A new station opened yesterday on the outskirts of Chelmsford, the first on the Great Eastern Main Line in over 100 years. It's Beaulieu Park, a swish boxy station wedged between the A12 and an expanding housing estate of the same name which it was specifically built to serve. It's bus-friendly, bike-friendly and commuter-friendly, and served by half-hourly trains to London with a doubled-up boost at peak times. All it's missing is somewhere to buy a coffee, a convenient footbridge and anyone living nearby, but these will come. [12 photos]
Beaulieu Park is a 3 platform station, which is clever because generally only two of these are used so fast trains could easily nip through the middle. It's got fairly generic modular architecture because this helps keep costs down, but also an attractive ribbed timber roof because that's a cost-effective means of bringing character. It has a broadconcourse with eight ticket machines but no ticket office, only an intermittently-staffed information desk. It has a lift-enabled footbridge and staircases broad enough to cope with what will one day be the rush for the 0753 to Liverpool Street. I'm particularly delighted it's finished because I've been kicked off onto a rail replacement bus to Billericay far too often over the last couple of years.
The down platform has the best shelter and the up platform the broadest canopy, plus a surprisingly poky waiting room half shuttered-off in readiness for someone opening a coffee kiosk. Toilets are provided on the island platform and just inside the gateline, which is the correct way to design a station. All the most up-to-date signage is installed, including a touchscreen panel which allows you to check live train times and other key information. And if you walk to the far end of the platform a separate footbridge notionally provides an emergency escape route but also offers a decent elevated vantage point, with views not generally available in the flatter parts of Essex.
On Day One you would also have found avid devotees flocking to the new station to film whatitlookslike and to say they'd been. Most contrived to catch the first train out at 7.20, rather fewer were left by mid-morning and by the afternoon it was just lone adolescents and excitable boys whose parents were giving them the best day out. A barista's cart was doing a roaring trade, there being nothing on offer from units labelled Retailers coming soon. The Greater Anglia goodie table was in full effect with free cupcakes for the earliest risers, plus notepads, waterbottles and pens from the corporate cupboards. By the time I arrived I had to make do with two badges and a red polypropylene carrier bag, which I shall add to my stash of unused promotional freebies. The hired saxophonist didn't hang around past noon.
Outside it soon becomes clear that this is an integrated transport hub, with separate zones for cars, bikes and buses. The car park is extensive, as befits a potential park and ride, even if the pay machines aren't yet working (due to a technical issue) so you need to use your phone. There's also a separate overspill car park a good hike away, run by a completely different operator, although both have the same fees. For a short shopping trip to Colchester you might get away with "£5.50 for up to 3 hours" but commuters need to stump up £11.50, effectively increasing the cost of their return journey by 20%. The 'kiss and ride' drop-off point is more convenient but has a time limit of 10 minutes and no return within 20 minutes, so could be chaotic if the trains are late.
For cyclists there are 500 free spaces in the racks, which at present is merely good forward-planning, or you can pay to lock your bike away inside something more secure. It's the bus station that's perhaps the most surprising, a long stand with no fewer than eight bays, five of which are already being used. The local bus company are using Beaulieu Park station as the terminus for three routes which thread round the contorted reaches of the local housing estate, thus can collect and deliver anyone without a car, should any such resident exist. Only buses and bikes are allowed along the new western access road, car drivers have to go the long way via the bypass or the mega-roundabout. Zero points to the designers who assumed pedestrians would take the long route via the zebra crossing and the bike sheds rather than cutting directly across the bus station.
The peculiar thing about Beaulieu Park is that it's been built to serve 14000 new homes, thousands of which are already built, but nobody lives within a five minute walk of the station and barely anyone within ten. One reason for the lack of residential occupancy is that the station sits alongside the A12 and the other side of the road is all trading estates and service stations. It's by no means simple to get across on foot, requiring the unpleasant crossing of a busy and very complex road junction, not all of which is signal controlled. Pedestrians also have to divert via a new overpass some distance from the station, built as the start of a new Chelmsford bypass, because the proposed shortcut footbridge was scrapped by the government to save money. I do not recommend giving it a try.
But the main reason there's no housing by the station is that the adjacent land is the former Great Park of a Tudor mansion, the Palace of Beaulieu. Henry VIII bought it off Anne Boleyn's father in 1516, rebuilt it in brick and brought his court to stay for a month in the summer of 1527. Following a succession of noble owners it was bought by the nuns of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, whose almost-accessible burial place is England's oldest Catholic cemetery in continuous use. In 1799 they opened a school in the main building which, much enlarged with dormitories and sports pitches, is still operational as a large private school called New Hall. Only the North Wing is original but that's still a damned impressive survivor, unless of course you're trying to build an enormous housing development named after the palace and there's a Grade I listed building and its estate in the way.
New houses will one day form a full horseshoe around the school grounds but thus far only the western side has been built, a thick wedge of modern homes nudged up against the existing suburb of Springfield. Three bedrooms as an absolute minimum and often three storeys tall, these are unashamedly aspirational homes in a pinch-gabled Essex vernacular. Each fresh segment is allocated to a different housing developer so architectural styles vary, but within each area the same few designs repeat (The Abberton, The Grosvenor, The Firecrest), originally bought off-plan from the nice lady in the showhome. Most are packed down curving cul-de-sacs off a distributor road with intermittent greenery and pavements that fade into parking spaces, a residential maze to pick through on the way to hardly any shops. I'd want more than a Sainsbury's Local, a Costa and two takeaways if I'd moved to an enormous estate, but at least the new doctors' surgery finally opens next week.
All the street names make reference to WW1 so we have Remembrance Avenue, Regiment Gate and Centenary Way, while the main retail centre is at Armistice Square. Meanwhile the roads bearing off are all named after fallen soldiers, each of whom gets a potted biography on the street sign. In that annoying modern tradition their full names are used, so it's Stanley Wilks Crescent and Wilfred Waterman Drive rather than just Wilks and Waterman, overtly highlighting the fact that nobody being commemmorated is female. What with poppies in the corner of every street sign it must be like living in a remembrance bubble all year round. The small public park instead goes for a royal theme with wooden chess pieces in the shrubbery, and a belvedere on a mound overlooking a sparse playground that would have been a lot better if they'd spent the proceeds of one more five-bedder on some decent equipment.
The northern fringe is still mostly building sites, plus fields where yet more houses will be squeezed along the line of Chelmsford's new northeast bypass. But even though they'll be less than a mile from the station it's still going to be most tempting to drive there, the allocated cycle and pedestrian route being an unlit narrow lane followed by a path along the edge of the Great Park. A resident of the existing estate stopped me by the station, surprised by how long it had taken her to walk there and disappointed it wouldn't be possible to drive in direct. One day the closest plot will be developed as Beaulieu Central, a commercial quarter with a new hotel, but for now that remains a scrappy waste and Beaulieu Park remains the brand new station nobody quite lives close enough to.
