Mark Wild tells Building the rest of the stations will be ready to open

Crossrail’s central section will open with or without Bond Street, the £18.6bn scheme’s chief executive has said.

Mark Wild told Building that the station’s inclusion in the opening depended on how quickly the rest of the key central London route could get up and running.

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Oversite development at Bond Street station is pushing ahead as well

The opening of the Elizabeth line has been pencilled in for the first half of next year, which Wild said it was on course to meet.

Other stations, including Canary Wharf and Whitechapel, are still to be completed but Bond Street will be the last to finish.

Wild said: “I’m confident the rest of the stations, including Canary Wharf and Whitechapel, they’ll get there […] but we couldn’t delay the whole railway just because of Bond Street.

> Mark Wild full interview: why Crossrail will be worth the wait

“So, it depends on when the railway opens. If the railway opens around the time that Bond Street is available, then it will be in it.”

He added Bond Street’s woes dated back to the tunnelling and said it had been plagued by design coordination problems in the early years of the project.

Original station contractor, Costain-Skanska, (CSJV), was replaced by Engie last summer but Wild said the joint venture was not solely to blame for the delays.

He said: “We’ve turned a big corner on Bond Street really in recent years. Even with CSJV in charge of the project, we’d really turned the corner.

“They’ve been carrying this lateness, one year to 18 months, [since] the very beginning of the job, so I feel a bit sorry for them for that.”

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