A look at the upgrades underway at Clapham Junction station

Anyone who has used the Brighton Yard end of Clapham Junction station recently will know there’s been a lot of building work going on. From lots of hoardings around the station entrance, to work on platforms 13/14 to improve the staircase, there’s a multi-phase project to improve the station.

The ticket hall at the Brighton Yard end of the station used to have a WH Smiths inside the hall on the left as you go in, but it closed a while back, and is now a building site. With the old shop covered in hoardings, it would not be unreasonable for busy people rushing through to know that they’re not just refurbishing the shop, but doing something rather more interesting with the space.

The issue is that the ticket hall hasn’t got enough space for the number of ticket barriers they want, but they’re not going to be putting more ticket barriers where the old shop was.

As it happens, the wall next to the ticket barriers would make for a much better location for the gateline to expand into as it’s right in front of the ticket hall entrance.

Where the new ticket gates will be going

But that wall is the back of the toilets, and if they demolish the wall, where will the loos go? The loos are going where the WH Smiths used to be and will be much larger loos than the ones that are currently there.

Shiny new tiled floors to replace the old WHSmiths carpet.

A rough schematic of the changes underway

So a lot of work is underway at the moment to prepare the space for the new toilets, which is why the station entrance looks like a building site at the moment.

The primary goal was to improve the ticket barrier capacity, but as Network Rail’s Senior Sponsor, Kate Neill-Sneller told me, while the toilets aren’t a big source of complaints, they’re hardly ideal either.

It’s probably not unreasonable to say that in the past, providing toilets at railway stations was seen as more of an unfortunate obligation, and even the ones that charged to use them were pretty unwelcoming spaces.

That attitude changed some years back when the charges were phased out and Network Rail started refurbishing the loos. It was part of a wider understanding that rail travel is an experience, and if your first or last memory of the trip was a dirty smelly toilet, it’s hardly going to encourage repeat travel by train.

There’s also a focus on improving accessibility to the railways, and many older loos didn’t consider that when they were built.

So the project here at Clapham Junction will deliver both a much wider gateline for passengers, but also a much larger and more accessible set of loos.

Octavius Infrastructure’s senior site manager, Adetokunbo Odunukan explained some of the works that had to be carried out once they had cleared the area. The old floor needed strengthening and they had to take out some of the old floor and lay a fresh concrete slab first.

Standing in the future ladies loos

Above, the new ventilation systems have been installed, and they’re now starting to fit out the walls that’ll separate men from ladies. The walls up at the moment form the space for the men, and the rest of the space will be the ladies loos.

Men’s loos will be inside the walled off area

When completed – the ladies will go from just three cubicles to eight cubicles, while the men will double from two to four cubicles and also add four urinals. The small baby changing space will be larger and will be joined by two accessible toilets, including a much larger changing places grade toilet for people who may need additional support.

Although it can seem to be fairly routine plumbing work to fit out a block of toilets, doing so on a live railway adds complications, and doing so with passengers using the station magnifies it. From coordinating with suppliers to ensuring that every site layout change is checked for railway safety compliance, this small site can be surprisingly complicated to work in.

Although the works will look as if they’re all up here at the ticket office level, a lot also had to go on downstairs as well. The ticket office is supported on brick arches, and they had to fill in a couple of the arches to provide extra strength to support the heavier toilet block upstairs.

Underneath the ticket hall in the Parcel Yard

Those arches may come back into use though — as they were the old parcel yard, and if you walk around the side of the station there’s the grand frontage of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway parcel depot building.

At the moment, the arches behind are mainly being used for storage, but Network Rail has planning permission to repurpose the space and rent it out, so the locked doors could open to the public for the first time in decades.

Just don’t tell anyone there’s a block of toilets right above their heads.

That’s for the future though, but something that’s open to the public already is a few metres away over on the busy platforms 13 and 14.

New stairs are just over a third wider than the old stairs

One of the quirks of Clapham Junction is that over half the passengers using it never leave the station – they swap between services, but the stairs from platforms 13/14 were notable for being quite steep. So over the Easter weekend, the steep staircase was replaced with a much wider set of stairs.

Swapping out the stairs wasn’t a simple job though, because the wider stairs were also longer, to create a less steep climb, and that meant they had to demolish part of the waiting room that was too close to the planned new staircase.

In effect, they sliced about a metre off the waiting room and rebuilt the wall, using the same bricks that had just been taken down. It’s not unfair to say that past rebuilding works have been less than kind to heritage, with modern bricks used as infills, but here, it’s genuinely difficult to see quite where the old and the new line up.

If they had used modern bricks, as you can see they did in the past on the wall on platform 17 behind Starbucks, then the new wall would stand out as strikingly new, but now it’s quite likely that many people will have already forgotten that the waiting room used to be a bit bigger, because you can’t easily see the joins.

The new wall built from the reclaimed bricks

The old stairs had also been home to the machine room for the platform lift, and that had to be moved to a new spot as well.

That’s a lot of preparation just to — seemingly — widen a staircase.

They took advantage of an Easter closure to rip out the old staircase, and then a huge crane was brought to the site to lift the new staircase, in four parts over the station to the platforms.

It reopened on the Tuesday after Easter, and Adetokunbo said that he had watched people getting off the train that first morning and some did stop for a moment in surprise when they saw the new staircase — blimey where did that come from?

It can look a bit unfinished at the moment, but that’s mainly because there’s still scaffolding around it. They can’t remove that until the railway isn’t in use, and as these platforms serve the overnight Gatwick Express trains, they have to wait until there’s a suitable engineering possession that’ll close the line for an evening.

Then they can clean up the finishing details.

Thanks to the hidden preparation works that had to be carried out earlier, the new staircase is already making life a bit easier.

Wandsworth Council is working on a planning masterplan for the wider area, and that may tie in with a simmering ambition for a large rebuild of Clapham Junction station. But that’s a long way into the future.

In the meantime, though, work carries on to open the new loos and expand the space in the ticket hall.

—

Update: Corrected the platform numbers, not sure how that got in there as my notes had the correct ones.