10 August 2022 · By Richard Waite

Feilden Fowles has won approval, by the slimmest of margins, for a new entrance hall and new ‘public face’ of the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York

Last week the chair of the City of York’s planning committee, Chris Cullwick, used his deciding vote to give consent to the contentious Central Hall scheme, which has provoked criticism over its impact on local access and routes through the site.

The proposal will close Leeman Road (marked with a blue outline below) and unite the NRM’s two sites either side, anchored by a central rotunda built on the former road.

Residents claimed that, while the scheme allows them to walk through it during museum opening hours, outside those times it would effectively block off an existing route to the city centre and station for around 4,000 people.

The proposals include an alternative pedestrian route running around the museum but this would be nearly 400m longer than the current route along Leeman Road. The scheme received 9 8 letters of objection.

The museum’s application had previously been deferred to allow for an equalities impact assessment to be drawn up, setting out how the needs of disabled people would be taken into account in the proposed walkway.

Speaking during the meeting and voting against the application last Thursday (4 August), Labour councillor Janet Looker said: ‘It is an awful lot to ask our residents to give up that absolute, 24-hour free access.’

After a four-hour debate, councillors were eventually split five to five on whether to approve the scheme. But Cullwick, as head of the committee and as one of those backing the plans, had the casting vote.

NRM director Judith McNicol said the plans would have ‘transformative benefits for York and the wider region’, adding: ‘This approval will allow the museum to realise its potential as the “world’s railway museum” by improving our offer, welcoming more visitors, and helping us to inspire the next generation of engineers and problem-solvers.

‘As we move towards construction, we will continue to engage with residents and visitors to ensure that the world-class museum we are creating can act as a true community resource for our evolving neighbourhood.'

This decision is a huge blow for local residents. This development will disproportionately affect disabled ppl, women, children, pedestrians + cyclists going about their daily lives. I still urge the NRM to meaningfully engage with the community to develop less detrimental plans

— Rachel Melly (@rachel_melly_) August 4, 2022

Feilden Fowleswas chosen to design the Central Hall scheme in early 2020 ahead of Carmody Groarke, 6a architects, Heneghan Peng Architects and France’s Atelier d’Architecture Philippe Prost.

The two-stage competition, organised by Malcolm Reading Consultants on behalf of the Science Museum Group, called for a 4,500m² gallery and gateway structure to sit between the museum’s Great Hall and Station Hall exhibition spaces at the museum’s entrance.

The AJ 40 under 40 practice won the contest with a ‘low-tech’ low-carbon rotunda with a spoke-like Douglas fir ceiling.

The new Central Hall is being billed as a ‘cornerstone’ of the museum’s Vision 2025 regeneration masterplan. The museum’s ongoing revamp and expansion sits within the wider 45ha York Central development drawn up by Allies and Morrison, which secured outline planning consent in 2019.

Central Hall will feature a gallery 'showcasing the latest innovations in rail technology' and house a café overlooking the new museum square, a shop, flexible event space and new visitor facilities.

The scheme has been developed with M&E engineer Max Fordham and structural engineer Price & Myers.

Feilden Fowles associate Ingrid Petit said the project would ‘not only transform the site by offering a new visitor welcome space and exhibition hall, improving access to and legibility of the existing galleries’,  but would also ‘adjoin a new public square between the museum and station’.

She said: ‘The team has been working closely with the museum over the past couple of years to refine the brief and set the sustainability ambitions for the project and [we] look forward to progressing the next stages.’

The museum opened in 1975 on the former 8ha site of the York North Locomotive Depot. It features more than 100 locomotives and 200 other items of rolling stock. The museum is the largest of its type in the country and has 750,000 visitors a year.

Feilden Fowles’ scheme is expected to be built in time for the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2025.

The new Central Hall building has been designed to infill a critical node in the site plan that is freed up by the removal of Leeman Road. The building provides a central drum to allow for intuitive arrival and orientation space, and an easy link between the main access points on the Station Hall, Great Hall and Workshop buildings, along with new retail, café and gallery spaces.

Largely single-storey, the building is intended to have a very low embodied carbon content. This means using carbon-intensive materials – notably concrete and steel – in a very limited and careful way throughout the structure of the building.

Our primary task is to be as efficient as possible in our designs to make sure every structural element is working optimally.

This process is aided by using simple regular grids, not imposing onerous loading requirements, avoiding complexity and misalignment of the structure, and using the geometry of the structure to assist in creating efficient forms.

Generally, the structure will be exposed to view as much as possible, which not only lends the building legibility and clarity but also reduces the embodied carbon by eliminating the requirement for finishing materials.

The structural scheme is primarily in load-bearing timber framing and steelwork with non-load-bearing masonry external walls. The geotechnical investigation findings indicate that the superstructure will be supported on piled foundations, and the ground floor formed in concrete to have the appropriate robustness, load capacity and flexibility of use.

Central Hall can be split into three primary areas: Futures Gallery to the west, Central Hall in the middle and the café to the east.

A structural grid of approximately 9 x 9m has been adopted for the Futures Gallery and café to align with the existing structural grid of Station Hall whilst also serving to reduce the number of columns and maximise the flexibility of the space.

The roofs will consist of timber rafters spanning on to purlins which in turn will be supported on symmetrical timber roof trusses spaced at circa 3m centres, which in turn are supported on steel transfer beams and cruciform columns. The Central Hall drum has an expressed radial timber truss structure with fine steel wires and struts where needed to optimise the timber.

The trusses will be prefabricated where possible and delivered to site in tapering elements approximately 6.5m long by 3m high at their highest point. Initial enquiries with a timber specialist has indicated that this element can be delivered through the Leeman Road tunnel (bridge structure) on super-low loaders, given the tunnel height restriction of 3.7m.

Building stability will be provided by the ply diaphragm to the roof and a combination of vertical steel braced bays and ply timber stud shear wall

Evolution of the main rotunda: contest-winning design (left) and submitted plan (right)

Location York Local authority City of York Council Client Science Museum Group Architect Feilden Fowles Landscape architect Barton Howe (for planning) Structural and civil engineer Price & Myers M&E consultant Max Fordham Acoustic consultant Max Fordham Planning consultant O’Neill Associates Quantity surveyor Arcadis Principal designer and project manager Faithful + Gould Lighting consultant Max Fordham Main contractor Not yet appointed Funding To be confirmed Competition date 2020 Anticipated completion 2025 Gross internal floor area m² approx 3,200m² Form of contract Traditional – two-stage tender Value To be confirmed

Tags access Feilden Fowles National Railway Museum York

At lest it won’t turn out like the vast Birmingham New Street station rebuild, where one of the two cross routes for people changing platforms is impeded by a public right of way through the middle of the station forcing you to exit a ticket gate then enter through another.

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