It’s often nostalgic to look back at places that have been torn asunder by major construction sites and think, goodness, it really did look like that.
Thanks to the magic of Google Street view and its archive facility – here are some then and now photos along the central section of the Crossrail project.
Abbey Wood Station
Sept 2009
April 2018
June 2012
April 2018
North Woolwich tunnel head
Sept 2009
May 2018
Connaught Tunnel
Aug 2008
May 2018
Custom House Station
Aug 2008
March 2018
May 2012
May 2018
Silvertown Station
July 2008
May 2018
Whitechapel Station
June 2008
May 2018
Liverpool Street Station
June 2012
Feb 2018
Moorgate Station
July 2008
Sept 2017
Farringdon Station
Oct 2008
Oct 2015
July 2008
March 2018
July 2008
Feb 2018
Tottenham Court Road Station
June 2008
April 2018
Oct 2008
April 2018
Paddington Station
Aug 2009
Nov 2018
All photos courtesy Google Street View.
Tottenham Court Road has definitely lost a lot of it’s older charm. The Crossrail project has stolen a lot of history from there. Hopefully it will get back to normal – one day?!
I can’t comprehend how or why such beautiful Victorian buildings have been demolished and replaced by sterile buildings of no character.
Why were they not listed or preserved.
The cross rail project is simply another bombing raid on London’s iconic architecture.
More considerate planning should have been carried out but the powers that be seem to have tunnel vision!
Victorian architectural flim-flammery with its superfluity of over-blown decoration serving no point but to trump the craftsmanship of its progenitors puts to shame, like, the economic, modern eze-kleen glass box.
When someone is paid to decorate such inanity, being out of practice shows, I think. We can end up with cloud art on a statement glass canopy being confused with dirty smudges and obscuring any actual fluffy white clouds that might just be passing over Paddington station, for instance.
Shame that some of those Victorian buildings couldn’t have been saved, and that the awful Centrepoint could’ve gone instead.
Which is a reminder that what we loathe today will be the iconic heritage of tomorrow. You might decry the demolition of the older buildings, but tear down Centrepoint today and the next generation might live to curse you.
@John B: I’d imagine demolishing Centre Point is unlikely ever to happen as the economical method of dispensing with it might have a literal impact on the station below.
Centrepoint is an exemplar of its age and is liked and loathed in equal measure to, say, the former Pan Am building (now MetLife) in New York whose midwife was Walter Gropius, no less. They are statements of their age’s intent and without them, history would be the poorer.
Eventually some of the two or three hundred skyscrapers foisted on London in this day and age will achieve similar recognition and be saved. Then we can rejoice in tearing down the inane majority; glass, steel, concrete, 3D printed polymers et al.
The central London sequence is rather misleading. Yes some of the impact at TCR is shown at the eastern end (though focusing on the Astoria and ignoring the swathe of C19 buildings lost on the opposite sde), but remember the western entrance has obliterated the best part of a city block near Dean St