page_title: Waterloo International railway station
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Waterloo International railway station / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Former Eurostar London Waterloo Station in 2010.
context_page_description: Waterloo International station was the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening on 14 November 1994 until it closed on 13 November 2007 when it was replaced by St Pancras as the terminal for international rail services. It stands on the western side of Waterloo railway station, but was managed and branded separately from the mainline station.
  In August 2017, the buildings and platforms were incorporated into the main Waterloo station when the platforms reopened during the works at platforms 1–8. The platforms closed again on 5 September 2017. After a period of redevelopment, they were scheduled to be permanently re-opened in December 2018 as part of the main station. Platforms 20–22 re-opened as part of the main station on 10 December 2018 and platforms 23 and 24 on 20 May 2019.
context_section_description: British Rail developed a series of concepts during the late 1980s with an initial location at the opposite end of the concourse.
  A more appropriate location was subsequently defined as at present but at first incorporating an existing staff building alongside Platform 10 while displacing the Armstrong lift that was on the site and had provided the means of allowing Waterloo City Line stock to be raised up from the tunnels below.
  Before long, the existing staff building as well as the lift were abandoned but the new terminal was already then taking the form initially of a cable-stayed, flat-roofed structure and was the basis for the final stage of the Hybrid Parliamentary Bill as it passed through the House of Lords and as featured in a press release at the time.
  The in-house design team assisted by Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners as traffic Engineers co-opted the services of Anthony Hunt so as to take the dynamic structure forward. However the BR architects felt that a cable stayed structure, while in vogue at the time, might not be so innovative with an operational opening then planned for May 1993.
  Security issues as well as structural and the above consideration led the designers to review alternative structural forms that might meet the evolving brief. An arch structure had its appeal in that an arch-based tracery was subtly evident at Waterloo over the approach road and was more likely to be fresher than a cable-stayed option by the time the terminal was ready for use in the early to mid 1990s. Arches were not the vogue in the early 1980s.
  The form selected was soon to be based on a series of lattice arches of decreasing sizes and each connected with a Teflon membrane. Additional transparency was to be provided by glazing over each of the lattice arches.
  The five-track configuration implied each arch grounding alongside the track but creating a challenge in avoiding a potential clash between the kinetic envelope of the anticipated new rolling stock and the "shed" structure.
  BR's in-house architects however established this wind-sock form as the basis for briefing external architectural practices competing for the detail design stage that followed. Also, along the way, the use of Teflon was abandoned in favour of a stainless steel covering.
caption: Waterloo International arch
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