London’s Liverpool Street station redevelopment: on the wrong track?

Proposing artificial light, a concourse one floor away from the platforms and the partial demolition of a listed building, a £1.5bn plan to redevelop this historic London railway terminus seems ill-conceived, even with Herzog & de Meuron on board

Liverpool 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 Dracula and now 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.