SAVE Britain's Heritage has welcomed Network Rail's decision, announced today, to drop its plans to demolish Span Four at Paddington Station and to invest in its restoration.
The decision comes after Westminster Council had approved the demolition on grounds of railway need. SAVE continued the fight with a campaigning publication "Save Paddington's Span Four: This engineering marvel must stay". SAVE's campaign gained support from leading engineers and leading figures in the railway world.
Span Four is an elegant and dramatic Edwardian extension to the station, dating from 1911-16, by the Great Western Railway's New Works Engineer, W Young Armstrong. It both complements and enhances IK Brunel's original work at the station. For the last thirteen years it has been hidden from the travelling public by a scaffold crash deck.
Network Rail had planned to demolish Span Four and replace it with an office on a deck over the rails, claiming that the development was essential to increase railway capacity at the station and that Span Four was a poor pastiche. SAVE argued that Span Four was a fine piece of architecture in its own right, and that the increase in capacity at Paddington created by the arrival of Crossrail would negate the need to demolish Span Four.
Adam Wilkinson, Secretary of SAVE told Sapling.info: "We are delighted at Network Rail's decision to retain Span Four and excited at the prospect of it being restored. It will once again be a truly magnificent space, returning Paddington to its status as a world class station. Once Crossrail is completed there will be no operational reason to demolish this handsome Grade I listed structure."
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