Friday 2 May 2008

Bobbingworth: Blake Hall Station


John Betjeman is said to have liked Blake Hall Station, (photographed here after closure in 1985). Is this the truth, or was it an April Fool’s Joke?

The following is quoted from a recent book.

"This bucolic line [Epping to Ongar branch] was to become the most unlikely electric outpost of London Transport's Central Line when the last steam trains ran in 1957.

"Betjeman once said that his ideal job would have been station master at Blake Hall, a pretty little red brick station (now a private residence) along a line that might have been two hundred miles for the City of London in the 1950s" (Clancey p4).


Bibliography

Clancey, Jonathon. John Betjeman. On Trains (Methuen, 2006):

For more information on this branch line see my notes on ‘North Weald: Stepping Back Into History’.

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