History
The station was opened in May 1857 by the Midland Railway on a line linking the Midland to the Great Northern Railway at Hitchin. (Later the Midland gained its own London terminus at St Pancras railway station.)
It was designed by C.H. Driver, with particularly fine "pierced grill" cast ironwork on the platforms. Although it was altered between 1879 and 1884 when the line was quadrupled, and again in 1896, it is regarded as one of best remaining examples of Midland architecture.
At the time, the leather trade being in recession, over half of its population was on poor relief. The railway enabled the town to sell its products over a much wider area and restored it to prosperity.
In the 1970s the glass canopies became a maintenance headache for British Rail, who proposed to remove the tops of the cast iron columns and replace the glass canopies with plastic sheeting. Kettering Civic Society objected to the plans and the canopies and columns were reprieved, later to be sympathetically restored by Railtrack in 2000.
Read more about this topic: Kettering Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)