Station Name: YARMOUTH SOUTH TOWN

 

[Source: Darren Kitson



The first aerial view was included to show the location of the station and goods yard relative to Haven Bridge and the seafront. This is a closer version of the same view and shows certain details more clearly. The level crossing over Southtown Road and its gates can be seen, as can some of the wagon turntables within the goods yard. The electric tramway can also be better seen. On the opposite side of the river some wagons can be seen on the quayside tramway. At far left, the building on the corner with arched windows is the Railway Hotel; it still stands as of 2017 but is now a pizza outlet. The building below it is The Two Bears hotel which had a pair of bear statues on the apex of its frontage and installed in 1910. The statues can just be made out and survived demolition of the building in 2014/15. They now sit incongruously on the Hughes store which now occupies the site. In front of The Two Bears and running alongside the station is the cab rank, today Pasteur Road runs through the site. The pitched roof building at the end of the then-much-shorter Platform 4 was a left luggage store. Despite there being a left luggage office in the station building, when Platform 4 was extended in 1952 the store was for some inexplicable reason moved to the north of the track and thus was isolated from the station. Presumably the store was manned but this particular detail remains unclear. To the right of the maltings, bottom left, is the siding which terminated at a small dock. At bottom right is the goods dock with its hand-operated crane. Records show South Town possessed only one crane, of 6-ton capacity (Beach and Vauxhall had only 5-ton cranes), so this must be it. The goods yard, across the road, began life rather smaller and was expanded and altered over a long period of time but strangely there is no record of it ever having a crane. It will be noted that at this time there were no cattle pens on the goods platform to the right. The story of Great Yarmouth cattle market is something of a saga. It was located on Station Road, just out of view to the right, but at two different sites at various times; the first was on the north side and opposite the station and the second was at the far end occupying the land bounded by what is now an extended Station Road and Tamworth Lane, opposite the site of the locomotive turntable. Sometime in the early twentieth century another, smaller, cattle market had appeared squashed into the space between the station and the maltings. It occupied land believed to have been a bowling green and visible here on the east side of the maltings. The small dock adjacent to the maltings appeared in 1892, but there is no evidence that this dock was later used for cattle and its main user appears to have been the maltings. In any event this dock appears to have been too narrow to accommodate cattle. The cattle market near the maltings and that at Station Road/Tamworth Lane coexisted for a time. In 2017 all that remained was part of the Station Road site, a semi-derelict part cobble, part tarmac area. The site had been bisected by the extension to Station Road which turned
southwards at this point..
Photo from Britain From Above with permission

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