Five-year £500m redevelopment of King's Cross station almost complete
Redevelopment has restored Victorian facades but added spectacular 150m 'diagrid' roof over western concourse
Gwyn Topham, transport correspondent
The Guardian, Wednesday 14 March 2012
Should you rise from the underground, step off a train from Cambridge, or pass en route from Paris to Edinburgh next week, have the decency to gaze up at the reincarnated London's King's Cross station. After five years of construction the new western concourse is all but complete: a smaller but equally elegant counterpoint to its neighbour, St Pancras International.
Network Rail has restored and preserved Victorian facades but added a stunning modern roof, creating an uninterrupted space springing from one plume of white steel - and all without, as the company stresses, cancelling one train.
The wow factor in the £500m redevelopment is a "diagrid" roof - the kind seen atop the British Museum's Great Court, but in this case spanning 150m with not one visible bolt in the entire structure. Designed to cover the largest area without the need for supporting columns in the middle, this vast bright space is "the head of a matchstick", the engineers explain. The steel piles underpinning the visible lattice are driven 50m into the ground.
Architect Hiro Aso, who has been part of the project with architects John McAslan since submitting their winning design in the late 1990s, says: "It leaps, it's glorious, organic - a very bold expression of the overlay of new and old. We could have been a bit more apologetic, or subordinate, but this is an absolutely amazing structure."
After the cramped conditions that have faced the 47 million passengers who use the station each year, the revamp promises not only free flow but perhaps even time to relax. An elevated second storey in the concourse will have cafes and shops more detached from the commuter rush. The biggest pub of any railway station will also now be found here: a boon for many awaiting the evening East Coast services, if not perhaps the cleaning staff or guards.
Although wooden passages of construction hoardings have funnelled passengers through to the western platforms and St Pancras for years, many were utterly oblivious of the transformation taking place behind the boards, according to project manager Ian Fry. "We've held presentations for people here showing what we're doing, and they frequently ask: 'So when are you going to start?'"
Clearer light has already been falling on the eastern platforms, the main train shed, since the first sections of its glass roof were recently completed.
Photovoltaic panels will generate 10-20% of the station's power needs. That work continues, and after the Olympics builders will start pulling off the scabrous eyesore, the "dingy green canopy" (as Network Rail's own literature describes it) that hangs over the present entrance. For a few last days the ageing concourse behind, remains the main point of departure. Next year it will be demolished to make way for an outdoor plaza.
The most frequently asked question, Network Rail bosses admit, is the location of platform nine and three-quarters, boarding point for the Hogwart's Express of Harry Potter fame. Despite the station's reconstruction the monument, a luggage trolley vanishing into the brickwork, has kept tourists queuing - even when relocated to a dismal exterior wall on the accident blackspot of York Way junction, a setting to challenge the most ardent JK Rowling fan's suspension of disbelief.
A new space will be found amid the renovation of the original 1852 building - but discreetly, not between platforms nine and 10, and facing away from any trains lest the incessant flash photography unsights the drivers.
UK: redevelopment of King's Cross station almost complete
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Re: UK: redevelopment of King's Cross station almost complet
http://railwayeye.blogspot.com/2012/03/ ... -hall.html?At Broad Street we lost a station to development.
At Liverpool Street we gained retail and office space with platforms.
At King's Cross we actually get a station first and foremost, offering some retail opportunities.
Good effort.
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Re: UK: redevelopment of King's Cross station almost complet
London King's Cross concourse – review
King's Cross's new roof is magnificent. It's just a shame it sits so uncomfortably with its neighbouring buildings
Rowan Moore
The Observer, Sunday 18 March 2012
The big metal roof is as deeply ingrained in British architectural tradition as thatched cottages and stone churches. The idea was invented for greenhouses, then applied to the great Victorian railway stations and to the Crystal Palace, that wondrous achievement of scale and ingenuity, whose mythic power is made all the greater by the fact that it no longer exists. Big metal roofs speak of confidence and boldness and of the time of this country's greatest industrial might.
The concept has been exported, leading, for example, to the geodesic domes of American visionary Buckminster Fuller, potentially vast structures with which he hoped to rehouse humanity. More recent versions include the great over-sailing structures of Norman Foster's airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, and Lord Rogers's Millennium Dome. It manages to be futuristic and nostalgic at once; the concept may be pushing two centuries old, but the likes of Foster and Rogers still present it as the acme of modernity.
With the new western concourse at King's Cross station, designed by John McAslan and Partners, the big metal roof is coming home. It is sited between two famous examples of the genre, King's Cross station of 1852 and the later, more daring, St Pancras station, of 1868, and it is part of the £500m creation of a "transport super-hub", completed in time for the Olympics, when hundreds of thousands will pass through here on their way to the Javelin train from St Pancras to Stratford.
