History: When the railways came to Basingstoke

Construction work started in October of that year. On June 10, 1839 the line was opened from Nine Elms to Basingstoke and from Southampton to Winchester.

Passengers for Southampton had to travel by coach between Basingstoke and Winchester until the line between the two towns opened on 11 May 1840.

The original 1839 timetable showed six trains leaving Basingstoke for Nine Elms and six trains running in the opposite direction.

READ MORE: Travelling before the railways came to Basingstoke

By 1842 there were seven trains running in both directions, plus two goods trains running each way which also carried third-class passengers in open wagons.

The fastest train was timetabled to take one hour 33 minutes from Nine Elms to Basingstoke and the slower trains took two hours. The goods trains took about 3½ hours. This was much quicker than the stagecoach services.

In 1830 the mail coach took 5½ hours to travel from London to Basingstoke. It is unlikely that coaches were significantly faster by the time the railway came to Basingstoke.

Bradshaw's Railway Companion from 1842 (Image: Contributed)

In 1848 the Great Western Railway (GWR) opened a line from Reading, which they converted to standard gauge in 1856 to allow passengers and goods to travel between the south coast and the north without changing trains.

The London and South Western Railway opened a line to Andover in 1854 which was extended to Salisbury in 1857, and later to the West Country.

The coming of the railway in 1839 and its subsequent development in the 1840s had a disastrous impact on the coaching trade and the inns and other businesses that served it.

Before the railway came to Basingstoke around 40 long-distance stagecoaches stopped at Basingstoke every day.

By 1844, the Reading coach was the only coach serving Basingstoke, and this ceased after 1848 when the GWR line opened.

Early LSWR locomotive (Image: Contributed)

The coach services had given employment to a large number of supporting workers, including innkeepers, tapsters, domestic staff, ostlers, grooms, porters and postboys.

It had also supported the local services of wheelwrights, farriers, saddlers, harness makers, and other trades. Many of these lost their jobs when the railways came.

In 1839 James Biggs, a Basingstoke coach master, was made bankrupt.

In 1840, Charles Tubb, a Basingstoke innkeeper, was imprisoned for debt, and Eliza King, the landlady of the Crown, was made bankrupt. One of her ostlers committed suicide for fear of being sent to the workhouse.

The Crown ceased to be an inn. Part of the building was later used as an ordinary public house, which retained the name of the Crown, initially the Crown Tap, and the yard was used as a coachmaker’s workshop.

The George with its seven bedrooms and other equipment was put up for auction in 1843, “the Business of the Inn being relinquished”.

Richard Curtis, the owner of the Angel was unable to pay his debts and in 1850 his assigns put the Angel and the other inns he owned up for auction.

Angel Inn, circa 1860 (Image: Contributed)

One observer noted in 1841 that, because the coaches had ceased to run through Basingstoke, “not only is the appearance of the town much less cheerful ... but many local interests are suffering from the transition”.

A journalist on the Hampshire Advertiser who visited Basingstoke in 1846 reported that he saw in the Market Place “eight or ten men idling about – upon inquiring the reason, they one and all stated they could get no employment at any price; one, a married man with three children, stated he would gladly work for 1s a day, if he could get it. They were not agricultural labourers, but men who formerly supported their families by working in stables. Since the railway passed here, all such employment, or nearly so, is lost”.

The Market Place in the 1840s (Image: Contributed)

Between 1841 and 1851 the population of Basingstoke grew by only 197 – a 4.8 per cent increase, compared with the 12.7 per cent increase during the same period for England and Wales as a whole. This shows that during that period Basingstoke was far from a flourishing town.

SEE ALSO: SWR to upgrade Basingstoke railway station waiting room

Apart from agriculture, May’s brewery was the only large-scale business in the town. It was part of a development that took place in the 18th century towards brewing on an industrial scale and the introduction of the tied house system.

In 1794 May’s had an estate of at least 18 pubs. By 1857 it owned or leased 63 pubs, 23 of which were in Basingstoke.

Basingstoke railway station today

They also supplied 29 free houses and owned a small steam vessel which they used to transport beer along the Basingstoke Canal to outlets connected with the new military camp at Aldershot.

Although the railway meant that people, goods and livestock could be transported quicker and cheaper than before, the loss of employment following the collapse of the coaching trade was not immediately offset by the benefits of being at the centre of a railway hub.

Any goods that Basingstoke manufactured were produced in small workshops and sold locally. It was not until the mid-1850s that the town began to take advantage of its position as an important railway junction and began a period of industrial expansion, manufacturing goods that were exported beyond its immediate vicinity and, eventually, worldwide. But that is another story, which I will tell next time.