Each of the different stations had its own design team and they were encouraged
to embrace some of the characteristics of the different areas within which the stations sit
but at the same time Crossrail was really keen that there would be a
consistent and coherent look and feel across these stations and that's where we came in.
Our remit really was to develop a family of finishes and components that help to bring a
common thread across those different station environments. The starting point for us was
the engineering I think firstly we really wanted to capture some of the heroic scale
of these engineering spaces for the passenger but also we took our cue from the engineering in terms
of deciding which elements would be consistent line-wide and which would be station specific,
so for example the spaces below ground are often quite similar in terms of their engineering and
it really made sense that there'd be a strong sort of line-wide identity in those spaces.
London has a rich history of line-wide design going back to architects such as Charles Holden,
Leslie Green and it really comes down to passenger experience at a subliminal level passengers need
to really understand when they're in a Elizabeth line environment without necessarily looking at
signage and at a functional level if the stations are presented in a familiar way from one station
to the next it just makes the system more intuitive and easier to use. This is one of
five tunnel stations which actually have very similar spatial characteristics and the concept
within these spaces was about trying to create calm, clutter-free environments for passengers
and one of the key moves in doing this was about taking some of those engineering elements such as
lighting, furniture, signage, equipment etc bringing it down to low level and locating
on elements such as the totems, the platform edge screens, the escalators and this is a
benefit in terms of first of all decluttering the spaces, but also for the operation of the stations
it actually keeps these shorter life elements at low level where it's easier to maintain
and upgrade these over time, and maybe taking the escalators behind us is a good example of this,
by providing all the lighting you need within that space at low level it means you can maintain
that lighting without having to erect scaffolding and creating huge disruption.
There was a huge amount of effort actually working with the tunnel engineering team,
the different station teams to try and standardize the geometry of all the tunnels and
really this brings an economy of scale, means that things like cladding panels we can actually reuse,
molds you know and the more panels you can get out of a mold the cheaper it becomes, but also
by adopting a consistent cladding grid through the different spaces as well it means all of
the equipment that interfaces with the cladding such as signage that again gets standardized and
that brings real benefits not just in terms of construction but also future maintenance.
One of the benefits of the sprayed concrete lining engineering is it's allowed us to create these
very curvaceous transitions between the different tunnels and this is a real benefit actually for
the passenger in that it really opens up sight lines around the corners and it really reduces
the chances of people colliding as they they move from one tunnel to the next and you know
while it creates this distinctive language for the tunnel environments it's really come out
of that desire to make the environments as safe as possible for the passengers.
Prototyping is vital for a project of this scale it's all very well you can draw and
draw but there's nothing better than actually producing something full size,
a product or an environment that people can actually engage with, we can talk about,
we can view it at a real scale and that allows us to engage with people who are going to use that,
whether it's Transport for London, whether it's maintenance and access engineers,
or actually maybe it might even be the contractors who have finally built that. It also allows us to
test things so we can look at not only the fit and finish of some of the products we can look at how
the electrical services are integrated, we can look at how that's accessed and
then we can generally understand how these products go together. We can refine them,
redesign and when it goes to manufacture we know that it's been tried and tested. Now you wouldn't
think that the seating needs to be tested but we saw this as an opportunity to reassess not only
the scale of the seats but also the materials and how that interacts with the customer experience.
So we did a full ergonomic model, we worked with various inclusive groups,
we refined things like the width of a seat, a radius of a handrail. the tactility
of those finishes. We produced a lot of mock-ups and prototypes for the escalator lighting, for the
totem lighting you see behind me and we were able to test to make sure the LUX levels were right,
make sure the glare angles were correct and it's those sort of things we can do early in the design
phase which will make sure that what we produce is most cost-effective and compliant products for the
stations. We had a specialist lighting engineer G I A Equation within our team and they brought
a lot of innovation to the lighting design. Transport environments can often be quite uniform,
often even sterile environments and we were trying to bring different lighting characteristics to the
different parts of the journey, so for instance these concourse spaces it's about indirect
lighting which is uplighting the spaces making them feel generous and spacious, similar on the
platform spaces as well and then the cross passage spaces in between these are smaller in scale
and here we have direct lighting, and you'll notice the colour temperature is cooler within
these spaces as well so you get this variety between warm and cool colour temperature between
the lighting and it's really about trying to provide that variety along the passenger
journey. The totem concept came from a requirement for signage at the crossroads of going
east or west to the platforms and we saw this as an opportunity not only to put signage at
this location but also to gather all these other components, for example you'll see on this totem
there's a light on the top, just below it there is a speaker, below that there could be cameras,
below that is emergency lighting and then signage panels and even
tape barriers which you can pull across to close off the spaces. It's almost a magnet
which attracts all those components which frees up and cleans the environment of the cladding.
The platform screens are needed for the ventilation strategy and also to keep passengers
safe on the platforms. We saw a real opportunity here to integrate a lot of the equipment such as
the ventilation, the lighting, the cameras, speakers, even things like the real-time
information for passengers, the advertising. It's a great opportunity to try and consolidate all of
that equipment into your one hard-working service wall and a huge effort went in particularly led
by the Atkins Engineering team to coordinate all of those different elements onto this one system,
and the benefit of that is the rest of the platform environments, the back wall,
in particular, are left very calm and uncluttered, and really create a great backdrop
for the wayfinding signage. For passengers arriving onto the platform off the trains
our approach has been to really understand the scale of the environment, these platforms are
over 250 meters long so when someone comes out of the train they require very different information
from someone who's actually getting onto the train. So if we focus on what information people
require when they're getting off, we've located the information on the back wall where you've
got directional signage and that's supplemented by the signage you see here on my left hand side
which you'll probably recognize from the street signage called Legible London which you see around
the city, and this enables people to understand where those ticket halls are in relationship to
the station, so it's very important to people to understand which exit they've got to take.
The requirements of the departing passenger we have customer information systems above each door,
not only do they give you train information service but they also give you a line map
which tells you what stations are next and the interchanges in those stations
so you can have a seamless journey and plan your journey going forward to the next station.
What I'm excited about when it opens is actually being here walking around the stations and seeing
how people use them, seeing how they flow through the spaces, hopefully seamlessly but also I'll be
very interested to hear how it works for the staff because it's their environment and it's
their place of work and we would hope that during the whole design process over all these years
we've taken on board everyone's requirements and that it provides not only a great experience for
the passengers but also for the staff working in these environments as well