Rooftop park proposal for Euston

Rooftop park plan ‘will liberate Euston station from gloom surrounding HS2’

A team of architects and structural engineers have unveiled a bold new proposal for Euston, including a massive public park on top of the main railway station.

The New Journal was given an exclusive presentation of the detailed plans at the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, on Monday.

The experts want to create a project that “liberates Euston station from the gloom and negativity surrounding HS2”.

Crucially, they say the huge park – twice the size of Russell Square and with imposing steps leading up to it from what is now the bus station – could be built without temporarily closing any of the railway lines.

The designs – which will work whether HS2 is built or not – include a forest path that would snake west above the current railway line towards Old Oak Common.

And it could all be funded through a series of seven-storey terrace blocks while an intricate design structure – compared to a “giant waffle” – would allow retail space to sit in between the park and the main station roof.

One of the architects behind the designs is Pierre D’Avoine who runs his own practice and teaches at the AA.

He said: “Whether HS2 happens or not, we realised that if you put a top on Euston station, and relocate the bus station, you can make a park.

“This space is something that has never been proposed or thought about before. “We thought this would be something really positive for Euston.”

He added: “We also have this idea of culverting the rail track all the way to Old Oak Common, wherever we can, in a forest. You will be able to walk, or ride your bike along it.

“It will help to reinforce London’s pre-eminence as an urban forest. It is the most forested city in the world apparently.”

Another of the AA architects working on the project, Yimeng “Emo” Shi, said the park could create a much-needed “urban buzz” around Euston.

He said “the roof of Euston station pretty much gives you the makings of an open square” that could provide “a lush green surface”, adding: “A huge floating U-shaped building circles the boundaries, and in our plan it will provide housing and offices…”

The forest section of the project is nicknamed “Emo’s forest” after Mr Shi, who said his name evoked “a musical style with a little bit of sadness”.

Mr Shi has been working hard on the project for months with two other architects, Ray Zhilei Xu and Harry Togi Mathew, while the park is being called Peter’s Park after a pioneering student at the AA, Peter Bum-su Park.

In the designs, the park resting on top of Euston station would be 380 metres by 156 metres – twice the size of Russell Square – and constructed on “Vierendeel beams” 17 metres up above the existing ground level. It would contain lawns and evergreen beds and flowering shrubs in a space comparable to the “Palais Royale and Place des Vosges” in Paris.

The proposal said the scheme makes a “serious practical contribution to addressing the climate emergency”.

Speaking of the Vierendeel beams system, Aran Chadwick, a director at structural engineering firm Atelier One, who lives in Kentish Town, said: “It’s structural necessity to create the rigidity for a park. It’s effectively a giant waffle.”

He said keeping the station open and running was “fundamental” to the way the designs had been worked up.

The proposal is tagged: “A new park for London – rethinking Euston after HS2.”

It said: “HS2 is a white elephant of mammoth proportions, sadly not quite extinct – a huge drain on the nation’s resources, enriching a tiny minority while causing misery and loss to communities across the country, none more so than in the London borough of Camden, where HS2 was proposed to terminate at Euston station.”

It goes on to detail how the HS2 project has blighted Camden in what may end up a “massive land grab for developers”. The team are looking to hold a public meeting on the designs and to meet with senior council chiefs.

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The designs – which will work whether HS2 is built or not – include a forest path that would snake west above the current railway line towards Old Oak Common.

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takno said:

To make it less unacceptable, they've decided that all of it can be done without any line closures, because as people who know nothing about the station they have deemed it so.

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NotATrainspott said:

Why should there continue to be individual large houses on Park Village East when this land is going to be so incredibly valuable once the railway is complete? With how long the construction would last for, HS2 Ltd should have been able to just buy up and demolish buildings adjacent at current market value, and then sell the land as development parcels at its higher post-HS2-completion value. This is how Hong Kong funds the construction of its public transport network and it is fundamentally the most efficient way of delivering infrastructure improvements, as it enables land value capture.

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HSTEd said:

Obviously the land compensation act would prevent compulsory purchase in such a manner.
However, even if it didn't, this would render the current political mess over HS2 and Euston into a minor curfuffle compared to the politics of seizing vast swathes of Camden for redevelopment that isn't really connected to the construction of the railway. The apparent scope for corruption would also widen enormously.

EDIT:
Does anyone know why Euston is built on a skew relative to its approach lines. Why wasn't this fixed in the 1960s? Is there some reason they couldn't have skewed the platforms to face the approach tracks rather than having the kink that it does today?

