People have been using it for over 20 years, and although it opened in 1999, in a way, Bermondsey station on the Jubilee line can be said to be still unfinished. That’s because it’s a low single-storey building in an area with lots of tower blocks, and it’s also supposed to have a tower block on top of it. Built to a design by Ian Ritchie Architects, although it looks like a square building from above, the tube station elements is L shaped, with a ground floor shop taking up one corner, and the station wrapping around it. It’s very light inside, with glass ceilings, and substantial concrete bracing that creates a tall box for the escalators and lets light flood deep down to the platforms. The escalator box is also arguably one of the underappreciated architectural gems of the Jubilee line.
But back to the outside of the station:
Tube stations and entire lines were often built with the intention to be used for property development after the railway was completed, but in the 1960s-80s, there seemed to be a collapse in interest in using oversite development to part-fund railway upgrades. For example, much of the Victoria line excluded anything above their new stations.
Then along came the Jubilee line, and for several new stations, they were engineered to support mid-sized developments above the stations. Not too much though, as bigger foundations meant bigger bills to pay to build them, and as there was no guarantee that anything would be built above the station, they hedged their bets a bit.