Cannon Street station

Cannon Street station stands on the north bank of the Thames in the City of London. It is a railway terminus reached by the Cannon Street Railway Bridge, a brick viaduct 210 metres long that carries eight platforms. The station sits beside London Stone, a relic of Roman London, and is served by London Buses routes 15 and 17. Its approach tracks link it to London Bridge and Charing Cross, forming part of the South Eastern Main Line. The station is managed by Network Rail and is one of eighteen stations in the country under its control. The station was built in 1866 on the site of the medieval Steelyard, the Hanseatic League’s trading base from the 10th century until 1598. It was designed by Sir John Hawkshaw and John Wolfe-Barry, who created a grand iron-and-glass train shed topped by two Wren-style towers 41 metres high. The City Terminus Hotel opened the following year, providing passenger facilities and an imposing street frontage. The hotel later hosted the foundation congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 and is mentioned in T. S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land*. Today visitors find a busy commuter station with entrances on Cannon Street and Dowgate Hill. The original platform 1 was removed during a late-19th-century refurbishment, leaving seven platforms for Southeastern services. The brick viaduct above Upper Thames Street contains remains of Roman buildings protected as a scheduled monument. The station’s weekday services run mostly for commuters from Kent and south-east London, with occasional long-distance trains introduced in the 2010s.