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The Elizabeth Line has won the UK’s top architecture prize, with judges praising the cross-London railway as a “triumph of architect-led collaboration” and an “exemplar of inclusive design”.
The Royal Institute of British Architects said on Wednesday that the £18.9bn transit system, also known as Crossrail, had won the 2024 Stirling Prize, which annually recognises the country’s best new building project.
Led by architects Grimshaw and opened in May 2022, the Elizabeth Line was delivered by a consortium of Maynard, Equation and AtkinsRéalis.
Stretching from Reading to Shenfield and Abbey Wood through central London, it has become a marker of what well-designed infrastructure can do, notably in a nation that seems to struggle with big transport projects.
Muyiwa Oki, Riba president and chair of judges, said the Elizabeth Line was “a triumph in architect-led collaboration” that transformed “the typical commuter chaos . . . into an effortless experience”.
“It rewrites the rules of accessible public transport, and sets a bold new standard for civic infrastructure, opening up the network and by extension, London, to everyone,” he added.
Three and a half years late and £4bn over budget, the Elizabeth Line was not, initially, a smooth ride. But the thing about new infrastructure is that once people begin using it, all of that is forgotten as it grafts on to a city’s connective tissue.
More than 700,000 people a day now use the railway, and the architectural clarity of its stations and connections — with their smooth, beautifully finished and coolly lit concrete linings — continues to delight in a capital whose infrastructure is often ancient and creaking.
Calling the network an “exemplar of inclusive design”, the Stirling Prize jury said its seating, step-free access and “uncluttered double-length platforms” helped passengers travel “with confidence”.
This year’s Stirling shortlist — which also included the King’s Cross Masterplan, housing in east London and Sheffield, and the National Portrait Gallery — seemed to embody a cross-section of national preoccupations.
The restoration of the central section of Sheffield’s Brutalist 1950s Park Hill estate by architects Mikhail Riches is a careful and thoughtful project that treats the original building with respect. It incorporates an element of social housing into what has been seen, on occasion, as a vast programme of gentrification.
At the other end of the scale, Chowdhury Walk, a small mixed-tenancy project for the London Borough of Hackney (architect Al-Jawad Pike) represents an elegant densification of existing council housing.
National identity is represented by Jamie Fobert’s extensive remodelling of the National Portrait Gallery. Its finest aspect is by far the generous reimagining of the public space outside the London institution, which has been utterly and yet still subtly transformed.
Wraxall Yard (Clementine Blakemore Architects) represents a restoration of a dilapidated range of farm buildings in Dorset to become accommodation for people with disabilities incorporating an organic farm and regenerative 250-acre landscape.
Finally, the King’s Cross master plan (architects Allies and Morrison and Porphyrios Associates) has become one of Britain’s best urban regeneration schemes, using existing industrial and railway buildings to give grain and character while commissioning consistently good architects within a considered framework to create both a genuine sense of place and a dense new neighbourhood.
Housing, health, transport, social mix and what to do about the decline of the countryside are represented here in fascinating ways.
If architecture prizes can veer towards indulging the cultural over the infrastructural, and museums over heavy engineering, this triumph by London’s most successful railway line in a generation redresses the balance a little.
An enviable example of how architecture can be used to imagine new public space beneath some of the world’s most expensive real estate, the Elizabeth Line has become instantly indispensable.
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