The Railway and Chivers Factory
The opening of the Cambridge & St. Ives Branch by the Eastern Counties Railway Company on August 17, 1847 fuelled the growth of the villages and the expansion of companies within. Steven Chivers was one of the first to seize the new opportunity that this brought. In 1850 he bought an orchard next to the line giving him access to London and the north of England and in 1870 he sent his sons to open a fruit distribution centre in Bradford. Their customers were mainly jam makers and this was quickly noted by the boys. Following an extra good harvest of fruit in 1873 they got their father to let them make their first jam in a barn off Milton Road, Impington. This proved a successful venture, and within two years the Victoria Works jam factory had opened on the orchard site. By 1895 Chivers had diversified into many other areas including lemonade, marmalade and dessert jellies, and were the first large scale commercial canners in Europe. By 1939 the company owned most of the large farms and estates in Histon and Impington, Impington windmill and 8,000 acres (32 km2) of land around East Anglia, and the factory employed up to 3,000 people. The factory and farms were sold to Schweppes in 1959, though the farms were bought back by the family in 1961.
In the 1960s eighty trains a day were scheduled at Histon railway station. This caused many delays for road users and prompted the building of the bridge road bypass, opened by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in 1963. The road was originally scheduled to be constructed in the 1930s but was delayed because of World War II. However, fewer than ten years after it opened, on October 5, 1970, passenger services were withdrawn from the line, though seasonal deliveries of fruit continued to be delivered by rail to Chivers factory until 1983. The 1980s saw an end to the old factory. In a management buyout the site was sold to developers and a new five million pound factory was built at the rear of the property by new owners by Premier Foods, for the production of Sun-Pat peanut butter and Smash instant mashed potatoes, as well as jams. Vision Park, a business park, was built on the old site and all rail services stopped in 1992. Following removal of the rail lines, the route of the railway through Histon and Impington became the route for the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway.
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