It has been arguably the most chaotic development process of any major project in the UK over the past decade but these latest proposals could well represent the best way forward
How do you redevelop a site like Liverpool Street station? The grand Victorian interchange sums up many of the challenges the UK faces in upgrading its infrastructure.
The UK’s busiest station, which overtook Waterloo following the opening of the Elizabeth line, is a complete mess. It is overcrowded, cluttered and hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the 270,000 people who pass through it every weekday.
Something needs to be done. But, like much of the UK’s rail infrastructure, it is also a significant heritage asset. This means the work will be expensive. Someone will have to cough up, and there isn’t a huge amount of money sloshing around at the moment.
So it is no surprise that the development process for the site has been arguably the most chaotic of any major UK project over the past decade.
Site owner Network Rail first unveiled plans for the station in 2022 with its then-development partner Sellar. This scheme, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, caused such an outcry among heritage campaigners that it was scrapped in November 2024 and replaced by a second scheme designed by Acme, which promised to be more sensitive to the station’s heritage.
Amid another backlash against the new proposal, Sellar, which had by this point been dropped by Network Rail, resurfaced in June with a plan of its own to revise its original Herzog & de Meuron scheme and try get it independently approved by the City of London, even though the developer does not own the site.
It was around this time that John McAslan + Partners decided to pay the station a visit. In late July last year, the architect behind the extension of King’s Cross station had found himself with a bit of spare time on his hands and, having followed the increasingly absurd situation which the redevelopment had got into, opted to have a look around himself.
Speaking at a Save Britain’s Heritage event in Farringdon last week, McAslan said: “It struck me that there was something not just very wrong about what had been proposed, but there was perhaps a much simpler approach, which would speak to the station or the architecture of the station.”
While McAslan recognised that the redevelopment needed some form of commercial development to pay for upgrades to the station, he thought it could be done without removing large parts of the trainshed’s sympathetic 1980s extension, which both the Herzog & de Meuron and Acme schemes had proposed.
Four months later McAslan unveiled his own proposal for the station, marking the scheme’s third plot twist in little more than a year. While both of Network Rail’s own schemes had been widely vilified by heritage groups including Historic England, the government’s heritage advisor, McAslan’s vision has been championed by Save Britain’s Heritage as a much more sensitive, yet still viable, approach to upgrading the site.
The point about viability is essential to understanding McAslan’s thinking. While Network Rail has claimed that its proposals for a hefty office development above the trainshed are needed to support the costs of the scheme, a viability assessment by Gleeds included in the application found that it would still make a loss of more than £220m.
McAslan says his plan, designed in collaboration with London Velodrome engineer Expedition, would contain 60% of the office space proposed in the Acme scheme but at 40% of the cost. The overstation development would consist of a lightweight bridge-like structure supported on piles either side of the train shed in a concept similar to SOM’s nearby Exchange House.
It would also, crucially, be entirely reversible. A future developer could dismantle the structure and restore the station to its pre-redevelopment appearance.
The idea has echoes of the trainshed’s Victorian-style extension, completed in 1992, which had triumphed over a rival plan to entirely demolish the station and rebuild it in a brutalist style. The extension looks so authentic that many passengers today are unaware that the station’s cathedral-like concourse is less than four decades old.
“In a way, what Liverpool Street has become is sort of perfect in itself. It’s a reimagined piece of architecture, but it works so beautifully,” McAslan told the audience at the Save event. “And really we felt, why? Why sort of break it apart?”
Members of the McAslan project team, including McAslan and Expedition co-founder Chris Wise, met with Network Rail in November to discuss the plans. Robin Dobson, chief executive of Network Rail’s property business Platform4, was also present at the two meetings. The discussion initially became “quite feisty”, Wise told the Save audience, but he claims the transport operator appeared to have been at least partially persuaded by the end of the second meeting.
“They specifically said – I got them to repeat it – that the scheme was in their view viable in terms of the way that it had been put together, which I thought was fair of them to admit that,” Wise said.
While Network Rail had, according to Wise, said they had already considered many of the ideas proposed by the McAslan team, “they hadn’t joined them together in the way that we joined them together”, Wise said.
“We’ve approached it logically, and we think we’ve got the minimum disruption scheme. Looking at it from the outside, it looks as though both the Sellar scheme and the Acme scheme are at least as disruptive as ours, probably more. It would be hard to argue the other way. Certainly they are much bigger, so the consequences, the knock-on effect on everything around the station is going to be more significant.”
While McAslan said he believes Acme is a quality architect with many expert people on its design team, he blames Network Rail for what the scheme has become. “I think their brief is completely wrong and they haven’t been able to challenge it,” he said, adding: “It’s a project that just destroys the station irreversibly. And we thought, well, we have to do something else.”
Acme’s application for the redevelopment is expected to be heard by the City’s planning committee in the coming weeks. Although it has now amassed almost exactly the same number of objections as the scrapped Herzog & de Meuron scheme – 2,276 to the latter’s 2,278 – the newer plans have received significantly more support – 1,135 representations in favour compared to just 29 for the original plans. Acme’s scheme has also been given a milder treatment by key heritage consultee Historic England, which said last year that it was a “significant improvement” on the previous proposal.
Given how long it will have taken to get to committee, and the City’s famously pro-development track record when making planning decisions, it is likely that the scheme will be recommended for approval and then signed off by councillors. This, however, will be far from the end of the story.
The size of the project means that it may get called in by the government and sent to a public inquiry, which could add another year or more to the planning process. Meanwhile, any decisions taken subsequently will almost certainly be challenged in the courts by campaigners – and the commuters battling through the station’s crowds each day will continue to do so for years to come.
McAslan’s approach – a vaulted, arching structure which takes its design cues from surrounding buildings and the trainshed above which it would sit – is in itself much more sympathetic to the site context than both proposals Network Rail has brought forward. It’s reversible design and lower projected construction cost make it a compelling option that Network Rail should give serious consideration to.
It is not too late to change course and, with heritage groups and campaigners on side, it has the potential to get spades in the ground sooner than a scheme which gets bogged down in legal challenges.
“We’ve got the bones of something that can go forward,” McAslan told the audience of the Save event. Currently, it could be the only option that does.
Postscript
Tom Lowe is a senior reporter on Building Design
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