The Two Railway Stations of Basingstoke, 1839-1932

The standard gauge London and Southampton Railway, soon to be London and South Western Railway, opened to Basingstoke on 10th June 1839[1] when a small station was built. This was replaced by one designed by Sir William Tite about 1850 similar to that still in existence at Micheldever. A second railway reached Basingstoke in 1848[2] when the broad gauge Great Western branch opened from Reading with a station with an overall roof being built north of the LSWR station.

It was not possible for trains to pass from one railway to the other due to the difference in gauge and a Transfer shed was built where goods could be transferred across a platform from a broad gauge wagon to a standard gauge one.[3] This system only lasted until 1856 when the GWR laid a standard gauge rail on its broad gauge track.

Tite’s station was enlarged, the two LSWR tracks were increased to four and the Chapel Street Bridge enlarged in 1875 and again in 1903[4]. At this time the third LSWR station was built in a Neo-Tudor style in rich red brick[5] to the south, town side, of the running lines and at a lower level with a subway giving access to the platforms.

In 1932 trains from Reading ran into the main station and the GWR building was demolished[6]. Both railways had large goods sheds and extensive goods sidings but these have mostly been demolished and the ground used for large car parks.

Numbers using the railway have grown dramatically as the town has grown in size and this had led to two remodelling of the entrance and ticket office areas of the 1903 building in 1987 and most recently in 2012[7].

Derek Spruce

[1]   Dendy Marshall, C.F. (revised Kidner, R.W., (1963) History of the Southern Railway. p. 61 

[2]   The Times (London, England), Oct 25, 1848, p. 2

[3]   Ordnance Survey map of Basingstoke 6” 1872

[4]   Mitchell, K & Smith, K (1988), Woking to Southampton, p. 43

[5]   Bullen, M, Crook, R, Hubbock, R, Pevsner, N (2010), Hampshire: Winchester and the North, p. 163

[6]   Mitchell, K & Smith, K (1988), Woking to Southampton, p. 47

[7] Basingstoke Gazette, Monday 19th March 2012