Well then. At the end of the last article I promised to write about the stations on HS2 phase 1 assuming that I hadn’t been too enraged by the political fallout from hopefully soon-to-be-ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak’s cancellation of phase 2 of HS2.

Reader, I have been enraged.

I have had to have a very long lie down in a darkened room. And every time I have thought about returning to the subject here, something else stupid has happened. Most recently, definitely soon-to-be-ex-rail minister Huw Merriman was to be found suggesting that an additional platform at Dore & Totley station had been delivered, “as part of our Network North plan, made possible by reallocated HS2 funding” despite said platform having been specified and funded years ago, long before HS2 phase 2 was cancelled.

Quite why the previously fairly sensible and independent-minded chair of parliament’s Transport Select Committee would have agreed to a substantially better-remunerated role as a government minister if governmental collective responsibility requires spouting nonsense like this will presumably have to await Merriman’s diaries.

Network North, you will recall, was announced by Sunak as a ‘replacement’ for HS2’s more northerly elements. It alleged to divert HS2 money all over the country into a haphazard collection of rail, bus and road schemes; a coalition of chaos if ever I saw one.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that over the last few months Network North has been unravelling faster than an incumbent political party’s hastily called general election campaign.

Some Network North projects (for instance a rapid transit network for Bristol and the reopening of the Leamside Line) were cancelled and deleted from the Network North plans within 24 hours.

Other projects in Network North turned out to have been completed years ago, like an extension of the Nottingham Express Transit light rail system to Clifton South, which opened in 2015.

Some of the Network North rail schemes were sprung on Network Rail with no warning; yes we should be electrifying the North Wales Main Line (all main lines, in fact) but this idea will now need to be worked up by Network Rail for delivery, and will probably take as long to complete as HS2 would have done. And anyway, we should have been building HS2 in full as well as electrifying the existing rail network through a rolling programme. It should never have been a case of one or the other.

Would you care to take a bet that the majority of projects that are eventually delivered via Network North are the motorway improvements and pothole filling while most of the sustainable transport schemes fall away? I ask only because in late December the government announced £235m of repairs to London’s roads, using “redirected funding from HS2“.

As ever, one should bear in mind that none of the Network North funding has been (or actually could be) made available by scrapping HS2’s northern elements. For a start, significant spending has yet to start on these elements. And, more importantly, spending on HS2 was financed by borrowing against future fares income from HS2. No HS2 phase 2, no fares income, nothing to borrow, no funds to divert. The fact that all this Network North spending has been announced in the last few months simply shows that the government could and should always have been fixing local transport and the existing rail network at the same time as building HS2’s northern legs. But there you go, this is just what passes for transport policy these days, and who needs transport planners pointing this sort of thing out when you have culture wars to stoke?

But enough of Network North. I did promise to write about HS2’s phase 1 stations, and this is a promise I am about to renege upon, while I instead reallocate the words to something different. Wherever did I get that idea from?

It occurred to me that to put the HS2 phase 1 stations in context, it would be useful instead to look first at the stations of HS1, which connects London with the Channel Tunnel and is currently the UK’s only true high speed line.

One of my very few disappointments with HS1 is the architecture of its two new intermediate stations. Confronted by the opportunity to reflect in those stations the amazing achievement of Britain’s first major high speed railway, it feels like an opportunity was missed.

HS1’s London terminus St Pancras International, is of course wonderful and widely recognised as such, including by this website (The Beauty of Transport 22 April 2015). Towards the southern end of the line, Ashford International (The Beauty of Transport 22 March 2017) is a very good piece of late British Rail design (I was even asked to be on the television to talk about it once¹) but it predates HS1 and was located on the ‘classic’ railway network which Eurostar trains used between the Channel Tunnel and London before the opening of HS1’s first phase (Channel Tunnel to north Kent) in 2003.

The two new pure-HS1 intermediate stations are Ebbsfleet International in north Kent and Stratford International in east London, and they opened in 2007 when the second phase of HS1 opened between north Kent and London St Pancras.

