Imagine a train journey that begins with your wellbeing

Project Insight

Network Rail invited proposals to challenge and re-imagine what a ‘station’ could become in the 21st century as the interface between the community and the railway. Network Rail was looking for designs that could be integrated in a wide range of suburban and rural contexts and looked for ideas that explored a response to the changing character of our society.

Project Idea

Working with Buro Happold, Maynard and the Royal Horticultural Society, our idea explored a modular design that centred around a signature garden, taking inspiration from a traditional Japanese courtyard to create a contemplative and peaceful space in the heart of the station.

Project Design

Our station design faces and embraced the community with a covered cloister for local uses, such as market stalls, charge points and bike park and ride spaces. The cloister is mirrored to face the railway, welcoming arriving visitors into a locally generated marketplace. Glazed walls connect platform and community to a central garden.

Local station gardens would become a regional symbol, expressing the variety and diversity of UK plants, as a source of local pride and an appropriate local welcome to visitors. By connecting people to nature, gardens have proven well-being and mental health benefits for us all, soothing anxious travellers and creating a green heart to an often noisy and harsh environment.

The engineered timber ‘trees’ create a wonderfully adaptive structure, minimising embodied energy and combining with the garden to form a woodland glade. The canopies harness solar power in any orientation and collect rainfall to irrigate the garden.

By designing a part of the station as an independent structure, there is an ease to scaling up naturally for larger stations. The canopy is a simply repeating module configurable to any size of station, new or existing. The design is fabricated from a kit of parts allowing fabrication by a local contractor using easily sourced materials.