How the Curzon Street design was kept on the right tracks

The detailed designs for the HS2 station at Curzon Street were revealed yesterday, and predictably generated at least one Twitter poll.

The unscientific answer to “do the new HS2 station designs look like a shed?” was met with an overwhelmingly positive answer. 46% said “no, they’re beautiful” and 40% asked “what’s wrong with sheds?”.

Carol Stitchman

That might be because there is plenty of science and careful thought that has gone in to the structure of the planned station.

Carol Stitchman, WSP Design Manager on Curzon Street, who worked on the overhaul of New Street station when she was at Network Rail, said: “One of the things which dictated the shape and the form of the building – and a lesson that I learned from New Street – was I asked the architect to give me a station concourse that doesn’t have any columns on it.

“Anytime you have a column on a station you increase the journey time by up to one to three seconds, which might not sound like a lot but over at New Street – where you have 120,000 passengers a day which now ramps up to 200,000 passengers a day – that increases the journey time by quite a considerable amount.”

The foundation of the design is for a clean and uncluttered look throughout, to make sure it works for its main purpose: a transport hub.

“Internally we want to make sure that it doesn’t look like an aircraft hangar,” said Stitchman. “It’s a massive, massive space inside there, and what we’re trying to do is make it feel like a public space as well as a space that is a railway station.

“Primarily it’s a railway station, but for the members of public and customers that might be in there that are not catching a train, they don’t feel like they’re in this great big open cavern and it still feels like quite a nice space to be in.”

WSP has sought to achieve this through a three-word ethos for the design: simple, elegant and refined.

She said: “When you have that as a concept, you then look at all the elements that you look at within the building, outside the building, within the public realm, and they all follow that.

“Imagine lampposts that have got a lot of speakers on there and CCTV cameras. That becomes really cluttered, but we’ve looked at a very simple and elegant element to make sure that it fits in with that ‘simple, elegant, refined’.”

There were a number of challenges in the design of the station, from the 15-metre drop from the eastern side to the west, the entrance that faces north and a station accommodating trains that will be 400 metres long.

All of those dictated elements that fed into the overall look that culminated in the images that have been revealed.

“As well as being a catalyst for regeneration, the new HS2 Curzon Street station will become a landmark destination, welcoming people to the heart of Birmingham,” added Stitchman.

“Our design recognises the station’s function as a place of arrival and connection. It is the only HS2 station that welcomes you with a view of the city, where you can see the city from the train, and the train from the city.”