is the the archaeological remains of a Roman villa, which include some truly remarkable finds, particularly the exceedingly rare examples of painted fresco work on wall plaster, which evidence Christian worship in Roman Britain.
The story of lullingstone always intrigues me - that the southern actually built a station there even though the airport hadn’t started being built always surprised me!
Was also going to say the same thing. The airport there is long gone and become a housing estate called Kings Hill, but they kept all the old administrative buildings and the control tower was restored and is now a coffee shop.
@ericprice3225 my parents worked there when it was still an airfield with a firm of aircraft fitters. I used to love the air display there every summer.
Yep, that mispronunciation grated with me too! I used to love going there for gliding while in the Maidstone Grammar CCF - although the semi-derelict airfield buildings could be more than a bit spooky...
I learned to parascend at West Malling airfield, about 45 years ago when it was still an airfield! Some of the old buildings still remain today (the "H-blocks"), although most of the property has been subsumed as the new town of King's Hill.
I remember the fogs and diversions from 'London Airport' to Northolt, Blackbushe or even RAF/USAF Bovingdon. Then when I was at secondary school, there was Foulness and also Cublington in Herts.
West Mauling, not Maling! As in Hall and Hal. As a resident (somewhat reluctantly) of Darkest Kent, the idea of a major airport at Lullingstone - of all places - is beyond weird!
As an aviation/rail nerd, I kind of like the idea of 10 smaller airfields personally. If you hadn't done a video on this subject it would make a great one... I'm also fascinated by North Weald Airfield since it was on the Central railway before service was cut back one station... To me that would make another great airport for London and one that' slightly closer... And with a 6000' runway it's long enough to land A220 100's on it that could fly as far away as Toronto... Or anywhere else in a 6300 km radius including Dubai!
Hello Jago, Lullingstone brings back a distant memory of visiting the Roman villa (begun about AD 100 and features various mosaics one of which contains a symbols remaniscent to the one at Upminster Bridge in your video Tales from the Tube - Suspect Symbols. Best wishes from Oxfordshire.
If the Lullingstone Extension ever happened, it would have suffered from the same issues as the Heathrow Extension of the Piccadilly Line. In that the journey time would be too long & the capacity would be too limited thanks to the Small Tube-Sized Trains.
I'd not heard of this one either. Perhaps you could explore some of the other never happened airports sometime and if they had potential rail connections.
Waddon was the station for Croydon Airport, and had a sign to that effect, but it’s far enough away to have been not very convenient. At Warwick Avenue station there used to be an illuminated train indicator sign with a list of stations. The last station on the list was Camberwell. It had been covered over with black paint, but this had started to peel off, revealing part of the station name.
Lullingstone can be reached via Eynsford station which we reached using Thameslink from Blackfriars. In Eynsford there is a Norman Castle which survives with impressively high walls and then down the road past the ford, you get to Lullingstone Roman villa which is very interesting if you like Roman history and then a bit further on is Lullingstone Castle which has a World Garden, created after Tom Hart Dyke was kidnapped and had the idea when in captivity for 9 months. It has plants from all over the world, as the name implies. All walkable from the train. So even if the airport didn't happen, lots to see.
Lullingstone station was mentioned by Edwin Course in his classic books on Railways of Southern England, but was reckoned to be more for the proposed housing developments, which never really happened. An interesting parallel on the south coast was a halt built at Shoreham Airport which was also entitled Bungalow Town. Neither the airport nor the "expected bungaloid growth" ever really took off. The word "bungaloid" once appeared on Call my Bluff, and thanks to Dr Course I actually knew the meaning!
London stands out in the number of airports it has. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City - and Southend is at least as close to central London as is Stansted, the last time I checked. Among big metro areas, I think only Los Angeles has a comparable number of airports - LAX, Ontario, Orange County, Burbank, Long Beach. And the LA metro area is truly vast.
