Things outside London: the Ouse Valley Viaduct

George Bradshaw's Descriptive Railway Hand-Book (1861) is a marvellous, exhaustive, and really odd account of the new-fangled Victorian railway network and the places it connected   It blends semi-random factual dryness:

NUNEATON. 

POPULATION, 4859.

A telegraph station.

FAIRS.— Feb 18th, May, 14th, and October, 31st. 

with didactic instruction on how to think: 

The piquant Tudor or Elizabethan style...is so well adapted for buildings in which domestic requirements are to be studied.  It likewise harmonises thoroughly with the English scenery.  

God alone knows why Nuneaton station inspired this brief treatise on English architecture.  And, yup, just like we have Mrs Beeton's 1861 [snap!] Book of Household Management to thank for a century of considering garlic to be Dangerously Foreign, Bradshaw was indoctrinating NIMBYs into regarding Tudorbethan as The Best Style For Houses, way back in mid-Nineteenth Century.   

Also, George, what on earth is going on with your punctuation in that line about FAIRS?  Full stop, m-dash?  See me after.

Another bit of weirdness comes from the section on Balcombe ('Distance from station, 1 mile'), on the line from London to Brighton:

A short distance further on the line crosses the Ouse by the viaduct of that name, one of the finest works in the kingdom, which is only excelled by the viaduct over the Dee on the Chester and Shrewsbury Railway. It consists of 37 arches, and its summit commands extensive views of the surrounding country. 

As we are whirled along it, the prospect presents us with an unbounded scene of beauty, the country round being steeped in the most luxuriant verdure, and hill and dale, woodland and pasture land, succeed each other in infinite variety to the very verge of the horizon.

Are you okay, George?  There's some typically mangled language here, but anything that causes the author to lapse into a second-person reverie (lunchtime laudanum?) really must be seen.

And so I set off.  Somewhat whimsically, the mile-long walk from the station felt off-putting.  So I decided a better approach would be to take the train to Lingfield (literally just because I've never been there), and cycle the 90 minutes to get to the viaduct.  Perhaps I was channelling my inner George.

Lingfield station wasn't build until after 1861, so sadly we don't have Bradshaw's commentary on the building.  So, I'll repurpose his description of the countryside surrounding Statford: 'peculiarly English...but nothing striking'.  Ooh, you bitch, George.

Closer inspection suggests that the builders were likewise off their hods on opium - the banded brickwork doesn't flow across to the extension on the left, and neither does brick bond.  For that matter, the upstairs window is sporting a Gothic arch, whereas the ones beneath it are Romanesque, and the extension's doorways has lost the polychromatic brick trim.  One chimney stack is missing its pots.  It's like an architectural Spot The Difference.  Also, there appears to be one CCTV camera and one big bin per person in the village.

Using Google Maps for cycling directions is the unholy trinity of frustrating, fascinating and deeply weird.  Pootling merrily along a road, it'll suddenly decide to send you off past some bins (a recurrent theme) to a quagmire choked with nettles, mud and stiles which is notionally a path but is mightily bike-unfriendly.  But, just occasionally, it'll uncover something rather lovely.  Directing me down the back of a multi-storey car park in East Grinstead (here we go again...), the path improbably revealed itself to be a few miles of disused rail track, Worth Way.  Lots of dappled light, passing under old bridges, and no cars.  Delightful.

Anyway.  We're not here for nature - we're here for opiate-addled inspection of Big Piles of Victorian Bricks.  And, cor, it's a cracker.

Some George-style facts: 

HEIGHT, 96, feet.

ARCHES.—37, semi-circular.

BRICKS. Yes; 11 million, bricks.

The Wikipedia page tells a sorry tale of our best efforts to let this poor thing fall to pieces, but it was finally restored in the 1990s to preserve this really astonishing confection.

I get happy Barbican vibes from the paired normal/inverted arches here (Brandon Mews - image from here)

Final warning to cyclist: getting to Balcombe station from the viaduct involves climbing the hill that they didn't want the trains to have to.