Coming of Age

Waterloo International Terminal, Lambeth

Architect: Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners (now Grimshaw)

The opening of the Channel Tunnel in November 1994 was the culmination of surely the 20th century’s biggest single civil engineering and political project. Physically connecting Britain and mainland Europe for the first time in their histories, newspapers at the time declared: ‘No longer an Island’.
Nicholas Grimshaw’s ingenious glass and steel superstructure of the multi-faceted new London terminus at Waterloo was a suitably contemporary monument to the new railway age, winning accolades from the RIBA President’s Building of the Year to the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture.
Eurostar’s shift of operations to St Pancras Station in 2007 left the former terminal at Waterloo mothballed for more than a decade, but the platforms came back into regular use for regional train services from 2018, offering passengers the chance to again marvel at this engineering tour-de-force. Now a backdrop to the grind of the daily commute, rather than a glamorous departure point to the continent.

Coming of Age

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