Acton Town
The first station in London, according to the A to Z
In this series of the Underground stations of London, this time I’m turning to the first alphabetically (Abbey Wood and Acton Main Line being on the Elizabeth Line and not the tube).
During April 2024, I did a walk in the area as part of my series whereby I’m walking between every station. I had been long putting off doing this walk. I am more than familiar with the Acton Town area - I think that the most expensive fish and chips in London area can be bought here. To be honest, walking along Bollo Lane (towards Chiswick Park station) was just about the dullest direction I could imagine. In my distant brief days of the 1980s working for London Underground Ltd, I completed a signalling course at the Acton Town Works that I’d started at Earl’s Court the week before. I remember nothing of what I was taught.
But I did remember the entrance to Frank Pick House and Acton Works on Bollo Lane. This road seemed then to be semi-derelict industrial buildings amidst post-war residential blocks of flats of the ‘concrete facia’ sort. It was not a road I considered that I needed to return to in a hurry but Acton Town to Chiswick Park needed to be walked some day.
Last time I visited was 2021 was to take photos of ‘The Mosaic House’ and Bollo Lane was an unattractive building site.
It has changed immensely after my previous visit and I am now able to tell the story how (but maybe not why).
But with tales of Bollo Lane, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The station here opened on 1 July 1879, and was operated by the District Railway. It was a terminus until the railway extended lines to Hounslow Town and Park Royal & Twyford Abbey in 1883 and 1903 respectively.
The station was originally called Mill Hill Park, named after a couple of former large houses to the station’s north east. This was a much better name for the station, given the proliferation of Acton station names in every variation and compass direction.
As can be seen from the 1860s map above of the area around the future station, an even better name would have been Gunnersbury as the Victorian centre of that place was just along Gunnersbury Lane and marked on the map.
The station would be built at the corner where the label Foot Br above indicates the top of Bollo Lane. Interestingly there were many fish ponds in the immediate area. One was beside Bollo Bridge taking Stamford Brook under Gunnersbury Lane, one was in the grounds of Gunnersbury Lodge and one under the future site of the marvellous Art Deco Gunnersbury Court at the top of Bollo Lane.
Here is the same area thirty years later with the local fish ponds numbering five. As the suburb developed, it was evidently very bad news if you were a fish. It would have been carnage as your pond - fishy ancestors stretching back generations - was filled in and built over.
Development was progressing on the south east side of the 1890s map - Enfield Road (the corner of which was a gelatine works), Osborne Road and Hanbury Road. This was poorer housing. The soon-to-be-buried Stamford Brook separated this from Heathfield Road - a crescent-shaped road encircling the Mill Hill House estate.
With the projected appearance of the station, Mill Hill House and its grounds were purchased in 1877. A gated (yes - even in Victorian times!) private estate was established, featuring three roads: Heathfield Road, Avenue Crescent and Avenue Gardens.
The original 1879 station was rebuilt in February 1910 and renamed Acton Town on 1 March that year.
The Piccadilly line began serving the station on 4 July 1932 and Charles Holden designed a new station, employing a modern European style with brick, reinforced concrete and glass.
The areas to the north and west of Acton Town station are solidly middle-class and perhaps we might return to their stories. But not in this article. It’s time to wander down Bollo Lane. You can view the video of this wander by clicking on the link at the bottom of this article.
Bollo Lane is a very old road, the name dating back to the twelfth century and the Bollo Bridge over Stamford Brook we saw before. The earliest reference is as Bolhollane in 1408, the name meaning the ‘lane at Bull Hollow’. I don’t know what Bull Hollow was, mind.
Once we are past the 1930s Gunnersbury Court, Bollo Lane now is a procession of modern blocks. They are all sightly in different styles but they can be categorised as "21st century world generic". We could be in Dubai, Dublin or Dieppe. The buildings would look the same. If the architect has cut costs, it will just be a square box with no vernacular features. Bollo Lane at least has some variety.
These were all going up on my previous visit in August 2021 (photo below).
We can credit one particular architectural firm for this proliferation of cube-shaped buildings all over the world. The firm was called Togawa Smith Martin and it was active in the mid 1990s.
In particular we can blame (or credit) Tim Smith - the 'Smith' of Togawa Smith Martin.
In the mid 1990s, a new Los Angeles building code had reclassified fire-retardant-treated-wood as 'non combustable'.
This was a game changer - wood framed buildings had been limited to two storeys before that because of the perceived fire risk.
The new rule meant that non-combustible wood framed buildings were now allowed to be five storeys (if they had a sprinkler system). Before that, such buildings needed to be steel-framed.
Tim Smith realised that if he laid a concrete podium floor - and concrete-encased stairwells and lift shafts - he was allowed to construct a five-storey wood framed building above, under the new rules.
This allowed buildings to be taller, wider and cheaper. The building cost nearly halved.
In 1996, Smith designed the first new LA building to use this method.
Federal building codes were relaxed in the US in 2000 to match, and this type of building spread from Los Angeles nationwide. The building style became known as a ‘5 over 1’ in the US.
Two main variations developed. One variant where the ground floor over the concrete podium was devoted to retail and another where there was a parking garage on the bottom. Above were apartments. Lots of them.
