Deep beneath London you’ll find this £19BN new railway.
Its 42 kilometres of new tunnels have been carved out in between the foundations, services
and other tube lines that all sit under what is one of the world’s most historic cities.
But when it starts to open later in 2022, there’ll be one station missing: Bond Street.
The delays and cost overruns impacting what will be London’s new Elizabeth Line are
well-reported: the project is now four years late and nearly £3BN over budget.
It had issues long before the pandemic, but when COVID came along it didn’t exactly
do much to help things.
For more than decade teams right across this vast rail project have battled to build new
stations and tunnels beneath one of the world’s biggest cities – so what was it that made
Bond Street so particularly challenging and why is this now the only station on the line
that won’t open with the rest of it?
Back in 2007 the idea for a new commuter rail service across London seemed like a good one.
The Crossrail project was set up to build the Elizabeth Line, a budget of £14.8BN was
agreed and work began in 2009.
With London’s population growing, the railway is out to better connect the suburbs with
the city centre.
The line runs for 100-kilometres from Reading way out here in the West, beneath the very
heart of the city and over to Abbey Wood and Shenfield the East.
It’ll service more than 40 stations including 10 new ones, built from scratch.
It might all sound like a lot of work, but the project is expected to add £42BN to the
UK’s economy.
It’ll also help to ease London’s housing crisis by spurring the development of some
200,000 new homes along its route and creating better connections so that commuters could
live out the city.
The new railway will even plug into HS2, the also long-delayed high speed rail link between
London and the Midlands.
Without the Elizabeth Line, the projected rise in passenger numbers onto the underground
network could force station closures due to overcrowding.
Now, fast forward from 2009 to today, 2022, and the railway is in passenger trials and
is just about to open.
Its 2018 completion date has slipped by the three and a half years and the budget has
grown to £19BN.
Despite the remarkable feats of engineering involved it’s not exactly a great advert
for the construction industry – and the poster-boy of that bad ad is Bond Street station.
Reports of setbacks here go back as far as 2014, when delays in tunnelling, which is
always unpredictable, began to have a knock-on effect on the rest of the schedule.
The plan was to first dig the train tunnels and then, working from street level downwards,
create a station box which would break through to the tunnels.
But not long after construction began, it became obvious that tunnelling Bond Street
Station would be even more complicated than predicted.
To try and understand this in more detail I caught up with Crossrail CEO Mark Wild.
There was a particularly large geological fault found there and that took a lot of engineering
time for the civil engineers to work out, the piles are particularly deep at Bond Street.
I think there are some piles at Bond Street that are nearly down to the chalk aquifer.
They are really deep, so there was a geological problem with Bond Street that had to be overcome.
But the fundamentals of it were Bond Street was the mustering point where the tunnel boring
machines were largely recovered from.
So Bond Street had to really wait for the tunnelling to be completed before a lot of
the tunnel boring machine equipment was pulled out in and around that area.
Conditions up at street level didn’t exactly help.
Bond Street Station sits in the middle of Mayfair -- an ultra-exclusive area that boasts
luxury hotels, shops and … heavy traffic.
It’s home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and that leaves
very little room for street level access.
For large stretches of the project, the only access to the site was through two nine-metre
access holes.
These proved too small to deliver the heavy machinery and steelwork needed below ground
level.
Instead, engineering trains brought them directly to the station, sharing the already-busy tracks
with other traffic.
Extra work was also needed to comply with updated fire safety standards in the wake
of London’s Grenfell Tower tragedy.
There were concerns that fire might spread unseen behind the concrete cladding – so
it had to be temporarily removed to let construction teams add more fire barriers.
Then March 2020 arrived.
The World Health Organisation declared the outbreak an international public health emergency
We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear
You must stay home
Crossrail quickly imposed a “Safe Stop” temporary halt on all construction and work
only resumed around three months later on most sites.
But it wasn’t that simple at Bond Street.
When the pandemic hit there were almost 800 people a day working down there.
Imposing a temporary stop and then getting going again wasn’t straight forward, and
the whole station’s schedule had to be re-planned.
In amongst all that, main contractors Costain and Skanska –
working under a joint venture – were removed from the project, and Crossrrail took direct
responsibility for finishing the station.
In a funny way, although it cost us about 13 weeks of time, you know, we de-mobilised
the whole of the site about 7,000 people in 48 hours, and then we rebuilt our resources
back over 13 weeks with safe procedures.
Interestingly, when we re-mobilised, our productivity was much higher
Bond Street different kettle of fish I'm afraid, when the pandemic occurred, we had 800 people
at Bond Street.
And, as you say, a very confined space.
So there was just no way of re mobilising Bond Street in 13 weeks.
So there's too many people inside.
It was too dense, you know, working two metres apart from each other wearing masks.
Bond Street was the site that we had to completely reschedule.
Putting those dark, socially distanced days behind us, efforts to finish the station are
paying off: Bond Street is now estimated to be a mere three months behind schedule.
I guess two things, you know, a really good job done by the new team in the post-pandemic
era, they've greatly increased their productivity.
Typically, you get 70, 80 percent productivity now on the street and to be fair to all the
other stations, the fact that we finished the routeway, we finished the railway, the
signalling people don't need to be in the tunnel ventilation system means that the station
people can just focus on it.
There’s a lot to be excited about when the station does open; advanced acoustic dampers
should make it sound calm even when packed with commuters, the ticket hall will be given
the Mayfair treatment with brass finishings, and of course there’s the main benefit of
having another interchange in central London.
Bond Street Station will be one of the jewels in the crown.
No doubt.
The initial fears about long-term working from home trends don’t seem to have come
true, in fact industries like banking and insurance are signalling a full return to
the office and the wider Underground has been getting busier in recent weeks.
When Bond Street Station does finally open, it will be at an uncertain time for the tube
network.
Transport for London’s finances are in bad shape after two years of pandemic disruption
and while passenger numbers look set to rise in the long run, journeys are currently 30
percent down on pre-COVID levels – impacting revenues.
It's no secret, of course that Crossrail has its challenges.
Many people will look at this project and say, look, we've built tube lines under London
before.
How was the planning of this so underestimated to the extent that it caused a delay and cost
overrun that it did?
Well, Crossrail's an interesting project in the fact it's not really a new tube line.
It's big suburban trains going underneath London, linking the great western and the
great eastern together, so it's more than just the tube line.
Also, if you think of the historical context, London's tube lines were pretty much finished
by 1905 and the Vic came along in the 60s.
Then we extended the jubilee in kind of the late 90s.
So this is a genuine once in a generation engineering achievement.
There's no doubt that we had a lot of trouble on this programme. 2017, 2018, you know, we
were over budget by about 25 percent, and we're about three years later than the baseline,
so there's no use hiding away from that.
But I think part of the reason for that was just the immense complexity and scale of this
project has never actually been done before.
Now that's not an excuse.
It's just the reason why it was greatly underestimated.
Pretty much between 2016 and 2018, we kind of lost the scale of the integration in particular.
This project had its challenges – regular viewers of The B1M will know its not the first
infrastructure project in the world to find itself behind schedule and over budget, and
it won’t be the last.
But that’ll never detract from its long-term impact, stretching decades into the future
and enabling millions of journeys and helping to shape London.
In time the delays at Bond Street will be forgotten, and the station itself will be
taken for granted, part of the fabric of this city.
That for me underlines the power of construction – yes this project was tough, yes, this
team has worked hard to turn things around, but the results will echo through time and
help better connect this great city.
That’s all for me down here on London’s new Elizabeth Line guys and don’t forget
if you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction, and you want
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