Putting Stuff on Top of Southwark Tube Station

26 years in the making.

[cva]

This video sponsored by the Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things

[cawsha]

Whenever anyone mentions Bauhaus I always think of the Madness song "Bauhaus in the middle of our street".

[alfredlamowen]

As a student in London, I like the idea of this. How many students can say they live above a tube station? Major bragging rights

[cawsha]

0:58 The pigeons are all signing a petition against the plan as they don't want to be evicted.

[HJJSL-blkk]

I don't live in Southwark but have been Southwark-adjacent for over 60 years. I have worked in Southwark and always favoured Southwark tube for trips to the Globe, Tate etc with up to 60 schoolchildren. Far too easy to lose children at Waterloo. I hated the red block proposal but really love the student/council blocks. Now that buildings aren't black with soot, as they once were, pale stone is welcome and I love the curvy corners too.

[philiphowley]

I agree with your view. The new proposed towers fit well with the design of the station and are of a scale that doesn’t overwhelm.

[Bruce-hw]

Thanks for your definition of “affordable”.

[AlphaBee]

The 'concerns' by Victor Chamberlain seems to tick all the boxes of a typical NIMBY campaign against any type of new development. The design for this is fine - I already love the look of Southwark station inside and out and this seems to respect that rather than be just a featureless block plonked on top of it. I guess the difference between this and the Liverpool Street proposal is this is building a modern structure on a (relatively) modern station, rather than shoehorning modern structures on and around an old one. Even the Victorian looking building housing the McDonalds there is a facade built in the 1980s.

[baldytail]

Bermondsey station next perhaps? TFL needs to develop over stations to help fund the Bakerloo line extension.

[DavidShepheard]

I think what I like about that building is that it follows the lines of the existing Southwark Tube station at ground level. That makes it look like it always belonged there.

What I do not like is that the council housing is a separate building that could easily be downscaled. I think it is time to require developers to stop building "social housing" that is sold at 20% discount and make them start building council housing that is completed first and handed over to the council before the rest of a site is developed.

I'm also concerned a bit about "student accommodation". This seems to me to be a cheat to get permission to build housing units that do not give people enough space to do everything. I can see property developers later arguing that "we have too much student accommodation" and then trying to sell these small boxes as leasehold properties where people also have to pay a ground rent (so end up getting fleeced at both ends and living in a small box).

[teejayy]

The student traffic cone argument is a brilliant one😅

[christophervalkoinen]

"Are we even going to need all this office space?"

There's a lot of people trying to work out the answer to that question, including Network Rail. You should check out their Future of Cities report.

[DavidShepheard]

"No description has been added to this video." - Jago leaves his Southwark Tube Station incomplete and will build a description on top of the video later. 🤪

[keithwesley]

Those tower blocks in the square mile make the place even more claustrophobic than it was 60 years ago! Anyway you wouldn't get me to go further up than the first floor!

[lefthandedspanner]

one city unlikely to be bothered by excessive tower blocks any time soon is Cambridge - the high water table means the ground can't support the weight of very tall structures
this is also why the terminal junction of M11 was originally built as a partial cloverleaf, which is unusual in the UK - it's large in terms of surface area, but only two levels high

[sandy_knight]

NIMBYs will be NIMBYs. I say this as someone who lives very close to New Malden station, known for its 16+ storey 'twin towers' that tower above everything around it. It didn't stop people complaining about a recent 4(?) storey housing development right next to them...

[bipbipletucha]

I'm glad to see this! It's always felt weird to me that southwark never had OSD from the beginning

[Julia_and_the_City]

To say this building is "Bauhaus-inspired" is I think quite a stretch of what falls under the Bauhaus school of architecture and what forms it produces, I don't see it. But what I do see is this really really lovely motive of rounded edges in the building that masterfully blends in with the existing station, as if it was always designed to be built like this. For that alone I think it deserves my amateur-architect-eye's approval.

[JohnBand]

I like this development.

Re Jago's rant, I think hybrid working has the absolute opposite consequences he's implying for offices - if they're places that we only go to a few times per week or per month for meetings then they obviously should be in places like the City of London or the West End which have good transport links and associated social venues, and the ones in Croydon and suburban business parks are the ones that should be torn down to be replaced with housing.

[eastlancsesteem]

I used to dream of having a private tube station in a basement accessible by stairs at the ground floor of my former house in Upper Sydenham.