Jonathan Morrison
Nicholas Grimshaw, the star architect who is fixing our railways
Nicholas Grimshaw, the Eden Project’s architect, is designing Birmingham’s HS2 terminus. It might just unite the country, he explains
The great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto used to have a boat named after a line in the New Testament; he called it Nemo Propheta in Patria — “Only in his own country is a prophet without honour.” It wasn’t true of Aalto, who appeared on notes and stamps and had a university named after him in the end, but it’s a verse that Nicholas Grimshaw, an equally enthusiastic sailor, might consider adding to his boat.
He comes across as a bit too down-to-earth for that, however, despite a catalogue of achievements and a list of continuing projects that has pushed him into the first rank of global architects, let alone the Brits. Yet if people have heard of him it’s probably for the incredible Eden Project in Cornwall, which is spawning offshoots worldwide, or maybe even the 1993 Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo, which he finished a year early and which sat idle until the official opening by the Queen. Both also found favour with the Prince of Wales, unlike so many other modern developments. “He thought they were like a Victorian railway station and a greenhouse,” Grimshaw says. “Which are about the only two topics he’s OK with. He hadn’t noticed they were 150 years on.”
At 79 Grimshaw is working on projects that range from a skyscraper in Melbourne to a pavilion for the 2020 Dubai Expo that will capture condensation and gradually turn part of the desert green. He has designed airports in St Petersburg, Zurich and Istanbul and has spent a decade creating a botanic garden for Oman. His practice maintains nine offices and a staff of 600, but he jokes that every time his partners want to launch another base in another country, he replies: “Do we really have to?”
However, it’s the scale and spread of his work in Britain that puts him closest to being the successor to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the two Victorian giants he cites as a lifelong inspiration, along with Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace. There are few big British transport projects in recent years that have not benefited from his touch.
Having just completed the five-year, £1 billion transformation of London Bridge station, which opened in May, he is working on the third runway at Heathrow, has just designed the stations for Crossrail, Europe’s biggest building project, and has begun construction on Birmingham’s HS2 terminus, from where 40,000 commuters a day will be whisked back and forth to London at 250mph. Despite trenchant criticism of the £56 billion high-speed line, he remains enthusiastic.
“HS2 I’m a fundamental believer in,” he says. “Especially the idea of a spine up the length of Britain, drawing the whole place together. I just hope they do it properly, justify the expenditure and don’t leave bits undone. Unfortunately we’re great at trying to do things half-price.”
Looking every inch a veteran sea captain in a thick cable-knit jumper when we meet at his practice in Clerkenwell, central London, the unusually round spectacles laid to one side, he insists that “how it is done” will ultimately decide whether HS2 is embraced by the public, travelling or otherwise. He draws on the example of Brunel, who masterminded the Great Western Line between Bristol and Paddington in the 1830s.
The plan for the HS2 Station in Birmingham (GRIMSHAW ARCHITECTS)
“I’m of the view that construction can be beautiful,” he says. “Brunel crossed scenic valley after scenic valley and now we list his bridges and think everything he touched was wonderful, but they didn’t think so then. They hated it. So opinions change.
“But trains are a wonderful way to get around the country. There’s no continuous roar like a motorway, and with electric lines overhead they’re not polluting.”
Grimshaw, who remains a firm believer in the environmental advocacy of Eden, is sensitive to the charge that his work at Heathrow might increase pollution. An intense squint replaces the usual wry smile as he defends his involvement. “We don’t have the political clout to say it should be at Gatwick or Heathrow,” he says, his hands rolling expansively. “We’ll just try to make it as good as we can. But there’s an argument that if the planes aren’t having to circle, then that will reduce the pollution.”
He also points out that up to 30 per cent of the fuel is used on the ground, when aircraft are idling or taxiing — “Pilots like to rev up their engines; vroom, vroom!” — so the Heathrow expansion is likely to introduce electric tugs to move aircraft. That’s if they aren’t already welcoming aircraft with electric engines by then.
