Stand on the Quay and look across at Wallasea. Two hundred years ago, someone wanted that bank to be the busy one.

A river for a road

In 1800 the easiest way to move anything heavy round here was by water. Roads were poor and carting was slow and dear, so the Crouch did the job of a main road. Barges worked up the river as far as Battlesbridge, and from there wagons took the goods on inland.

Burnham was the biggest port on the river. Coal, timber and supplies came in over the Quay, not just for the town but for Southminster and most of Mayland too.

1811: an iron railway, pulled by horses

In 1811 there was a plan for a railway from West Ham out to Wickford, then on along the south side of the Crouch to the point on Wallasea where the Roach runs into it.

It would have had iron rails, but no engines. Horses would have pulled the wagons.

It was never built. C. E. Jefferies, writing in 1970, thought that if it had been, the town would probably have grown on the south side of the river instead. The Burnham we know might have been a quiet village looking across at a busy railhead.

1825: a canal to Billericay

Fourteen years later came another idea: carry the river trade further inland by digging a canal from near Battlesbridge to Billericay, by way of Wickford and Downham.

That never happened either, and the barges kept doing the work.

What happened instead

Burnham stayed a river town, and it grew anyway. Its population nearly trebled across the century, from 1,054 in 1801 to 2,919 in 1901. Some time in the 1830s it overtook Southminster, and by 1901 it was twice its size.

The railway did finally arrive in 1888–89, from the north. By then the town was already growing, so the railway wasn’t what made Burnham. It did speed things up, though: the town grew up to meet the line, which is why Station Road, Western Road and the “New Town” streets are where they are.

The milk trains

The railway changed farming too. Every morning horse-drawn floats carrying churns of milk clattered down to the station to meet the milk train to London or Southend, and every evening they came back for the empties. Porters and farmhands raced each other rolling two or three churns at once on their bottom edges, and the noise was deafening.

It lasted about thirty years. During the railway strike of 1921 farmers had to send their milk by lorry, and they never went back to the trains.