The First London and Birmingham Railway Advert - 1837

The London and Birmingham Railway was opened in its entirety on 17 September 1838. However, like most intercity railways of the age, prior to this date different sections of its line were completed as they were opened. Thus, this advert from John Bull on 5 November 1837 shows the services the company was providing between London and Tring, the line to which opened in late October that year. As with most railway adverts of the age, the reader was not treated to beautiful images or bright colours. Rather, they had to make do with simple text.

"The first shock of a great earthquake" - Dickens and Railway Construction

In Dombey and Son, Dickens described the destruction of the fictional Stagg’s Garden’s in Camden as the London and Birmingham Railway built towards Euston in the mid 1830s. While Stagg's Gardens itself was fictional - the level of destruction was not.

‘The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within the dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was is progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.’