ABSTRACT
Using the redesign of Paddington Station in the 1850s as a case study, this chapter investigates ‘coding’ passenger movement in dialogue with the creative practice of plotting fictional lives to understand how station planners anticipated and directed moving crowds. The chapter brings together sketches by the civil engineer Isambard K. Brunel, journalism, William Powell Frith’s painting The Railway Station (1862) and Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1862). Brunel tried to find a synthesis between the public desire to move freely and the need to channel crowds ready for departure. As this chapter demonstrates, station design encouraged travellers to ‘code’ themselves in terms of class, departure time and similarity to fellow passengers. Characterisation and plot trajectories provide a framework for thinking through passenger logistics in Paddington Station. Travelling through the station, passengers also helped to create it, filling it with the kind of purposeful movement that Frith depicts in his narrative painting and Trollope brings to life in his novel. The coded dynamics of any planned passenger terminus could therefore only be determined through practice – through repeatedly rerunning the system until it shifted from novelty to familiarity, and eventually into a widely recognised genre.
