In the early 1960’s Birmingham New Street Station was originally rebuilt to accommodate 60,000 passengers a day and the concrete station came to represent the city of Birmingham for many travellers. The redesign of Birmingham New Street will transform the reinforced concrete station into a futuristic transport hub.
In 2008 Network Rail awarded Atkins the detailed design (GRIP 5) for Birmingham New Street, where up to 170,000 passengers now travel through the station each day.
During the last seven years, Atkins has played a lead role in the design of the station and the shopping centre Grand Central, overcoming significant challenges by applying innovative solutions to help successfully deliver one of the biggest station refurbishments in Europe.
The project involved the assessment of existing structures and the design of new ones including the stainless steel façade, new atrium roof and the steel framed John Lewis structure, which is built partly over the 1965 reinforced concrete station. This entailed the building of a Global Stability Analysis Model (GSAM), to understand how the old station and the new constructions would behave under different loadings, both in its final state and during key stages of the construction programme.
Working closely with Network Rail and Mace, Atkins drew upon their range of multidisciplinary specialists, from civils, highways and architecture, to modelling, telecoms, landscaping and project management to deliver the design for this extraordinary project.