The rail journey from Paddington to Bristol tells the story of the start of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s spectacular career as a civil engineer. He was thirty when construction of the Great Western Railway began in 1836, and he barely stopped working until he died, worn out, at fifty-three in 1859.
The first major structure out of Paddington, the Wharncliffe Viaduct, carries trains 66 feet above the valley of the River Brent on eight graceful arches.
Otherwise known as the Hanwell Viaduct, it’s named as a compliment James Stuart-Wortley, 1st Baron Wharncliffe (1776-1845), who chaired the parliamentary committee that considered and approved the passage of the Great Western Railway Act (1835). His lordship’s coat of arms embellishes the south face of the viaduct.
Opened in 1838, it’s not the first major railway viaduct – George Stephenson’s Sankey Viaduct in Lancashire dates from 1830 – but it can claim a fistful of other firsts.
It was Brunel’s first major civil-engineering project, yet with audacious confidence he designed it as the first bridge in the world to have hollow piers, saving cost without sacrificing structural strength.
The interiors of the piers are a favourite roost for colonies of bats, whose privacy is carefully safeguarded by naturalists.
Brunel saw the potential of Sir Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke’s new electric telegraph, and persuaded them to lay down experimental telegraph cables alongside the track. The system proved practical in 1839, making Hanwell the first viaduct in the world to carry a commercial telegraph. The system was opened to the public in 1843.
This proved invaluable when a suspected murderer, John Tawell, was identified as he boarded a train at Slough and a telegraph message, describing him as “a Kwaker [sic] with a brown great coat on which reaches his feet” and locating his first-class compartment, was passed to Paddington station. He was duly arrested when he alighted on New Year’s Day 1845.
Queen Victoria travelled by train for the first time from Windsor to London on June 13th 1842, and on at least one occasion is said to have ordered a stop on the viaduct so she could admire the view.
Brunel designed it to carry two broad-gauge tracks, and in 1877 a duplicate set of arches were added to the north side to carry a third line. The abolition of the broad gauge in 1892 enabled the viaduct to carry four standard-gauge tracks.
The viaduct continues to prove useful as technology develops. It now carries transatlantic telephone and latterly fibre-optic cables and overhead power-lines to propel electric trains.
It became one of the first structures in Britain to be listed as a building of architectural and historic importance in 1949, and was commended by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England for its “architectural panache”: its tapered piers are capped by stone cornices that carried the timber centering that supported the arches during construction.
The Wharncliffe Viaduct is easily accessible from Hanwell station, which is now served solely by the Elizabeth Line. On arrival from London turn right out of the station and head towards the A4060 Uxbridge Road. Continue away from London to Brent Meadow, an open space beside the Viaduct pub, which until Brunel came along was the eighteenth-century Coach & Horses. Footpaths lead directly to the viaduct.