Still making it in Derby

 

On the day that Rolls Royce announced new contracts to produce the UK’s first small reactors for nuclear power stations, we went to Derby again, 55 minutes by train direct from Lowdham. Since we were last there, the old silk mill next to the River Derwent has been transformed into the excellent Museum of Making. Most of one upper floor is given over to the Midland Railway. It’s full of railway related artefacts, many of which still need sorting and explaining. Most of the ground floor is given over to a rather nice café.

The main reason for our visit was the exhibition “Wright of Derby: From the Shadows”, recently returned to Joseph Wright’s home city from the National Gallery. He was an extraordinary artist and I would strongly recommend anyone who can get there before the display ends in November to make the trip to Derby Museum and Art Gallery.

The Grade II listed triangle of buildings fronting onto Railway Terrace, which is the approach road to the station from the north, is now a conservation area that reminds us just how important the railway has always been for Derby. It includes an array of brick-built, slate roofed terraced streets provided for rail workers in the nineteenth century and the old Railway Institute. As the headquarters of the Midland Railway and as a location for manufacturing and maintaining locomotives and rolling stock, the city has a rich railway heritage and a long-established reputation for making things of quality and for the necessary skilled craftsmanship.

The façade of the modern station barely does justice to its strategic past, though it has been tidied up a bit with a paved pedestrian area and a bus interchange. Derby remains a busy and important junction for passenger traffic, where East Midlands Trains services between Sheffield and London St Pancras intersect with Cross Country trains from the north east to the south west of England, as well as the hourly east-west EMR link between Lincoln and Crewe.