Great Malvern railway station was built as the arrival and departure point for the elite visitors who flocked to the district to take water cures in the mid-Victorian period.
The spa resort thrived from the arrival of the Worcester & Hereford Railway in 1860, and the station at Great Malvern, opened in 1862, was the major hub for visitors, local inhabitants and freight. There were two other less important stations, Malvern Link to the north and Malvern Wells (closed in 1965) to the south.
The character of the station, like the rest of the town, was heavily influenced by Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900), the widowed Lady of the Manor, whose late husband’s will gave her independence and considerable influence. She disliked travelling through the two tunnels on the line, at Ledbury and Colwall, so she habitually travelled by road between her country seat at Stoke Edith and her private waiting room at Great Malvern.
The Gothic buildings at Great Malvern station were built in local Malvern Rag stone and designed by a local architect, Edmund Wallace Elmslie. He was responsible for the road bridge at the north end of the platforms and the remarkable iron columns which support the canopies on both platforms. The beautifully restored and brightly painted capitals are in twelve different designs, hand-forged in wrought iron, and serve to direct rainwater down the interior of each column.
Edmund Wallace Elmslie at the same time designed the Imperial Hotel across Avenue Road from the station. It was the largest hotel in Malvern, owned by the Great Malvern Hotel Company, chaired by the hydrotherapy pioneer Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883).
Its elaborate Gothic architecture is enlivened by carvings by the Worcester sculptor William Forsyth (c1834-1915), whose brother James created, among much else, the huge Perseus Fountain at Witley Court, Worcestershire.
In 1919 the hotel was bought for £32,500 by Miss Greenslade and Miss Poulton, the two founders of Malvern Girls’ College which dated from small beginnings in 1893 elsewhere in Malvern. A complex succession of amalgamations with Lawnside, The Abbey and St James’s School (all of which were founded by women) eventually created Malvern St James in 2006.
The hotel was directly connected with the station platform by a gently sloping covered passageway of brick, wood and corrugated iron which is known as The Worm, for reasons which are obvious when looking at it from the overbridge. It enabled guests with limited mobility to reach the hotel from the railway. There is a shorter underground goods tunnel north of passenger walkway.
There’s a regular train service to Great Malvern from Worcester and Hereford, and a bus-service up the hill to the town centre.
Lady Foley’s former private waiting room operated as Lady Foley’s Tea Room until it closed in October 2023.
Though there was a project in 2017 to restore The Worm, it’s currently inaccessible for safety reasons.