The style then spread to other countries.
Without the US restrictions, these new buildings in other countries could be higher.
Building with wood has a lot of benefits:
Wood is cheap
Wooden-framed buildings can be built quickly and using prefabricated materials
Wood is better for the environment than concrete and steel. Carbon emissions are way down
If it catches fire, wood frame fires can spread slowly and be predictable. Steel and concrete fires are much more unpredictable
This has benefits if a government wishes to build a lot of affordable housing.
Downsides include the issue that wood expands and contracts. So in a wetter climate like the UK, there can be cracks that rain can penetrate if it's built on the cheap leading to water damage and then mould and mildew become issues.
In recent decades, London has excelled at creating jobs and opportunities. But at the same time, London has failed to build enough homes.
There's a generation of Londoners who cannot afford their rent and many are forced to live in overcrowded or unsuitable conditions.
For many in this generation, home ownership is a distant dream.
So any housing initiatives which causes a lot to be built helps out the young. But this has to be balanced with urban planning needs:
Protecting the green belt
The best use of brownfield sites
Ensuring infrastructure keeps up
And then there's the need of the existing community. Sudden high housing density in established neighbourhoods will need some adjustments.
At time of walking in April 2024, the Bollo Lane Post Office depot marked the boundary between all the new builds and the remaining brownfield sites - deserted offices, showrooms and industrial estates. No doubt the days of these buildings between the Post Office depot and Colville Road are numbered and new builds are a-coming.
Continuing along Bollo Lane, just after Colville Road, we once would have been crossed by District Line tracks.
The Acton Town to South Acton shuttle was a District Line service connecting the two stations via a now closed spur. It was both known as ‘The Ginny’ and also as ‘the kettle run’ since the crew could set off from Acton Town, travel the short distance to South Acton and back and the tea making started at Acton Town would be finished upon their return. The South Acton branch was closed on 28 February 1959 due to low usage. There is little evidence left of its existence.
Further on, there are two level crossings along Bollo Lane. Level crossings in London are rare as hen's teeth and here there are two. The first one is over what it still called the Broad Street and Old Kew Line. The next is the Old North London line - now part of the London Overground.
To finish this article, I’ll complete the videoed walk I made to Chiswick Park station - which isn’t so far from the level crossings.
This area is called Acton Green and it was a remote hamlet before the railways came. The area consisted of orchards during the early nineteenth century and just after the second level crossing in the 1860s was a house called Fairlawn Villa, amidst all the apples and pears. This house survived quite late on before Weston Road was built over the site around the turn of the twentieth century.
The map above not only shows the orchards but the Hammersmith to Richmond railway line along the bottom edge. From the Acton Lane bridge over this railway, the branch to Acton Town was built ten years after the map’s publication.
From Bollo Lane, as part of the video walk, I decided to hang a left into Antrobus Road (mainly because of its great name). Antrobus is a village in Cheshire, about seven miles south of Warrington though the road sounds like it’s named after a Roman emperor.
The orchard upon which Antrobus Road was built, was purchased by the British Land Company. This was a company set up to develop land around London and build houses. They set out new roads here including Antrobus Road and Cunnington Street during the 1870s, The plots were swiftly occupied by modest houses, primarily for laundry workers and brickmakers.
There are some great old street signs in the area.
This particular development lacked usage restrictions, leading the area to evolve into a mixed industrial and residential area. Houses doubled as laundries, some residents kept pigs, and businesses included bone-crushing plants and abattoirs. The local board investigated conditions with officials persistently attempting to remove pigs and noxious trades.
Continuing along Cunnington Street and into Fairlawn Grove, we reach a wildly different sort of a house.
Carrie Reichardt’s five-bedroomed house is quite remarkable - a building covered from top to bottom in colourful mosaic tiles. The project first began in the 1990s. The house is now an ‘uncensored public mural’. Carrie Reichardt decided to use her home as a canvas, so she could do exactly what she pleased. Neighbourhood opinions are, it must be said, mixed
Fairlawn Grove is named after a house called Fairlawn upon which the road was laid out. Fairlawn Villa, beside the level crossing featured earlier, was built by the owners of Fairlawn to move into as once they sold it to the British Land Company. This is why it lasted thirty years after its namesake before the family sold Fairlawn Villa too.
Ravenscroft Road completes the journey to Chiswick Park station. Chiswick Park station is an architectural marvel but its given name confused the issue since the area was already called Acton Green. Since we’re moving around every underground station during this series of articles, it’s a station we’ll return to.
An interesting article as usual.
I spent two months living in Gunnersbury Court on Bollo Lane in the mid 80s and so I recognised a lot of what you described.
Hi, there was a similar cottage opposite the other signal box but gone before my time. My earliest recollection is that between the two level crossings was Express Dairy and they had a siding off the line opposite no 95. During the second world war there was an Anderson shelter in the garden and afterwards it was dug up and rebuilt in the garden and used as a shed, where I played as a child. It was still there a few years ago but alas gone now. The house looks to be in a poor state and I guess it will be demolished. The site must be a prime piece of real estate