London's Lost Railways

Abandoned stations. Ghost platforms. Hidden viaducts and tunnels. Overgrown embankments and tantalising fragments of track concealed in plain sight.

In London’s Lost Railways Paul Talling – our best-loved investigator of London’s lost history – sets out on foot to trace thirteen of the capital’s former railway lines and unearth their secrets. The stories he uncovers take us from the west London line completed as one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s final projects to a magnificent Gothic terminus built by a hotelier to attract wealthy guests to his country retreat; from a railway constructed to serve Victorian London’s booming docks to long-forgotten routes that carried pleasure-seekers to Greenwich Park and the Crystal Palace.

Together, these lost lines reveal the ambition and the rivalries that made Victorian London – and the forces that transformed it. Through wartime destruction, post-war redevelopment, the decline of industry and changing patterns of leisure, Talling charts the changing fortunes of London’s railways and their impact on the city we know today.

Packed with maps, archival material and colour photographs, London’s Lost Railways brings a forgotten world back to life, revealing the traces it has left across modern London, and inviting us to see the capital from a different angle.