London Bridge Station forms the cornerstone of Thameslink’s ambitious vision, to increase passenger capacity through London by two thirds of its previous volume.

The new station is designed to accommodate over 90 million passengers per year in a new expansive street level concourse – larger than the football pitch at Wembley stadium – which links two communities in Southwark for the first time since Victorian times.

Operationally the project creates a unified site that includes extended platforms, integrated new street entrances, three new through tracks, fewer terminating platforms and convenient links to onward travel.

Beneath the tracks, a grand street-level space that humanises journeys through its naturally lit concourse filtered through voids in the platforms above, flanked by timber lined soffits providing visual softness and warmth to the space.

The station has a rich history, it was the first railway station built in the capital in 1836. Our project incorporates its layers of history by adaptively reusing spaces where we can and only creating new ones when we can’t.

The new concourse cut through the existing brick viaducts is connected to the Underground station by the shop lined Western Arcade, historically a site of an market when the station was first built. This link has been extended to over three times its original length with board marked concrete quadripartite arches inspired by the original brick arches whilst referencing the rich brutalist heritage of the South Bank.

The redevelopment of the station, began with a consented master plan by TP Bennett and Alan Baxter associates in 2000, Grimshaw were appointed in 2010 to design a world class station befitting its location and status. Construction began in 2012 and the station was opened in 2018 transformed without disruption to usual station operations.

We always make the analogy that it’s like open heart surgery, because we had to rebuild the station whilst millions of passengers still flowing through it.

Mark Middleton
Partner, Grimshaw