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Victoria station
Location: London Victoria station, City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom (51.5173°N 0.1774°W)
Website:
London Victoria station:
London Victoria station, generally known as Victoria, is a central London railway terminus and London Underground complex named after nearby Victoria Street. With over 73 million passenger entries and exits between April 2010 and March 2011, Victoria is the second-busiest terminus in London (and the UK) after Waterloo, and includes an air terminal for passengers travelling by train to Gatwick Airport. It is one of 17 stations managed by Network Rail. The area around the station is an important interchange for other forms of transport: a local bus station is in the forecourt, and Victoria Coach Station for long-distance road coaches is nearby. Victoria is in Travelcard Zone 1.
There are effectively four railway stations on the site: on National Rail, two serving main-line routes in south eastern England, to Brighton, Hove, Worthing, Eastbourne, Canterbury and Dover; and on the London Underground, an underground station built by the cut-and-cover method serving the District and Circle Lines and the deep-level Victoria line tube line station. The National Rail and Underground stations will be dealt with separately.
History of London Victoria station:
The railways serving destinations to the south of London were inconvenient for Central London as they terminated south of the river Thames, whereas the main centres of population, business and government were north of the river in the City of London, the West End and Westminster. Victoria Station came about in a piecemeal fashion to help address this problem for the London Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR) and the London Chatham and Dover Railway (LC&DR). It consisted of two adjacent mainline railway stations which, from the viewpoint of passengers, were unconnected.