I also expect it would be very difficult to dismantle the old station roof without massive closures. Because otherwise that would be the ideal first step.

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NotATrainspott said:

Indeed, but the lack of discussion about how to make the most of all of those billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is one of the reasons this project has struggled. Would the land really not be connected to the construction of the railway, if our failure to redevelop it and capture the increased land value resulted in the entire scheme being unaffordable?

The status quo is that the owner of a house on Park Village East or anywhere nearby owns an extremely expensive plot of land with a fairly basic pile of bricks and mortar on top. As a result of HS2 and all of the other public transport improvements it brings, their plot of land will be worth even more money, despite the fact that they did nothing to earn that. They could choose to move out of their property and demolish it (or leave it derelict so that nature and vandalism takes its course) and they'd still receive all of that increase in land value. All of that value was created by the expense of every other taxpayer in the country. Is it fair for them to benefit when they don't have any actual stake in the project? They don't even need to live there through the construction period, or even suffer a reduction in rental income, as the value is associated with their plot of land and not what arrangement of bricks and mortar they have on top of it.

How much land is available for the engineers to use during construction can have a really dramatic effect on what is possible and at what cost. The more land you have, the easier it is to do pretty much everything - construction compounds, phasing, diversions, etc. When there is such a compelling case for redevelopment after the project is done, is it really that unreasonable to prepare for it ahead of time and simplify the engineering? E.g. if we extended the construction site to the west, then it might have been possible to build the full 11 platforms offline without requiring any change to the existing station.

The only real limit to this principle is when the redevelopment potential isn't that much greater than what happens today. London has a dire shortage of all types of residential and commercial accommodation, so pretty much any site is ripe for high density development. The same isn't true out in e.g. the suburbs of Manchester, where all you'd be able to do is replace one set of 2-story suburban houses with equivalents. We need to be able to sell the empty land afterwards for much more than the CPO cost of the land+buildings beforehand. Camden and the area around OOC will benefit directly from HS2 and the increased connectivity it provides, but areas along the plain line route won't so much because they don't have stations. The benefit there is mostly clustered around the stations and rail freight facilities on the existing WCML, as they'll get improved services post-HS2 opening.

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NotATrainspott said:

Indeed, but the lack of discussion about how to make the most of all of those billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is one of the reasons this project has struggled. Would the land really not be connected to the construction of the railway, if our failure to redevelop it and capture the increased land value resulted in the entire scheme being unaffordable?

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NotATrainspott said:

The status quo is that the owner of a house on Park Village East or anywhere nearby owns an extremely expensive plot of land with a fairly basic pile of bricks and mortar on top. As a result of HS2 and all of the other public transport improvements it brings, their plot of land will be worth even more money, despite the fact that they did nothing to earn that. They could choose to move out of their property and demolish it (or leave it derelict so that nature and vandalism takes its course) and they'd still receive all of that increase in land value. All of that value was created by the expense of every other taxpayer in the country. Is it fair for them to benefit when they don't have any actual stake in the project?

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NotATrainspott said:

How much land is available for the engineers to use during construction can have a really dramatic effect on what is possible and at what cost. The more land you have, the easier it is to do pretty much everything - construction compounds, phasing, diversions, etc. When there is such a compelling case for redevelopment after the project is done, is it really that unreasonable to prepare for it ahead of time and simplify the engineering? E.g. if we extended the construction site to the west, then it might have been possible to build the full 11 platforms offline without requiring any change to the existing station.

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HSTEd said:

I'm skeptical that this is the reason that the Euston project has failed.
I'd argue it is far more likely to be runaway scope creep and fundamentally an inability to integrate what is desired with the environment at Euston./


Well they also didn't request that the project occurred. So you are in essence forcing an increase in land value and then using that as a reason to seize that land for your own purposes.
And I am skeptical how much of the value of the house is actually the value of the land, rather than the value of the planning consent which is entirely within the power of the state.
How much would it be worth if the state's position was that no redevelopment would ever be permitted?


Then the scope of the project would just have runaway further until that land was not enough, and the project would still have failed. Just as every previous attempt to spec the Euston station has failed.
The problems of Euston are emblematic of the problems in project management and scope creep seen in HS2 as a whole.

Until a clear definition of what is needed at Euston post HS2, no sensible plan can be created. And that requires a proper appreciation of a realistic post HS2 timetable given the railway's circumstances. As well as actual decisions to be made over the level of passenger amenity to be provided at the new station.

