There can be few people who are unaware that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the engineer of the Great Western Railway, but less well known is that he had previously carried out a preliminary survey for the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway. All the discussions of Brunel’s work I have seen agree that the exact route he proposed is not known, but was to the east of the line eventually built via the Lickey Incline.
The earliest account I have so far found covering the abortive initial B&G proposals is The Midland Railway: its Rise and Progress by Frederick S. Williams (1876), who described his historical sources as fthe fragmentary records of the dead, and…the fading recollections of the living”.1 It notes that Brunel was engaged in 1832 (which is wrong, although this date appears in many subsequent books, articles and websites) and that he avoided the gradients of the future Lickey Incline with a route “farther to the east” but gives no other detail.
I have seen only one attempt to show it on a map, by Peter Long and Wilbert Awdry in The Birmingham & Gloucester Railway, where they give a conjectural diagram of several early B&G proposals. It includes a much-simplified indicative route described as Brunel’s, which passes close to Evesham and Redditch (also incorrectly dated 1832).
This study looks at the context of Brunel’s involvement with the B&G and attempts to identify the line he proposed from his own records and contemporary newspapers.
Early proposals
The first scheme for a Birmingham to Bristol railway originated in late 1824. Several newspapers reported a meeting in Bristol on 13th December, at which it was agreed to form a company called the Bristol, Northern & Western Railway to build a line via Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Worcester. On 3rd February 1825 the Worcester Journal (quoting the Bristol Journal) noted the appointment of Josias Jessop, son of the canal engineer William Jessop, to establish and survey the route.
Jessop started work, but the project soon ran into problems. On 4th July Aris’s Birmingham Gazette reported that the railway would be built only as far north as Worcester, with onward traffic being transferred to the Worcester & Birmingham Canal. The Worcester Journal of 20th October announced that the Parliamentary submission would be postponed due, it said, to difficulties with identifying a route “unobjectionable to the land owners”. Aris’s published the company’s notice abandoning the project on 29th May 1826.
Although not then acknowledged, the main reason was probably lack of money. There was a financial crisis in 1825-6, usually known as ‘The (Great) Panic’.2 When the scheme was revived four years later it was stated that the abandonment had been because of “the state of the times”, which does suggest that the real problem was one of finance due to the crisis.
The completion of the Gloucester & Sharpness (originally Berkeley) Canal in 1827 enabled ships of up to 600 tons to reach Gloucester by eliminating an awkward section of the River Severn3 and influenced the next two attempts to connect Bristol, Gloucester and Birmingham by rail.
The 1830 schemes
After the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in September 1830, railway speculation took off in a way that foreshadowed the much larger ‘Railway Mania’ of the mid-1840s and was described in an article copied with slight variations by many newspapers in the second half of the following month. The added its own headline suggesting a mixture of cynicism and amusement on the part of its editor: ‘RAIL-ROAD
