A brief comment has been released on part of the redevelopment proposals for the land which will be cleared as a result of the Crossrail developments at Tottenham Court Road tube station. As the buildings on the corner will be completely demolished, an opportunity exists to not just redevelop the site, but hopefully also widen pedestrian access down what has been a ridiculously narrow pavement.

The site is currently made up of two blocks of buildings separated by a rather dank road. Under the initial proposals – and these are just indicative ideas – it seems that the replacement buildings will be set further back from the main road, and hence widening the pavement.

The more interesting aspect though is the currently narrow side street will be opened up and a wide pedestrian avenue will be created leading towards Soho Square and creating a plaza around St Patrick’s Church.

The developers are Derwent London, and the graphic was released in the presentation to investors for their financial results.

Although it is just an initial proposal, I quite like the changes – especially the opening up of the side street leading down towards Soho Square.

Via SkyscraperCity

Earlier this year I attended a breakfast lecture at the Building Centre on the topic of Crossrail, hosted by David Anderson, the Engineering Director of Crossrail.

You might be interested to know that they are hosting a second lecture – this time next month on Thur 6th Nov.

Having been before, I wont go a second time – but you might be interested in booking a free ticket if you want.

http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/events/event_diary_details.asp?id=401

Just back from a very interesting lecture at The Building Centre in central London, hosted by David Anderson, the Engineering Director of Crossrail.

After wandering round the upstairs exhibition on subterranean London with a coffee – we were herded downstairs for the lecture. It was a packed room, and they had all three slide-show screens working. Note to other venues, if the room is large, please set up duplicate screens for the slide-show, it really does make a difference.

After a brief intro, Mr Anderson detailed the inevitability of the Crossrail project and went into some details about the history and reason for the railway before launching into the most interesting bit of the lecture, which was to discuss the engineering aspect of the central tunnels and the plans for some of the stations.

Most of the statistics he showed are already published in various documents, but a few may be worth repeating.

The project should increase public transport capacity along the axis of the railway by 10% – and lead to a massive 45% reduction in “crowding” on the tube.

Main works start in 2010, with the first Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) starting work in mid 2011.

The TBMs will start at Paddington and out towards the East (Whitechappel?) respectively and head into the center towards Farringdon station. Now something interesting, the reason for the TBMs terminating at Farringdon was explained as they have to do a lot of digging in the area as it lies right on a fault line in the geology and at that specific point the London Clay is replaced with a layer known as the “Lambeth Group”, and it is much easier to avoid tunneling with a TBM at that spot.

Each of the central area stations will have two entrance/exits, one at each end of the platform – so there will in fact be four entrances to the Crossrail running between Bond St. and Tottenham Court Road. The Liverpool St station will have a second exit linking with Moorgate station.

There is a lot of thought going into the stations themselves, and an interesting development is that there will be minimal ticket sales points, as it is expected that the vast majority of users will have Oyster cards by the time the line is open to the public.

The tunnels themselves are larger than tube tunnels, to allow for overland trains – but will be smaller than the recently completed Eurostar tunnels which lead to St Pancras International station. There will be a sidewalk running along the entire length of the tunnels for emergency access – and under the path will lie all the air extraction systems to cool the tunnels down.

We then had some question and answer sessions – which as usual elicited some good (and dire) questions about the project.

The second “question” came from an activist – I forgot to note which organization – but it was quite clear from the speech she read out that she was very much against the project and worried about old WW2 bombs in the East End destroying buildings. To be fair, some of the points she raised were interesting and worth responding to – but she droned on and on in a really annoying manner, then spent the rest of the Q&A session interrupting and making derogatory remarks about other answers.

No matter how persuasive your argument, being rude and having an awful presentation manner really does not help your cause.

Your correspondent himself asked a question – and I was interested in whether the proximity of some of the Crossrail infrastructure to the existing tube network would allow some sharing of air conditioning kit to reduce the temperature on the tube. Alas, he wasn’t able to give a specific answer to that – and to be fair it probably wasn’t entirely his remit – but it sounds like this is one of the issues which could be raised during the technical planning of the fit-out of the finished tunnel structures.

(There is a lecture next Tuesday evening at the same venue on air conditioning of the tube, but I am alas already booked at a different event)

A final note which was nice to hear – if Crossrail 2 is ever built in the future, the plans theoretically include a station at Tottenham Court Road as well – and the works on CR1 will include some construction of tunnels and access points in the station to permit easy interchange with CR2 if it is ever built.

Forward planning like that is very nice, if annoyingly rare.

Overall, a very interesting lecture, and worth popping into town for. Final note to thank Arup for sponsoring the event.

The ever wonderful Building Centre in London will be setting out a new exhibition from the end of next week all about “London’s Hidden Infrastructure”.

28 FEBRUARY – 19 APRIL 2008

As London’s skyline becomes ever more clustered with new developments and tall buildings adding to the historic landscape, it is easy to forget the complex underground infrastructure necessary to service this increasingly crowded over ground. This latest exhibition by The Building Centre will expose London’s inner workings and demonstrate that without a successful underground, what is built on top cannot function.

http://www.newlondonarchitecture.org/talks_series.php?id=7

There are also some breakfast lectures and I can be found attending the Crossrail lecture on 5th March and the Underground lecture on 16th April.

Say “hi” if you are going and see me there.