Hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing. With it, we can look back at the demolition of countless buildings, across the length and breadth of the British Isles and ask the inevitable of both developers and councils alike: ‘what were they thinking?‘ Almost every community, town and city in the UK has its own equivalent of the Euston Arch to mourn the loss of, be it a local cinema, civic building or station.

It is the latter that is currently at risk in Southwark, S.E.1, where Transport for London (TfL) and their joint venture partner, U+I are expected to submit a planning application later this year to Southwark Council for the construction of a 225,000 sq ft residential-led mixed use development, designed by Alfred Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) to stand directly above Southwark Tube station.

The original JV agreement between TfL and Development Securities (as U+I was then known) for the redevelopment of a one-acre site above and around Southwark station that includes Algarve House, was signed on March 2, 2015, as part of TfL’s plan to realise £3.4bn in non-fares revenue by 2023, which it will reinvest back in to the transport network.

An over-station development above Southwark was always the intention when the station was originally designed and built in the late 1990’s as part of the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE), and as such a new building, designed by a highly regarded practice such as AHMM, who also penned the nearby 240 Blackfriars Road, should not, in theory, pose a problem.

Unfortunately, what TfL and U+I are proposing is expected to be a 30-storey building, which is considerably taller than the 10 to 12-storeys that the existing piling at Southwark was designed to cope with. As such, it is anticipated that both the station entrance and ticket hall will sadly have to be demolished as part of the plans.

With Historic England having already concluded in their assessment for listing that the ‘entrance hub and rotunda on Blackfriars Road…do not merit listing at Grade II*’ it is foresight, rather than hindsight that is needed for Southwark Council to protect and preserve this important public space and maintain the architectural integrity of the JLE stations.

Southwark is one of 11 stations on the 16km JLE that stretches from Stratford in the east to Westminster in the west, opening on November 20, 1999. Not since the Piccadilly line extension opened in the early 1930’s, overseen by Frank Pick (1878-1941) as Managing Director of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERCL), and Charles Holden (1875-1960), had a group of stations been built with such architectural unity.

In the same way that the stations between Manor House and Cockfosters in the east, and those between Acton Town, Hounslow West and Uxbridge in the west owe their architectural legacy to Holden and Pick’s vision, it was Sir Wilfrid Newton (1928-2012), as Chairman and Chief Executive of London Regional Transport, and Chairman of London Underground, and Roland Paoletti (1931-2013) as architect-in-chief that masterminded the JLE’s stations.

The pair had already achieved great success together in Hong Kong, where Newton had been Chairman and Chief Executive of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation, overseeing the opening of the deep-level Island Line in 1986, whilst Paoletti had been MTR’s Chief Architect, responsible for the design of 36 stations.

For the JLE, Paoletti adopted a strategy of appointing and overseeing individual architectal practices to design several of the stations, which included: Michael Hopkins & Partners (Westminster); Weston Williamson (London Bridge); Ian Ritchie Architects (Bermondsey); Foster & Partners (Canary Wharf); Alsop, Lyall and Störmer (North Greenwich); Troughton McAslan (Canning Town and Stratford); van Heyningen and Howard (West Ham); and Chris Wilkinson Architects (Stratford).

For Southwark, Paoletti commissioned MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (now known as MJP Architects), with Richard MacCormac (1938-2014) the partner-in-charge on the £70m project. MacCormac’s main aim with the station was to minimise the complexity for passengers on their ‘journey‘ from ground to platform level, with the station comprising four distinct main areas: Blackfriars Road ticket hall; Waterloo East ticket hall; the intermediate concourse; and the lower concourse.

Whilst the near-16m high intermediate concourse, constructed from polished and course concrete blocks on one side, and a wall of 630 triangular panes of blue, enamelled glass on the other, rightly takes the architectural plaudits and acts as the station’s literal centrepiece, the Blackfriars Road ticket hall, a 20m double volume drum of high-quality, white concrete with stainless steel cladding quietly impresses with its nod to the Holden stations.

Historic England’s broader assesment that Southwark’s entrance hub and rotunda ‘are not of the same very high calibre architecturally, aesthetically or functionally as the intermediate concourse and its approach from below’ is not necessarily an unfair judgement, however in losing one of the four main areas of the station, you inevitably lose the ‘journey’ that MacCormac both envisaged and delivered.

With Newton, Paoletti, and MacCormac having all sadly passed away in the three consecutive years from 2012 to 2014, it has fallen to MJP Architects’ Manging Director, Jeremy Estop to lead the campaign against Southwark’s demolition, writing an open letter to The Times, signed by several of the original architects listed above, in which they suggest ‘rebuilding the ticket hall to match the existing design would not be an unreasonable planning condition’.

I wholeheartedly agree with them. Southwark was never designed to be a lone building but one of a series of stations, all of which adhere to the same overarching design principles, making extensive use of concrete, glass and stainless steel, as set by the JLE team under Paoletti’s guidance. As such, the station should not be viewed in isolation but through the same holistic lens that it was originally conceived – by destroying one of the parts, you undoubtedly weaken the whole.