Friends of the Rail Forum

On the wrong track

Our railways may be revitalised, but their stations risk becoming glorified shopping malls

o Jonathan Glancey
o The Guardian,
o Tuesday September 2 2008


The much-trumpeted "modernisation" of British Railways, announced in 1955, began rather badly. Instead of pushing ahead with electrification and a world of fast, clean trains, hundreds of untried and untested diesel locomotives of any number of designs from a variety of manufacturers were bought at great cost. Few were as powerful, fast or reliable as the modern steam locomotives they pushed from service.

While French and other continental railways modernised radically without demonising the passing age of steam, Britain's were forced to be modishly "modern" without being allowed to develop a proper notion of what "modernisation" meant in practice.

It was a case of out with the old and in with whatever seemed to be overtly modern in order to appease Whitehall. But, if steam locomotives were destroyed with missionary zeal, railway architecture fared just as badly.

The big shock came in 1961 when the magnificent Euston Arch, a commanding Greek revival triumphal gateway that had fronted the London terminus since 1837, was demolished.

A group of campaigners went to No 10 Downing Street to discuss the issue with the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. According to Richards, "Macmillan sat without moving, with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact, he said nothing except that he would consider the matter."

Macmillan had indeed considered the matter. The arch was razed to the ground before Dr Beeching, chairman of the new British Railways Board, announced his plan, The Reshaping of Britain's Railways, that saw thousands of miles of railways hacked into housing estates, roads, fields or nothing at all. The new Euston station, meanwhile, resembled a bland airport terminal.

The winds of change have blown through Britain's railways since then. Although crudely privatised, our railways are busy. The remodelled St Pancras has been hailed as an architectural, and operational, tour de force. New high-speed lines up and down the country are being discussed. Crossrail appears to be going ahead.

Is this a new golden age for the railways? Not quite. For every good decision made in the railways' favour, others appear to be ill-considered, if not intentionally destructive. Did you know Euston station is up for redevelopment again? Birmingham New Street is, too, as is Waterloo. And, yet, for all the progress made at St Pancras, the new-look Euston, New Street and Waterloo may well fall short of our expectations. Why? Because each is being developed by, well, developers.

There is nothing wrong with developers developing as long as someone offers them direction. Network Rail has no chief architect. It certainly has no fondness for Waterloo, describing it, in the hope of gutting it, as a "late and rather tired expression of Edwardian architecture".

The big idea is to redevelop Waterloo, New Street and Euston along ruthlessly commercial lines. Give the developers their heads. Allow them to appoint some nominally talented architects (Foreign Office Architects, in the example of Euston). Above all, ensure the financial path to what might or might not be more efficient stations is eased by licensing lashings of shops, offices and flats behind, before, above, between, below platforms and concourses.

Early illustrations for the new Euston have revealed a Chinese-Middle Eastern-style mall without a single train on show. Throughout Europe, and elsewhere, handsome and even magnificent new stations are emerging. Have you seen Berlin's Hauptbahnhof or Melbourne's Southern Cross Station, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners, architects of the newly threatened Waterloo International Terminal? Have you taken a train to any of the latest generation of TGV stations in France?

Before we allow some of our most famous transport buildings to become giant, developer-led malls, let's see an architect, with a love of railways as well as design and planning, appointed to ensure railway stations remain, in whatever style and no matter how modern, railway stations.


jonathan.glancey@guardian.co.uk

A good piece.

It is actually commendable that people pick it up these aspects and get published.

It's very noticeable in UK that both railway stations and airports have become shopping malls first and foremost. What were originally wide passenger circulation areas have been crammed with shops and kiosks so you can now hardly move. Seating has been reduced, presumably because if you're seated comfortably with a book you won't wander around aimlessly "enjoying" the "shopping experience". At airports it's become even worse as the new placebo security measures and their associated queues further eat into the passenger circulation areas.

The new St Pancras bucks that trend. There are indeed a lot of shops, but they don't encroach on passenger movement - so far, at least. But major London termini such as Victoria, Waterloo and even the 1960s Euston have seen their passenger circulation space reduced drastically. Liverpool Street and Paddington are not too bad, the former because most of the shops are on an upper level, the latter due to a new area that was added for shops.

During a recent visit I noticed that in both Edinburgh and Aberdeen, shops are appearing as though it is some sort of virus - which it is! In Aberdeen the bus station adjoined the railway station, now it has been moved some distance away to allow more shops to be built. To get from the bus to the train means a long walk through the shopping centre. Good marketing but lousy planning.

In Zürich and Luzern the railway stations have large shopping areas but they are mostly tucked away down below with their own access points from the street. However, in Bern the passenger has to wade through throngs of shoppers to get to the trains. Heaven help you if you are late. We even have locomotives painted with adverts, SBB Re 460, which I admit does not look nice but the revenue gained does help to keep the fares down.

Malcolm

I have just finished reading (in the latest issue of Trains) about the busiest station in the world - in Japan. It is part of/linked to, a massive multi story departmental store! Escalators out lead to this store.

Apart from reducing the passenger circulating space, the shops also prevent people from seeing properly the cathedral-like vastness of many of these great railway stations. That is true even in the booking hall of Copenhagen's main station. The trains are considered just another service to be fitted in wherever they can be squeezed, down deep escalators on claustrophobic sub-surface platforms with low roofs (thinking here of both Birmigham New Street in UK and the New York station which holds trains going north to Albany and Toronto - is that Penn Central or another one?). So different from the original vision of the architects and, as the author of the original piece says, a few enlightened modern ones.