Bedford and the Marston Vale line

Booked yesterday off for no particular reason, other than fancied a long weekend after being in charge of the Returns team for a month while Judith was in Australia visiting her daughter (she’s back on Monday, thankfully).

Decided to take the train to Bedford, for no better reason than I’d never been there. This is the Marston Vale line, a little service (my outward train was only one carriage) between Bletchley and Bedford, a marooned still-open stretch of the former Varsity Line that ran between Oxford and Cambridge. There seems to be a plan to re-open the route, as part of the East West Rail project, but I’m not sure how far it’s progressed. Currently, you can get a train from Oxford to Bicester (this stretch was re-opened in the 1980s and then upgraded a few years ago by Chiltern Railways, with the creation of the new Oxford Parkway station and trains through to London Marylebone) but the stretch between Bicester and Bletchley was closed in 1967 so you’d have to walk that bit. I believe the track is still in place for most of that route, as evidenced by lots of pictures like this one.

Teeny train waiting to leave Bletchley

From Bletchley, you can travel as far as Bedford, stopping at a number of tiny stations, but then that’s it – the stretch from Bedford to Cambridge was also closed in the late 1960s and evidently has been built over in a couple of places, which would presumably hamper its re-opening.

At Bletchley station, there’s a concrete flyover which was apparently built to carry the Varsity Line over the West Coast Main Line. I can't quite make out whether it was ever used for passenger services and I ran out of energy for the internet research. This YouTube clip shows a driver's eye view going over it.

Flyover coming in from the left and crossing the main line further down

Bedford town centre is distinctly underwhelming. Thankfully, after a dispiriting mile’s walk from the station past branches of Poundland and Cash Converters, I arrived at St Paul’s Square, where things improve with some attractive old buildings and access to the riverside walkways and footbridges, which are pleasant.

While walking along the river I passed the Boatslide hydro power facility, which, according to the information board by it, features something called an Archimedean screw turbine. It looks rather as though it would mince anything going through it, but the board assures passers-by that fish are safe.

I walked eastwards along the river for a while and then turned up through some pleasant residential streets just north of the Embankment. Walked past the Panacea Museum, which I went into out of curiosity as it was free entry. I knew nothing about the Panacea Society and equally little about Joanna Southcott's Box - the latter is referred to in a Monty Python sketch (the Epsom Furniture Race) but I'd never bothered to look up what it actually was.

Joanna Southcott lived in the second half of the 18th century and claimed to hear words from God, which she interpreted as prophecies. She wrote these down and stored them in a box. She left instructions that the box only be opened at a time of national crisis and in the presence of all the bishops of the Church of England. Shortly before her death, Southcott seems to have claimed that she was pregnant with the messiah but, disappointingly for her followers, this didn’t come to anything.

Snip from larger picture here

About 100 years later, interest in Joanna Southcott’s Box was reignited by one Mabel Barltrop, who found that the suffragetty atmos in the early 20th century formed a receptive climate for ideas that the coming of the messiah might be heralded by a woman. Barltrop founded the Panacea Society in 1919. The Society apparently funded a national advertising campaign to have the Box opened, involving posters such as the one shown above. The real Box is, apparently, still in a secret location, but the museum contains a replica (pictured below).

The Idler piece from which the billboard photo above is taken is amusing, if mocking. This BBC piece from 2017 tells the story of "a cult of women who thought they could avert Armageddon". At the least, the Panacea Society all sounds rather fun. It seems to have flourished up until the Second World War, when membership tailed off a bit. The museum is free admission, very nicely laid out and well kept, in a large Victorian house, so there's clearly still money somewhere. The exhibits are over two floors and it looked as if you could also go out into the garden, though I didn't as I was mindful of train times by then. It's a diverting enough place to visit.

I walked up the nearby Castle Mound to take a photo and then returned to the station.