It’s taken years and years – but works have finally got going on building a second entrance to Queenstown Road station. This was originally proposed way back in 2014, as part of Taylor Wimpey’s ambitious Battersea Exchange development, which combined lots of little bits of land, two railway viaducts and a school, to create new flats, shops and office space (and a replacement school).
We have reported on it many times since then – mostly noting that there have been new delays, or small changes to the plans bit with no actual works underway! The development itself completed years ago, with a layout clearly designed to accommodate the second entrance – but nothing happened on the station aspect. But after many delays, things are now progressing quickly. This is most visible from the back of the building, where the brickwork of the entrance archway is in place, the once-overgrown and abandoned back yard of the station now has steps installed, and the electrics and lighting are installed.
What’s being done is quite straightforward – we’ll have an entrance straight on to Patcham Terrace, which is a new road built by the developers that currently ends behind the station (which is in yellow on the diagram below).
It’ll be a useful link – it connects the station more directly to the school in the development, and also bring a bit of pedestrian traffic to Patcham Terrace, which is a rather isolated near-dead-end road where the small shops and offices under the railway arches have been slow to let. Because both the entrances will be outside the station gateline, anyone coming from Queenstown Road towards Battersea Park Station or the new tube station at the power station will be able to use this as a shortcut during station opening hours.
It’s a nice, simple, and above all cheap project. There are steps because the level at the back doesn’t match the station level, but there’s no expensive lift included as the front entrance is already accessible (ish).
The slightly frustrating thing about this is that, if the project was proposed now, it would be a lot less likely to get the go ahead – because since the plans were originally agreed Queenstown Road has seen a huge decline in passenger numbers, losing nearly two thirds of its passenger numbers, and doing so despite the population of the town around it exploding thanks to a load of new developments.
Covid and working from home played their part, and some local commuter traffic towards Waterloo has clearly also shifted across to the new Northern Line extension, which opens up more options for onward travel than the short overland journey to Waterloo used to. But the main reason is that in 2022 South West Trains slashed the number of trains that stop at the station, from eight to just four an hour. They sacrificed half of the stops at this station, as from their point of view these stopping trains were just blocking the line for smallish numbers of passengers – who were mostly also making relatively unprofitable short journeys to Waterloo – to make space for more of their more profitable long-distance trains from further out to get to Waterloo at peak times.
Worse still, the four trains hour that still do stop at peak times aren’t evenly spread through the hour, so you can easily be waiting over 20 minutes for the next train. All the evidence suggests that maximum-15-minute waits are the magic number where usage goes up, because passengers feel comfortable in just turning up rather than worrying about checking train times beforehand. The passenger numbers graph below (from ever-useful site Railstats) shows how severe the impact has been! Speaking bluntly, it’s fairly clear that South West Trains couldn’t care less about this minor station – but at least the small upgrade funded mainly by Taylor Wimpey has happened.
All is not lost, and the station still sees a fairly steady stream of people from south west London use the station to access Battersea Park, and Battersea Power Station. It remains comfortably within the top third of the busiest stations in the UK, even if it’s a shadow of the days when it saw nearly 2 million passengers a year (more than several northern cities!), and the more convenient access to the east that the new entrance will enable may see usage edge upwards again to the point where the decision to drop half of its train services may be revisited. There have also been long running plans to repoen Platform 1, which has been abandoned since the early 1990s (and which unusually is still made of wood!). This could allow local (‘Windsor’) and mainline services to be kept more separate – providing additional capacity on the approach to London Waterloo; if this is ever done it would allow a proper train service at Queenstown Road again.
One of the reasons for adding the second entrance was to create a better link to Battersea Park station – which has new-entrance plans of its own. Battersea Park’s passenger numbers are much higher that Queenstown Road, at nearly 2 million a year. After a notable dip in usage (like all other stations) during Covid lockdowns, passenger numbers there have bounced back and been going up and up, as it has become a key access route for visitors from all over south east London and beyond to get to Battersea Power Station, as well as the park itself (where the Saturday morning parkruns alone regularly attract well over 1000 people). The roads east and west of the station used to be a quiet area, but now you can’t miss the stream of people walking along the road between the two day and night.
Battersea Park station is long overdue for step-free access, as it is currently a bit of an accessibility nightmare and a borderline safety hazard, with the exceptionally steep wooden stairways within the station. This project has also been running for years, and unfortunately as the article we wrote on that project in 2023 makes rather clear, it’s a more awkward and expensive project that Queenstown Road’s second entrance – as it’s a really complicated thing to actually deliver, with steep stairs, narrow spaces, lots of old structures in the way, and not a lot of space on the platforms. And we have an update on that one – but that will be in another post in a few days.
This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.
