Great lost teas etc etc
CROXLEY GREEN TEA
A year after it opened, in 1912, Croxley Green Railway Station was burned down by Suffragettes. Although the Station House was rebuilt, its rural location, west of Watford, meant that there was little practical use for it, and both the station and the railway line fell into a slow decline, eventually closing in the late 1970s.
In December of 1951, a freight train derailment had damaged the far end of the London-bound platform. This section of the platform was then permanently closed to the general public and as a result passengers were only ever able to board or depart from the first four carriages of any train that stopped at the station.
The following Spring, an abundant variety of herbs sprung up in the gaps in the broken platform, possibly seeded from the nearby walled herb gardens at Atlas House.
In 1953, a tea stall, run by two elderly sisters, opened on the platform, the tea being prepared from the dried or freshly cut herbs that grew around the station. Tea was sold by the cup but more commonly, commuters and railway workers would bring their own containers and buy it by the flask.
The tea stall closed in 1961, after one of the sisters died. For a while, there was a teashop in Croxley, with a large herb garden at the back, which served tea very similar to that which had been sold at the Railway Station. It is now a private residence and the garden has been divided into allotment plots.
Although there was nothing special or distinctive about Croxley Green Tea, I recall with great fondness, arriving at the station early in the morning and queuing up at the stall for a flask of Croxley Camomile.
I also remember returning from the city one mellow Autumn evening and pausing beneath the wooden awning of the station, on the sun-dappled platform, with the train pulling away from it, loosening the stiff collar of my shirt from around my sore neck and sipping from a steaming cup of mint and dandelion tea before walking in the dying light through the village to the place that was my home.
When I think back to that time - the little wooden tea stand, the two sisters struggling with their kettles full of water and the sprigs of herbs laid out neatly on the counter beside a pair of red handled secateurs, I feel a deep-seeded, almost painful longing for a part of English life and for a part of my own life that have both long since disappeared.
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""All my friends are soldiers
and they are getting drunk
Oh, Johnny come and save me
I believe my luck has sunk.""
- Jeffrey Lee Pierce"
