Getting there

With the long-awaited Crossrail about to start burrowing beneath London, the most unconventional thing about this public project is the way private developers have been needed to make it happen

Words Jan Carlos Kucharek | Images Crossrail

Descending like a Passover across every sector of the UK’s public spending budget allocation,  the coalition government’s comprehensive spending review in October left little untouched in its wake. But one thing it did spare in its entirety, to the relief of London’s long-suffering commuters, was the proposed £16bn Crossrail, the infrastructure project intended to relieve the severely congested central portion of the London underground network by boring over 21km of twin tunnels deep under the capital, to connect Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Canary Wharf, Woolwich, Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. This 118km stretch of rail line will be served by nine new London stations, each designed by a different architect. At Farringdon, east of King’s Cross, it will connect with Network Rail’s £5.5bn Thameslink programme, which aims to efficiently link Bedford to the north with Brighton in the south. If carried out as projected, these new cross-routes will bring hyper-connectivity to a over 1.5 million residents within the compass of the Greater London area and Thames Gateway, significantly reducing journey times to the capital, and linking four international airports. It’s the connectivity of a modernist’s dream.

The concept of a cross London rail route is 20 years old, born as the Central London Rail Study, presented as a private bill to the House of Commons in 1991. However, faced with a country in recession and reduced passenger numbers, the bill was rejected in 1994, but not before the government had put ‘safeguarding directions’ in place to protect the route alignment of any future rail line across London. In 2001 Cross London Rail Links – a 50/50 joint venture between the Department for Transport (DfT) and Transport for London (TfL) – formed to research the case for gaining parliamentary powers to build Crossrail. Presented to the House in May 2005, the Crossrail Act and its route finally received Royal Assent on 22 July 2008. Two days later Crossrail Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of TfL, came into being, supported by an act giving it the legal powers to facilitate the line’s construction. Of the £15.9bn financial package, the DfT is responsible for £5.1BN, with the London mayor via TfL providing £7.7bn and Network Rail £2.3bn for upgrading its existing infrastructure. BAA and Corporation of London are contributing £0.5bn, plus a little over £0.3bn from private developers. By Crossrail’s official figures, this investment is intended to generate £42bn for the UK economy over 60 years.

The scale and complexity of the tunnelling project cannot be underestimated. From 2011, two 6m diameter tunnels will start to be bored west of Paddington at Royal Oak and will only resurface at Stratford and Woolwich. Large subterranean station boxes at varying depths will be needed for all stations along the route. These will have to connect with existing tube station reconfiguration works at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel. Numerous draft relief shafts will need constructing – one 40m deep currently sits idle beneath Foster + Partners’ Moorhouse on London Wall, waiting to tap into the two tunnels for Liverpool Street. All Crossrail platforms will be 260m long, and take the 10-carriage trains, running 24 services an hour, whose 2,000 person capacities will dwarf the 800 of a standard tube train. Tunnel boring will start at the eastern and western tunnel ends and work 24 hours a day, removing five million tonnes of London clay, eventually to meet 20-40m below the city centre.

The wide-ranging powers conferred under the Crossrail Act has certainly done a lot to cut through bureaucratic and planning red tape. Under Schedule 7 of the Crossrail Act, planning permission for the line is deemed already to have been given, limiting the objection options – under the Town and Country Planning Act – of the London boroughs that the line passes through – Westminster, City of London, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Greenwich. The Act allows compulsory purchase orders for all station sites, temporary and enabling works, stopping up of highways – even to overrule the onerous requirements of the Planning (Listed Building and Conservation Areas) Act when necessary. In fact, a ‘Qualifying Authority’ can only refuse or impose conditions on a Schedule 7 station application on the grounds ‘that arrangements ought to be modified to preserve the local environment or local amenity or to reduce the prejudicial effects on road safety or on the free flow of traffic in the local area, and are reasonably capable of being so modified’.  The result is that Crossrail can effectively do whatever it needs to get the line built.

Above ground however, where the architects’ role in the whole process becomes palpable, the role of the planning authorities becomes less benign – although no less complex. While the design of stations still falls under Schedule 7, (but can be modified via the above clause), other ‘over site developments’ (OSDs) will be subject to the Planning Act through numerous planning briefs, drawn up by the individual councils and appended to the Crossrail Act. According to Graham King, head of strategic planning and transport at Westminster City Council, the boroughs will have a job on their hands when formal applications start coming in thick and fast in 2011 (so far only three have been submitted – for Canary Wharf, Farringdon West and TCR). Every station has been allocated an architect, who, due to the prohibitive cost of trying to build a ticket hall below ground, will produce ground-level designs with escalators taking passengers down to the deep platform levels – a decision made in spite of the high lease value that such sites would command in the retail market. Every station will be double-ended, some entrances up to 400m apart from each other, as a result spilling into sometimes very different urban contexts.

But, as King explains, the station is only half the story. The part-sunken Paddington Crossrail, a simple station box that will sit alongside Brunel’s Grade I listed structure, being developed by client Network Rail, is an anomaly, with the others (save for Whitechapel in Tower Hamlets) characterised mainly by large mixed-use office/retail OSDs, taking advantage of their prime locations and site value. The 1994 safeguarding directions must have come as a godsend to the corporate developers and institutional investors, as they earmarked, early on, the city centre sites singled out for possible development. You can see they have done their homework in securing packages of highly valuable capital real estate, and the roll call is all big guns – Grosvenor and Great Portland Estates at Bond Street, Derwent London at Tottenham Court Road, Cardinal Lysander Properties at Farringdon and Aviva at Liverpool Street. A visit to most of these sites will see only holes where buildings once were, all of them compulsorily purchased, and all waiting for the completion of the station structures before the developers are given the option to repurchase their sites and develop them. According to a GPE press release on the Hanover Square site, this will be done ‘at a discount to the open market value at that time’ – a figure being put at 10%-20%.

