Canary Wharf Railway Station

Above-ground part of the station

The Canary Wharf station is under construction railway station in London . It is being built in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in Docklands , on the northern edge of the Canary Wharf business district . From December 2019 it will be served by Crossrail trains on the Abbey Wood branch of the Elizabeth Line. While the tracks lie in a tunnel, the above-ground part forms an artificial island in a former harbor basin. The station is part of the £ 500 million Crossrail Place construction project . There will be crossings to Canary Wharf on the London Underground and Poplar on the Docklands Light Railway .

investment

The station is located 28 meters below the north basin of the West India Docks , between the HSBC Tower on the south side and the Billingsgate fish market hall on the north side. The building complex extends in a west-east direction and protrudes like a ship from the eastern half of the basin. The soberly designed platform level has a 250 meter long central platform . A transfer point at the western end enables trains to turn. The six-storey shopping and leisure center Crossrail Place rises above the platform level , with two storeys above the water level. On the top floor there is a roof garden , which is enclosed by a 310 meter long, futuristic-looking glass roof structure. Its wooden frame is held together by steel knots and transparent plastic tubes.

Planning and construction

Originally, the plans provided that the main access should be from the Great Wharf Bridge. From this bridge escalators should lead to the main hall below the water level of the harbor basin. More escalators would have brought passengers down to the platforms. The planning name of the station was Isle of Dogs , after the peninsula of the same name . Most of the construction work took place on Hertsmere Road, which runs parallel to the harbor basin, and would have taken five years.

Real estate company Canary Wharf Group , the main owner of the Canary Wharf business district, announced an additional £ 150 million in December 2008. The renowned architect Norman Foster then carried out a complete redesign. The station should now be part of a shopping and leisure center called Crossrail Place , supplemented by a roof garden in the middle of the harbor basin. The name of the station in Canary Wharf was also changed. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on May 15, 2009, in the presence of Mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Gordon Brown .

First, 293 interlocking steel piles 18.5 m high and 1.2 m wide had to be driven into the bottom of the harbor basin to form a coffer dam . In each of these steel piles, an additional 38 m long reinforced concrete piles were inserted . Another 160 temporary anchor posts and links were attached to further stabilize the cofferdam. Sadiq Khan , the then State Secretary of the Ministry of Transport, activated the pumps on February 11, 2010, with which almost 100 million liters of water were pumped out of the cofferdam over the next six weeks. The maximum pump volume was 13,500 liters per minute.

The station was then built in the drained part of the harbor basin, in a similar construction method with which the nearby underground station had already been built. Part of Crossrail Place opened on May 1st, 2015. The shell of the station was completed in September 2015, after which the interior work was carried out. The station is to be opened in December 2019.