“The King's Cross site has undeniable strategic advantages to its location, but it also brings significant difficulties. The advantages, which must be exploited, are of course convenience and proximity, jobs and homes might only be a few minutes walk from a major transport hub. The difficulties, which have to be addressed, stem from the nature of transience, disorientation and from the scale and destruction of the transport infrastructure itself.”
“The design of how the street looks and feels will clearly influence both the behaviour of people driving vehicles through the site and of people walking through it. But how you integrate and optimally mix vehicle and people movement is one of the great challenges to King's Cross, and for urban areas more generally. Sometimes these things are in a fairly obvious conflict that needs management.”
“On February the15th, 2003 I happened to be at Paddington Station and, by chance really, had the opportunity to watch as the commuters crossed paths with the demonstrators who were on their way to protest about the war in Iraq – all those people coming and going to different purposes, face to face encounters and the high visibility that the station afforded. The point I would like to make for King's Cross is that train stations, as public spaces and a crossroads where people encounter each other, are an opportunity that we must preserve as good places for protest.”
“What this scheme is going to do, make no mistake about it, is to resolve real barriers, both physical and social. There has been a tremendous amount of outreach and what the consultation with the communities has shown is that people who sit next to this physical space at the moment do not feel part of London because the site actually represents to them a barrier. So how do we build the city for everybody, how do we make it permeable? King’s Cross is not just for the people who are going to get off the Eurostar from Paris and Brussels but for the people who actually are Londoners.”
“The thing that worries me most about King's Cross is the fact that, in certain senses, it appears to be turning into a private domain rather than a part of the city that belongs to everyone. The scheme is wrapped around by a girdle of roads but there is not much sense about how this part of King Cross is going to connect to the rest of the city other than to Islington and its gentrification.”
