Victorian London was awash with speculative plans to bring newly invented railways into the city centre: overground, underground, along streets and above them. Lavish shopping arcades were proposed beneath the Deptford & Greenwich Viaduct. Dainty villas and a leafy boulevard were to accompany the London to Greenwich Railway. But the trains were too big, noisy and dirty for such ideas to work.
The most spectacular Victorian railway dream was James Samuel and John Heppel’s plan to march a Thames Viaduct Railway down the river, linking London Bridge to Westminster in five minutes.
Victorian valhalla
Between the 1850s and 1904, as the high noon of mid-Victorian self-confidence began to ebb, architects, including the prestigious George Gilbert Scott, imagined a “New Valhalla” or “Imperial Mausoleum” just to the south of Westminster Abbey.
Most breathtaking were the last proposals by the now-forgotten John Pollard Seddon and Laurence Harvey with ambulatories, clustered chapels and an enormous Memorial Tower, three times the height of Westminster Abbey. E.B. Lamb’s imagined drawing of the never-to-be-constructed scheme is so beautiful and photorealistic as to leave one wishing it had been created.
