Marble Arch Coach Exchange by Hannah Cordell
Art blends with infrastructure in a new bus station beneath Marble Arch.
Hannah's thinking
"With increasing densification where can low cost infrastructure go?
Victoria Coach Station was never designed to cope with its current visitor numbers and a proposed move eastward looks like a convenient way to distribute less profitable programs away from the city centre.
The identity of the Marble Arch area has always been that of a threshold. Coaches already stop around the site in their masses, causing Park Lane to be a, somewhat more multicoloured, manifestation of Terry Farrell’s ‘Wall of Red’.
This proposal suggests digging under Marble Arch to create an accessible Coach station/ interchange, with arms that drop people directly into the tube or deep into the surrounding areas of Hyde park, Oxford Street, Mayfair or further. The proposal is also an extension to the pubic realm and a sculpture gallery; perhaps exhibiting casts of the otherwise inaccessible monuments adorning Park Lane and Hyde Park. Visitors can wait for their coach whilst admiring art and with direct access to all the appropriate facilities. It also means that, instead of being welcomed into London by the side of a five-lane carriageway, the visitor arrives into an exciting, vibrant space that might go some way to dignifying this tragic piece of forgotten space.
March Arch was once and iconic figure and a gateway to London. Let it be that again!"
