London’s Liverpool Street station redevelopment: on the wrong track?
L iverpool Street station in London, grand old Victorian terminus, one of the busiest in the country by footfall – honoured by a place on the Monopoly board – plus the adjoining former Great Eastern hotel, where the vampire-hunter Van Helsing stayed in Bram Stoker’s Draculaandnow called the Andaz, are, depending on your point of view, soon most likely to be either transformed or wrecked. “A world-class gateway to our great capital,” says the consortium that wants to build nearly 1 million sq feet (93,000 sq metres) of commercial accommodation above the station concourse and the old hotel. “Crass and unsustainable,” says the Liverpool Street Station Campaign, a coalition of eight heritage organisations set up to oppose the plans. “It’s like putting a giant clown’s hat on top of St Paul’s Cathedral,” says Griff Rhys Jones, the group’s president.
The £1.5bn proposal, recently submitted for planning approval after a not very informative public information campaign, is designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, famous for Tate Modern, the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing and the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg. Their designs would replace the listed Victorian-style steel-and-glass structure over the main concourse with an opaque ceiling, artificially lit. Hope Square, a public space containing a memorial to the Kindertransport, would disappear and the sculpture be relocated. Above the concourse, the square and the eight-storey listed hotel building, blocks containing offices and hotel accommodation, rising up to 16 additional storeys, would be built – a roof extension, in other words, double the height of the building it surmounts, and several times the volume.
A feature of Liverpool Street station is
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