Shoreditch High Street station is a rather impressively large concrete box, raised on a viaduct: the box is designed, as is the way of these things, for some hideous corporate office block to be built on top of it (no Paris Metro-style sense of space and light here).
Close-up, through rather clever massing and finishing, the sheer bulk is a little less obvious:
That decorative finish makes it the antithesis of Holden's austere Modernist boxes, about which I was going on yesterday (which nonetheless somehow seem much, much warmer and more human than this shiny new station).
Note the wiring poking out of the side of the sign: they are still snagging, and only this section of the eastern extension is now open (it's the bit that used to be the East London Line, plus three or four stations to the north). The new stations use a materials palette consisting of poured concrete, glass, and orange fixtures, along with steel cladding for the exteriors:
The rest of this section of line will open next month, with a further extension in 2011, and the final "missing" link (between New Cross and Clapham Junction, to form an outer ring railway) in early 2012.
The brand new stations are generally rather impressive, and the Overground corporate identity is beginning to shine through (that orange with grey and white is growing on me). But there's evidence of meanness, too -- look at how crushingly low the ceilings are over these platforms:
For the hardcore train nerds among you, those Class 378s are the full-length, 4-car jobs rather than the shortened 3-car units that have been in use elsewhere on the Overground until now.
The new track rides extraordinarily smoothly, and it's only because these CapitalStars have such jittery suspension that you can feel anything.
I'm beginning to admire the vision of whoever came up with the Overground concept: knitting together this completely disparate set of underused or disused suburban railway lines into a coherent system is turning out to be a stroke of utter genius. Formerly remote parts of London suddenly seem easy to reach.
7 comments:
I agree, the finishing on the building really lessens the severity of the box. The orange does a lot to liven up the space too. It's a nice splash of color.
The problem with brute concrete in the UK is that it just doesn't wear well in our damp sun-free climate with its freeze-thaw winters. No marks for guessing what those places will look like ten years hence: plain horrible! You can see it starting to set in along a joint in the very first picture. By contrast those pre-war modernist stations still look spectacular in exchange for a modicum of tlc now and then.
I'm afraid I agree with you: alas, exposed concrete just doesn't seem to work in our climate. Though it does look beautiful when it's new.
I was on the new service yesterday, too.
Entirely agree about concrete; though having worked overseas (and in the tropics) I know of nowhere where concrete looks good after about five years. Why don't designers ever seem to realise that buildings and structures can't be changed like underwear when they've grown grey and grungy?
(Of course some formerly trendy architects clearly thought they could ...)
Greedy self-important sods think there'll be another commission for them nice and soon... simple!
Were you once frightened by an architect when you were a small child...?
Not at all, one of my forebears designed some magnificent work in the 1820s which still looks very smart indeed in one of our largest northern cities. Sadly many in the profession have been seduced by Mammon and PR people, and too many corporate and municipal clients aren't worthy of their inflated budgets. We get what we deserve.
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