Design fault 2
Terrazzo terror
Christopher Howse braves the slippery slopes of London's stations Every time it rains I seem to hear a far- off sound like the crunching of matchboxes. It is the noise of old ladies breaking their hips on slippery surfaces. And what is more slippery than wet terrazzo?
Terrazzo, if you didn't know, is the floor- ing that looks like reconstituted marble which they put on the floors of shopping malls, booking halls and Underground pas- sageways. It comes in tiles or in slabs. It has been used ubiquitously by British Rail and London Underground to replace flooring. When I was young the concourse of Water- loo station was black asphalt; now it is an off-white skating-rink that is meant to be easily cleanable. It needs to be, for the con- tents of plastic milk-shake cartons and the effluvia of down-and-outs are everywhere visible.
But there is good news. The Terrazzo Terror is over, at least on the Under- ground. Its engineering director's ukase has gone out: 'Don't use it'. This applies to new contracts alone, not to the patching of existing surfaces.
What ought the railway people to use for paving? London Underground say they are looking for something that is safe, hard- wearing, comfortable, not too noisy, not too slippery, easily cleaned, bright and good-looking. So asphalt is out. 'It wears,' says Mr Mike Stollery, the enthusiastic 'sta- tion enhancement' architect of London Underground. 'It gets dips in it. It is easy to patch, but it looks god-awful.'
That is as may be. London Underground is at present trying to persuade the Gov- ernment that it needs £900 million a year investment for the next ten years. If it gets the money it promises to break even in 2003; if it doesn't it promises disaster. In aid of its cause it has issued a colourful booklet entitled Making Vision into Reality. To illustrate how badly treated it has been by the Government the booklet carries a photograph of Wapping Station, where groundwater runs over the platform. In fact I have never found any difficulty at Wap- ping; indeed, it is an astonishing place. Although the first underground railway opened between Paddington and Farring- don in 1863, the tunnel that runs from Wapping under the Thames was built in 1843 by Brunel and his father. It is not sur- prising then that water seepage is a prob- lem — not so much seepage as a cascade that falls audibly behind the hoardings, where exotic ferns grow on the walls, and runs in a merry brook behind the plat- forms, which are of course safely paved with asphalt.
London Underground seems to rejoice in its shortcomings in the hope that the Government will fulfil its duties as a benev- olent provider. Making Visions into Reality also carries a large picture of Kennington station, where the paint is peeling off the damp tunnel roof. But the platform is paved with flagstones — not too bright, perhaps, but a boost to the confidence of those hurrying to catch a train.
By contrast, the showpiece rebuilt station at Angel (where the longest escalator in Europe was months late into operation through various cock-ups) is proudly pic- tured with its terrazzo-tiled platforms, from which any passenger could be rudely cata- pulted into the next world by slipping on remnants of a takeaway drink on the edge of the platform into the path of an oncom- ing train. And at Tottenham Court Road there is a permanent warning sign at the entrance to a passage that is not only ter- razzo and suffering from water seepage but actually slopes down and up.
A similar villain to terrazzo is the ceram- ic tile surface, such as that newly laid between Bank station and the Docklands Light Railway, also on a slope. Here the strumming of buskers mingles with the cries of those who don't quite make it when running for the train to Ruislip Gardens. But my Torvill and Dean award goes to Shepherd's Bush, where passengers have to make a sharp 180-degree turn from the booking hall to the escalator.
If you think I am exaggerating, why do the Underground and British Rail put up notices warning of the danger to passen- gers (sorry, 'customers')? At Liverpool Street (British Rail) there is a notice: 'In wet weather conditions please take care as concourse & platform areas become slip- pery'. That is partly the fault of the IRA, which blew the roof off. There is a similar notice at Victoria, where the taxis disem- bogue.
But British Rail shows none of the humility of London Underground. It will not abandon terrazzo: the unfinished refur- bishment of Paddington uses it extensively. When I rang, the man from InterCity employed a most extraordinary argument in its defence. There are fewer accidents, he said, because of the psychological fac- tor: if people are warned of slipperiness they tend not to dash around. By that rea- soning perhaps there should be circular saws on every platform.
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