King admits that some interesting planning issues will arise from these developments being shoehorned into sensitive low-scaled central London sites adjacent to numerous listed buildings, but is assured that the planning briefs issued are detailed enough to give thorough guidance on design approaches. But prospective planning demands may well have affected who Crossrail and the developers chose to build the OSDs, all of them with proven experience of working at city scale, and each site having its own challenges. Beyond Weston Williamson designing in Brunel’s shadow at Paddington, Hawkins\ Brown, Stanton Williams and AHMM at TCR will be trying to realise a logistically complex development at one of the city’s busiest intersections; McAslan and PLP Architects at Bond Street will have to avoid being a bull in Mayfair’s china shop; PLP for the OSD and Aedas at Farringdon will try to co-ordinate with Crossrail’s intersection with the north/south Thameslink Programme, while BDP will attempt regeneration at Whitechapel. Grimshaw has also been taken on by Crossrail under its C100 contract not only to develop the corporate branding of the line by way of platform level design, lighting, furniture and wayfinding, but also as client advisor to the appointed architects to oversee the ‘common components’ of the stations, creating, in Crossrail’s words, a ‘model specification… which each designer tailors to suit their design’.

Before Cabe hit the buffers in the spending review, it received several design proposals for Farringdon, TCR and Paddington, and while generally approving of the station design approaches, the sense is that, given the overarching powers of Schedule 7, the quango was already a little out of its depth, offering piecemeal improvement ideas to schemes that, through legislation, technical complexity and budget capping, it was in a bad position to do much about. It seemed more keen to advise on public realm improvements around the stations, such as the Stanton Williams glazed canopies at TCR, but even Cabe acknowledged that under Schedule 7 there was no requirement for Crossrail to submit public realm improvements as part of a station application. That said, it seems like Crossrail has taken its general comments on board, announcing last month that it had finalised a memorandum of understanding with all 18 boroughs that will be affected by the development ‘which aims to make improvements outside stations that reflect a local area’s characteristics and needs’. Sam Richards, head of urban integration at Crossrail, acknowledges that their role doesn’t end at the station’s demise, but that they’re part of a broader masterplan, along with TfL and the landowners for the whole area around them, and are looking at sources of funding to achieve this. Certainly for Graham King at Westminster, ‘pulling together a public realm strategy for major sites in the borough has been a significant success’. His view is encouraging as the disruption caused to the public realm up until 2017 is likely to be enormous, and, as he points out, Crossrail is not obliged to enter a Section 106 Agreement to deal with it.

While it is no surprise that the big developers will work to maximise the huge sites released to them through the stations, an interesting aside to the whole Crossrail story is how private money still funds non-commercial stations along the line. BAA and the Corporation of London are between them paying half a billion for the privilege of Crossrail stopping at Heathrow and Liverpool Street. Berkeley Homes’ £1bn mixed-use masterplan, with 5,000 homes at Woolwich Royal Arsenal, was left high and dry when the DfT decided in 2006 to drop plans for a station there due to lack of funding. John Anderson of Berkeley Homes and Greenwich say the proposal was reinstated due to keen lobbying from the council and local businesses, but, once the Council had reportedly sold the developer a leisure centre car park adjoining the Arsenal site to allow it to extend and reconfigure its masterplan, it was Berkeley that had to stump up the £160m needed to bring the station to the site. For Canary Wharf Group plc too, the 34,000m2 development being built in its North Dock, of four retail floors finished at surface level by a huge Foster + Partners timber diagrid roof, and of a similar scale to the firm’s original Jubilee Line station, would probably have lower footfall if the group wasn’t subbing £150m, ‘in lieu of a Section 106 Agreement’, of the £500m required to construct its own station at the bottom of it. The actual Section 106, for education, ‘connectivity’ and the building of community park by landscaper Gillespies is a far less impressive £7.7m.

But maybe this highlights the difference between the two building programmes. New Canary Wharf may be the same size as its Jubilee Line predecessor, but at root they are very different beasts. The Jubilee Line extension was the last of a London Underground station construction programme that saw itself building stand-alone stations within its own design traditions and purely for the purposes of people movement. With the need at times to raze whole blocks of central London to build this route, the active involvement of corporate developers was a pre-requisite; it was likewise a necessity, with the budget capped, to offset the costs of building new stations at its eastern stretches with the private sector. Whether design quality will suffer the scourge of value engineering post the comprehensive spending review, and once it clears planning, remains to be seen – one hopes the planning briefs are robust. Open dialogue between all interests and the public at these critical design stages would certainly have helped, but with developers, TfL, the Greater London Authority, Design for London and the architects all deferring media enquiries to Crossrail to stage manage, one has to ask if this scenario is being encouraged at all. In the new austerity, it all smacks of a loss of innocence – something Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti, who lauded the necessary velocity of Modern Life and hailed London as the ‘Futurist city par excellence’ would understand. Stumbling from the wreckage of his crashed car in 1908, bloodied, concussed and oil-stained, it was like he had walked away from an old world and into a new, burbling of his desire for ‘omnipresent speed’. Le Corbusier later echoed this, coining ‘The city that is built for speed is built for success’. One hopes that when all’s said and done, and Crossrail is shuttling thousands of people through its tunnels every hour across London, the millions in the streets above are not left to rue our need for speed.