It is a large semi-circular addition to the flank of the old station, with a basic if essential purpose: to allow enough space for increasingly large numbers of passengers to move freely and smoothly as they emerge from the underground or enter from the street, buy tickets and catch their trains. It is a departures space only, as in airports, with arriving passengers exiting through the original front door of the station. It replaces the existing concourse, a low, crowded 1970s structure of dim design, that has never been loved for the way it blots the view of the plain, handsome twin-arched front of the original station. This structure will disappear later this year, allowing the creation of a new forecourt.
The concourse distributes people in one direction to the main line platforms, in another to suburban lines, and also allows a more leisurely route up some escalators, along a balcony where you can dally in various restaurants and on to a footbridge across the tracks of the old station, from which you can descend to your platform. It smooths out knots and anomalies in the previous arrangements and triples the space available for circulation. It also has space for shopping, without which no contemporary public work would be complete.
Meanwhile, the original glass roof has been cleaned up and had its glass restored, while unnecessary clutter in the space below has been removed, making it more bright and airy than it has looked at any time since it opened, 160 years ago. The effect is dazzling, of seeing this familiar, eternally grubby place transformed. It is as if you had just popped a perception-enhancing pill or been granted an extra faculty of sight.
But the main event of the new work is the half-cylinder of the new concourse and its roof, which has a span of 52 metres. Its structure, engineered by Arup, rises up a great steel stalk in the centre and then spreads into a tree-like canopy of intersecting branches, before descending into a ring of supports at the circumference. In so doing, it avoids the need to drop columns into the ticket hall of the underground station underneath the main space. Beneath the canopy, a sinuous pavilion in glass and tile takes care of the retail.
"It is the greatest station building, ever," declares architect John McAslan, who is not shy of speaking things as he sees them, and it is certainly impressive. Its main effect is a mighty oomph as you enter, from whatever direction, caused by the abundance of space and the unity of the structure. It is big and single-minded and has a generosity to which we have grown unused.
It's also nice to see organisations such as Network Rail, which usually grind their projects into dust through processes of procurement and value engineering, rediscovering some of the vim of their railway-building forebears, especially as more people now travel on railways in Britain than at any time before, including their Victorian-Edwardian heyday. In this, Network Rail was considerably helped by the budget-loosening power of the Olympics; the Department of Transport had previously decided that the concourse was too expensive, but made the money available when it realised that the world would be watching.
Half-a-billion pounds certainly seems like a lot to pay for adjustments to an existing station, even though these include the restoration of the huge old building and a new platform. The case for spending this much money is that it was ultimately unavoidable, as the station in its previous form would have eventually ceased to function, and that changing a fully functioning, Grade I-listed terminus is expensive. Also that it is essential to the success of the huge, long-planned development of land to the north, which brings with it £2.2bn of investment. The mighty Google is rumoured to be moving in and, goes the argument, the boys from Silicon Valley would not have been impressed by wrestling their way to work through the overcrowded entrails of Edward Heath-era infrastructure.
Whatever, it's a fine-looking thing, which might make it seem perverse to request that next time a major transport building is built, if there is a next time, it is something other than another reworking of the Victorian big roof – just for a change, but also because, when so much energy and effort goes into the structure, other aspects lose out. Where McAslan's show-stopping canopy is less strong is in the moments when it encounters the rest of the world; it sits clunkily against the brick side of the old station and seems uncomfortable with the Great Northern hotel, a grade II-listed building that is half-engulfed by the curvaceous skirt of the new roof.
From the outside, the form of the new building establishes no particular relationship with the things around it and contributes to the making of a formless no-man's-land between King's Cross, St Pancras and various preserved oddments. It looks like a structure that it would be hard to modify or add to, which is the almost invariable fate of station buildings. And, with two of the greatest big metal roofs in the world already in the neighbourhood, maybe it would be interesting to complement them rather than compete.
An alternative could be imagined with a simpler structure, but still-ample spaces, and greater investment in the finer-grained relationships of the parts, with different shades of experience as well as the big hit of the big space. It's not often that public works of this quality come round, so I don't want to complain, but maybe it is time to consider transport buildings as pieces of city, which, with their accumulation of shops and restaurants they increasingly resemble, rather than works of heroic engineering.
King's Cross's new roof is magnificent. It's just a shame it sits so uncomfortably with its neighbouring buildings
Rowan Moore
The Observer, Sunday 18 March 2012
The big metal roof is as deeply ingrained in British architectural tradition as thatched cottages and stone churches. The idea was invented for greenhouses, then applied to the great Victorian railway stations and to the Crystal Palace, that wondrous achievement of scale and ingenuity, whose mythic power is made all the greater by the fact that it no longer exists. Big metal roofs speak of confidence and boldness and of the time of this country's greatest industrial might.
The concept has been exported, leading, for example, to the geodesic domes of American visionary Buckminster Fuller, potentially vast structures with which he hoped to rehouse humanity. More recent versions include the great over-sailing structures of Norman Foster's airports at Stansted, Hong Kong and Beijing, and Lord Rogers's Millennium Dome. It manages to be futuristic and nostalgic at once; the concept may be pushing two centuries old, but the likes of Foster and Rogers still present it as the acme of modernity.
