The London Daily Newsletter Thursday 18 May

East Putney
East Putney is a London Underground station on the Wimbledon branch of the District line.

On 3 June 1889, East Putney station was inaugurated as part of an extension to Wimbledon from Putney Bridge station by the District Railway (DR), which is now known as the District line. The London and South Western Railway (LSWR) constructed the extension and commenced operating their own trains over the line on 1 July 1889. This was facilitated through connecting tracks from their Waterloo to Reading line at Point Pleasant Junction, located just west of Wandsworth station (now Wandsworth Town), to East Putney. The electrification of the District line from Putney Bridge to Wimbledon occurred on 27 August 1905, which completed the conversion from steam to electric operation. Southern Railway, the LSWR’s successor, discontinued regular passenger services between Waterloo and Wimbledon through East Putney on 4 May 1941. Nevertheless, the line remained under the ownership of British Rail until 1 April 1994 when it was sold to London Underground for £1. Prior to the sale, the station was branded as a British Rail station. South Western Railway currently employs the Wandsworth Town to Wimbledon route, including the connection between Point Pleasant Junction and East Putney, for empty stock movements, occasional service train diversions, and three daily services that run between Waterloo and the route in the early morning hours to maintain train crews’ knowledge of the route. However, these services do not stop at East Putney. There are also rare movements of Network Rail engineering trains and light engine movements through the station. East Putney is a proposed stop on the Chelsea-Hackney Line. It is envisaged that the station’s District Line service will be replaced by the new line.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

The Surrey Canal, Camberwell (1935) Algernon Newton began to exhibit regularly at the Royal Academy summer shows in 1923 and he continued to send paintings for several decades. His chosen subjects were views of London, mostly in the St John’s Wood, Hampstead, Kentish Town and Paddington areas. He was particularly fond of including a stretch of water in his compositions and often chose back-street views of canals, as here. He liked the slightly forlorn Regency and early Victorian terraces that faced the canals, and gave them a curiously uninhabited look. He once wrote: ’There is beauty to be found in everything, you only have to search for it; a gasometer can make as beautiful a picture as a palace on the Grand Canal, Venice. It simply depends on the artist’s vision.’

Algernon Newton (1880–1968)/Tate Collection

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster