Friends of the Rail Forum

Leading French architects have attacked the planned glass renovation of the Gare du Nord rail station in Paris, warning that the project to create a vast shopping space is “unacceptable”, “indecent” and a “serious offence to transport users”.

The award-winning French architect Jean Nouvel as well as historians and town planners wrote an open letter to Le Monde saying the €600m (£540m) renovation plan to create a glass structure – with tens of thousands of square metres of shops, walkways, split-levels and 105 escalators – was a “serious urban error” that would deform the historic building, fail Parisians and befuddle travellers...

A group of leading French architects have denounced a plan to renovate the Gare du Nord, one of Paris’s main train stations, calling the designs that would turn the station into a glassy, mammoth, restaurant-filled shopping mall “indecent,” “absurd” and “unacceptable.”

The plan for the Gare du Nord, the terminus for the Eurostar train from London and the largest station in Europe, would cost 600 million euros, about $660 million, and force commuters and travelers to go through a platform lined with shops before getting to the train platforms, in much the way that airports route passengers through duty-free shops.

“This means: more distance to travel, significantly increased access times,” the experts wrote in an open letter published in Le Monde on Tuesday. They called the plan to triple the station’s surface area and saturate it with shops, restaurants and cafes in an area already buzzing with them a “serious offense” to users of transport...

“Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to walk through commercial spaces becomes unbearable when this gift to trade goes with long and unnecessarily complicated journeys”...

Cette transformation concerne prioritairement les voyageurs du quotidien, les millions d’usagers des RER et des trains de banlieue. Pour eux, la nouvelle gare sera plus grande (deux fois et demie), plus accessible, plus agréable et proposera plus de services et de commerces. Les connexions avec les RER B, D et E et les métros des lignes 2, 4 et 5 seront plus rapides et plus simples pour les voyageurs. Redimensionnée en 2001 pour 500 000 voyageurs par jour, en accueillant à ce jour 700 000, la première gare d’Europe accueillera 900 000 voyageurs en 2030...

As developers aim to turn France’s busiest train station into a gargantuan airport-style mall, Parisians fear for the local neighbourhood – and the station’s soul

Ask Parisians what is their least favourite part of the city, and most will probably tell you it is the area around the Gare du Nord railway station.

Described a few years ago - admittedly by a Briton - as the "squalor pit of Europe", the location where the Eurostar arrives from London is set for a multi-million euro makeover. But the prospect of yet another railway station-cum-shopping centre is far from being universally accepted.

Cramped, crowded and cruddy would be a fair description. Plus crime-ridden if you wanted a fourth alliteration.

A survey published in November concluded that it was the scariest place on the Paris transport system...

Paris city hall has promised to fight a government decision to give the go-ahead to a €600m (£540m) redevelopment of Europe’s busiest railway station, the Gare du Nord, described by its opponents as an urban disaster.

“The city will explore all possible political and legal routes to block this project, using all the tools at our disposition,” Emmanuel Grégoire, the deputy mayor for urban development, said on Wednesday. “We will be appealing, obviously.”

Grégoire described the project as “an utter absurdity” and the timescale for its completion as “neither credible nor serious”. Serge Remy, the head of a local residents’ group, said the overhaul was “bad for users and bad for residents”...