Jubilee Park: A Roof Garden Over a Dock

Jubilee Park in Canary Wharf, London, is a street-level roof garden built directly on top of a 300-metre-long underground railway station constructed inside a drained 19th-century dock. Designed by Belgian landscape architect Jacques Wirtz for Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee, the park features over 200 Metasequoia trees planted in irrigated containers. Beneath the park, the station handles over 40 million passengers annually and required specialized anchoring systems to prevent the concrete structure from floating.

London Β· from the walk β€œDocks to Dollars” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

Jubilee Park, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AB

How was Jubilee Park in Canary Wharf constructed above a subterranean railway station?

Look around you. Grass, trees, children playing, office workers stretched out on their lunch break. It feels like any ordinary London park... but beneath your feet, right Now, thousands of commuters are hurtling through tunnels at speed. Jubilee Park is effectively a roof garden, built above an underground railway station. And not just any station.......... What was here two hundred years ago? Water. Open dock water, stretching as far as the eye could see. The West India Docks were a series of three docks, quaysides, and warehouses built to import goods from the British West Indies. The first dock opened in eighteen oh two. These docks were enormous... almost a kilometre long, with moorings for five hundred vessels. Sugar, rum, mahogany, coffee... the riches of the Caribbean flowed through this very spot, guarded by high spiked walls, a moat, and its own police force, built like a fortress against the rampant theft that plagued the Thames.......... Then came decline. Following their commercial closure in nineteen eighty, the Canary Wharf development was built around the wet docks. And when they needed a tube station for the new Jubilee Line extension, the engineers had a brilliant idea. The site contained one of the historic docks, allowing them to use a cut and cover method of construction, as the required space below ground level... the cut... already existed. They drained the dock and built Inside it.......... But here's the engineering twist that most people never hear about. A major challenge was sinking the station box into the former dock while combating uplift, caused by the station effectively Floating, which could counteract its weight and cause structural failure. Think about that. The station wanted to float... like a ship in the very dock it replaced. They had to Anchor it down with special systems to stop it rising up from the ground.......... Measuring three hundred metres in length, the station's underground structure is as long as Canary Wharf Tower is tall. That's the entire skyscraper, laid on its side, hidden beneath this gentle park.......... And the park itself? It was established for the Golden Jubilee celebration of Queen Elizabeth the Second, and named after that anniversary. Designed by the office of Jacques Wirtz, the celebrated Belgian landscape architect, over two hundred Metasequoia trees were planted in irrigated containers right here on the roof. Those are dawn redwoods... living fossils, once thought to be extinct, now thriving above a cathedral of concrete and steel.......... Over forty million people pass through the station each year, making it the second busiest on the London Underground outside Central London after Stratford, and also the busiest that serves only a single line. All of them, passing beneath your feet... where sailing ships once carried the cargo of an empire.

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