CLIENT FILE 47
This image Central Hall is scheduled to open to the public in 2027
vehicles in the right place and under cover to tell the right story. We are approaching completion on a huge
renovation and roof replacement project by architects Buttress on Station Hall, our Grade II listed station building at the National Rail Museum. Tis will open in September in time for the museum’s 50th birthday and will feature a new exhibition designed by Drinkall Dean. We’ve also undertaken significant projects
to safeguard our collection, fixing hazards and carrying out a wide range of enabling works such as a new substation, landscaping and demolition of our former entrance. Our next step is breaking ground on our new welcome building and gallery of future railway transport, Central Hall. Designed by Feilden Fowles, this is the largest part of the masterplan.
How important is architecture and design to realising the masterplan’s vision? Exceptional quality is at the heart of our projects, as well as being core to the York Central development. York as a city has
enormous architectural coherence, and we need to match that quality with our contemporary interventions. Happily, our estate bridges our own past/
present/future narrative nicely – with heritage brick buildings being restored to the highest quality and PV panels fitted to the roof, while more recent buildings and spaces are being renovated for new galleries. In the future, Central Hall will be a light and airy, mainly timber structure with passive cooling and heating systems, but with design details that draw on railway architecture of the past. We are committed to bringing our built heritage into the 21st century without destroying their unique aspects. At Locomotion, our challenge has been to design a high quality, low cost and low impact building on a former banana processing plant. We’ve achieved this by making the design work hard on a simple yet striking building. Designed by architects AOC with graphics by Graphic Tought Facility, this complements both the main collections building from 2004 and our 19th-century railway buildings, and
looks at home among the trees and meadows of the immediate area.
What is your process for commissioning designers? We run public procurement processes for our design teams and competitively tender everything. For the new Central Hall building, because of its high profile, we ran an international competition supported by Malcolm Reading Consultants and shortlisted six finalists before selecting Feilden Fowles, an emerging young practice.
What qualities do you look for in designers and architects? We prefer to appoint a team not a scheme. I’m always looking for a team that gets the ambition and scale of our transformation and responds accordingly, whether through form or materiality. Railway designers and engineers were the mavericks of their day after all! I don’t like it when people go lazy with the stereotypes. We’re an industrial goods yard site, not a heritage railway, so we don’t want a
PHOTO: FEILDEN FOWLES
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