The plan for a Thameside central station by engineer Perceval Parsons (1819-1892)

A UNIQUE map of Charing Cross from the 1850s, illustrating plans for a grand central station that was never built, has been unearthed by an antiquarian bookseller.

Believed to be the only one in existence, the rare find casts a light on what central London could have looked like if the project had not been abandoned due to the Crimean War.

The map of Charing Cross by the engineer Perceval Parsons shows plans for a grand railway hub that would connect the many mainline stations popping up across the Victorian capital.

The find is one of 200 lots gathered together over the past 15 years by Jarndyce Books staffer Joshua Clayton, who put the catalogue together.

He and colleagues searched high and low for rare manuscripts, maps and pamphlets in time for the 200th anniversary of the country’s modern passenger railway system.

He said: “We’ve generally been on the lookout for quirky and interesting items throughout this time, with an emphasis on the unusual and the visual.

Jarndyce team members Joshua Clayton and Hester Malin at the booksellers in Great Russell Street

“The items have come from a variety of sources, including auctions and other dealers.

“Some items are very rare, with only one or two other examples traced… a prospectus for a proposed railway in London we have not been able to locate another copy”.

The catalogue of the 200 unique items has prices from £20 up to £2,750, and will be launched at the York Book Fair.

It begins with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington line in September 1825.

A rare print of the original suspension bridge on the route, which failed and had to be replaced, is included.

Mr Clayton added: “There are early railways maps, drawings of locomotives, letters – including one from George Stephenson, 1834, and another from Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1838, – travellers’ guides, timetables, original manuscripts and documents dating from the early years of steam, through broadsides, pamphlets, plans of projected lines, satirical prints, photographs and ephemera.”

The George Stephenson letter to his son Robert discusses designing steam engines. In it, he wonders if it would be better to have two funnels for smoke and steam rather than one.

And the Charing Cross hub plans shed a light on the life of the engineer Parsons, from Stockwell, who got a job on the Eastern Counties Railway and by 1850 had his own engineering business in London where he designed new railway fittings such as signals.

In 1853 he turned his eye to create a new London railway – following the path of today’s Metropolitan and District lines – that would bring routes to a massive central station in the Embankment Gardens.

Perceval Parsons’s 1853 proposal for a London railway ‘to afford direct railway communication between the city and Westminster and all the western suburbs… and to unite the whole of the existing metropolitan railways both north and south of the Thames and provide them with a general central station’

Robert Stephenson approved the plans and was due to be a consultant engineer, but war with Russia in the Crimea saw the project mothballed and then dropped.

Investments were put on ice during the uncertain period and the project was never restarted.

The detailed plans, printed on two large linen maps, are thought to be the only ones in existence.
Mr Clayton said: “It is a handsomely produced prospectus, including two large folding hand-coloured maps, for a grandiose railway engineering project to connect all the major railway termini in London.

As Parsons explains in his opening statement, ‘The great desideratum of a connecting link to unite the termini of the various metropolitan railways, and at the same time afford them access to the heart of London, has long been admitted, and a line that would affect this, and at the same time give a like accommodation to the principal suburbs, would be of still greater importance’.

“In this scarce pamphlet, Parsons outlines the railway and its likely route, and provides a rough estimate of the costs. The intention was for an entirely new terminus at Great Scotland Yard, partially built on an embankment, and with a main ornamental frontage some 800 feet in length.

“The project was by all accounts favourably regarded but was never realised, due in part to the onset of the Crimean War. After the end of hostilities, less costly alternatives had been put forward, and Parsons’s great vision was quietly forgotten.”