Maybe you could do an item about attempts to get a railway to Los Angeles International Airport. For years there was a railway called the Railway from Nowhere to Nowhere that was meant to go to the airport but ended at Inglewood a mile or two away because of lobbying by car park operators. You are not allowed to walk into or out of the airport, you must be carried by a motor vehicle. I think they have now succeeded in extending this railway into the airport.
When I was a kid living in Eltham, my mates and I would cycle out to Eynsford and Lullingstone regularly. One of the highlights was to stop at the old station at 1:50 and put 1p coins on the line to make 2p's! Unfortunately, as we usually did this on a Sunday, we had to wait quite a while for a train to come by...and then it was normally on the other line!
Sweet Joy !! Another view of the defunct station near to where I was born in Camberwell , if it hadn't been for those pesky trams ... ( irritated growling noises and gnashing of fragile teeth !! )
I only heard about Lullingstone Airport fairly recently, and I have to say that it was never going to be a very big airport..the whole pre and post war plan for airports was pretty half baked.. Interesting that Gatwick got a rail connection right from the start, and Heathrow had to wait until the late 1970s before it got the Piccadilly extension, then the spur from the Great Western mainline in the 1990s...integrated transport plan? not really! Another first rate video, Jago!
Gatwick Airport was built on the site of Gatwick Racecourse, which opened in 1891 and had its own station. The racecourse even had its own dedicated aerodrome, so it was an easy choice to make it London’s second airport in 1957 after its closure in 1940. The Grand National was held there during the First World War while Aintree was taken over by the War Office, Lester Piggott's grandfather being the winner in 1917.
Having lived on the line they proposed to take over, all I can say is... What the heck? We lost service frequency when Eurostar ran through there. The idea you could get a tube frequency on rails shared with the Chatham Mainline is just insane! But then that's probably why it was never built...
I have a book about the history of Croydon Airport and there was a branch from the Waddon - Wallington line into the airport, though it seems to have gone by 1928.
It seems to have been built in 1917 to serve an aircraft factory, rather than the airport itself. There is some information at the page you can find by searching on _Croydon Airport Railway - UK Prototype Questions - RMweb_ It was not particularly well used because of the end of the First Small Disagreement in 1918, and it crossed Stafford Road and the tramway along it on the level. It appears to have been closed after an even smaller disagreement between one of its trains and a tram. It's shown on _RailMapOnline._
I'd heard about this airport proposal, and never understood why they chose Lullingstone, as the railway there runs down a river valley. The area isn't flat at all.
Imagine having a large airport in Central London with tube lines to serve the airport in Central London. Mind you the Jubilee Line would have had a 2nd extension from Canning Town & North Greenwich to Thamesmead via London City Airport and North Woolwich. And perhaps the Victoria Line should extend to Gatwick Airport and the Central Line to Stansted Airport.
The 1930s proposal for Thames Airport - which would have spanned the river from the Houses of Parliament to Lambeth Bridge - could have been the answer. A bold plan to say the least.
@@AndrewG1989 Boris Island is bonkers. For an international airport designed to serve the whole of the UK, it's about as far away from the rest of the UK as it's possible to get. Heathrow is far easier to get to from the rest of the country.
After Lullingstone was abandoned by the Southern, the platform canopies were moved to Canterbury East. If you every pop into Rye, in East Sussex - and you should, it's lovely - there is a treasure trove of railwayana at Adams of Rye (venerable stationers and newsagents) including one of the Lullingstone station signs on the wall.
You mention Bovington - last time I went there (Which was well over 15 yrs ago) there used to be Loads of Market Stalls there - Known as Bovington Market!!! 🤔🚂🚂🚂
I remember going to the market at Bovingdon (not Bovington). I also went to Banger Racing track that used to operate on one of the old runways, towards the south-east corner of the site. Closed down in the late 2000's I believe.
@@jasonuk8333 The market is no more, a number of TV and film studios occupy some of the site now. It's where ITV film big entertainment shows like The Masked Singer.
