Left Liverpool Street will be the Elizabeth Line’s main station in the City
Below top Liverpool Street will feature interchanges with several other lines, including the Northern Line
Below bottom By unifying the design principles across all Elizabeth Line stations, passengers will get a sense of continuity across the entire line
CROSSRAIL 099
CASE STUDY LIVERPOOL STREET
The Elizabeth Line’s main station in the City of London is Liverpool Street, which spans the districts of Moorgate and Broadgate. This is another very busy hub with interchanges to multiple tube lines and National Rail connections to both Stansted and Southend airports. It has also been one of Crossrail’s trickier undertakings to weave into the area’s densely packed urban fabric. Some of the challenges underground have included the need to navigate existing tube lines, a network of sewers and a Post Ofice railway line. Then there was the delicate task of re-interring 4,000 skeletons from a mass burial site and the need to work with archaeologists on thousands of artefacts uncovered during the construction and dating back to Roman Londinium.
There are no big differences in the east and west ticket halls for Liverpool Street apart from dark blue glass panels near the entrance at the Moorgate entrance that announce that the City of London Corporation has part-funded the Elizabeth Line. At the Broadgate end, there is an inclined lift that floats up alongside the escalators and is there to aid anyone with accessibility needs. Towering above the Moorgate ticket hall is another Wilkinson Eyre project in the form of 21 Moorfields, 564,000 sq ft of high- quality retail and ofice space and set to be Deutsche Bank’s London HQ when it opens in late 2022. It will also include a reconfigured high walk and act as a kind of bridge across the top of both the Circle and Elizabeth Lines.
A NEW LEVEL UP FOR LONDON
The Elizabeth Line was Europe’s largest infrastructure project and its Paddington to Abbey Wood section is due to open early this summer. It has cost over £18bn (£5bn has come from government), will run from both Heathrow and Reading in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. It will span 100km; 42km of this will be through new tunnels beneath London. It will carry an estimated 200 million passengers per year, boost Central London’s rail capacity by 10% and introduce 10 new stations. Thirty one existing stations have been upgraded. Paddington, Canary Wharf and Woolwich are ‘box stations’. This means the site was excavated and then created with concrete. The stations were then built inside the box.
The ticket halls themselves sport a unified architectural design and much use of materials such as Portland stone. A shallow, folded ceiling plane formed by ribbed pre-cast concrete panels breaks the perception of the low, flat ceilings to deliver a sense of space, scale and movement while a subtle sparkle of mica in the fibre-reinforced white concrete glows with indirect lighting. You enter the eastern ticket hall at Broadgate (though the entrance name is Liverpool Street) through a 5m-high glazed canopy in an open pedestrian plaza. Natural light spills down below ground during the day but at night, the canopy becomes like a lantern with artificial lighting from inside shining out of the glazed entrance to illuminate the streetscape. The western ticket hall at Moorgate is at street level and
accessed through an angular portal entrance, framed by bold, blue coloured glass. Glass panels and acoustic panels made from perforated enamel steel are used on walls and terrazzo on the floors. This has been a Wilkinson Eyre project and its director Ollie Tyler has been involved in the Crossrail project for a whopping 28 years. He told FX: ‘This is really the world’s first digital railway and the hope is that what we’re doing will last 120 years. But Liverpool Street has been one of the most challenging Elizabeth Line stations because of what we had to work around in the ground beneath the excavation site. I would liken our approach to surgery and plumbing when dealing with issues such as culverted rivers and archaeological finds. But the delights of digital surveying helped us with those.’
A ‘mined’ station – it has been excavated
34m below ground 238m-passenger platform length
124,000 passengers predicted per day on the Elizabeth Line 24 trains per hour (peak, each way)
ANTONY GREENWOOD
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