Join us for a fascinating deep dive into our library’s extensive railway collections, tailored for researchers and enthusiasts alike. Discover historical documents, rare maps, and archival materials that trace the evolution of rail transport in Britain, and learn how to navigate specialised collections for your research needs.
The event features two talks:
Railways across metropolises, nations and continents. Discovering the early railway plans of London and Paris in the Senate House Library by Professor Carlos Lopez-Galviz
This talk will contrast two rare holdings of Senate House Library, discuss what they tell us about the early years of railway development in London and Paris, and locate them in the broader context of urban development of 19th-century cities. The first is the Report of the Directors of the London Grand Junction Railway (1835), one of the early proponents of connecting the main line railway termini built by private companies competing for goods and passenger traffic into and out of London. The second is a study of railways connecting Paris to Belgium, and Belgium to England dating from 1837, encouraging transcontinental travel, also for goods and passengers, linked directly to the French capital. Each in its own way provides a glimpse of the aspirations that railways engendered in the early years of their operation and of the needs they were to meet in two different cities. Each encapsulates too germane visions of underground travel in a way familiar to us all nearing two centuries later.
Carlos is Professor of History and Social Futures in Lancaster University. His books include Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (2016); Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (2019); and the Routledge International Handbook of Social Futures (2022). From 2020 to 2024, Carlos served as President of T2M, the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility.
England’s Places and Peoples transformed? by Dr Adam Chapman
The railway as an agent of transformation is a cliche. The arrival (and loss), of a railway to a community could have far reaching impacts. The collections in Senate House Library can provide insights into the change to individual lives through new forms of employment – the navvies and railway workers – and opportunities for trade. The biggest impact, in many places, arguably, was physical: new barriers in the landscape, diversion of roads and waterways, new, acquisitive landowners operating dangerous machinery. This talk will look at how the railways interacted with the communities of England, most still rural, with the coming of the ‘Railway Age’ using business and legal records, employment records, and how these engineering interventions were received across England.
Dr Adam Chapman is Lecturer in Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR). He is also Co-General Editor of the Victoria History of the Counties of England, better know as the VCH which since 1899 has aimed to produce a place by place history of England from the earliest times to the ever-moving now.