Rob Wilson takes a pre-opening tour of the tunnelled stretch of the long-awaited Elizabeth line

I’m standing on an Elizabeth line platform and a list of the trains due updates constantly on a digital display above the doors of the glazed screen running along the platform edge. They swoosh in, empty, every two and a half minutes. Crossrail is trialling the 24-trains-per-hour frequency of the service on the central section of the line in advance of its opening on 24 May. I check my watch, confirming that the displays reflect accurate real-time minutes and not the frustrating stretched-out ones you experience on many London Underground lines.

Tottenham Court Road Station platform

The accurate, smooth-running frequency contrasts pointedly with the seeming aeons that Londoners have been waiting for this east-west rail link to be built. The most recent delay saw its opening postponed from the end of 2018 to this year. ‘Well, we have been on the project for 30 years,’ says Hawkins\Brown co-founder Roger Hawkins, one of the architects on the scheme, with a half-laugh, half-sigh.

The idea of creating an east-west rail link under London from Liverpool Street to Paddington – akin to the north-south Thameslink line – goes back to the 1940s. It was dubbed ‘Crossrail’ in a 1974 London Rail Study Report, which paved the way for a feasibility study, eventually undertaken in 1989. After many subsequent hurdles and consideration of competing proposals, the Crossrail Act was given Royal Assent in 2008 and construction began.

The final approved route sees a central section from Paddington to Whitechapel connected on existing tracks to Reading in the west and to Shenfield in the east, with two spurs leading off to Heathrow and to Abbey Wood (via Canary Wharf) respectively. While not a tube line per se, Crossrail – since renamed the Elizabeth line – will be operated by MTR Corporation (Crossrail) Ltd as a concession of tube operator Transport for London. It is marked on tube maps by a distinguishing purple, an appropriately royal colour for a line named after the Queen.

Timescale aside, all the other stats associated with what became the biggest infrastructure project being undertaken in Europe are enormous, too – not least the budget, which had ballooned to £19 billion at the last count. Passenger journeys, predicted to be 200 million a year (revised down from pre-Brexit and pre-Covid predictions of 250 million), will increase central London’s overall rail passenger traffic capacity by 10 per cent.

Integrating new and existing infrastructure, the project includes the construction of 10 new stations – eight of them underground – as well as upgrades to 31 existing stations. Physically, too, its elements have a grand scale for an inner-city service: the 240m-long trains and proportionate platforms are twice as long as those on the Underground.

Above all, it has been a mammoth engineering feat, with 10 pairs of tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) driving 21km (13 miles) of twin tunnels beneath London, each single tunnel 6.2m in diameter (compared with 3.81m on the Victoria line). Their size allows, amongst other things, faster emergency evacuation of passengers through the side doors of the new, larger rolling stock, rather than along the length of the train.

The five new tunnelled stations created for the scheme in central London – Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Whitechapel – have been constructed using the now fairly standard technique of spraying quick-setting, steel fibre-reinforced concrete directly onto the freshly tunnelled earth. Others, such as Paddington, Canary Wharf and Woolwich, are ‘box’ stations, the entire outline of the station excavated on site and then boxed out in concrete.

Questions of sustainability rather pale in the face of a project predicated on vast excavations and concrete volumes. That said, the green credentials of the project are there. It is, after all, a new piece of mass public transport infrastructure helping take people off the roads, with a design prioritising long-life, low-maintenance materials, which should keep a cap on costs, as well as minimising waste. Sustainability initiatives have included using 3 million tonnes of excavated spoil to restore a wetland habitat in Essex and utilising 72 per cent cement-replacement concrete. That 96 per cent of the contracts were awarded to UK-based companies has also helped reduce the project’s carbon footprint. 

There’s most design consistency at platform level, with the stations becoming more distinctive as you move to the street

To bring this vast mass transit system together design-wise, Crossrail established an in-house architecture team. The guiding idea, as its head, Julian Robinson, says, was ‘… the train as the common factor. We worked out from there to create a consistent experience across the line: so there’s most design consistency at platform level, with the stations becoming individually more distinctive as you move to the street above’.

Grimshaw was appointed to lead this ‘line-wide’ design, tasked with forging a common identity with standardised architectural components and products across platforms, concourses, escalators and ticket halls. This palette of elements interfaces and integrates with the work of 10 architecture practices appointed for the individual station designs to street level, including John McAslan + Partners, Adamson Associates, Allies and Morrison, Aedas, WilkinsonEyre, Weston Williamson, Hawkins\Brown and BDP.

Some have commented that this design hierarchy inverts previous London Transport station design thinking, when recognisable burgundy-tiled tube entrances stood out against the cacophony of the street while at platform level varying colours and materials identified different lines and stations. In fact, much of the latter, such as the oft-cited Paolozzi murals at Tottenham Court Road, were later additions to the original design. The main wayfinding identities, in any case, as across the whole TfL network, will be the distinctive decals and signage – reworked in the distinctive purple for Elizabeth line Stations by Grimshaw with consultants Atkins and Maynard Design. 

Grimshaw has developed what Neill McClements, a partner at the firm, calls a ‘family of elements’ in a series of design packages. Besides signage and wayfinding, these include tunnel cladding, platform edge screens, flooring, lighting, seating, poster frames, fire equipment cabinets, handrails and balustrades, and integrated communications equipment. Everything went through rigorous testing and prototyping, including full-size mock-ups of sections of station.

Of the packages, the most defining, ubiquitous element, particularly in tunnel stations, is inevitably the cladding. Formed of creamy glassfibre-reinforced concrete (GFRC) panels, their matt surface is enlivened subtly by tiny pieces of embedded mica. These hug the tunnel linings tightly, ‘shrink wrapped’ as an ‘expression of the engineering, capturing as much space as possible’, as McClements puts it.

