There was much to celebrate last year on the architecture front – the end of the pandemic brought the opening of long-delayed projects ranging from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Hollywood to the Taipei Performing Arts Centre in Taiwan. But there was one construction project that stood head and shoulders above the rest in size and ambition, and that was the transport link formerly known as Crossrail.
The Taipei Centre may have been seven years late and the Academy Museum (now home to Judy Garland’s red slippers and R2D2, among other artefacts) more than a couple of decades in gestation, but that is nothing compared with London’s Elizabeth Line, which was first proposed in the 1940s. It got the ‘Crossrail’ moniker in a 1974 report, a first feasibility study happened in 1989 and, after an attempt to get it through parliament in 1991 failed, the Crossrail Act was finally given royal assent in 2008.
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