GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

GWR Route: North Warwickshire Line

Birmingham Snow Hill Station: gwrbsh2689

A plan of Monmouth Street station circa 1854 which shows a two sided station with brick constructions on the Up side as well a some similar structures along the Down side. This side appears to have been largely open with the overall roof supported on timber posts, typically 12" x 10" at roughly 12 foot centres spanned by wrought iron tie bars supporting the main roof span. The use of relatively large unclad side bays is not unusual and featured in many of the smaller one sided regional stations and probably was rooted in the practise of the earlier trains pulling wagons bearing passenger's horse drawn carriages which needed to be manoeuvered on arrival/departure. As Bertram was the Resident Engineer my bones tell me the design and layout would have been much like Banbury and Leamington and would have been roofed over with a combination of corrugated zinc cladding over timber boarding with glazed middle ventilating sections.

Thankfully the National Archive at Kew have original drawings for both Leamington and Banbury which help in making sense of Pigott Smith's drawings, held at the Library of Birmingham, which also indicate the station was built on a curve and thus is similar to an undocumented sketch held at SS Great Britain, along with a number of sketches of room layouts along the Snow Hill side. Each end gable would have had decorative glazed cladding which in Snow Hill's case appears to have had an external passenger bridge at the southern end. The drawing also shows the water tower at the southern end of the Up platform which is similar to that shown on an earlier view of Bath station. Further south is the then open cutting beyond Monmouth Street bounded by the Bluecoat School facing St Phillip's Churchyard and the rear of the shops along Bull Street. The covering over by iron girders spanning brick pier walls and construction of Victoria Arcade followed some years later. At the northern end are three of Brunel's Balloon topped girders spanning Great Charles Street a genre which appears to have been prevalent along the stretch between the Napton Canal crossing south east of Leamington and Great Charles Street and which were mostly replaced around 1907.

Derek Harrison claimed the original Snow Hill station (1851-32) was removed to Didcot and re-erected as a carriage shed and supported this claim with a picture of the same in one of his books on the station. I think this painted Snow Hill as initially constructed in a rather poor light. My research is based on two primary sources, Brunel's sketch books at www.ssgreatbritain.org in Bristol and the John Pigott Smith surveys of Birmingham of the same period both which confirm the site outline and with the latter, the building plan, though apart from contemporay illustrations of Leamington and Banbury stations I have not found any illustrative material of the original station.

Graham Laucht

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