Pride of place: Sydney’s new metro stations

Sydney’s new eight-station metro line has three standout characteristics. First and most astounding is the spontaneous acclaim with which Sydneysiders embraced it; second is the evident quality arc in station design, with by far the most glorious stations in the middle; and third is the overwhelming ubiquity of brown. Considering these seriatim yields some insight into Sydney’s complicated relationship with its architecture.

Sydneysiders don’t generally take pride in their city. The beaches, sure. The harbour, the climate, the opera house. But not the workaday city. Yet on 19 August, when the new line opened, the public joy was immediate and palpable. Social media was at once aflutter with tribal exultation at this extraordinary thing. In an era of neoliberal public meanness, we’d spent billions on making life easier, more dignified and more thrilling for thousands of ordinary humans. Even now, this delight continues, with floods of users and whole families travelling at weekends to gawk at and Instagram themselves with the art and architecture that has suddenly bloomed in their town. What thrills people isn’t just quick new routes of travel. It’s also the grandeur of the stations themselves and the joy of art.

Which brings us to point two, the quality arc. The eight stations along this new line run from the existing heavy-rail station at Sydenham in Sydney’s inner-south, north to Waterloo, then to Central Station at the southern end of the CBD; Gadigal (an entirely new station a short walk from the elderly Town Hall station); Martin Place, in the banking district; Barangaroo (Sydney’s equivalent of Docklands); under the harbour to Victoria Cross at North Sydney; and finally Chatswood, on the lower north shore.

Curiously, five of the eight involved UK architects. Foster + Partners designed two (Gadigal and Barangaroo); John McAslan + Partners two (Central and Waterloo, the former led by Australian practice Woods Bagot) and Grimshaw one (Martin Place). These five occupy the centre of the line and of the city. So perhaps it’s natural that they’re also the most prestigious, the most lavish and – though it doesn’t necessarily follow – the best.

Seen in the abstract, this Brit-dominated design seems oddly old-fashioned, a remnant of some pompous, square-jawed railway-building empire. (To be fair, this railway-building empire may simply be the reason why British architects have a richer station-design tradition upon which to draw.) The quality arc too seems all rather last-century masc, its implied monocentric and hierarchical view of ‘city’ being so utterly at odds with the diverse, polycentric networked mixed-use city-of-villages of which we so often talk.

And so to brown. Up to the 1950s, Sydney was a 12-storey brick city, and before that sandstone. This has enabled the ubiquitous brown-terracotta-pink toning that dominates all the new stations – the above-ground buildings, much of the art and many of the concourses – to be passed off as historical contextualism or, in local lore, the ‘Sydney sandstone aesthetic’.

Bizarrely, this is accepted uncritically by most architects. But much has changed since the mid-century. and to pretend that brown-toned brick, concrete, terracotta, rusted steel, anodised aluminium and precast terrazzo somehow ‘represent’ the sandstone city is at best facile and at worst downright insulting.

Luckily, in the flesh, the spatial delight more than compensates. Sydney’s existing underground network, like undergrounds everywhere, is grubby and cramped, with that sweet, sooty smell of air pushed too long through tunnels and never completely refreshed. By contrast, these new stations are grand, airy, clean and alight with spatial drama. They are also, despite their immense depth, generously connected to the streets. 

No doubt it’s this grandeur that has kneejerk journalism dubbing the stations ‘cathedrals of the 21st century’. Of course, that’s nonsense. There’s no worship here, nor even a Keynesian commitment to public spending since most of the grandeur is funded by immense ‘over station’ development. But what they do demonstrate is the dignifying power of architecture.

The largest of the new stations is Grimshaw’s Martin Place. With Sydney-headquartered banking group Macquarie as the proponent, it is blindingly well-funded by not one but two above-ground towers (both brown, designed by local architects JPW and Tzannes respectively), with five subterranean levels of retail and a great array of glossy public art. There’s also a good deal of virtue-signalling in the form of Indigenous messaging in the floor and a 3,500-space end-of-trip bike-parking facility that, being fully glazed, is very visible to the travelling crowds.

The station itself is vast and many-layered, with several street links, including some yet to open. Down below, it is commendably broad, clear and crisp – almost to the point of soullessness, and with way too much stone-coloured precast concrete for my taste. This slightly gaunt, under-occupied feeling can be expected to ease as the extensive retail offering and new street links start to come alive.

Next along is Gadigal by Foster + Partners. Unusual in being a wholly new station, it is near to Town Hall (one of the city’s busiest underground stations) but not attached. Here, too, the funding is via an above-ground tower, also by Foster and also very brown, in the manner of earlier buildings at Sydney’s Central Park. 

