Which is the busiest railway station in Britain? The answer is a surprising one: Liverpool Street in the City of London, where passenger numbers have been boosted by the recent opening of the new Elizabeth Line. More people go through it each day than all the Heathrow airport terminals combined. It has come a long way since the 1970s, before the fast Cambridge trains moved to King’s Cross, before ticket barriers, before doors that could be locked before departure, before cappuccinos in Styrofoam cups, before the station had been transformed by the makeover given it by architect Nick Derbyshire around 1990. It is now one of the treasures of London – but very busy.

Authorities are alert to the issue. The 98 million passenger movements a year that Liverpool Street experiences now are estimated to rise to 158m by 2041 – eventually the figure could reach 200m. (So much for increasing numbers of people working from home. Even more, it seems, will pile into the metropolis.) Clearly, Liverpool Street requires upgrading to meet the challenge. This will require money, generated by redeveloping part of the site. Network Rail made an attempt to do so with the Swiss starchitects Herzog and de Meuron, famous for Tate Modern. They produced a typically dazzling design, bearing little relation to the character of the existing station. It was rejected in 2023. Undettered, another scheme was commissioned, this time from ACME. Their proposal will provide new entrances to the station, more escalators and a bigger concourse, financed by a 21-storey tower at the station’s entrance. Yet, the tower will overshadow public areas, cause sundry demolition and seriously mar a conservation area. Save Britain’s Heritage are frothing.

There is, however, an alternative, devised by John McAslan of John McAslan + Partners. Since McAslan is the architect of the revamped King’s Cross in London, Sydney’s Metro Central in Australia, the new Grand Central Station in Belfast and Bond Street on London’s Elizabeth Line, his ideas are always going to be worth taking seriously when it comes to stations. In this case, they are nothing short of brilliant. They are also in a tradition that Britain deserves to be proud of: the reimagination of the great railway termini since the 1980s.

Not all major stations escaped demolition. Euston stands as a monument to its time, the 1960s, having been rebuilt by Ray L. Moorcroft. These days, some people whom I respect have come round to Euston; they like the Modernist aesthetic, drawing particular attention to the marble floor. The real point about Euston is made by the promotional literature put out at the time. Brochures show smartly dressed people strolling through low-ceilinged spaces, without a puff of smoke in sight. The age of steam was over, and not a day too soon; it had blackened cities and clogged bronchial tubes. The new Euston presented itself not as a station but an airport. Air terminals, in that far distant age, seemed classier, cleaner and the way of the future. That is why Euston seems so alien today. The experience is disconnected from the mode of travel it was built to serve. It lacks ‘station-ness’ – the platonic essence of what we know, in our hearts, a station should be.

This is why, surely, the great station makeovers of relatively recent years have been so successful. They celebrate the qualities of the Victorian station without pedantry – without, even, a more than nominal respect for how the station might have looked when it opened. In doing so, they express something of the self-assurance of the cigar-chomping railway promoters, engineers and architects who built these temples to transport in the 19th century. St Pancras, always a pleasure to walk through, now makes use of vaults that were not intended for the eyes of passengers: they were originally used for beer from Burton on Trent. Waterloo is nothing like the confused muddle described by Jerome K. Jerome in his novel of 1889, Three Men in a Boat. Paddington’s glass roof is actually made of polycarbonate glazing panels installed in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter; we still know it’s a station. During the Victorian age, stations were changing all the time, in line with the railways themselves.

All this is illustrated par excellence by Liverpool Street. Originally, the terminus of the Great Eastern Railway was known as Bishopsgate Station, suggesting that it served the City of London – a fraud on the public, since it was not located within the Square Mile but amid what were then the slums of Shoreditch. It did not reach its present site until 1874. This was late, given that London Bridge and other stations had opened in the 1830s. As happened before rail privatisation, one private station for the Great Eastern Railways – Liverpool Street – sat beside that of another terminus: Broad Street, built for the North London Railway. The site was crowded; the man who designed it, Edward Wilson, was an engineer. He did his best, favouring an eclectic Gothic-cum-Italianate style combined with a curving glass roof.

But he could not resolve the plan, due to the presence of two tracks for freight trains which deposed their load beneath the Great Eastern Hotel (every station had its grand hotel). So passengers had to traverse the site using walkways. One of the footbridges, spanning 20 or so platforms, provided the vantage point from which a writer for the Daily Telegraph could survey Dantean crowds on a Bank Holiday in 1899. ‘Flowing in obedience to ubiquitous placards and direction boards towards the various starting points, while the stout bridge itself vibrates and sways under the ceaseless stream which flows over it’, they must have been well in excess of 40,300 – the number of the tickets sold that day – because they would have had the prudence to buy tickets in advance. Even so, a mere fifth the volume passing through Liverpool Street on any average day of this decade.

