How art and design

How art and design

I'm very aware that people may be looking at this work decades from now. But that made me even more certain this little corner of the new line had to be intimate and homely. I didn't want big and industrial."

The man who since 2008 has had to worry about all elements of Crossrail station design, big and small, is head of architecture Julian Robinson.

Architecturally it has been a vast project. There are 10 big new stations on the Elizabeth line - and that's before you talk about the outlying places where we've made smaller changes to existing sites.

"The rule was to have a more or less standard approach to the new platforms. But the design elements passengers encounter buying a ticket or on the way down to platform level will be more variable. It was an evolutionary and pragmatic process

 Ultimately, Robinson is facing the same design challenge as Joffe - though the scale is entirely different. Yet he shares her relish for influencing how London will look in years to come.

It's one of the reasons I do the job. There's very little you do these days that you can say has true civic value, in terms of building infrastructure.

Of course when we open I hope people will admire what we've built. But above all I want them to think the stations work as stations. And a century from now I hope people will think the same thing