Two lines could and should have been used for a Bakerloo line extension - the goods line from New Cross to Bricklayers Arms, and the branch line from Nunhead to Crystal Palace High Level. Half a mile of tunnel under New Kent Road would have taken the Bakerloo line to Bricklayers Arms where it could have taken over the goods only line, paralleling the Old Kent Road as far as New Cross (this trackbed sadly laid abandoned until the mid 1980s when it was turned into the road now called Mandela Way). The Bakerloo could have terminated at New Cross OR continued either in tunnel or partially alongside existing tracks to a point beyond Nunhead where it could have taken oven the line to Crystal Palace High Level, an electrified London branch line ideal for a tube conversion. Again, sadly, the line sat abandoned until the mid 1960s when it was largely built over by housing. Opportunities lost.......
I heard the intro to the and laughed because the last time they tried such extension was with the northern line with the northern hights and that well we all know what happened..
There has been so many airport plans in and London that didn't get beyond planning I remember proposals for Cublington /Yardley Chase in 1979 in the Buckinghamshire Northamptonshire borders. In the end they chose to develop Stansted. Then most major flagcarriers refused to move from Heathrow to Stansted although American Airlines moved a few services to mainly sweeten the CAA and BAA to offer them slots at Heathrow. Meanwhile several Thames Estury airports have been mooted but never moved. Most recently the 'Boris Island' plan. Just like Stansted the transport links were somewhat an afterthought initially
My late father used to live near Fairlop Airfield during the war. He and his friend would row out onto the lake to watch the planes, even during air raids!.....
Sorry! The bit about the lake *cannot* be true. RAF Fairlop closed in 1946 and was derelict for nearly 20 years, until it became a gravel quarry. When quarrying eventually finished, the gravel workings were flooded and the area was turned into Fairlop Waters Country Park. So the lake was created about 50 years after the war ended.
@@peterdean8009 Curiouser and curiouser! Not only are you shattering one of my long held beliefs, learned at my fathers metaphorical knee, but you also seem to share two of my three names! My middle name is peter....
You should look into the Crane line, a thought experiment by Nicholas Crane in planning his own tube line, with help from Transport for London. Funnily enough, TfL was quite interested in this line, and did a few feasibility duties on it. It still is in TfL's records.
Although the original British Airways had nothing to do with the current one Imperial was an ancestor of BOAC which in turn was an ancestor of the current BA.
Ten airports may sound excessive, but there are eight today. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, City and Luton of course. Southend counts as a London airport. Biggin Hill and the Heliport. Fairoaks is in the control zone and has fire cover for medium size business jets. Oops, that's nine. Elstree handles some corporate jets as well. What is Northolt up to these days?
Not that long ago, Kidlington airfield (north of Oxford) was designated as a London airport. Did they finally give up on that? And, as caw25sha mentions, there was Manston, which is closer to Paris than it is to London.
@@Tevildo "Manston, which is closer to Paris than it is to London." You exaggerate more than a little. The perpendicular bisector of the line joining London and Paris runs approximately along the southern coast of the Channel. Calais, Ostend, Cherbourg and even Le Touquet are closer to London than to Paris.
London Ashford Airport. On Denge Marsh, the most deserted part of the kent coast. . 76 mile drive from London. 18 mile drive from Ashford.Just 22 miles from France. No train connection to London or Ashford. Used to be famous as an car air ferry to France. At it's peak in 1960 Silver City Airlines. Carried 90,000 vehicles and 220,000 passengers.
@1:43, not much to see there. 😜 I do enjoy the endless speculation about extending the Bakerloo line south. Let's just say that it's never going to happen in my lifetime.
Just as crazy as the situation we have with 7 different main line stations in a ring around London to go to different destinations! Thankfully the idea of "hub" entered the psyche, including for freight, mail etc before they committed to that crazy plan.