Doesn’t Grimshaw feel unfairly pigeonholed by all the transport work? Wouldn’t he like to have a go at other things? “We enjoy it and think we can bring knowledge to it, but we have achieved a diversity of work too. The only thing we haven’t had much to do with is housing, which is in a parlous state because the government has consistently turned its back on it since Mrs Thatcher. We need new ways of thinking if we’re going to stop building rabbit hutches, but I don’t believe for a minute there are no new ideas. Maybe that’s something we can look at philanthropically in future.”
Rather, he is convinced that politicians have a duty to lift the issue of housing out of the mire of bickering and point-scoring — along with the NHS — and work together collegiately to find solutions, especially in the wake of the Grenfell fire, which left him “aghast”. So where does he sit politically?
“Well, I don’t think you can be Labour in this situation,” he says. “I’d go for Lib Dem. It’s a husk of what it was, but there’s a huge scope for a new central party now because so many people have become disillusioned. Brexit has been a total waste of time and the uncertainty has upset everyone. At the same time we’ve got migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean because the West has abandoned its obligation to help to make their lives work — we should be spending a huge proportion of our wealth to help them start successful businesses in their own countries. I’d be happy to pay more tax if necessary.”
Yet, despite the rolling-news horrors, he remains intensely optimistic about the future. He cites a statistic, picked up at Eden, that all wildlife outside zoos and nature reserves could be extinguished by 2035. He worries that the human race could be made extinct within two years of a substantial loss of greenery. And yet . . .
“People are endlessly inventive,” he says. “We may be going down a destructive route with burning fossil fuels, but I refuse to believe we’re intent on destroying ourselves. We will find a way out of it — new foods, new ways of building.”
Grimshaw has a track record in radical innovation. He was one of the first architects to embrace the new materials and techniques borrowed from aerospace that ushered in the “high-tech” era of architecture in the UK in the 1970s, spawned such buildings as the Sainsbury Centre at UEA by Lord Foster and the Lloyds Building by Lord Rogers and drove a stake through the heart of brutalism. Yet even if early works such as the Oxford Ice Rink or the Sainsbury’s in Camden became advertisements for the movement, Grimshaw resists attempts to pigeonhole him as high-tech’s high priest. He retains his love of precision engineering, but insists that his most effective techniques are listening and discussion.
“The most important thing I’ve learnt in 54 years of practice is to really listen. The turning point comes when you and the client understand each other and it becomes a joint thing. We don’t have a set formula, but we do try to do projects for people we like because who wants to spend their time getting bullied?”
In fact, Grimshaw, who was born in Hove, East Sussex, hails from an engineering and artistic family, so perhaps the rigour of his designs comes as second nature. One great-grandfather built dams on the Nile; another put the sewers under Dublin. After his father, who was also an engineer, died when he was two and a half, he was raised by his mother, a painter, alongside two sisters before going to Edinburgh College of Art, then the Architectural Association to study.
The family tradition looks set to continue. He has to break off the interview at one point because he has left one of his four grandchildren (he has two daughters with his wife of 46 years, Lavinia) in the model department playing with a laser cutter. He’s 11.
In one way, then, his legacy is assured. And just over a month ago it was announced that Grimshaw would be awarded the prestigious Royal Gold Medal for 2019, in recognition of his lifetime’s work, which suggests that he has not been entirely ignored by Britain’s architectural establishment. Yet Foster got his in 1983 and Rogers collected one in 1985; Grimshaw’s is decades overdue. Does it not rankle that his contemporaries have been showered with honours when he has arguably had just as much of an impact on the course of architecture?
“I don’t believe in this celebrity stuff,” he says. “It’s a wonderful thing to be up there with Aalto [also a recipient], but it’s dictated by fashion. Some years they want to give it to brutalists or women or people from abroad. So it’s pot luck, but I’m chuffed.
“I’ve kept a steady line, stuck to my guns, and hopefully it confirms that I’ve been heading in the right direction, but the only thing that matters is that we’re proud of everything we’ve done. And that’s not something everyone can say.”
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