Refurb For Euston Station

Dean Nicholas
By Dean Nicholas Last edited 150 months ago
Refurb For Euston Station

One day, so the theory goes, Euston station will be rebuilt, its crass Sixties styling replaced by a major new terminus that ties in the existing rail and Tube lines with a hub for the planned High Speed 2 project.

Yet it's not likely to happen any time soon, and in recent years dowdy Euston has seen near neighbours St Pancras and King's Cross get swish new makeovers. Good news perhaps, then, that Euston is also going to have a spruce-up, as shown in the image above. The main focus will be to introduce a new mezzanine level for departing passengers, and to remodel the windswept promenade outside; a strange choice as, to judge from the image, they seem to have removed all the food outlets that livened up one of the bleakest station forecourts when they were introduced just a year or two ago.

No matter what happens at the station, it will continue to front onto the dirty, crowded and noisy Euston Road. While those first two adjectives might be tough to mitigate, the third is being tackled by sound artist Bill Fontana, who has created an audio installation at the Wellcome Collection that brings the soothing lilt of the tide at Dorset's Chesil Beach to the urban blight of NW1.The artist has deployed a quartet of microphones at the beach, from whence the ambient sound will be streamed through to a group off eight speakers located in the Wellcome's building which face out onto the busy street.

White Sound: An Urban Seascape runs until 16 October.

Last Updated 23 September 2011