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NotATrainspott said:

I think those problems really just boil down to financing. If the money is there, we can build anything we like. If the money is not there, then we start to be constrained. The fact that over-site development has popped up again and again will be a big part of design changes, as you need to design in the supports into the railway but there's no point building supports for buildings that won't happen for other reasons.

The neighbours didn't ask for the project but if we just let them capture the land value, then they get to benefit from it despite having no involvement whatsoever. Would it make sense to send each owner a cheque for £2m? Fundamentally that's what we're doing by increasing their land values. If it would be absurd to write them a cheque for that amount, then allowing their land to increase in value by that amount is just as silly.

If we use a plot of land for a big mansion house we can't use it for a block of flats, or a school, or a fire station, or anything else. When there is such a shortage of housing in London it doesn't stand to reason that we should preserve the ability for a few people to have their own detached house at the expense of preventing other people having a home at all. If people want to live in London they're going to need to accept that houses need to be stacked on top of each other in the form of flats, of varying configurations and heights. Rich people in Manhattan tore down single mansions and replaced them with apartment blocks made up of equivalent mansions stacked on top of each other.

All that HS2 would need to do is free up the land and then hand it over to a development partner for an increased value. It doesn't need to care that much about what gets built afterwards, so long as the numbers stack up.

I said above that this is the way that Hong Kong funds its public transport expansion projects. If we want TfL to be able to solve problems, then we need to give it the powers to buy up more land and redevelop it. It would make it a lot easier and a lot cheaper to do projects like rebuilding Camden Town station if they could just buy up the buildings nearby, demolish them, dig down to put in the right station, leave a development deck on top and then hand it over to another developer. Crossrail did a little bit of this with the stations but the principle can be applied to entire lines or specific projects, like a new depot.

The main difference vs existing practice is that it's about redeveloping existing areas of high demand, rather than filling in areas of ex-industrial land where there isn't anything today. It's easy to take an old railway yard and fill in some buildings around a shiny new station, because there's no individual residents to complain about CPO etc. Car Giant doesn't care about their OOC site - they just want the money they can get for it. But, we're running out of these sites, and unless we have an active strategy to recycle land already in use, we're never going to be able to solve problems. Our status quo of preserving things is actually the problem; the Victorians had no qualms about knocking down buildings they put up only a few years before when the opportunity arose to build something even better on the same land.

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Large uplifts in land values were estimated as a consequence of major infrastructure projects, although their benefits were far more diffuse. The Greater London Authority (GLA) and Transport for London (TFL) highlighted a study by real estate advisors, GVA, which found that development dependent on the new Elizabeth line would create a potential value uplift of £13 billion in residential values and £215 million in commercial values by 2026. Julian Ware, from TFL, told us that methodology prepared by KPMG and Savills estimated that eight prospective transport projects in London, including Crossrail 2 and the Bakerloo line extension, could generate a land value uplift of £87 billion, although 65% of this would be realised in the existing residential market.

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Baxenden Bank said:

As I said. Because, in shorthand, we live in a property owning democracy and not a totalitarian state which just confiscates other peoples property 'because they feel like it'.

The tax was under the 'Development Land Tax Act 1976'

More recently there is a discussion here (parliament.gov.uk: Land Value Capture), which includes the following:

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NotATrainspott said:

I never said that we would confiscate the property without compensation. But, it is also not fair to pay the owners of the property based on the increased land value that they themselves did not generate, just because that is what they want to be paid.

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Expropriation does not work as an economic strategy because the result is that no one would ever invest in capital improvements.

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The second question is more fundamental, and it underpins this argument. If we allow current landowners to absorb increased in land value, then it is not a neutral act. All of that increase in value is produced by everyone else. All of that money they get came from someone else. Over time, the owners of land will therefore accumulate more and more money, at the expense of everyone else.

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HSTEd said:

EDIT:
Does anyone know why Euston is built on a skew relative to its approach lines. Why wasn't this fixed in the 1960s? Is there some reason they couldn't have skewed the platforms to face the approach tracks rather than having the kink that it does today?

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Baxenden Bank said:

But it is the law. Fair or not. Fair to whom being the starting point. A person being deprived of a large (unexpected) sum of money may regard it as unfair if that windfall is taken away from them.

If I own a strip of land (a ransom strip), behind which there is a development site which cannot be accessed by any other route, by convention I am entitled to a large chunk (50%) of the value of the whole site, not the redevelopment value of my actual strip of land (which may be £0). The amount is subject to agreement by both parties. No one has to buy at that 50%, no-one has to sell at any value. CPO legislation is the route around that knotty problem for public projects, where the owner is fairly compensated based on established rules.

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