With the new western concourse at King's Cross station, designed by John McAslan and Partners, the big metal roof is coming home. It is sited between two famous examples of the genre, King's Cross station of 1852 and the later, more daring, St Pancras station, of 1868, and it is part of the £500m creation of a "transport super-hub", completed in time for the Olympics, when hundreds of thousands will pass through here on their way to the Javelin train from St Pancras to Stratford.
It is a large semi-circular addition to the flank of the old station, with a basic if essential purpose: to allow enough space for increasingly large numbers of passengers to move freely and smoothly as they emerge from the underground or enter from the street, buy tickets and catch their trains. It is a departures space only, as in airports, with arriving passengers exiting through the original front door of the station. It replaces the existing concourse, a low, crowded 1970s structure of dim design, that has never been loved for the way it blots the view of the plain, handsome twin-arched front of the original station. This structure will disappear later this year, allowing the creation of a new forecourt.
The concourse distributes people in one direction to the main line platforms, in another to suburban lines, and also allows a more leisurely route up some escalators, along a balcony where you can dally in various restaurants and on to a footbridge across the tracks of the old station, from which you can descend to your platform. It smooths out knots and anomalies in the previous arrangements and triples the space available for circulation. It also has space for shopping, without which no contemporary public work would be complete.
Meanwhile, the original glass roof has been cleaned up and had its glass restored, while unnecessary clutter in the space below has been removed, making it more bright and airy than it has looked at any time since it opened, 160 years ago. The effect is dazzling, of seeing this familiar, eternally grubby place transformed. It is as if you had just popped a perception-enhancing pill or been granted an extra faculty of sight.
But the main event of the new work is the half-cylinder of the new concourse and its roof, which has a span of 52 metres. Its structure, engineered by Arup, rises up a great steel stalk in the centre and then spreads into a tree-like canopy of intersecting branches, before descending into a ring of supports at the circumference. In so doing, it avoids the need to drop columns into the ticket hall of the underground station underneath the main space. Beneath the canopy, a sinuous pavilion in glass and tile takes care of the retail.
"It is the greatest station building, ever," declares architect John McAslan, who is not shy of speaking things as he sees them, and it is certainly impressive. Its main effect is a mighty oomph as you enter, from whatever direction, caused by the abundance of space and the unity of the structure. It is big and single-minded and has a generosity to which we have grown unused.
It's also nice to see organisations such as Network Rail, which usually grind their projects into dust through processes of procurement and value engineering, rediscovering some of the vim of their railway-building forebears, especially as more people now travel on railways in Britain than at any time before, including their Victorian-Edwardian heyday. In this, Network Rail was considerably helped by the budget-loosening power of the Olympics; the Department of Transport had previously decided that the concourse was too expensive, but made the money available when it realised that the world would be watching.
Half-a-billion pounds certainly seems like a lot to pay for adjustments to an existing station, even though these include the restoration of the huge old building and a new platform. The case for spending this much money is that it was ultimately unavoidable, as the station in its previous form would have eventually ceased to function, and that changing a fully functioning, Grade I-listed terminus is expensive. Also that it is essential to the success of the huge, long-planned development of land to the north, which brings with it £2.2bn of investment. The mighty Google is rumoured to be moving in and, goes the argument, the boys from Silicon Valley would not have been impressed by wrestling their way to work through the overcrowded entrails of Edward Heath-era infrastructure.
Whatever, it's a fine-looking thing, which might make it seem perverse to request that next time a major transport building is built, if there is a next time, it is something other than another reworking of the Victorian big roof – just for a change, but also because, when so much energy and effort goes into the structure, other aspects lose out. Where McAslan's show-stopping canopy is less strong is in the moments when it encounters the rest of the world; it sits clunkily against the brick side of the old station and seems uncomfortable with the Great Northern hotel, a grade II-listed building that is half-engulfed by the curvaceous skirt of the new roof.
From the outside, the form of the new building establishes no particular relationship with the things around it and contributes to the making of a formless no-man's-land between King's Cross, St Pancras and various preserved oddments. It looks like a structure that it would be hard to modify or add to, which is the almost invariable fate of station buildings. And, with two of the greatest big metal roofs in the world already in the neighbourhood, maybe it would be interesting to complement them rather than compete.
An alternative could be imagined with a simpler structure, but still-ample spaces, and greater investment in the finer-grained relationships of the parts, with different shades of experience as well as the big hit of the big space. It's not often that public works of this quality come round, so I don't want to complain, but maybe it is time to consider transport buildings as pieces of city, which, with their accumulation of shops and restaurants they increasingly resemble, rather than works of heroic engineering.
-
Kevin Wilson-Smith
Re: UK: redevelopment of King's Cross station almost complet
It looks out of place from the photos I have looked at.
Will have to wait until I can see it the flesh to be able to really comment though - and following a recent op., it looks like it will be a while before I travel again......
Something to look forward to......!
Will have to wait until I can see it the flesh to be able to really comment though - and following a recent op., it looks like it will be a while before I travel again......
Something to look forward to......!