Designed by Mark Fisher under Alastair Lansley as chief architect for entire HS1 project, the stations are effectively twins, sharing the same design. Both are effective enough, but never quite transcend the first impression that they give passengers, which is that they are large glass boxes, neither seeking nor delivering any greater sense of excitement or wonder. Considering that HS1 actually is a thing of excitement and wonder (at least in domestic terms if slightly less so internationally), this has always seemed a shame, and a contrast with the thrilling St Pancras International. I sometimes wonder if this was a deliberate design choice, and that Ebbsfleet and Stratford Internationals’ subdued design intentionally ensured that they did not overshadow St Pancras International, which was always intended to be the jewel in the crown of HS1.

Both stations are arranged so that the main station building spans the railway tracks which run underneath, in a deep cutting at Stratford and a shallow one at Ebbsfleet, acting effectively as giant footbridges with associated facilities.

The long edges of the station buildings, which run at 90 degrees to the tracks below, are fully glazed with a simple grid of rectangular glass panels. The short ends of the buildings feature smaller glazed areas at each end (again at full height) with dark grey panelling between. Full width canopies extend out from both short sides of the station buildings and are supported on plain steel columns.

Within the overall cuboid form of the two stations, there is something slightly more complicated going on. The station buildings are effectively doughnuts, with ‘domestic’ facilities along both short sides and one of the long sides, and ‘international’ facilities along the other long side. The hole in the middle is a lightwell, covered by a 700m² EFTE pillow skylight which protects the platforms below and brings natural light down to the areas under the building at both stations.

Although both stations have the suffix “International”, and both contain areas to be used for arriving/departing international passengers, neither of these parts of the stations are currently in use for this purpose. The ‘international’ parts of the station are segregated from the domestic parts to cope with international border security requirements, and at both stations are currently standing empty. Ebbsfleet has not been served by international trains since the Covid pandemic began in 2020 and there seems little likelihood that this will change in the near future. Slightly more ridiculously, despite the provision of an ‘international’ section of the building and a pair of international platforms, Stratford International has never been used for international train services, Eurostar making it clear from the start of services along HS1 that it had no intention of serving a station that was so close to St Pancras International.

Stratford International was really about helping regenerate the local area, which was chosen as the site for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is hard to quantify the precise impact Stratford International has had on regeneration, or its role in the success of the Games bid, and to disentangle it from other transport improvements in the area such as a new Docklands Light Railway station. However, the area around Stratford International and the pre-existing Stratford domestic station is unrecognisable compared to 20 years ago with the Games site transformed into a park containing impressive sports facilities (yay!) and a massive new Westfield shopping centre (yay?) between the two stations.

The regeneration role of Stratford International has been delivered through the domestic train services which use it, rather than international ones. These are the ‘Javelin’ services operated by Southeastern, which run between St Pancras International, Stratford International, Ebbsfleet International and various locations in Kent. Some of these services use HS1 only between St Pancras and Ebbsfleet before switching to the conventional railway network, while others continue to Ashford before moving onto conventional tracks.

Javelin trains serving North Kent and leaving/joining HS1 at Ebbsfleet use platforms which are physically separate from those underneath the main station building. It is a slightly awkward arrangement that makes them feel disconnected from the main station, and they are accessed by an underpass which has a covered entrance, just to the east of Ebbsfleet International’s main building.

This in fact is the main physical difference between Ebbsfleet and Stratford Internationals, and while Ebbsfleet has an underpass entrance, Stratford has a canopy at its north end which gives sheltered access to the adjacent Docklands Light Railway station.

Javelin trains run at up to 140mph on HS1 rather than the 186mph of Eurostar trains, although the closely-spaced stations on HS1 (by typical high speed rail standards anyway) mean that 140mph is quite sufficient as they would have little chance to reach the same speed as Eurostar trains before needing to slow down again for the next station. The journey time benefit of 186mph domestic trains would apparently be only a couple of minutes, their gearing would make it more difficult to timetable them between trains on the conventional railway network, not to mention that – as noted by the managing director of Southeastern – such trains would also be more expensive.

