Historic Tilbury Riverside station to be revived as cultural hub with £4.5 million Lottery boost
A project planning to reopen the disused Tilbury Riverside station as a new cultural and business centre has secured nearly £4.5 million from the National Lottery to support their plans.
Tilbury Riverside railway station is a once busy place with six platforms sitting next to London’s main cruise ship terminus, and would have been the railway station that thousands of people arriving in the UK would have used to complete their journey into London.
Notably, this is where the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948.
Although the railway has long since been removed, the large booking hall shed and the original ticket office remain empty and rarely seen by the public.
At the moment, the space is used by the cruise terminal for baggage handling, but a charity, Tilbury on the Thames Trust is working on plans to reopen the hall to the public again.
The total cost of the scheme is not far off £6 million, and it will include creating heritage, creative, and event spaces, a new community café, and refurbishing the building’s interior.
Following an initial support grant in 2022, the project has now been awarded £4.48 million by the National Lottery to support the creation of a “community hub, including artists’ studios and a cafe”.
The aim is to open the building again while ensuring sufficient commercial income to care for it and keep it open for visitors. Now that they have secured the bulk of the funding needed, in a couple of years, you could also step into the station that once thronged with thousands of people catching or departing from cruise ships docking on the edge of London.
And maybe even catch a parliamentary rail replacement bus service to get there.
You can read more about the plans from a previous consultation here.
Complete waste of money without a ferry to transport people from Kent
Are the visitors from the north of the river not worthy of consideration then?
Look at the size, the space! Maybe this could be used for HS2 terminus instead of the smaller Euston?
PS where are the mastodon posts (please)?
I am so pleased that this historic building is to be restored
I have happy memories of getting off the the train from Grays to catch the ferry to the beautiful art deco lido in Gravesend
We need the the ferry service restored so that our neighbours in Gravesend can enjoy this facility too
I do think it’s fantastic but what about the town of Tilbury which needs to be regenerated there was money for it but who knows where that money is now
If you’re referring to the Tilbury and Grays Towns Fund – then it took me barely few seconds on Google to find the council reports that you can read about it.
Why not reconnect it to the rail system and use it as a cruise terminal that people people can access by rail lots of cruises stop there and visitors would travel by train to central London, why invent uses when it has one already and was stupidly disconnected from the UK rail system.
Apart from demolishing all the buildings that are now in the way, have the economics changed so drastically from when the line was closed to justify its reopening?