Francis Thompson was an English architect particularly well known for his railway work.
Early life
Thompson was born in Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, the second of seven children of George Thompson and his wife Elizabeth. George Thompson was a builder and the Suffolk county surveyor, descended from a family of farmers in the nearby village of Bredfield. Francis' grandfather Jacob was also a builder and two of his uncles were architects. Thompson attended Woodbridge Grammar School and his family's background instilled him with an interest in architecture. He married Anna Maria Watson on 17 May 1830 in Woodbridge church. The couple soon emigrated to Montreal in British North America. Their son, Francis Jacob, was born the following year. Anna died of cholera in 1832 as a result of the second cholera pandemic, a global outbreak which killed 4,000 people in Montreal. Thompson designed multiple houses, commercial buildings, courts, and a church. In 1832, he worked with John Wells to build St. Anne's Market, which was temporarily used for the pre-confederation Canadian parliament. Thompson returned to England in 1837, prompted by growing friction between French and British settlers.
Railway work
Although at first sight Thompson was young and inexperienced, Robert Stephenson the engineer for the North Midland Railway, recruited him to be the railway company's architect in February 1839. The North Midland was in the early stages of building its line north from Derby to Leeds. He designed many publicly acclaimed buildings, including multiple railway stations and warehouses. In Derby, he designed a compete railway town, featuring Derby Trijunct station, the meeting point for three railway companies. The station had a three-bay glazed train shed and a two-storey, red-brick frontage in an Italianate style, described as "the first really great station". Thompson was also responsible for a cluster of buildings around the station, including a roundhouse, terraced houses for the workers, and the Midland Hotel, which is among the most representative of his surviving works. The group was the world's first complete complex of railway buildings. The station was remodelled several times in the intervening century and almost completely rebuilt in the 1980s. Thompson designed several smaller stations for the NMR, including Belper and Eckington, both since rebuilt, and Wingfield and Ambergate. Notable for his criticism of the extravagant nature of the railway architecture of the day, Whishaw nevertheless praised Thompson's works in Derby, writing:
The admirably contrived and elegant roofs, the spacious platforms, the great length of the whole erection extending to upwards of a thousand feet. All unite in rendering it the most complete structure of the kind in the United Kingdom or perhaps the world.
Thompson remarried in 1840. His second wife, Elizabeth, died in 1852, and on 30 June 1853, he married Mary Ann Groves, from Wareham, Dorset. The couple sailed for Canada, and Thompson took up employment with the Grand Trunk Railway and the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad. He designed Union station in Portland, Maine, which was claimed to be the largest station in America when it opened in 1855. He also designed the masonry for the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, another Stephenson-designed tubular bridge, as well as multiple other stations and railway workshops. The Thompsons returned to London in April 1859. In 1866, he retired to a house he built in Hastings in Sussex, before finally moving home to Bredfield in Suffolk, where he died on 23 April 1895. He was buried in the local cemetery. Although well paid during his career, retirement rained Thompson's wealth and he died in poverty without leaving a will.
