Computer-generated PR images often outshine reality, but rarely has so much been promised and so little delivered as at Old Street roundabout in east London, finally complete after more than a decade in the works. It was supposed to be the radiant hub of the UK’s very own Tech City, the much-vaunted Silicon Roundabout around which a vibrant community of startups would orbit, fizzing with ideas.
In 2012, the then prime minister David Cameron pledged £50m to transform this undistinguished traffic intersection into “the largest civic space in Europe” – a shining beacon for our “aspiration nation”, where tech companies would rub shoulders with young innovators in a dynamic, multilevelled, interactive landscape. It was eagerly championed by his Bullingdon club chum and then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who saw in it the chance for another novelty infrastructure project to add to his collection of costly follies. But their Nathan Barley fantasy never came to pass.
Five years later, Islington council picked up the ball and launched an architectural competition, this time with an optimistic budget of just £1m. From over 120 entries, 39 architects and designers, including the likes of Zaha Hadid and Es Devlin, were chosen to conjure breathtaking visions for what this “iconic gateway” could look like. They imagined futuristic forests of air-cleaning pylons, spherical “digital libraries” and high-rise bicycle storage towers, like scenes from an eco-Blade Runner. There were undulating green canopies, towers of digital screens and magical poles that would pump out clouds of pollution-absorbing mist, on to which images could be projected after dark. This would be a dazzling showcase of smart city technology and London’s – if not the world’s – most thrilling public space.
Twelve years on and £132m spent since Cameron’s announcement, the hoardings have finally come down. If you had given birth to a baby at the inception of the project, they could now be cycling through the Old Street junction on their way to secondary school. It has been London’s longest-running roadworks, a sisyphean spectacle to behold; but you might be hard-pressed to tell what has changed after all this time.
There are no throbbing digital spheres, no hovering haloes and no multistorey maker-spaces in sight. Interactive totems and dancing water features there are none. Instead, visitors to the roundabout are greeted by a barren expanse of paving, adorned with a big blank service box and ringed by 120 hefty bollards. It is a grim carousel of hostile vehicle mitigation and anti-homeless design features, a place as uninviting as they come – and cluttered to deter cyclists from riding across it. And yes, the underwhelming scene is still loomed over by the huge steel-arched structure from which four giant advertising screens dangle, like a jumbotron airlifted here from an American football stadium – a jaunty relic from when the roundabout was last iconicised in the 1990s.
The total effect looks like something a local authority highways department might have cobbled together overnight and executed in a few weeks, rather than a project of national government-level importance, subject to a tortured decade of planning and several aborted design competitions. As TikToker Moses Combe complained in a recent viral video: “London is crying at this abomination … I feel robbed,” adding that the inside of the Underground station “still looks like a trap house”. How did it come to this?
As was often the case during the bluster-filled tenures of Cameron and Johnson, their PR fanfare and snappy taglines weren’t backed up by much in the way of costed reality. On a recent site visit, the Old Street roundabout project lead, Helen Cansick, head of healthy streets investment at Transport for London, said she hadn’t even heard of their grand vision. “This was a highways project,” she says, “driven primarily by safety concerns. There was a collision between a cyclist and a cement lorry in 2018, in which the cyclist lost her leg, and that was really the impetus for us to get on with it.”
The dangers had been known for years. Between 2009 and 2018, there were 215 collisions on the roundabout causing injuries and two fatalities. It was notoriously one of the most dangerous spots on the capital’s road network. When 38-year-old Sarah Doone was dragged under the front wheels of a huge lorry in 2018, and lost her left leg after 15 hours of surgery, TfL was galvanised into getting on with a project that been stuck on the back burner, falling between the administrative boundaries of Islington, Hackney and the City of London, and therefore a priority for none of them.
When the pressure came to get on with it, the seductive architectural visions were swiftly abandoned. As councillor Rowena Champion, Islington’s executive member for environment, air quality and transport explains, the council “initially intended to use feedback from a public competition to inform the design of the space” but, given “competing priorities” and “the complexity of the scheme and the cost”, they abandoned the plan.
Rather than launch a new architectural competition, TfL used its procurement framework to appoint contractor Morgan Sindall, which then subcontracted the design work to infrastructure specialists Weston Williamson + Partners and engineering giant WSP. The result is what you might expect from a contractor-led consortium, looking a bit like a dumping ground of leftovers from other projects: a row of bollards here, a new glass entrance box there, placed uncomfortably close to a clumsy shed housing power and services for the station. The most striking element of the motley ensemble is a sculptural concrete ventilation shaft, which dates from the original 1960s scheme – now adorned with a skirt of lumpy paving to deter rough sleepers, a ubiquitous feature of our callous times.
The bigger changes are to the road layout, which has seen the introduction of new surface-level crossings and traffic lights for cyclists. It is an improvement on the former roulette wheel of death, but the London Cycling Campaign gives it seven out of 10 for safety, suggesting it could be better. Cyclists have complained of confusing partial segregation and separated lanes suddenly petering out, leaving them thrust into traffic. TfL says there were four collisions in the nine months after the new road layout went live, but none resulted in serious injury.
The roundabout has been connected to the pavement on its north-western side, transforming it into a “peninsula”, where the new green-roofed station entrance is held up by a branching concrete column, while some of the former underpass entrances have been filled in with sustainable urban drainage tanks and covered with planting. There are some new benches (which also double up as hostile-vehicle barriers), but little attempt has been made to turn it into a place you might want to linger. There had been plans to put stepped seating on the sloping roof of the station entrance, but Islington council vetoed the idea on safety grounds. In the planner’s mindset, seating equates to antisocial behaviour, not resting.
The new entrance leads down into a revamped shopping arcade, still awaiting tenants, where skylights bring welcome new daylight down into what was a dingy underpass. It might not look like it, but Cansick says a big chunk of the budget went underground, much of it on “unforeseen” elements. The lighting, heating, water, communications and fire safety systems for the station all had to be upgraded, as did its entire power supply. Numerous pipes and cables were uncovered, which hadn’t been in the survey drawings, as well as a large number of bones – which, after forensic analysis, suggested the roundabout was once a horse graveyard. The pandemic added further delays.
Given all the time and money spent, it might come as a surprise that new lift only descends to the retail level, not to the platforms, and none of the rest of the station has been improved, leaving a jarring junction where the revamp stops before the ticket barriers. Falling under the streets department, not the Underground, there was neither the budget nor scope to reach further into the station – a symptom of TfL’s deeply siloed nature.
Like the overall project, it is a painful reflection of a very British form of bureaucratic bumbling, following a process that somehow manages to be both hurried and endlessly dragged out, resulting in a place that falls far short of the original vision, for an even greater cost.