Island Gardens DLR Station

Above: Helicopter view looking south near the southern end of the Isle of Dogs, about 1988. The Royal Naval College and Greenwich Pier are to be seen along the top of the view. A one-carriage DLR train is approaching Island Gardens DLR Stations which had two short platforms, forming a ‘V’ at the end of the line.

If you travel on the DLR these days, the network is now so expanded from its early times that it is easy to forget how restricted it was when it first started. Most of the stations that have been added to the original layout have not changed much because these stations were built with the knowledge that trains would be three carriages in length. When the network was first built, all the stations were only long enough to accommodate single-carriage trains. Many of the original stations were initially extended for two-carriage trains and then extended again a few years later to allow for three carriages.

Many people will probably have forgotten the original stations on the Isle of Dogs. Speaking as a photographer, my only regret is not taking enough images of the stations in their early state so that I had pictures of ‘before’ and ‘after’ to show all the changes. A picture which does exist shows the original Island Gardens from a helicopter.

Island Gardens DLR Station was reached by the trains using part of an old brick-arched viaduct, built in Victorian times. It had been unused for decades and the railway lines were laid out on top of it. The very last part – the southern end where the terminus for the DLR was constructed – required some modern concrete arches to complete the line. It was not a very useful terminus because the southern end of the Isle of Dogs was hardly a destination in its own right. People arriving there were usually those who wanted to visit Greenwich and so they had to alight from the train and walk through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, with the ‘Cutty Sark’ at its southern end.

When Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the new railway, in 1987, she unveiled a plaque on Island Gardens Station and took her ride on one of the trains from Island Gardens DLR Station.

Above: The Victorian viaduct, which carried trains on the DLR to the old Island Gardens terminus when it first opened, is now disused once more.

When the DLR was extended south to Greenwich and Lewisham, the small DLR terminus was dismantled and the line was put underground to enable it to cross the Thames via a new tunnel. It does not emerge into the daylight until its new interchange with Greenwich Railway Station.

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