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With Angela Rayner back in her old job, I wanted to propose that she takes a quick look at what is going on at Liverpool Street station.
I know that she said “‘beautiful’ means nothing really”, but I think she might inquire into the muddy water of Network Rail’s development ambitions.
The first scheme from Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron was not beautiful. It was a swamp monster. The Victorian Society, English Heritage and the Twentieth Century Society came together like a meeting of the five families in shock.
There were 2,200 written objections. I posted details of the intentions on Instagram and got almost half a million views. Nearly all the comments were appalled. The developer and architect retreated.
Network Rail, the owner of the station, then came back with another architect called ACME, and a hastily re-conceived scheme. It is worse.
It is difficult to appreciate the scale of this proposed white elephant. The architects have produced visualisations, but they have been taken from a rat’s viewpoint, at gutter level.
The distinguished Andaz Hotel (or Great Eastern as it once was) looks dominant in their renderings and the development behind it, tiny.
Not so. It is 20 storeys high – almost a million square feet of glass phallus, plonked on top of the concourse, and not made more amenable by a froth of fashionable green foliage at the tip.
With an understandable element of weariness, the troops rallied after the second development plan appeared – 3,700 wrote this time. They were pointedly ignored.
The City of London Planning Authority has given the go-ahead. The application now moves to the mayor of London. He has the right to stop it. There has been quite a long pause.
I worry. The mayor, (soon-to-be Lord) Sir Sadiq Khan, has already promoted investment in Waterloo and Victoria stations. We face the prospect of skyscrapers there too.
Liverpool Street station is not a brownfield site. I was on its concourse on Saturday. The restored and listed engine sheds are quite magnificent, filled with natural light. It presented a beautiful, sunny, wide and generally uncluttered space.
There was no evidence that it was unfit for purpose. More to the point, it is a significant part of a legally designated conservation area. The station is made up of Grade 2 and Grade 2* listed buildings. This heritage will be harmed. It should not be.
Network Rail claims it needs what is nearly a million square feet of office simply to pay for improvements. But what improvements exactly? It can’t create more actual ground space. There isn’t any. The proposed supporting columns for the new offices would narrow the platform approaches.
Does it need to build 20 storeys of office block, thus destroying the look of the entire place, just to move a few ticket machines and Costas around?
And how much of this vaunted “spend” on the station is actually for the vast columns holding up the office block above them? We need proper probing. The City did not do this.
New disabled lifts? Well, yes. But the biggest complaint on Tripadvisor is that the current lift is never working. Many concerns about the existing station (ludicrously turned into so-called “letters of support” by a PR company) were things such as “smelly toilets”.
Network Rail has a statutory duty to provide disabled lifts. Working ones. Now. Not in 10 years’ time when it finally gets round to completing this colossal disruption.
Even if many more passengers use the busiest station in London, this scheme won’t be able to provide more trains – they cannot enlarge the tunnel that brings the trains in.
So what is going on? Never mind “beauty”, this scheme represents an assault on language, propriety, and economics.
After being rebuffed, Network Rail is having a go at the billion-pound development itself – thus taking all the risk on the public’s behalf.
So eager is it to cash in on the Bishopsgate bonanza that, when the first scheme fell apart, it brought in its own development company, Platform4.
How many architects were invited to tender proposals for these very public works? Er… one: ACME.
Shouldn’t there have been an architectural competition? Even without a blueprint beauty contest, railway experts McAslan (who have done notable work at Kings Cross) were able to come up with their own less intrusive, less heritage-harmful design.
But how can any of this exploitation of Liverpool Street as a building site be possible at all? The fact is that Network Rail’s new property arm has stretched the definition of “brownfield”.
You might think that “brownfield” means a blighted, disused, commercial or former industrial area. You know, a mud-coloured empty field of some kind. (Network Rail has so many.)
But it says that “under planning and real-estate definitions, the space directly above an active transport hub is treated similarly to a brownfield site” when it is “under-utilised”.
This is self-serving nonsense: a wild definition that covers any despoilment. This initiative was supposed to help depressed economic areas. Is the City of London in need of regeneration?
Network Rail now claims a licence, or even a diktat, to build on top of everything, regardless of its quality or legal protections. What sort of precedent is that? Somebody with authority must challenge this bare-faced assertion. The mayor can and should. If not him, then Parliament.
There are already strong legal reasons for an inquiry. Indeed, all these concerns were laid out by the mayor’s own independent design committee, who thoroughly disliked this new scheme.
The expert, independent review panel said that the proposed office block at Liverpool Street station “lacks clear justification”, and they “remain unconvinced that the scale is appropriate …[or that it] is the right approach”.
Sir Sadiq must surely take stock of these words.
And, economically, the sums don’t add up. Construction in the City is hugely expensive.
To realise spare cash (profit) to pay for “station improvements” as well is a major risk, and it is likely that any shortfall would have to be covered by the taxpayer.
The Lords need to debate this. Let’s find out what Network Rail is really instructed to do, not what it purports. Is it really allowed to destroy its own railway heritage with speculative property dealing?
Does this brownfield “air rights” nonsense apply to all distinguished heritage terminals across London?
Doesn’t the City deserve a project at least the equal of the beautiful job done on Kings Cross and St Pancras?
There, modern accretions were removed, not added, and the whole area improved immeasurably because planners recognised that we should celebrate our pioneering Victorian architecture, not desecrate it.
Retaining value, probity and an appreciation of quality is vital to our future – or what the hell is growth for? This is not a beauty competition. Over to you, Angela.
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Come on, Sadiq – will you save Liverpool Street station?
Griff Rhys Jones is president of the Victorian Society, which is running a campaign to stop the proposed redevelopment
