ondon’s Farringdon
Station is about to break into the
infrastructural big time, becoming a key
interchange on the world’s oldest and
most prestigious transport network. With
the coming of the Crossrail project and its
Elizabeth line, this historic stop on the edge
of the City of London will be a meeting point
for Tube and rail. Carving out thousands
of cubic metres of earth beneath a 2,000-year-
old city was always going to be a challenge,
yet as you walk along the deep-level
platforms, crossovers and tunnels of this
shiny new piece of the capital’s transport
jigsaw, it seems almost impossible to conceive
that everything around you is totally new.For over three years, the city’s ancient soil
was gouged out by eight massive tunnel-
boring machines, excavating an estimated
seven million tonnes of material. Once
the tunnelling was finished, two of the
1,000-tonne boring machines were simply
embedded in the walls of the station, rather
than haul them up from a depth of 40m.
The new tunnels and platforms were then
lined with 200,000 concrete segments, before
being given a polished finish to join the dots
with London’s transport design aesthetic.
Farringdon is nearing completion. The
first stage of the Elizabeth line will officially
open in December 2018, with the entire route
expected to be up and running a year later.For now, the plastic wrap is staying on the
shiny new lighting upstands and station
indicators, while platforms are cluttered with
escalator parts and boxes of tiles. In June,
the track will go live for train testing.
The Crossrail project probably exceeds
even the ambition of London’s original
19th-century Tube lines. The final cost will be
around £14.8bn, with about a decade spent on
construction. All this money has been poured
into a system that’s not just about increasing
capacity, but broadening the perceived
boundaries of London, how far it extends,
and how locals and visitors engage with such
a sprawling city. Trains and transit inspire
streams of statistics and facts, but London »THE FACETED CONCRETE
CEILING OF FARRINGDON’S
NEW WESTERN TICKET
HALL, WHICH WILL LINK UP
WITH THE THAMESLINK
PLATFORMS. THE DIAMOND-
SHAPED FORMS ARE A
NOD TO THE NEARBY
HATTON GARDEN
JEWELLERY QUARTER∑ 117
Transport