Enter the shiny glass and steel station facade at Blackfriars and the world is your Oyster(card) as to your destination. Places as diverse as Upminster and Ealing Broadway, as glamorous as Turnham Green or East Putney can be easily reached.
When the main line station was opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway with the name St. Paul’s in 1886 the destinations were a little further afield and dare I say, some were a little more glamorous. These are celebrated today in a wall of bricks showing the destinations that the station was connected to.
Today these take the form of a single wall that sits inside the station concourse, but originally the bricks formed two separate columns that flanked each side of the station entrance.
The station was renamed Blackfriars in 1937 to avoid confusion with St Paul’s tube station. It was rebuilt in the 1970s, and updated in 2012 and the original railway bridge was demolished in 1985.
St Paul’s Station 1889