Liverpool Street Station is not one of the grand set pieces of mid-19th century engineering like St. Pancras Station or, in its different way, King’s Cross. It perhaps lacks the romance of Paddington Station, whose great, arched railways are the place of embarkation for the west country. It is nonetheless an important piece of architecture. It was designed by Edward Wilson, an engineer who worked for the Great Eastern Railway Company and built by Lucas Brothers, who were also responsible for Covent Garden’s Floral Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and Alexandra Palace. The great, overarching, ironwork roof was constructed by the Fairburn Engineering Company. 

Immediately next door stands the Great Eastern Hotel, designed by Charles Barry junior, son of the architect of the Palace of Westminster and also responsible for the buildings of the so-called Learned Societies round the courtyard of Burlington House. The hotel is said to have a monumental Masonic Temple inside it, which I have sadly never had a chance to see.

During the 1970s, British Rail planned to demolish Liverpool Street Station, as they had the great Greek Revival Station at Euston and as they would Broad Street Station in the 1980s. Their plans caused outrage. Then Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman led an effective public campaign to save the station. It was a key moment in the conservation movement of the 1970s, galvanising support for Victorian architecture and encouraging public interest in railway buildings.

One might have thought that having been saved from destruction during the 1970s, the station would have gained recognition as an important historic monument — admired not just for its architecture, but also for its associations with the kindertransport of the 1930s as recorded in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

Instead it appears that nothing in the City is safe from the wrecking ball, however important it is architecturally and regardless of whether it is listed. Network Rail, which owns the station and is responsible for it, has joined forces with James Sellar — son of Irvine Sellar who was responsible for the Shard, designed by Renzo Piano, and the redevelopment of London Bridge Station. It is fair to say that Network Rail has demonstrated at both St. Pancras Station and King’s Cross that it is perfectly capable of imaginative renovations of Victorian railway stations. They have successfully involved major architects, such as Norman Foster in the renovation of St. Pancras and John McAslan in adding a grand vaulted concourse area next door to King’s Cross. They have now approached Herzog and de Meuron, amongst the best architects in the world, responsible for Tate Modern and a firm who first made its reputation by the design of a new signal box in Basel.

Herzog and de Meuron’s proposals have recently been published to universal horror. They involve putting one sixteen-storey glass straight on top of the existing railway station and adjacent hotel, with no obvious sense of connection to it. A second, equally enormous glass tower block will land right next door. The combination will totally dwarf the railway station, deprive it of any natural daylight, and make it look as if the Victorian building is in the way, left there as if by accident, marooned amongst an assembly of glass fortresses.

To make matters worse, Sellar has not been transparent about the process of public consultation. First, a two-day public consultation was announced in the Evening Standard at the end of the first day, leaving no time for interested parties to see it, let alone give their views of it. This cannot be described as a legitimate process of consultation. There has been a second consultation more recently, which I did not see advertised, in which they showed only the railway station and hotel, not the tower block over it — a shockingly incomplete form of consultation, confusing the public by not actually showing what is proposed. It has taken time for the reality of the project to trickle out in a single photograph which demonstrates just how immense and destructive it is.

The plans are diametrically opposite to what the City of London is now trying to do. As a result of lockdowns, it is becoming clear that many of the people who traditionally worked in the City, at big financial companies and law firms, are taking time to come back. Many now prefer to work a three-day week, with two days working from a computer at home. The three days they spend in the City involve meetings and socialising. They don’t want to be confined to a computer terminal in vast, anonymous, open-plan, office blocks. They want places where they can meet colleagues, have lunch — places for discussion, not traditional tower block offices. The whole look and feel of what Herzog and de Meuron have proposed is suddenly strangely out-of-date.

Very unusually, the entire heritage community is united in its opposition to what is proposed, from the Georgian Group who object to the scale of what is proposed, and the Victorian Society who is leading the campaign, to the Twentieth Century Society who is interested in protecting the alterations which were done in the 1980s. Even Historic England, who is nowadays too often aligned with the big developers after accepting large sums of money for pre-application advice, is hostile to the proposals, and rightly so.

It now needs Chris Hayward, the chairman of the City’s Policy Committee, or Michael Gove as Secretary of State, to tell James Sellar that his plans will not be passed, that they contravene current planning policy. He, Network Rail and Herzog de Meuron must go back to the drawing board in order to find a way of renovating the station without destroying its character.