Pallasades holds key to New Street success

Feb 13 2008 Agenda

The budget for New Street Station is mind-boggling, but you can't build a 21st century railway station under a 1960s shopping centre, writes Terry Grimley.

When it comes to judging the impact of redevelopment schemes, there's a natural tendency to home-in on the price-tag.

I'm still amazed, for instance, that back in the mid-1990s a modest £4 million could buy you a substantial arts centre like Hereford's Courtyard. More recently, the £35 million well spent on Birmingham's magnificently refurbished Town hall is a good measure of a really large-scale restoration project.

Anything costing more than £100 million is still my idea of a seriously big project. The new Bullring shopping centre cost more than five times that.

So that gives some measure of the sheer scale of the project to rebuild New Street Station - the former Gateway project, now apparently renamed Gateway Plus - which is budgeted at a whisker short of £600 million. By any standards this is a huge figure, including almost £400 million of our own money which is being handed back to us by the Government.

What we usually fail to take into account in looking at the price of a major scheme is how much potential damage it could represent if the scheme is misconceived. But given the state of New Street, surely it would take the genius of a Herbert Manzoni to fail to deliver a substantial improvement.

But if substantial improvement is the least we can look forward to, just how good might the rebuilt New Street actually be?

So far, two of Britain's leading architectural practices, Will Alsop and John McAslan + Partners, have addressed the challenge. Alsop's doughnut-shaped concept never made it into the public realm, but is said to have been spectacular, while the rippling roofline of the initial McAslan design looked exciting.

But then it seems a spanner was thrown into the works. The Pallasades Shopping Centre, which was built over the station in the 1960s, changed hands and its new owners opted to sit tight rather than throw in their lot with a comprehensive redevelopment of the site.

The images of the revised, far less ambitious scheme which followed this show what is basically a re-clad 1960s megastructure. The dreary 1960s office block on Stephenson Street also remains untouched.

The major benefits of this scheme are improved access on and off the platforms and a greatly expanded concourse which actually looks quite an impressive space on the video fly-through.

The dreadful Station Street side is also much improved. Because of the falling gradient of the site, the pedestrian route through the Pallasades ends high up in the air above Station Street, and since the 1960s the route to ground level has been via a flight of narrow, dark and often urine-fouled steps. The revised McAslan scheme replaced this with a wide flight of open steps flanked by two high-rise buildings.

While undoubtedly much better than what we have now, it is hard to think of this scheme as £600 million-worth of improvement. Leaving money aside, it certainly does not stand comparison with the many examples of newage railway design built across Europe over the last 20 years.

There are people who think aesthetic qualities are a luxury that can be readily dispensed with. These people are wrong. Since the mid-19th century major railway stations have been key status symbols, announcing to arriving passengers they have come to a great city, even before they step through the ticket barrier.

A remarkable number of British cities have retained their own "Cathedral of steam" more or less in its original 19th century glory - Newcastle, York, Manchester Piccadilly, Liverpool Lime Street, Bristol Temple Meads, Glasgow Central and the various London termini, among which the recently extended and restored St Pancras is the crowning glory.

New Street could itself boast that its roof was the largest iron and glass structure in the world when it was opened in the 1850s. But during the dark days of the 1960s, when railways were assumed to be in ongoing and possibly terminal decline, it was thought acceptable to bury New Street under a concrete raft supporting a car park and a shopping centre.

So while the news that the Government is finally ready to write a cheque for New Street is welcome, it's not yet clear that it will really deliver the international-quality project that some have claimed.

Some progress was made with the announcement last month of a design competition to be run by the Royal Institute of British Architects on behalf of Network Rail to find a "visionary designer" to devise an overall concept for the exterior and atrium roof.

According to the press release, this was meant to reflect the aspirations of Birmingham and the wider region.

This process should now be near completion with an announcement soon on the selected architect. Meanwhile McAslans' connection with the project ended after two-and-a-half years at the beginning of February with the announcement that Atkins would be responsible for the detailed design.

Though Network Rail's efforts to raise the design standards are obviously welcome, they do sound rather like sticking-on architecture as an afterthought. It will be really interesting to see who the selected architects are and what they come up with, but I think the key to the quality of a future New Street lies with the Pallasades shopping centre.

If it stays we will end up with a deeply compromised improvement. If it goes the sky could be the limit.