Cambridge South station offers a gentler model for growth on the science fringe

As you approach Cambridge South station from the west, there is no taxi rank or car park. In fact, there is not even a road, just a sand-coloured cycle and footpath that almost immediately bleeds into the surrounding nature reserve. The station itself is all exposed timber and sloping green roofs, which unfurl down into a long tail-like canopy for cycle parking. Its architect suggests that it looks like a station that has been swallowed by a snake.

If this sounds more like the reception for an off-grid campsite than a busy urban commuter hub, that is because Cambridge South is not just about getting people to and from work. It is also trying to negotiate some of the tensions inherent in the city’s rapid expansion.

On the west side of the tracks is greenbelt, with new housing beyond. On the east side sits Europe’s largest biomedical campus, dominated by AstraZeneca’s £1.3bn UK headquarters. Masterplanned by Herzog & de Meuron, the pharma giant’s estate is heralded by the sawtooth facade of the Stirling-nominated Discovery Centre, immediately opposite the station.

Alongside it, a whole avenue of high-quality, if slightly forbidding, science buildings is taking shape: an aluminium-veiled energy and data centre by BDP, the concrete frame of Hawkins\Brown’s Rosalind Franklin megalab, and a plot earmarked for a six-storey office and conference centre by Jestico + Whiles.

Although the masterplan works hard to create a more human, urban feel at street level, it was important for Cambridge South to appear separate from the campus, says Jan Kroes, director at architect Fereday Pollard & Partners. “If the station had simply followed the same architectural language, it risked being drowned out, while also potentially contributing to the urbanisation of the greenbelt fringe. It became clear that we needed to do the opposite.”

Between science and nature

It says something about the status of AstraZeneca within the local, and indeed national, economy that all train services into Cambridge will stop here, making it essentially a satellite hub of the main station three miles further down the track. The four platforms will receive up to 20 trains an hour, on their way to and from London King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Stansted Airport, Norwich, Birmingham and Brighton. The station will also link in to the East-West line to Oxford, if and when that completes in the early 2030s.

The biomedical campus is estimated to generate £4.7bn a year and is part of a science and technology boom that stretches across the city and out to London and Oxford as part of the “Golden Triangle”. Cambridge’s tech cluster has an annual turnover of £21bn, and life sciences and healthcare are not far behind, employing nearly 23,000 people and generating turnover of £9bn. The thirst for laboratory space appears unquenchable – surplus retail around the city is earmarked for conversion into science parks, including the 1980s Grafton shopping centre.

We wanted to take a landscape approach and push as many green fingers over the railway as possible

Jan Kroes, Fereday Pollard & Partners

The urban fabric is struggling to keep up. House prices are rising three times faster than wages, pushing people into outlying towns, while the transport system creaks under the strain. Already the UK’s fastest growing city since 2011, the local plan has identified sites for another 50,000 homes over the next two decades.

All of this is keeping architects busy, with high-quality housing developments such as the university’s Eddington masterplan, and showpiece research buildings including Jestico + Whiles’ Ray Dolby Centre for the Cavendish Laboratory. But Cambridge also shows how difficult it can be to integrate science into the urban landscape. Research parks are by their nature filled with private, secure buildings, with often mysterious activities taking place behind opaque facades. The sense of disengagement this engenders is exacerbated when the people working there come and go by car.

Cambridge South is a concerted attempt to repair this disconnect. The station could easily have been seen as a hard edge between the science park and the wider city, or worse still, an encroachment from the science park across that hard edge.

Instead, Fereday Pollard has turned that on its head. “We wanted to take a landscape approach and push as many green fingers over the railway as possible,” says Kroes.

The whole fluid form is covered in a continuous 1500m² green roofscape that extends like a corridor over the entrance halls and bike canopies, punching deep into the asphalt campus and softening its impenetrable streetscape.

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The green roof rises up into an arch over the western entrance hall

Source: Fereday Pollard & Partners

Seating and the cycle path are all that separates the western entrance from the nature reserve

Source: Murphy Group

The eastern entrance hall is symmetrical in design and layout to the west side

Source: Murphy Group

The sloping roofs will be covered in sedum, while the lower bike canopies will be topped with native wildflowers seeded from surrounding meadows

Source: Murphy Group

The station includes parking for 1,000 bikes

Source: Nick Jones

The central platforms are lined with timber canopies covered with semi-transparent solar panels

Source: Nick Jones

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Down to earth

Fereday Pollard has set out to make the station feel both civic and human-scaled. Materials are high-quality, natural and earthy, with weathered steel panelling at ground level, fair-faced concrete wrapping around the lift cores and, most conspicuously, a continuous roof structure of curving glulam larch beams.

For sustainable transport to work, it has to be an attractive option, and ideally a more attractive option

Jan Kroes

“For sustainable transport to work, it has to be an attractive option, and ideally a more attractive option,” says Kroes. “Cars have changed significantly. They used to be designed largely around the exterior, but now there is a much greater focus on the internal environment and user experience. Stations need to catch up if they are to compete.”

For a building with a small footprint, there is a surprising sense of space. The timber roof draws the eye upwards, accentuating the height of the 11m entrance hall, in a distant echo of a cast-iron Victorian train shed. The gate line is right at the front of the entrance hall, making it feel more like a passenger reception than a place for meeting and milling.

Furnishings are minimal. Bentwood benches and side tables – familiar from recent Network Rail refurbishments such as London Bridge station – offer a simple perch for a dozen or so people. There’s no retail, no ticket office, no coffee outlet, apart from a van next to the taxi turnaround on the campus side of the building.

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The entrance halls are dominated by a 3m-wide bright orange stairwell that wraps around the lift core

Source: Murphy Group

Low-level lighting guides pedestrians and cyclists through the nature reserve towards the new neighbourhoods in south-east Cambridge

Source: Murphy Group

The larch roof structure of glulam beams and cross-laminated deck runs as a continuous element throughout the station

Source: Murphy Group

“Together We” artwork by Turner prize nominee Mark Titchner, inspired by Cambridge physician William Harvey’s pioneering work on the circulatory system

Source: Nick Jones

Herzog & de Meuron’s Stirling-nominated Discovery Centre for AstraZeneca sits immediately opposite the eastern station approach

Source: Murphy Group

The platform roof areas accommodate 211MWh/year of photovoltaic generation. In winter, the station will generate 38% of its operational energy needs on site; in summer, the figure rises to about 240%

Source: Nick Jones

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The only false note is the public art emblazoned on the orange stairwells. Apparently inspired by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood, this connects words of togetherness into a string of imperatives, in a way that’s weirdly reminiscent of a 1980s aerobics video (“And rise and form and bond and hold …”)

It’s a slightly hectoring presence in a station that’s otherwise unshouty. With its straightforward wayfinding, it feels like it wears all signage grudgingly – which makes it ironic that it has been heavily trailed as the first station to carry the branding of the new state-owned rail and track operator, Great British Railways. Ticket gates are emblazoned with GBR’s red, white and blue logo, while posters proclaim “A railway owned by you” and “Building a railway Britain can rely on”. On the morning I visited, trains had been cancelled in both directions.

Cambridge South may well help to bring the city’s science community back into the fold. If its public art occasionally strains for the same sense of connection, that feels like a small misstep in a station otherwise defined by tact and restraint.