Hop Pickers Line

Countryside Column 7 March.

Walking along the tracks

Myrtle and I visited North London recently and tried a new walk along a disused railway track from Highgate to Finsbury Park.  It was excellent. For four-and-a-half miles the city disappeared and you felt you were almost in the country. In fact the Parkland Walk is now the longest Local Nature Reserve in the capital and is enthusiastically used by joggers, cyclists, walkers and schoolchildren.

It made me wonder just what was happening to the quaintly named Hop Pickers’ Line from Paddock Wood to Hawkhurst.  This too was supposed to have re-opened as a ‘leisure pathway’ but things have gone extraordinarily quiet on the project.

The eleven mile branch line was conceived by the Weald of Kent Railway Company in 1864 and went through many travails before the final section was opened in 1893. The original plan to extend it to Tenterden and Hythe was abandoned, and the service struggled to survive. Goods were the mainstay, including moving  a million potted plants  a year for branches of Woolworths. The hopping traffic helped, with 26 special trains a day each bringing in two hundred pickers.  But outside harvest time the line wanted for customers.

One of its passengers was my father who, in 1945, arrived home after five years in the army. I can just imagine the scene on the platform at Hawkhurst with my grandparents waiting anxiously for his train to appear.

Anyway, despite the patronage of various east enders and occasional relatives, it closed in 1961, cleverly avoiding the Beeching axe which would surely have fallen a few years later.  But, tragically, the land was sold off to private owners and amalgamated into farms and gardens.

In 2008 the Hawkhurst Parish Council and local business proposed re-opening it as a walk and cycleway. To launch the project dignitaries were photographed at the abandoned station. Lottery funds were sought. There was a bit of a row when the signal box there was sold off to the Kent and East Sussex railway to be re-erected at Robertsbridge, but apart from that little seems to have happened.

Apparently the County Council’s Public Rights of Way team have been negotiating with landowners for access, and two tunnels have been assessed for safety and lighting.  But no one at KCC seems able to tell me if it’s actually going to happen.

It’s a pity because Myrtle and I would like a new walk along the tracks.