Shrewsbury

Wellington station was just how I remembered it from 1959, or perhaps I’ve just seen some pictures of it since - an airy layout with four tracks, including the loops that serve the main platforms. It’s original buildings, dating from 1849, are thankfully still intact but not all the rooms are in regular use. A four-car Class 158 belonging to Transport for Wales was observed heading for Birmingham. We took the 10.54 in the other direction and due into Shrewsbury at 11.07, in the form of a Class 170 operated by West Midlands Railway.

The station, itself, looked remarkably unchanged over the intervening fifty-seven years since I was last here. The main buildings - now Grade II listed, the overbridge, retaining walls and the extended, shallow V-shaped metal canopies appear just as they were. Shrewsbury has an interesting location, with its centre perched on a hill that is almost surrounded by a meander in the River Severn. We had hoped for a riverside walk on our recent return but that path was still largely under water. The county town has 800 listed buildings including many with that distinctive black and white Tudor-patterned, front elevation.

The River View Café is located at The Parade shops, which occupy the stylish and beautifully preserved Grade II listed building that was completed in 1830 as the Royal Salop Infirmary. The winter sun gave us enough warmth to sit out on the terrace with panoramic views across the still swollen and fast-moving river below. I could pick out Severn Bridge Junction signalbox, itself Grade II listed and recently renovated. It is the largest operational signalbox in the world, a status it is expected to maintain for some time to come, as signalling through Shrewsbury remains a mixture of semaphore and colour light.

The Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery was featuring a display of the work of Ladybird book artists. I recognised some of the names, including Rowland Hiller, Ronald Lampitt and Septimus Scott, because they had also been railway poster and carriage print artists in that same mid-twentieth century era. Ian reminded me that Scott’s stunning Art Deco quad royal poster showing a bathing beauty sitting on the top diving board at New Brighton’s outdoor baths is on display at the entrance to the Station Hall at the NRM.

In 1831, Charles Darwin, who was born and educated in Shrewsbury, had boarded a horse-drawn coach outside the Lion Hotel, the town’s leading coaching inn, and headed off to join the Beagle. Over the next five years, he had collected the animal, plant and fossil samples from four continents that would lead to his theory of natural selection, published in 1859. According to his son, Francis, when Charles Darwin revisited Shrewsbury with his daughter in 1869, he had communicated to her a strong impression of his love for his old home town. The trains had been running into Shrewsbury for over twenty years by then. At least, they should have made his journey home a speedier and more comfortable affair.