Arriving in Style: The Importance of Public Transit Design

Simon Hunt

Simon Hunt is a tech reporter for the Evening Standard and former Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review.

When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his first trip to London since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Brits raised an eyebrow at the choice of location for his arrival. Why Stansted?

‘Hasn’t Zelenskyy got enough problems without the UK forcing him to land at Stansted?’ one Twitter user asked.

‘He probably arrived and thought, “looks like we should be sending you aid!”,’ another quipped.

For those fortunate enough not to be acquainted with Stansted, it is one of London’s six passenger airports, and out of the six, it is rarely touted as the best for passenger experience.

The single­runway airport is over forty miles from central London, and takes up to an hour to reach by train. Queues for check­in can equally take ages, followed by more queueing at security checks. Then begins a marathon­like journey through the overbearing, snaking duty­free counters to reach the departure lounge which, with its horseshoe parade of narrow food stores around clustered metal seats, looks cramped and overcrowded given the number of flights the single runway now handles.

All of which should help explain why choosing Stansted to roll out the red carpet to one of the best­known world leaders — for only his second overseas trip since war broke out — did not sit well with many Brits. They were, as I was, concerned about the optics of such a welcome, when other airports were available.

This uneasiness can be explained by how Brits, and especially Londoners, have become well­acquainted with the value of well­designed public spaces, including economic, political and wellbeing benefits.

While tens, if not hundreds, of billions of pounds have been spent rebuilding and redesigning bits of London since the beginning of the century, transforming the capital’s skyline in the process, nowhere has the spending been more visibly beneficial than on the city’s transport system.

A dash across town

The best example is the opening of the £20 billion Elizabeth line underground railway in May 2022 after a decade in the works, in what was, at the time, the largest construction project in Europe.

The line’s design is visually striking. Its huge cavernous underground platforms, each more than a quarter kilometre long, are grand feats of engineering in their own right. The trains, which are far larger than the conventional “tube” trains, are smooth, air­cooled, and twice as fast. The rather charming blue and purple moquette that adorn the seats of the nine­car train sets have proved so popular, London’s transport authority TfL is selling its own range of cushions, armchairs and £2,500 sofas with the same design.

In the days following its opening in May last year, the line saw more excited tourists, keen to explore the new stations and trains, than it did commuters.

I, a humble commuter myself, seldom arrived at one of the line’s platforms or boarded a train without seeing someone take a picture. In the months that followed, it has arguably become the most popular tourist attraction in London, far surpassing Madame Tussaud’s or the London Eye — and a cursory survey of the number of languages I hear each time I board would attest to that. It is clear its value is much more than functional.

An entire ecosystem of YouTubers and TikTokers documenting the expansion of London’s rail network have discovered they now have an audience of tens of millions, and one made up not just of fringe British train enthusiasts like me but a bigger global audience, many of whom lack anything close to the same scale of public infrastructure in their towns and cities and gorp at its wonder.

Most recent figures estimate the Elizabeth line is now averaging 14 million passengers per month, significantly more than TfL had projected. A staggering one in six train journeys in the whole country is now made on the line, even though it is barely a year old. If that trend continues, based on current fare rates, the line’s turnover will have surpassed its own construction in under 40 years — not a bad rate of return for a long­term infra­ formance of 21 global business districts by accountancy firm EY. The study found that access to skilled labour — a crucial factor to employers — was closely linked to the importance of the ‘work/ live/play environment’ experienced by employees. The best global business districts were ‘striving to reinvent the experiences for their users,’ by ‘prioritising health and wellbeing’ and ‘becoming inclusive urban destinations beyond concentrations of office space.’ they were first built in the mid19th century. At the time, the grandeur of the ornate train sheds was not a decision by the state, but rather one by the Victorian railway companies vying with each other to get structure project.

In short, companies now pay far greater attention to how a place looks and feels for their employees when choosing to set up shop somewhere compared to how cheap the office space is or how low the tax rates are. The visual aesthetics of a place — how ‘Instagrammable’ it is, if you like — now carry enormous economic consequences.

But more than that, it is already having a significant impact on London’s economy. Office rents for buildings in close proximity to the line have soared some ten times higher than those in other parts of the city, while some of the world’s biggest companies, like Amazon, snapped up office space near Elizabeth line stations years before the trains started passing through the 34­metre­deep tunnels.

