A slick new video from Network Rail shows that their plans for Liverpool Street will leave a light and airy station, bathed in the year-round warm sunshine of London, and populated by an equally credible cross-section of the capital’s slim and glamorous population. The central atrium of Britain’s busiest station will be bathed in the light from the almost equatorial sun that shines over London, and will overcome the shading effects of the monolithic office blocks that bracket the redeveloped station on all four sides.
To misuse Indian terminology, the concourse at Liverpool Street is the epitome of “super dense crush status”. So, Network Rail’s magical reimagining of the circulating space is … nothing short of magical. Social media comment is generally favourable – although it has not escaped notice that the video lingers on the office accommodation rather longer than the station. There’s open speculation that it’s more of a blatant sales drive than an exposé of the new station.
2000 comments, 200 million people
Network Rail would prefer us to see the new Liverpool Street through the lens of enthusiasm. Almost 2,000 comments were submitted during public consultation, we are told, with more than 1,000 expressions of support logged on the City of London’s planning portal. This, apparently, places the scheme among the most warmly received planning applications the Square Mile has ever known—a statistic that says as much about who is invited to comment, and how, as it does about the scheme itself.
The justification, as ever, is numbers. Liverpool Street was crowned Britain’s busiest station once again in December, handling close to 100 million rail entries and exits a year, before Underground users are even counted. By 2041, that figure is forecast to reach 158 million, and in the longer term, the station is expected to cope with “more than 200 million people”. The scale of those figures is deployed as both warning and reassurance: change is inevitable, therefore the change proposed must be right.
A station stripped of excuses
To help sell that future, Network Rail has released a glossy fly-through video that places the viewer at the centre of a calmer, brighter, frictionless Liverpool Street. It is, we are assured, a passenger’s-eye view—though the passenger in question appears to move through the station without luggage, crowds, delays or the usual gravitational pull towards the nearest coffee queue—and everyone knows where to catch their train too.
Consultation feedback highlighted step-free access, lifts, and escalators as the top priorities, and the plans respond accordingly. Eight new lifts, an increase in escalators from four to ten, step-free access across all mainline and Underground platforms, more ticket barriers to ease queues, new toilets and family facilities on every level, and clearer signage throughout. On paper, at least, this is a station stripped of excuses. One is just left wondering where all the extra trains for the 100 million extra passengers will park themselves.
Heritage carefully revealed, signage less so
The concourse, too, is promised a significant enlargement. That’s a long-overdue and necessary intervention given current congestion. Alongside the passenger level are new elevated east–west and north–south routes intended to make movement through the station more intuitive. Liverpool Street’s historic entrances on Bishopsgate, Liverpool Street itself and Exchange Square are to be “celebrated”. That may be a misprint for “signposted”, which may be a more practical improvement. Close consultation is claimed with accessibility groups, neighbouring businesses (including those occupying the site of the former Broad Street Station next door) and heritage bodies (the Victorian Society may disagree with that).
Then there is the office building – that’s the office building programme, rather than a single structure. Officially, this is a “transport-led scheme”, brought forward by Network Rail and its property arm Platform4. It will deliver “much-needed public infrastructure improvements”, which just happen to be supported by a substantial commercial development above the concourse. The new offices, we are reassured, has been carefully designed to better reveal the Grade II* listed hotel building, and to respond sensitively to conservation constraints and protected views. In the video, it responds particularly well to prolonged, loving camera shots.
Flattering camera angles
This is where scepticism creeps in. Not because offices are inherently bad, or because stations should be frozen in aspic, but because the balance between transport function and commercial return is habitually understated. Liverpool Street risks becoming a modern echo of Penn Central: a station defined less by arrival and departure than by what has been built on top of it, where daylight is promised in renderings and rationed in reality.
Ellie Burrows, Network Rail’s managing director for Eastern, says the scheme will give Liverpool Street “more space, improved accessibility and a station designed for future demand”, adding that it is time the capital’s gateway to the City of London became “a destination in its own right”. That ambition is laudable—though one might reasonably ask whether a destination station should feel like a place you pass through, rather than one you disappear beneath.
The video shows us a future Liverpool Street that is light, airy and serenely uncongested. The question is not whether that future is desirable, but whether the fine print—commercial mass, structural shading and subterranean compromises—will look quite as flattering once the cameras are switched off.