Marylebone Station: The Beatles on the Run
Why is it significant?
Stand under the long iron and glass canopy that reaches from the station across the road to the old red-brick hotel opposite, and listen: it is quieter here than at any other London terminus.
Key Facts
| Place | Marylebone Station: The Beatles on the Run |
|---|---|
| Address | Melcombe Place, London NW1 6JJ, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52260, -0.16310 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand under the long iron and glass canopy that reaches from the station across the road to the old red-brick hotel opposite, and listen: it is quieter here than at any other London terminus. Marylebone Station is small, warm-coloured and almost domestic, more like a country town station that wandered into the capital by mistake.
It opened in 1899 as the London end of the Great Central Railway, the last main line built into London in the Victorian age. Its driving force, the railway baron Sir Edward Watkin, dreamed of running trains from the industrial north through London to the coast, and on, one day, through a tunnel under the Channel to France. Watkin even started digging that tunnel in the 1880s. The money and the politics ran out, the grand plans shrank, and his terminus was built far smaller than intended.
In 1964 these platforms became a film set. In the opening scene of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first film, John, Paul, George and Ringo sprint away from a crowd of screaming fans, and those famous shots were filmed right here, at Marylebone. And on the train scenes of the same film, George Harrison met a young model playing a schoolgirl, Pattie Boyd, who became his first wife.
Twenty years later the station nearly vanished altogether. In the 1980s there were serious plans to close it and turn the railway into a road for coaches. Commuters and campaigners fought back, the plans were dropped, and today trains run from here to the Chilterns and on to Birmingham. It also has a small claim to fame in millions of homes: it is one of the four stations on the London board of Monopoly.
Now walk out, cross Melcombe Place and step into Dorset Square, the quiet garden square just ahead. In 1787 a Yorkshireman named Thomas Lord laid out his first cricket ground on this very spot, before moving it twice to the place in St John's Wood that still bears his name. From the square, take Melcombe Street east to Baker Street, where the most famous fictional address on earth is waiting.