London Calling.
London Walks connecting people to London.
And today, Canadians in particular. So if you’re there, Pamela and Wendy and Bill and the rest of you from north of the 49th parallel, this one’s especially for you.
Ok, you ready for this? Here’s a surprise.
London’s railway story begins, unexpectedly, in Canada.
On a remote island in Lake Huron.
With a teenage soldier building a fort in the wilderness.
No locomotive.
No railway line.
No station.
Not yet.
Just an eighteen-year-old Royal Engineer, thousands of miles from London, learning how to build. How to bridge distances. How to overcome obstacles. How to make a way where there was no way.
His name was George Thomas Landmann.
And years later, that teenage fort-builder would become the engineer of London’s first steam passenger railway.
Which is why our new occasional series about London’s railway stations begins, not at Euston, King’s Cross or Paddington, but in Canada.
And it begins today for a quite extraordinary reason.
Today is August 18th.
And on August 18th, 1808, exactly 218 years ago today, George Thomas Landmann stood on a battlefield in Portugal and drew a panoramic sketch for the future Duke of Wellington.
We didn’t go looking for that anniversary.
It came looking for us.
George Thomas Landmann gets one solitary mention in Christian Wolmar’s wonderful book about London’s railway stations, Cathedrals of Steam.
One mention.
The name caught our eye.
It started a hare.
We did some digging.
And what we unearthed was one of the most colourful, surprising and action-packed London lives we’ve encountered in a very long time.
Soldier.
Military engineer.
Adventurer.
Amateur botanist.
Linguist.
Whale-chaser.
Battlefield artist.
And, eventually, railway pioneer.
The man who helped give London its first passenger railway.
George Thomas Landmann was born at Woolwich on April 11th, 1780.
Engineering was in the blood.
His father, Isaac Landmann, was professor of artillery and fortification at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
George became a cadet there at the age of thirteen.
At fifteen he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers.
At fifteen.
And while most fifteen-year-olds are still trying to work out what they want to do with their lives, young George Landmann was helping to fortify Plymouth.
Then Pendennis Castle.
Then St Mawes.
And then, in 1797, still only a teenager, he was sent to Canada.
That’s why London’s railway story begins there.
At Fort St Joseph, on Lake Huron, young Landmann helped to construct fortifications on a remote and immensely important frontier.
He was eighteen years old when he was put in charge of much of the early construction work.
Eighteen years old, thousands of miles from Woolwich, building a fort in the Canadian wilderness.
And he appears to have made quite an impression.
One account says that a Saulteaux chief adopted Landmann as a brother and gave him the name “The Little Spirit.”
There was steel in this young man.
But there was humanity as well.
At Quebec, in 1799, a dangerous fire broke out on the roof of a magazine.
A magazine, in this context, is a storehouse for gunpowder and ammunition.
A fire on its roof was not a little local difficulty.
It was a potential catastrophe.
Landmann climbed up and extinguished the flames with snow.
Then, in 1801 and 1802, he was employed cutting a new canal at the Cascades on the St Lawrence River.
Remember that.
Forts.
Canals.
Bridges.
Landmann was learning how to overcome obstacles. How to reshape the landscape. How to get people and materials from one place to another.
Canada was teaching the future railway engineer his trade.
And Canada remains part of London’s life.
At the last census, 21,772 Londoners had been born in Canada.
That’s a larger population than Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Think of it that way and there is, in population terms, a Canadian city tucked inside London.
And then there are the visitors.
In 2024, Canadians made 944,000 visits to the United Kingdom.
More than a third of the nights they spent here were spent in London.
I wonder how many of those Canadian Londoners, and how many of those Canadian visitors, know that London’s railway story began in their country.
Well, they do now.
Landmann returned to England at the end of 1802.
He worked on the defences of Winchester, Portsmouth and Gosport.
Then came Gibraltar.
And this is where the story becomes almost picaresque.
Landmann kept a lively journal.
It’s full of military and social observation, but it’s also full of mishaps, enthusiasms and adventures.
He fell off a ladder and split the tip bone of his left elbow.
When he contracted cholera, pieces of flannel soaked in boiling water were pressed against his stomach.
The cure sounds nearly as alarming as the disease.
He cultivated an exotic garden.
He learned to paint miniatures.
He amassed a library of more than a thousand books.
He displayed sixteen pictures in his house.
He attempted to master the Spanish guitar but, by his own admission, failed to rise above “the humblest mediocrity.”
And in 1808 he chased a whale in a ship’s boat.
A whale.
You begin to suspect that if something unusual, difficult or dangerous presented itself, George Thomas Landmann made straight for it.
But the great trial was coming.
In May 1808, Landmann sailed as commanding Royal Engineer with Major-General Brent Spencer’s force.
He was fluent in Spanish, so when six French warships were blockaded at Cadiz, Landmann went ashore to communicate with the Spanish garrison.
He witnessed the bombardment that preceded the French surrender.
Then, on August 8th, the British force landed at Mondego Bay in Portugal and joined Sir Arthur Wellesley.
The future Duke of Wellington.
