London Bridge station’s new concourse provides a good glimpse of what’s to come when the station fully opens in January 2018.
Even partially opened, it’s bigger than its predecessor. For the time being, it’s free from clutter.
Finding it is not easy. I arrived on a northbound Northern Line train and I followed signs from the Underground station. I passed gates shuttering an entrance used only at peak times and found myself outside at a corner of Guy’s hospital. I retraced my steps and saw a small sign that pointed me up an escalator. Through the station entrance and I’m on the upper concourses with Platforms 10-15 serving Southern’s terminating trains.
I found an information desk, obtained a map and advice on how to find the rest of the station. This took me down an escalator to the new lower concourse. This is what all the fuss is about. The dark wooden slats on the ceiling give it a ‘Scandi’ feel. There was a tang of sawdust in the air as work continues to complete the rest of the station.
There’s plenty of space, with shops set back, allowing large numbers of passengers to flow in and out. I hope Network Rail resists the temptation to fill the space with more shops. Experience elsewhere suggests it won’t.
I walked through a wide entrance onto St Thomas Street. I was very close to that hospital corner but hadn’t known the station entrance was so close. Perhaps an opportunity for some bigger and clearer signs?
St Thomas Street has a wide pavement to cope with crowds, lined with a sentinel of ‘silver stumps’ – those security bollards which today characterise any railway station. The street provides a pleasing view of the station’s clean brick walls, topped by the wavy new canopy above Platform 15. Here’, NR and its architect has done a pleasing job in linking the new brickwork with the old at what is London’s oldest suburban terminus.
Back in the station, and pausing to buy a coffee from a Change Please charity cart, a pair of very large plywood doors make clear that there’s more of the station still to open. Very long escalators rise from the concourse to the through platforms that Southeastern uses. Only Platforms 7-9 are open now, with two sets of escalators and a lift serving each island platform above. These platforms are very narrow. I suspect they will become very easily overcrowded as passengers congregate around the escalators. NR will need to work hard to encourage passengers to move along the platforms. Even then, they remain narrow and a potential problem. If the spacious new station has an Achilles’ heel, it will be these platforms.
Back downstairs, the concourse is beginning to feel as the evening peak begins. Passengers crowd around information screens. Usefully, platform screens around the lift shaft give full details of the next train on large screen and then details on smaller screens of the following two trains, including the stations at which they will stop. This could help keep passengers for those following trains on the concourse rather than the narrow platforms but with gaps of only a few minutes between trains, they will need to hurry up those long escalators when their train is due.
By the time I left, the peak passageway was open and it provided a much easier route back to London Underground. It’s clear this route is not finished and in this it reflects the station as a whole.
London Bridge follows King’s Cross, Birmingham and Reading as major Network Rail rebuilding projects (recognising that Birmingham and King’s Cross concentrated on concourses rather than platforms). They follows Railtrack’s work at Manchester Piccadilly and Leeds. It will be January 2018 before final conclusions can be drawn from London Bridge. I look forward to it.
This article first appeared in RAIL 809, published on September 14 2016.