UK firm to carry out transport security and design survey

Architect John McAslan + Partners (JMP) is to undertake a three-year study into the security of passenger station and terminal design across Europe.

The firm, which has designed the redevelopment of King’s Cross station as well as the Bond Street Crossrail station and 20 metro stations in India, won the work in competition as part of a multi-disciplinary consortium led by ISDEFE - the leading state-owned Spanish defence company.

The Secure Station study, which is funded by the European Commission, will create new principles in order to make terminals and transport hubs more resilient to terrorist attack and will result in the publication of a new design handbook for architects involved in such work.

JMP was also responsible for high security schemes around the world including the new British Embassy building in Algiers.

Simon Goode, associate director at JMP, said, “As more focus is placed on security measures, design must respond with comprehensive, guiding principles that create rigorous and transferable security measures.

“Terminals and stations are social hubs and are often people’s first experiences of a town or city, therefore these improvements to security must be done in a way that maintains the quality of the public space and the accessibility of these environments.”

President of the Association of Consultant Architects, Terry Brown, welcomed JMP’s involvement in the study and said many architects had become too focused on the economic gloom at the expense of issues like terrorism.

Brown recently spoke at an RIBA-organised event on “designing out terrorism”.

“Terrorism remains an issue and although the conference was well attended, a low proportion of those attending were architects,” he said.