A love letter to the Elizabeth Line – ADC

Gidea Park: know where that is? Twyford: sounds like it should be Wales. Goodmayes: good heavens, what? Slough: didn’t a poet once call for that place to be bombed?

These places, far far away though they may sound, can all be accessed by one train from places such as Whitechapel, Bond Street, Reading, Shenfield and Woolwich. This, in case you didn’t know, is incredible.

In the 1990s, getting to Seven Kings in the east to Hanwell in the west would’ve required taking four different trains – not all of them running at all frequently either. But now it takes just one train, one that runs smoothly and comes often. So it’s right that we reward a project that manages to neatly tie together these communities all while producing a series of elegant new stations as well.

The Elizabeth Line has won the 2024 Stirling Prize – read more here.

Which brings me on to another remarkable aspect: that of the eastern and western fringes of the Elizabeth Line network, only one of the stations is actually a new station: Woolwich. The rest beyond Zone 2 have all been (massively) modernised. To provide some context to this, even Custom House originally opened in 1855; Abbey Wood in 1849 and Southall in 1839, for example. All of course have been upgraded beyond recognition.

The real magic though, as we know, lies underground. The great purple thread weaving its way through 26 miles of tunnels has resulted in new subterranean stations between where the line plunges down at Paddington and resurfaces at Stratford and Custom House.

In this sense the Elizabeth Line can only really be compared to the Jubilee Line extension — a project that birthed us the wonders of MJP’s Southwark, Alsop’s North Greenwich, Hopkins’ Westminster and Foster’s Canary Wharf — some of the best stations on the underground network.

Those stations have character and identity in their own right but aesthetically aren’t as cohesive as what’s been achieved with the Elizabeth Line, a form of architectural identity second only on the network to Charles Holden’s work on the Piccadilly Line.

The Elizabeth Line’s milky-white tunnels might be anodyne to some, too close to airport aesthetics. But they are a welcome bit of visual relief to the busy visuals elsewhere on the underground.

Another comparison: In New York, the critic Alexandra Lange described the extension to the Q Line — which opened in 2017 — as a piece of architecture that wasn’t art, but was instead something that was saved by art. Lange was right. The extension to the Q Line sans any art would be incredibly dull. Lange was yearning for an architectural language a la Washington DC or Munich: something strong and well defined, punchy even. Something New York.

In London the Elizabeth Line does have an identity. Admittedly it’s not tied to any vernacular of its neighbours on the network, opting for a more abstract international style,  something that wouldn’t be out of sync of a Stanley Kubrick set (a film-maker so good there have been exhibitions on his ability to create spatial drama).

And that’s not to say the Elizabeth Line doesn’t have its own moments of panache. When at Paddington, look up and you’ll see a monochrome homage to Verner Panton’s lost Spiegel publishing house pool in Hamburg.

As for the actual trains, each can carry 1,500 people, almost double the capacity of a Piccadilly Line train (which uses the some of oldest rolling stock – dating back to 1973 – on the network).

Today, 700,000 passengers take the Elizabeth Line every working day of the week. It has created better links to the UK’s biggest airport and somehow linked Reading in Berkshire to Shenfield in Essex — a truly remarkable achievement.