London Road Viaduct

The London and Brighton Railway Act, passed on 15 July 1837, granted the London & Brighton Railway Company the right to build a railway line from Norwood to Brighton, a branch line from Brighton to Shoreham-by-Sea and another from Brighton to Newhaven via Lewes. The line to Shoreham-by-Sea was completed first, in 1840, and the Brighton Main Line opened in its entirety in September 1841; A new company, the Brighton, Lewes & Hastings Railway Company, was formed to build this line; John Urpeth Rastrick was employed as the surveyor and architect. In the 1840s, the land northeast of Brighton station was undeveloped, consisting of fields. Rastrick had to decide whether to cross this with an…

s]] The structure is 1200 ft long, and reaches a maximum height of 67 ft above the floor of the valley. It consists of 26 semi-circular arches each of 30 ft with piers of 7 ft thick at the base and 5 ft thick at the top, together with one elliptical arch of 50 ft over a section of the A23 London Road called Preston Road. The piers are thicker on the outside than on the inside because the viaduct is constructed on a sharp curve: trains reach the viaduct almost immediately after leaving the Brighton Main Line, and the line continues to curve away for several hundred metres. Of the 27 arches, 16 have a radius of curvature of 0.75 mi, and 11 have a radius of 0.125 mi. Approximately 10 million…

London Road Viaduct was listed at Grade II* by English Heritage on 19 April 1974. This status is given to "particularly important buildings of more than special interest". As of February 2001, it was one of 70 Grade II*-listed buildings and structures, and 1,218 listed buildings of all grades, in the city of Brighton and Hove. As of 2009, 174 scheduled passenger trains (87 eastbound and 87 westbound), all operated by Southern, cross the viaduct each weekday. There are fewer train movements at weekends.