Former Reading Room For Wolverton Railway Works

891/0/10003 STRATFORD ROAD 06-FEB-04 Wolverton Former Reading Room for Wolverton Rail way Works

GV II Former Reading Room, for the London and Birmingham Railway, empty at the time of inspection (2003). 1839 with minor C20 alterations. Red brick in English Bond. with some stone dressings. Hipped slate roof with roof lights and ridge ventilators. Restrained Classical style. EXTERIOR: Long east elevation to Canal has 6 first floor windows with some of those to ground floor blocked by a lower addition; slightly lower single bay to rear. West elevation faces the 1846 former locomotive shed (q.v.), to which it is attached with later in-fill structures. Windows have steel frames with 12 lights, under stone lintels with keyblocks. INTERIOR: Not inspected HISTORY: Built in 1839 as a reading room for the London and Birmingham Railway at the Wolverton Works, which had opened the previous year. The first buildings constructed were a passenger station, workshop, gas works, and five rows of houses; the reading room was one of several buildings constructed immediately afterwards to serve the social and spiritual needs of the railway employees. As a library and reading room it had 700 books and numerous periodicals; the building also served as a Wesleyan Chapel before the Chapel was built, and fulfilled several light industrial uses in the later C19 and early C20. SOURCES: West, Bill. The Trainmakers: The Story of Wolverton Works. Barracuda Books, 1982. Head, F.B. Stokers and Pokers; or the London and North Western Railway, 1849.

The 1839 brick former Reading Room is listed as an early and interesting example of social provision within a large scale works that has strong group value, and that survives relatively unaltered as an historically important component of the nationally important Wolverton Railway Works.

Group value with the other listed railway buildings at Wolverton, particularly the adjacent Former Railway Works Building (q.v.)