Regarding your map, surface the Bakerloo at Loughborough Junction and have it run through Milkwood on a separate pair of tracks to the east of the existing lines. At Herne Hill, platforms 1 & 2 will serve trains from Holborn Viaduct to stations beyond Tulse Hill, with the Bakerloo line serving platforms 3 & 4. The Chatham main line will dive into a tunnel between just north of Herne Hill. The Bakerloo line will take over the existing Penge Tunnel route and its stations. The new bore will surface & join the lines from via Catford at Shortlands, with a flyover taking the eastbound tube track to the north side of the alignment. It will run direction-grouped through to Swanley, the Bakerloo line diving briefly into a pair of tubes to avoid fouling Chislehurst Junction, as well as eastbound only under Swanley Junction. From here it will share tracks with the Maidstone East line to Lullingstone. National Rail services will be a quarter-hourly journey from Blackfriars to Orpington via Catford and a half-hourly route from Victoria calling at Brixton, Shortlands, Bromley South, Bickley, St Mary Cray, Swanley, Lullingstone and all stations to Sevenoaks.
What didn't help was the so called Lambeth North 'derailment' incident of Tuesday 31 October 1933. Scary thing is, it wasn't actually a 'derailment'. A Bakerloo train left Lambeth North for Elephant and Castle late that evening, it was around 10,45 pm and it had just 5 passengers on board, plus the driver and guard (they had them back in those days). And that train never arrived at the next (and last) stop, Elephant and Castle. They quickly made up a story about a derailment and fire, and heavily compensated the 7 families involved to stay very very quiet. To this day nobody knows where that train went, but train maintenance crews are reluctant to work alone down there as sometimes you get a very chilly breeze down there from somewhere and then you hear the sound of a train apporaching, even though no trains run then, the current in the rails is turned off for maintenance. The sound gets closer and closer - then stops. Dead silence. You just have that frigid breeze, as if a train just went by.
Is there anywhere I can read about this, I did a quick google but nothing turned up. Are you sure you can confirm an actual missing train or is it a story that may have gotten abit over accepted
Maybe I'm getting my timings off but when you mention how it was planned for London to have ten airports, wasn't that around the time that the government was trying to reduce the number of mainline stations? strikes me that ten airports would have all the same issues as having all the terminal stations... plus a few additional ones!
Graffiti is bad at the moment on the tube. I have lived in London for 14 years and never seen it so bad for "tags" and "just stop oil" and "extinction rebellion" logos sprayed or scratched onto trains and interiors. What is going on?
As someone from Kent, it grates when someone mispronounces a place. It is West Malling as in Balling, you don't say the first bit as you do the road by Buckingham Palace.
Just next to the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery with 2,000 tonnes of unexploded bombs from WW2 still on board! Genius idea for an airport location!
The Bakerloo is truly the mother of planned southern tube lines in London. Their northern counterpart would be the Northern (Northern Heights), their western counterpart, the Metropolitan (to Aylesbury), and their eastern counterpart the District (trains to Southend)
Well at least they were as mad in the 1930s on "Hair Brained Schemes" as we are with the Half HS2 sink hole. Thank you for another really enjoyable 6 minutes.
I've been to 3 of the 5 London airports, but I don't think I have a good reason to go to Luton or Stanstead. Now, I didn't have a good reason to fly into City, except that I wanted to ride the Elizabeth Line. Actually, that was a good reason.
Lullingston Airport sounds like a generic place name when playing Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon. Citizens celebrate as first aircraft arrives at Lullingston Airport!
I've lived in London all my life and I have never seen graffiti all over the side of trains, what has happened, have they sacked all of the security at depots or something, or removed the budget for cleaning the graffiti off?
@@CharlieFlemingOriginal it's also really confusing given the tube is 100% electric, surely they would be wanting the support of the rail users, not antagonising them
But standards on the Bakerloo seem to be slipping badly. The graffiti removing chemical they use makes it look even worse by stripping all the paint off
