The London
Evening Standard carries an article about the
modernised station:
"London's latest landmark:
Blackfriars station
The new £550 million Blackfriars
station has platforms stretching all the way across the river and a new South
Band entrance. It's an impressive feat of engineering - but why did they have to
cut design corners?
London's latest landmark:
Blackfriars station
The new £550 million Blackfriars
station has platforms stretching all the way across the river and a new South
Band entrance. It's an impressive feat of engineering - but why did they have to
cut design corners?
The majesty of London’s train
stations is for many a function of their scale. The vast, ghostly vault of
Brunel’s Paddington, King’s Cross, with its stunning train shed, and of course
St Pancras, with its 60 million bricks, are three of the capital’s most strident
and beloved monuments.
This week I visited our
21st-century contribution to this lineage: the new Blackfriars station, a
project with similar ambition to its Victorian ancestors in terms of complexity
if not scale. The £550 million remodelling of the mainline station is the most
ambitious aspect of a London-wide upgrade of the Thameslink line, which runs
between Bedford and Brighton through the City.
The route has been under growing
stress for years as the number of commuter journeys has steadily increased and
the improvements will allow for more frequent 12-carriage trains (from
eight-carriages currently), and therefore carry more passengers more
quickly. But how do you extend the platforms at a station hemmed in by the
City and the Thames while maintaining the flow of commuters during construction
of such an enormous project?
Blackfriars’ platforms previously
extended a little way across the river, downstream of Blackfriars road bridge,
but the decision was made in 2009 to extend them along the whole length of the
rail bridge, adding a new entrance on the south side, at Bankside, as well as a
new improved one on the north, turning Blackfriars into a unique station that
spans the Thames.
London hasn’t had buildings on its
bridges for a long time: not since 1831 when the old London Bridge (and the
medieval houses and shops that occupied it) was demolished. It will be a
distinctive presence in postcard views of the capital: a glassy bridge with
London’s largest solar panel array on its serrated roof.
All of this, including the
broadening of the bridge itself by nine metres, has been achieved while trains
continued running almost throughout the three-year construction. Blackfriars
Underground station is also open again after a nearly three-year closure to
passengers (though District and Circle line trains continued to run
through).
You might think that creating
large-scale, complex buildings is fairly straightforward these days. We tend to
gripe when these huge projects are late and over-budget, as if construction is
as predictable as assembling an iPad in a Chinese factory. Consider the
logistics, though. There was no storage on site, so every delivery, including
the 38m-long roof trusses, had to arrive just in time to be put in place, often
at night. The trusses arrived, appropriately, by train but much else was brought
in by barge from downriver, beyond the Isle of Dogs. Two thousand people were
employed on site at the peak of the construction. This is a significant
achievement by the team of Jacobs, Balfour Beatty and Network
Rail.
Much of the work is now complete
and the new entrances have been in use since April. The train shed itself,
however, will not be finished until Christmas, when we will be to see how
marvellously bright it is, allowing north light into the platforms from
rooflights in the distinctive roof. Glass facades to the bridge will also allow
some great views of the Thames.
Blackfriars station, then, will
make commuters’ lives better, was achieved on time and with minimum fuss. So why
is it that this is such an unsatisfying piece of architecture?
Take a look at the station’s south
entrance. This is a new single-storey glass and steel pavilion building, with a
glass staircase leading up to the platform level. Sounds fairly simple. But it’s
executed so clumsily that it comes off looking like the entrance to a leisure
centre in Slough. The building’s glass façade is almost entirely obscured by
unecessary amounts of white-painted steel frame (remember this is a
bungalow, not the Forth Bridge). The entrance building is elliptical in plan,
which does nothing to contribute to the public space of this odd riverside area:
it is an even less distinguished addition to the London riverside than the
concrete bunk of the Founders’ Arms pub, which it faces.
Once inside, you are faced with an
array of materials chucked together with abandon. The plasticky, maroon panels
on the walls look fragile enough to punch your hand through, and the reclaimed
London stock brick is a nice material but out of place in the context of a
19th/21st century iron and concrete bridge. The staircase, which also gives
great views of the river, is built like a temporary footbridge — all rattly
steel components and clipped-on glass panels.
On the north side it’s even worse.
Here the entrance is shared with the Tube and adds a generic piece of
glass-curtain walling to the corner of Queen Victoria Street. The new station
cowers blandly opposite the majestic Portland Stone sweep of Unilever House.
Inside, the last fragment of the Victorian Blackfriars is used as a piece of
interior decoration: blocks of sandstone carved with the destinations across
Europe that were once available to travellers from here. Its simple material
beauty mocks the paltry design ambition of the new station.
While it is unlikely that most of
its users will measure Blackfriars’ success by how lovely it is, I think it’s a
disgrace that a public place of this prominence is left to visual incompetents
to finish off. The original designers, architects Pascall and Watson, were
replaced with giant construction group Jacobs for the execution of the project:
an all too familiar story for public buildings today, as politicians have
invented contracts that make prices more predictable and reduce the risks of
overspend. This move only ever leads to the dumbing down of design quality and
the loss of the original architectural vision. And before anyone complains about
how expensive good architecture is, take a look at Jacobs’ $10 billion revenues
last year. Keeping the original architects on is not more expensive: it’s a
question of priorities and of imagination.
It is not the scale of the
Victorian stations that thrills us. It’s the exuberant literacy of the gothic
decoration at St Pancras, and the tracery and decorative details of Paddington’s
roof, so grandly emerging from the rusty murk, These details make the scale
comprehensible, they provide us with the foreground necessary to feel at home in
these industrial-scale spaces.
There are moments when a building
needs details, when the junction between two materials requires a skilful piece
of design to elegantly resolve, or where a building’s purpose and role in the
city needs articulation at small scale. Blackfriars has failed at the human
scale even while succeeding in the efficient resolution of a complex engineering
problem. This might not now be a problem, but no one will shed a tear in 80
years when it is once again taken to pieces and something new put in its
place.
Architects and engineers have been
working for centuries on ever more efficient, and often impressive, ways to span
long distances and make large envelopes of space for train stations, factories,
power stations and airports. But our new austere age, along with the search for
architectural efficiency, has edited out details like decoration, identifiable
entrances, signs, beautiful floor surfaces, humane moments of physical contact
like door handles that every other era of architecture found important to the
whole. Blackfriars is just the biggest, most visible example of a trend that
must be reversed."
The co-ordinates posted and the
photographs are for the new southern entrance to the
station.