The City of London came top in a recent study of the per­

And they carry substantial wellbeing benefits too. A 2022 study by the National Institute for Health and Care Research found that well­managed open spaces can have a significant impact on the wellbeing of the people who use them, and can have a bearing on a range of emotions including ‘optimism about the future, how useful, relaxed, and close to other people they felt, how well they dealt with problems, could think clearly, and could make up their own mind.’

From vainglory to welfare

Of course, the importance of having visually pleasing public forums is not an entirely novel concept — but the intent behind their design has changed. Prior to their 21st century improvements, St Pancras and King’s Cross stations had not undergone aesthetic transformations of the same scale since customers aboard their trains. When King’s Cross was built in 1852 by the Great Nor thern Railway, its austere design — the clock for its clocktower is rumoured to have been bought second­hand — was in large part a reflection of the relatively tight finances of the Great Northern. So when the Midland Railway built St Pancras next­door in 1868, no expense was spared to make their rival station visually superior. The company constructed a single­arch roof for the entire station — at the time the biggest of its kind in the world — while the clock above the train platforms was the largest at any station in Britain. The terminus had its own 150room hotel designed in a palatial gothic style, complete with a grand staircase and rooms lined with gold leaf walls.

In comparison, the £800 million upgrade to King’s Cross station, completed in 2007, saw the creation of a breathtaking 1,700 tonne geodesic steel and glass dome which acts as a new ticket hall for the 160­year­old train shed it sits alongside. Supposedly the lon­ gest single­span station structure in Europe, the stunning lattice­like dome quadrupled the size of the station’s concourse.

The impressive 19th­century features of these stations at the time served largely commercial ends. But these stations’ 21st­century additions, managed by the state, now serve a much broader set of interests from a wider range of stakeholders, which helps explain why so much thought went into their design. Many younger Londoners such as myself, some of our politicians. Just at the time when other European capitals seem to be catching up with London’s achievements in transport systems that are both functional and visually impressive, the UK’s capital is in danger of going backwards and failing to learn from its own success story. their intended lifespan when they were designed in the 1960s, and the same is true of the equally old Piccadilly line. who have grown up witnessing this steady improvement to public places over the past 20 years, have become so intuitively aware of the case for well­designed streetscape improvements that arguments in their favour barely ever need defending.

An enormous expansion of the Paris Metro, in what has now replaced the Elizabeth line as Europe’s largest infrastructure project, is underway and set to open in stages between now and 2030. The line will see the creation of 120 new miles of track spanning 68 new rail stations, making the Elizabeth line sound like a modest development by comparison.

The UK’s cash­strapped government risks becoming blinkered in its handling of infrastructure projects, snubbing an analysis of the wider societal benefits that a new railway would bring — including the aesthetic ones — in favour of a contrived cost­benefit evaluation geared only at finding where constrained government spending can best deliver a quick return.

Yet, all of this, which is intuitive to so many, is starting to become counterintuitive to

But what does London next have in its pipeline? The short answer is very little indeed. Beyond some preliminary work, such as public consultations, no public funds have been committed to the Crossrail 2 project, a North­South line under London designed to replicate many of the benefits achieved by the East­West Elizabeth line.

In addition, some parts of London’s public transport infrastructure are creaking at the seams. The Bakerloo line, a 120­year old line named after its route from Baker Street to Waterloo station, has rolling stock that are now over 50 years old, much longer than

Moreover, recent reports suggest the UK government may be slashing plans for HS2 — currently the government’s only major national rail infrastructure project — such that the new railway would never reach central London. Instead, it would terminate at a junction in a northern suburb, leaving its intended terminus, the present Euston station, in a state of dilapidation.

A cartoon in the Evening Standard newspaper, for which I write, poignantly mocked the plans, depicting a confused HS2 train driver instructing bewildered passengers to disembark in a field a few miles outside London, as he appeared to have run out of track.

Escaping backwards thinking on transportation

It is a subtle change in approach to managing the public realm whose effects could be unheeded for years before being felt strongly — and miserably — decades into the future.

The upshot is that the mild embarrassment some Londoners felt about Zelenskyy’s trip to Stansted could in the coming years extend to a much greater collective shame about the decline of the capital’s public infrastructure as a whole. Yet, without being too forebo ding, I fear that such embarrassment could become so commonplace that the collective zeitgeist becomes numb to the value of beautiful public spaces.

I can only hope that today’s politicians become aware of the benefits a well­designed public sphere brings to us all. The city’s future may hang in the balance.