The continuous surface flow of tunnel sides and roof leaves the impression of being inside a CAD parametric model, reflecting, no doubt, the design process. Particularly impressive tectonically are the tunnel junctions, where the sides appear to lean back as you approach, in contrast with the sharp blind corners found in circulation tunnels on the tube. This contributes to creating, says McClements, a ‘stress-free environment’, its seamless consistency helped by the standardisation and reduction of tunnel and junction-types from over 80 initial forms to just nine, which also brought economies of scale in manufacture.

The clear sightlines and sense of openness are also beneficial for security reasons. What other ‘Inspector Sands’-type security design measures there are – around blast-paths and so on – McClements is understandably not at liberty to divulge. At high-level, the GFRC panels incorporate acoustic attenuation perforations, which contrast with the plainer low-level panels, giving an orientating wall-ceiling definition to the tunnels, the perforations serving as a rhythmic decorative device animating the concourses and tunnels.

The tight fit of cladding to tunnel means other elements, such as lighting and signage, were developed as standalone components, which also aids maintenance. Particularly effective is the lighting along the tunnelled platforms, which takes the form of a strip of light box incorporated into the top of the platform edge screens, throwing light onto and down the GFRC cladding behind the platform, a softly diffusing rather than harshly reflecting light. The lighting modulates between colder in so-called ‘fast spaces’, such as cross-passages, and warmer in ‘dwell spaces’ such as platforms.

The platform-edge glazed security screens are impressive all-of-a-piece components, incorporating not just train information but advertising, too. Similarly well-conceived and multi-tasking are the prominent signage ‘totems’ in the concourses, which accommodate lighting, speakers and CCTV.

The consistent design language and environment created by the ‘family of elements’ is strongest at platform level in the five tunnelled stations. Box-constructed stations and ticket-halls meanwhile, have Grimshaw-designed components incorporated into environments and detailing designed by others.

Having visited a few Elizabeth line stations, a general observation is that in the search to establish their own expressive characters, the architects have flexed their individual design muscles by working simple but bold combinations of material, texture and form across walls or soffits in particular. Witness Hawkins\Brown’s patterned glass panels and can-shaped light-fittings at Tottenham Court Road Station, the larch roof structure at Abbey Wood designed by Fereday Pollard – or the rippled, ribbed cathedral-like concrete soffit designed by WilkinsonEyre above the escalators at Liverpool Street.

Wayfinding, Tottenham Court Road station

Apart from the purple signage branding, and exceptions such as Hawkins\Brown’s glass panels, there is a noticeable lack of rich colour, compared with, say, the gutsy blue tile used by Will Alsop on the Jubilee line’s Southwark Station. The result is that even small accents of colour – such as the striped banding around platform columns at Woolwich that reflect regimental colours associated with Woolwich Arsenal – make an impact, simply establishing a distinctive character.

Similarly, the incorporation of art is strangely underplayed, appearing often as single, contained pieces rather than animating stations as a whole – as the Paolozzi tiling does – although the ‘trackside wall’ installation by Sonia Boyce running through Custom House, Silvertown and North Woolwich is perhaps an exception. It reflects, perhaps, the fact that the funding of the art was essentially an added extra in the Crossrail project, subject to sponsorship and, disappointingly, not part of the core budget.

Art was essentially an added extra, subject to sponsorship and, disappointingly, not part of the core budget

However, given all the constraints, this is an incredibly impressive project – a total work of engineering – which is extraordinarily controlled and consistent in its delivery. And it is one that will undoubtedly improve the lives of people across London and beyond.

While the balance between bland, brand and the joie de vivre of travel on the Elizabeth line seems a touch too weighted towards Marc Augé’s ‘Non-Place’ genre – and one could certainly wish for a little more visual richness at times – in truth it’s difficult to assess its success without the usual hubbub of people animating the spaces. In any case, as with all infrastructure, there will no doubt be an inevitable accretion of  ‘stuff’ and unplanned character over time. Given that this gargantuan project is designed for a 120-year lifespan, there’s certainly time.

The materials palette, as part of the line-wide look, brings together two distinct design languages:the long-life architectural elements, such as the tunnel cladding and flooring, and the shorter-life technology that services the different environments.

Within the tunnel design the use of GFRC for the cladding system effectively ‘shrink wraps’ the engineering, enhancing the scale and volume of these active and busy spaces. Its form and muted neutral colour palette support an indirect lighting strategy and allows for wayfinding signage and acoustic perforations to be integrated flush within the cladding, enhancing accessibility for passengers and decluttering the space.

The double-curvature forms at junctions open up sightlines for passengers, creating an open and composed environment that belies its underground location. A consistent approach across the five tunnelled stations has also brought about an economy of scale: with a reduced number of cladding panel types lowering costs, from prototyping through to installation and maintenance.

In contrast, the technological elements, such as platform-edge screens, equipment cabinets and totems, have been designed with regular access in mind, allowing for future upgrades as new technologies emerge. These ‘hard-working’ products use robust, hard-wearing materials such as glass and stainless steel and are designed to enable seamless and straightforward maintenance as well as to accommodate a family of uses, leaving the platforms and tunnels clear for the flow of passenger activity. The integrated totems for example, bring together at low level lighting, wayfinding signage, security cameras and speakers with elements that can be easily removed, replaced and renewed. Neill McClements, partner, Grimshaw

Tags Crossrail Elizabeth line Hawkins\Brown Nicholas Grimshaw Transport for London Weston Williamson

Sign in or Register a new account to join the discussion.

We use cookies to personalize and improve your experience on our site. Visit our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to learn more. You can opt out of some cookies by adjusting your browser settings. More information on how to do this can be found in the cookie policy. By using our site, you agree to our use of cookies.