Below ground though, the flavour changes completely, from curved-glass faux historicism to Star Trek, with brightly lit tubular concourse spaces walled in curving, ribbed white-and-black GRC panels. The eight immense switch-back escalators that feed these corridors bring you face-to-face with the new line’s most successful and Instagrammable public artwork by far: Callum Morton’s The Underneath. The work comprises two huge trompe l’oeil tunnel images (18m and 12m high respectively) which, rendered in high-chroma enamelled porcelain tiles, could easily be taken for railway tunnels. In fact, they reference colonial Sydney’s earliest (now buried) water source, the Tank Stream.

Foster + Partners’ other station, Barangaroo, serves Sydney’s newish but rather soulless docklands stockbroking district of the same name. Here the concourse spaces are less distinguished than Gadigal and clad in highly figured stuck-on sandstone like some 1950s feature wall. There is one single blow-you-away moment, however, when you emerge at ground level metres from the glorious, glittering harbour.

That leaves the two stations involving John McAslan + Partners, Waterloo and Central. These are the best of the bunch. Waterloo has the dubious honour of being funded by four massive above-ground commercially driven towers (with the gently cynical title of Waterloo Collective) that will bring radical change to this, Sydney’s traditional public housing precinct. That’s above ground. Below, the station makes a valiant effort to memorialise local history. There’s a fine 10m-high portrait of smiling young Indigenous dancer Roscoe and a massive mural comprising hundreds of gleaming, moulded footsteps, both by Indigenous artist Nicole Monks, as well as a narrative premised on a chronological layering of materials, from ancient to modern, as you emerge into the light.

JMP Sydney director Troy Uleman recalls the design start-point in consulting Indigenous advisers Yerrabingin. ‘Through Yerrabingin we learnt the phrase “the past is in the earth and the future is in the sky” and that became our conceptual framework,’ he says. ‘Across three levels, passengers are taken on a journey from the ancient to the modern.’ There are also a lot of brown suspended ceilings, rusted-steel wall cladding and sepia-toned artworks.

Whether any of this historicism is perceptible to everyday commuters is moot. On the day I visit, two groups of old-timers occupy the station entrance. They’re conducting a shouted, toothless contest as to which of them ‘slept with her first’. This is the immediate history of the place and its vanishing present. With all public housing designated for redevelopment as well as developer Mirvac’s massive over-station ‘urban renewal’, gentrification is inevitable. These dudes, and the passionate, mutually supportive inner-city community they represent, will soon be gone.

Central Station, by Woods Bagot in collaboration with John McAslan + Partners, is the high point of the quality arc, far and away the most sophisticated moment along the line. It’s not flashy. There are few wildly expensive artworks, overworked metaphors or curtseys to historicism. What there is, everywhere you look, is clear unafraid intelligence. Let’s start with the weakest point, the exhortatory public ‘art’ by Rose Nolan, inserted permanently into the floor. Clumsily named All Alongside of Each Other, this ‘word work’ (you couldn’t call it poetry) instructs all to ‘simply breathe naturally’. Like some cheap AI-generated mindfulness manual, it continues to advise: ‘Learn something about yourself that you may not have known before … With practice an inner balance develops to a greater or lesser degree’. I mean what? How did public art fall into this humourless moral didacticism? Give me fake sandstone any day.

Luckily the architecture comes to the rescue. Here, despite the station’s almost infinite complexity, Woods Bagot and McAslan have deftly inserted the two metro lines deep beneath the existing heavy rail, keeping the trains running throughout construction and still generating a project whose elegance of detail does full justice to the elegance of the idea. 

The project has three main elements: the long north-south metro platforms; the east-west Central Walk linking these to a wholly new street entrance; and the grand new ‘urban room’ that connects the two, the Northern Concourse. This Northern Concourse is pivotal. Fed by escalators from below and above, roofed by a 35m asymmetrical light-filtering cantilever and washed by fresh air and sunlight, it is constantly thronged by travellers moving in all directions, including from a new arched entrance beneath the century-old Central Electric building that was hitherto hidden by accumulated station works. 

It sounds simple and, to the design team’s credit, feels it. Even more significantly, this wonderful intervention recognises that there are two modes of transport inherent in any train station: movement by train and movement on foot. Both are rendered clean, easy and dignified by this intervention in Sydney’s congested heart, which includes better, more generous links to the surrounding streets.

It’s not often that infrastructure on this scale improves the lot of the ordinary foot soldier, as well as the commuter. But this, and the new Sydney Metro more generally, is such a project. So I join with the rest of Sydney in saying, well done all!

Elizabeth Farrelly is a critic, academic, former architect, and author of Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul.