The influence of public carriers of goods, of which Pickford & Co. were the largest, resulted in their obtaining the rights of carriage and distribution of goods on the L&BR. Goods sheds had therefore to be provided for each individual carrier.
Pickfords, important carriers of goods by canal, had established their London headquarters at City Road Basin. The opening of the L&BR for goods traffic in 1839 prompted them to start diverting some of their trade to the railway. Joseph Baxendale, a partner of the firm, was a director of the Regent’s Canal Company and promptly bought a plot of land on the south side of the Regent’s Canal at the top of Oval Road. He asked the noted builder William Cubitt to create a special building which could transfer goods efficiently between road, water and rail. The idea of connecting road, rail and canal traffic in one building appears to have originated with Pickfords at Camden.
A large goods shed with extensive stabling in the basement was built at Pickford’s cost, designed by Lewis Cubitt and constructed by W&L Cubitt. It opened in December 1841. As seen in the painting, a timber bridge over the canal on the west side of Southampton Bridge provided a rail connection with the goods depot on the north bank. The chimney is that of the coke ovens and the white building on the southeast side of the bridge is Camden Flour Mills, which later became Gilbeys’ gin distillery.
Pickfords greatly increased the size of their shed c1845, when a reduction in carriage rates caused a large increase in traffic volume. The enlarged shed is shown in the picture below, which shows the short-lived Camden Station passenger platform across the mainline to Euston from a south-westerly viewpoint (near where St Mark’s Crescent now meets Gloucester Avenue). Beyond the four tracks is the ticket collectors’ platform and office and Bankriders’ waiting room, built in 1846. To the right lies Collard & Collard’s piano factory. Pickford’s shed occupies the rest of the middle distance, its western façade stepped back twice from its frontage along the mainline. On the left of the picture a sailing barge is glimpsed on the canal, and part of the iron railway bridge over the canal appears. Another shed built in 1845 by L&BR for Chaplin and Horne, the second largest of the goods carriers, can be seen beyond the canal on the left of the picture.
The goods carriage policy was reversed in 1846, when complaints about the carriers reaping all benefits from reduction in tolls obliged the rail company to purchase Pickfords’ shed and rent it back to Pickfords, as part of a new policy to carry out the rail carriage of goods through the railway company’s own agents. The interior of Pickfords shed at this time, seen below, shows the extensive storage deck and the means of loading the wagons.
While Pickfords gave up long-distance canal carriage from the end of 1847 in favour of becoming an agent for the railways, they retained their City Road premises and, although canal usage was greatly reduced, they continued to handle some lightered goods between the docks, City Road and the Camden Depot. They rented the goods shed until 1857, when it was reconstructed following a major fire, after which they shared it with Chaplin & Horne. A second fire in 1867 may have persuaded them to vacate it; the shed briefly became a potato market until in 1869 the LNWR persuaded Gilbeys to move their operations to the Goods Depot and take the shed on a 21 year lease.
Pickfords facilities at Camden can be compared with those built at King’s Cross little more than a decade later. At King’s Cross, canal boats had access into the Granary Basin, and thus into the two transit sheds. Transfer from one form of transport to another was across a ‘bank’, facilitated by a battalion of hydraulic cranes that were essential for transferring between the bank and a barge some five metres below.
All three forms of transport can be seen in this 1853 engraving of the Western Transit Shed: the cart road on the left, canal access centrally, and rail wagons on the right, with cranes mounted on the bank (Canal and River Trust). Hydraulic power was then in its infancy, but was employed from the start, the order to the Armstrong company being one of the first. Warehousing of general incoming and outgoing goods proved more controversial and was swiftly abandoned by the Company, although later taken up in some tenanted premises. A 10-ton crane on the north-west side of the Granary Basin was used to transfer heavy goods from rail to canal. However, canal movements declined towards the end of the nineteenth century and first the Coal and Stone Basin was filled in about 1898 for construction