Chester’s railway pioneer Thomas Brassey to receive bronze statue by renowned sculptor
A bronze statue of a railway pioneer is set to take pride of place outside Chester Railway Station following a successful fundraising campaign.
Cheshire West and Chester Council’s planning department has rubber-stamped plans for a statue of Thomas Brassey, who built a third of Britain’s railways, three quarters of France’s railways and one in 20 of all the railways in the world.
Born in Buerton near Chester in 1805, he also constructed Chester Station and worked alongside noted engineers of his time such as George and Robert Stephenson, Joseph Locke and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The planning application was made by The Thomas Brassey Society, which fundraised for the statue.
It will be sculpted by Andy Edwards, who also worked on The Beatles Statue in Liverpool. According to planning documents, the design itself will be of Brassey in his mid-40s, his age when he completed Chester Station in 1848, and will depict him reading a map of the Shrewsbury-Chester Railway, which he completed in the same year.
Positioned on land to the front of the station on Station Road, it will be cast in bronze at 1.2 x life size, standing alongside a piece of contemporary railway track at life-size, also cast in bronze. It will stand on a short plinth faced in York sandstone to match the surface of the pedestrian footway it stands on.
Recommending approval, a planning officer’s report said: “It is anticipated that the proposed statue would form an important part of the future redevelopment of Chester Railway Station.”
Brassey’s first job was manager of Storeton Quarry on the Wirral, but after being persuaded by Thomas Telford to help in surveying for the A5 London – Holyhead trunk road in North Wales, his first railway project was the construction of the Penkridge Viaduct on what is now the West Coast main line.
He built Chester Station to the design of Francis Thomson and it opened in August 1848, along with many of the railway lines still in use today – Shrewsbury-Chester, Chester-Crewe, Chester-Holyhead, and part of Chester-Birkenhead. As a civil engineer, his projects also included bridges, stations and viaducts.
He died in 1870 and is still considered by some to be an ‘unsung hero’ of Britain and the world’s engineering past.
The report added: “Although there is a bust of Thomas Brassey in Chester Cathedral, commemoration plaques at Chester Station and two Chester streets named after him, there are no statues of him anywhere. He deserves to be better recognised as the world’s greatest railway builder.”
By Mark Smith – Local Democracy Reporter
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