While the regeneration of Stratford means that Stratford International feels like it is a proper station (despite its misleading name) located in a real place, the same cannot be said of Ebbsfleet International. The latter is a parkway station in all but name and sits within a barren complex of car parks. Like so many parkway stations it feels unmoored both physically and spiritually from its local area, plonked in an abstract nowhere land. There is supposed to be some kind of masterplan for developing the area around the station, which seems a bit of a no-brainer given its excellent transport connections, but two decades on from the opening of Ebbsfleet International little seems to have happened. Perhaps when it eventually does, the circuitous and frustrating links to nearby Northfleet station will be sorted out. In theory, it is only a short walk between the two stations. In practice, it is not.

Inside the stations – the domestic areas anyway, all is functional and unremarkable. Terrazzo flooring bounces light upwards, and the glass walls let in plenty of daylight. The ceiling features acoustic panelling which absorbs noise and calms down the interiors, which are a succession of hard, flat surfaces which would otherwise be very echo-y. Interior finishes, signage and equipment were supplied by architecture and interior design practice Jestico + Whiles, working to main contractor Skanska.

Network Rail’s filming locations website suggests that Ebbsfleet International could double as an airport terminal for production purposes, and indeed that is an accurate summation. Emulating the air travel experience was a strange obsession in the early days of Channel Tunnel train services, initially demonstrated at Ashford International and Waterloo International, which featured the use of airport terminal terminology as well as design cues. It is particularly inexplicable at Ebbsfleet and Stratford Internationals which are more or less contemporaneous with St Pancras International, the latter defiantly a railway station and firmly in that idiom, rather than being inspired by air terminals.

There is little to report at platform level at either Ebbsfleet or Stratford, although there is a degree of excitement to be derived from Stratford International’s siting in a deep, rough finished concrete box, which gives rise to some visual drama. A viaduct rises over the platforms, giving Eurostar trains access to their depot at nearby Temple Mills.

The inner platforms at Stratford International are served by domestic Javelin trains, while the outer platforms were intended for use by international services but have only ever been used during the Olympic/Paralympic Games of 2012, on a temporary basis, for a domestic shuttle service from St Pancras.

One final decorative feature of the twin stations at Stratford and Ebbsfleet tells you everything you need to know about the chaos into which branding and signage on the privatised railway network had descended by 2007 and which continues to this day. Although the Labour government had initially been elected in 1997 with a promise to renationalise the railway, it abandoned that pledge as soon as it came to power, content instead to let the privatised railway continue in the fragmented way that has continued until the time of writing, with multitudinous branding and information standards proliferating across the network.

As can be seen, both Stratford and Ebbsfleet International stations have their name displayed on their exterior… in two completely different styles. When the railway can’t even deliver information consistency across two identical stations, situated next to each other, and which opened simultaneously, you might as well give up and go home (at 140mph) if you have any hopes for a simple signage and visual information standard that passengers can expect across the railway network.

With a general election campaign underway in the UK, the Labour party is seeking to gain power with an offer that includes the promise to create Great British Railways as “a single directing mind and brand” for the railway network. This, hopefully, will give the chance to standardise signage and information across the network. The work has already been done for Network Rail’s Wayfinding design manual (the latest edition of which is expected shortly) and Rail Symbol 2 design manual. Those of us who would like a return to branding and signage design consistency across the railway are keeping our fingers crossed that if Labour comes to power, this time it keeps its manifesto promise.

I am available to opine further on suitable liveries and seat moquettes for Great British Railways’ standardised branding if you want (you do not want).

To return to HS2 however, it appears that someone, somewhere, seems to have learned from Stratford and Ebbsfleet Internationals’ underwhelming architecture, because the stations of HS2 are much more the sort of buildings that speak to the revolutionary change and renaissance in rail travel that high speed railways bring. Or at least, the revolution and renaissance that high speed rail is supposed to bring when it isn’t cancelled halfway through. More on the HS2 stations another time. Probably next time, but I am wary of making promises I cannot keep…

Footnotes

1. This was much to my family’s surprise as I hadn’t told them in advance. Their reaction fully justified this decision. ↩︎

How to find Stratford and Ebbsfleet International stations

Click here for Ebbsfleet International on The Beauty of Transport‘s map, and here for Stratford International.

Bibliography and Further Reading

National Rail’s webpages for Ebbsfleet International and Stratford International

…and anything linked to in the article above

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