Euston's first trains were hauled up the hill by cable, not locomotive
When Euston opened in 1837 as London's first inter-city terminus, steam engines could not manage the steep climb from the platforms over Regent's Canal to Camden. So trains heading out were pulled up by cable until 1844. Residents' complaints about smoke had already persuaded Parliament to ban locomotives from the Euston area.
George and Robert Stephenson picked the site in 1831, on farmland at the city's edge beside the New Road, now Euston Road, after proposals for Marble Arch and elsewhere fell through. Unusually for a London terminus it is named not for its district but for Euston Hall in Suffolk, seat of the Dukes of Grafton, who owned the land. Space was left for the Great Western Railway to share the station, but that company built its own at Paddington, and the spare ground filled with extra platforms instead.
Philip Hardwick designed the original, fronted by the Euston Arch, a Doric gateway 72 feet high whose hollow columns were the largest ever made. The old station probably had the world's first roof trusses built entirely of wrought iron, and the first railway hotels in London opened beside the Arch in 1839. Hardwick's son added the Great Hall, a lofty classical waiting room with a sweeping double staircase and statues representing cities on the line. Growth was relentless: monthly parcels rose from 2,700 to 52,000 between 1838 and 1841, and two platforms eventually became fifteen.
A 1930s scheme to rebuild, complete with a rooftop helicopter pad, was shelved by war, and bombs damaged the Great Hall and platforms during the Blitz. When British Railways electrified the West Coast Main Line, it decided the station could only expand south, over the Arch and the Hall. The Arch's demolition, announced in July 1961, provoked protests from John Betjeman and dozens of architects, but Harold Macmillan cited cost and the lack of anywhere suitable to move it.
The modernist replacement still draws criticism. Today Euston is Britain's busiest inter-city terminal, and it is being redeveloped as the London end of High Speed 2.
Source: Euston railway station