In the 1970s, British Rail wanted to turn Liverpool Street into another Euston, by demolishing it and starting again. Broad Street was already derelict and could not be saved: it disappeared beneath the towers of the Broadgate development. But John Betjeman and others mounted a voluble campaign to keep Liverpool Street. They were aided by the delaying tactics employed by Simon Jenkins, the journalist and conservationist who was also a member of the British Rail board. The mood changed, and the station was sort of conserved. ‘Sort of’ because a lot of it, perhaps the majority of the existing fabric, was replaced. But the new work was so convincing, so lovingly attentive to the details of the old structure, that ‘station-ness’ was preserved. Some of the Victorian legacy was kept – look at the beautiful office building in patterned brick, at the front of the station, known as 50 Liverpool Street.

The Great Eastern Hotel survived, but 50 Liverpool Street was knocked down and meticulously rebuilt on a steel frame. Similarly, much of the canopy of the platforms is new, having been extended in the same style (you can see what was added by looking at the colour of the columns). The glass roof over the concourse, which has a Victorian air, is also new. So are the pairs of brick towers at either end of the station: they are delightful essays in spirit of what had previously existed. To archaeologists, perhaps, this playing fast and loose with the past vitiates Derbyshire’s achievement. To me, the reverse is true. The tribute that he pays to the station architecture of the heroic age makes his effort doubly impressive. It recognises the role that stations play in the national psyche.

Britain does not have a monopoly of splendid termini. Ours pale in comparison to the mighty Beaux-Arts stations of the United States – every city seems to have a splendid example, immense in scale, marble clad and breath-taking in their assurance. Grand Central in New York is the American equivalent to Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Recently it has been extended to embrace the Long Island Rail Road with passageways, vaults, ticket booths and signage in the style of the original. Alas, Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead and White was demolished in 1963 but amends have been made by creating a new hall in the former General Post Office nearby; it is called the Moynihan Train Hall after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a champion of Penn Station – and a campaigner to rebuild it – who had shined shoes in the original station during the Depression.

There are plenty of swaggering railway stations across Europe, too, the result of a more dirigiste approach to urban planning than that in Britain. Ours tended to emerge in a more piecemeal fashion, being in a state of almost continuous alteration since they were built. This has given the national character the chance to express itself, in the moaning about transport infrastructure that comes as second nature to us. Which brings us back to Liverpool Street. One of the priorities for the development – whose main purpose, we must remember, is to finance an upgrade that will make travelling smoother, not the reverse – is to minimise disruption. It can safely be said that the building of a 21-storey office block will make life for Liverpool Street’s many passengers hell for a couple of years.

This is one area in which the McAslan proposal is clever. It will take the form of a giant arch, not unlike that of a train shed: from the arch will be suspended eight floors of office space. By a miracle of engineering, the arch will touch ground on either side of the train tracks – a difficult feat, given that the ‘legs’ must avoid lurking dangers such as the Central Line and Post Office tunnels. The office space will be dazzling, the walk to it a never-endingly exciting prospect for the people lucky enough to work there. The new structure will complement the existing station. All the joy of the concourse, bright from natural light, will remain. Sunlight will even be channelled down to platform level through the new building, by means of vertical shafts lined with reflective material. Above all, no demolition will be necessary. This has an impact on the running of the station, which will have a better chance of operating reasonably as normal – with less noise and dust – for a longer period than would otherwise be the case. Crucially, it also has an immense bearing on the cost of the project. The ACME tower is expected to cost over £1.2bn – a huge sum, not least because of the large chunk needed for the clearing the site. Since the McAslan scheme does not need to squander resources in this way, it can – he and Save argue – produce a greater profit from a significantly smaller amount of office space. Given the uncertainty about the future of commercial property, with staff either ‘WFHing’ or under threat from AI, it’s a good approach.

Think also of sustainability. Construction is a great emitter of carbon; so is demolition. People may claim that the resultant structures are carbon neutral, but generally they only become so over the course of many decades, by which time the new building will itself have become old and in need of replacement. Far better to have a less intrusive structure, whose lighter presence means that it is altogether kinder to the environment as well as more congenial to its surroundings.

Curse the successive London mayors, including the present one, who have allowed London to be hemmed in by high-rise towers that nobody wants, whose lifts will go on guzzling energy for as long as the buildings stand. Down with the Walkie-Talkies and Cheesegraters. A smarter alternative is needed. The McAslan Liverpool Street offers just that. Let’s hope that the City Corporation, when it decides whether to give the Acme scheme planning permission in the next couple of months, takes note.