Liverpool Street Station Interior Photo: The Victorian Society
The Liverpool Street Station Campaign (LISSCA) has stood at this point before. In the 1970s, LISSCA was formed to oppose the demolition of the Victorian station buildings and, after years of campaigning, the group succeeded in saving the Great Eastern Hotel and key train sheds.
We now enter a new phase in that same mission: to protect Liverpool Street Station and ensure that the City of London gets a terminus worthy of its history and its people.
With the backing of thousands of supporters, LISSCA is prepared for the long haul. We will now await the decisions of the Mayor of London and, if necessary, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. We proceed knowing that public support for preserving the station remains strong.
Our JustGiving fundraiser to Save Liverpool Street Station remains open and Griff Rhys Jones, our President, urges our supporters to stand firm with us.
Griff Rhys Jones, President of the Victorian Society and of the Liverpool Street Station Campaign (LISSCA) said:
“This is sad day for the City of London. A disfiguring billion pound office block on top of a major heritage asset is not essential to the City’s development plans, it is doubtful whether it will easily provide the profit to “improve” the concourse, and can only realise a small amount of extra space for the passenger. Its focus is retail opportunities which the commuter doesn’t need. It will destroy an existing conservation area. It demolishes listed buildings. It is harmful to the surrounding historic fabric. It has been proposed on a false PR-led assertion that Network Rail is “under instruction” to build on top of its London Stations. It is not. Any advantages to disabled access are a statutory duty and should not require twenty storeys of office block and ten years of disruption to achieve. By ignoring all these considerations, the Corporation planning committee have bowed to developer ambitions, set a bad precedent for London and ignore the user. The City of London deserves better than this for its station – one of the busiest and therefore most important in Britain.”
Some background information
In 2023, The Victorian Society reformed the Liverpool Street Station Campaign (LISSCA), a group that was established in the 1970s to prevent the station’s total demolition at that time. The present LISSCA committee is comprised of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, The Twentieth Century Society, Historic Buildings & Places, The Council for British Archaeology, the Georgian Group, the Spitalfields Trust, Civic Voice, London Historians, the Betjeman Society, London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, the Victorian Society as well as individuals who helped save the station in the original campaign. The gathering of these major heritage voices is extremely rare and reflects how seriously they individually and collectively recognise the threat to the Station and it setting, as well as the backwardly destructive nature of Network Rail’s plans, which hark back to the dark days of loss and vandalism of historic (particularly Victorian) buildings. The President of LISSCA, and the Victorian Society, is Griff Rhys Jones, following in the footsteps of Sir John Betjeman, who spearheaded the campaign in the 1970s and 80s.
LISSCA and Griff Rhys Jones successfully campaigned with the public to bring about Network Rail dropping its original 2023 plans for the station, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, which attracted over 2,200 objections. The campaign has subsequently been engaged in combatting the most recent plans for the Station, which are hugely destructive and – according to Network Rail’s own appraisal – not financially viable, with a likely £220M shortfall in the event that the scheme is implemented, in turn exposing the potential for incurring vast public expense.
Network Rail and Acme plans showing Liverpool Street entrance. Visualisation: Acme and Network Rail.
Image showing a comparison of the Acme scheme versus the John McAslan Partnership alternative proposal
The Former Great Eastern Hotel – now the Andaz London Liverpool Street – as seen from the corner of Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate. Visualisation: Network Rail and Acme