Landmann was attached to the Light Brigade.
On August 17th, 1808, he fought at the Battle of Roliça.
The commanding Royal Engineer, Captain Howard Elphinstone, was wounded.
Landmann took his place.
And the following day, August 18th, 1808, Landmann drew a panoramic view of the battlefield.
Wellesley thought highly enough of it to send it home with his dispatches.
That was 218 years ago today.
And here we are, on August 18th, telling Landmann’s story.
Sometimes the tumblers click into place.
Three days later came the Battle of Vimeiro.
During a lone reconnaissance before the battle, Landmann was nearly captured by French dragoons.
During the fighting, he briefly acted as an aide-de-camp and then joined in the capture of a French field gun.
He was awarded a gold medal.
But here’s another glimpse of the man.
After the battle, Landmann found himself commanding the Royal Engineers for ten days.
A soldier had been sentenced to 300 lashes.
Landmann had what was described as a “great repugnance to the flogging system.”
He reduced the sentence from 300 lashes to 25.
Still brutal to our eyes.
But in that army, at that time, it was an act of mercy.
And there was no let-up.
In December 1808, Landmann was ordered to construct two bridges of boats and a flying bridge across Portuguese rivers.
He completed all three in five days.
In Cadiz, rioters threatened to kill the Spanish governor, suspecting him of disloyalty.
Landmann was sent in.
Because he spoke Spanish so well, he managed to calm the situation.
For that, he received the thanks of Ferdinand VII, the king of Spain.
The Spanish made him a lieutenant-colonel in their engineers.
Then a colonel of infantry.
He served at the siege of Matagorda.
He carried dispatches.
He travelled through Spain and Portugal.
At Castillejos, his horse fell under him and injured his left eye.
Eventually his health gave way.
He returned to Britain and served in Ireland, on the Thames and in Yorkshire.
In 1824, after nearly thirty years of military service, George Thomas Landmann retired from the Royal Engineers.
He was forty-four.
You might think he’d done enough.
Not Landmann.
Because in 1831, this former soldier, fort-builder, canal-cutter, bridge-maker, battlefield artist and whale-chaser turned his attention to a revolutionary new form of transport.
The railway.
Landmann and George Walter promoted a scheme for a railway running from Tooley Street, near London Bridge, to Greenwich.
This was not going to be a railway for carrying coal or stone.
It was going to be built specifically for passengers.
And because the streets of south London were already spreading across its path, the railway would be carried above them.
On a viaduct.
Three and three-quarter miles long.
Eight hundred and seventy-eight brick arches.
Nothing like it had ever been attempted.
Hugh McIntosh was the contractor.
George Thomas Landmann was the railway’s chief engineer.
The ground was treacherous.
Black peat.
The weight of that enormous brick viaduct had to be carried across it.
Landmann pioneered the use of concrete beneath the foundations.
There were problems.
Piers shifted.
Two arches collapsed.
Money poured away.
The railway would never become a great financial success.
But it changed London.
On February 8th, 1836, the first public section opened between Spa Road in Bermondsey and Deptford.
London’s first steam railway.
London’s first railway built specifically for passengers.
The world’s first entirely elevated railway.
And technically, little Spa Road became London’s first railway station.
Not Euston.
Not London Bridge.
Spa Road.
A tiny, vanished station in Bermondsey.
We’ll go looking for it in the next instalment of this series.
Because that first train did more than carry passengers from Bermondsey to Deptford.
It opened the door.
The railway had entered London.
And behind it came
London Bridge.
Euston.
Paddington.
Waterloo.
King’s Cross.
St Pancras.
Victoria.
The great railway age was under way.
And at the head of that procession, almost forgotten today, was George Thomas Landmann.
The man who had built forts in Canada.
Cut a canal on the St Lawrence.
Fought in Portugal.
Calmed a riot in Spain.
Captured a French gun.
Built three military bridges in five days.
Chased a whale off Gibraltar.
And engineered London’s first steam passenger railway.
Landmann died at Shacklewell, near Hackney, on August 27th, 1854.
That feels right.
A life that began at Woolwich, ranged through Canada, Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, and finally came home to London.
And today, August 18th, 218 years to the day after he drew that Portuguese battlefield for Wellington, George Thomas Landmann takes his place at the beginning of London’s railway story.
Which, as we now know, begins unexpectedly in Canada.
You’ve been listening to the London Walks podcast.
Our new occasional series on London’s railway stations is called Down the Ringing Grooves of London.
And there’s a real-world, out on the London pavement and forecourts counterpart to it.
Christian Wolmar, the laureate of the railway and top flight London Walks guide Sam Jacobs occasionally join forces to conduct an extraordinary, all-day survey of the capital’s great railway stations.
We call it The Secret History of London’s Railway Stations.
The next outing, on December 3rd, is already sold out.
But Christian and Sam will do it again.
Very occasionally.
So this one is a watch-this-space number.
London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
And today, tracks ahead.
Ringing grooves of change – London change – up ahead.
See you tomorrow.
Lastly, a tip of the hat and a big thank you to Canada.