History
The London and Brighton Railway Act, passed on 15 July 1837, granted the London & Brighton Railway Company the right to build a railway line from Norwood to Brighton, a branch line from Brighton to Shoreham-by-Sea and another from Brighton to Newhaven via Lewes. The line to Shoreham-by-Sea was completed first, in 1840, and the Brighton Main Line opened in its entirety in September 1841; but the route eastwards from Brighton towards Lewes was delayed until 8 June 1846. A new company, the Brighton, Lewes & Hastings Railway Company, was formed to build this line; John Urpeth Rastrick was employed as the surveyor and architect. The two companies and others amalgamated in July 1846 to form the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.
In the 1840s, the land northeast of Brighton station was undeveloped, consisting of fields. It lay in a steep-sided valley running from north to south, created by the River Wellesbourne (by then, reduced to an intermittently flowing, mostly underground winterbourne). Rastrick had to decide whether to cross this with an embankment or a viaduct. Local opinion favoured an embankment, and he faced opposition and criticism when he chose to build a viaduct. Nevertheless, he planned a route for it, and laid the foundation stone on 29 May 1845. Construction took 10 months: the structure was ready on 28 March 1846, more than two months before the line to Lewes opened. By the 1870s, dense terraced housing surrounded the viaduct: residential development was stimulated by the opening of the railway.
Brighton's most significant bombing raid of the Second World War severely damaged London Road Viaduct. At 12.30pm on 25 May 1943, Focke-Wulf fighter-bomber aircraft dropped several bombs on Brighton, five of which landed on the railway. One demolished two arches and one pier at the west end of the viaduct, two arches west of the Preston Road span, leaving the tracks spanning the gap in mid-air. Despite this, a temporary repair allowed trains to start using the viaduct again within 24 hours; in less than a month, the service was back to normal. Until the arches were fully repaired in September 1943, however, a 15 mph (24 km/h) speed restriction was enforced and Preston Road could be seen through the gaps between the sleepers where the brickwork had been blasted away. The replacement brickwork, darker than that of the main structure, can be seen from the road below.
Read more about this topic: London Road Viaduct
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