Bromley-by-Bow station has finally been repaired!
And it only took three years.
Here's how it looked in March 2020 with the new glass roof unveiled.
March 2020
An attractive refresh of a previously grim concourse, now with coffee kiosk, blue tiles and a central roundel. Lovely. Perhaps too tempting though, and so it proved.
In 2022 one of the glass panels got smashed, perhaps by a stone or hurled can, and was replaced by a sheet of wood. In 2023 half the roundel went the same way, and by the end of the year only three of the six glass panels were still intact. It looked a mess.
November 2023
It carried on looking like a smashed mess for the whole of 2024 and then the whole of 2025. By the start of 2026 it had looked a smashed mess for longer than it had ever looked intact.
Then in March 2026 scaffolding suddenly appeared. Finally, I thought, finally they're going to do something about it.
3rd March 2026
They didn't, not immediately. What they did do is hang the name of the station over the scaffolding, in nowhere near the right typeface. But nothing happened to the glass in April, nor for most of May. Only in the last week of May did workers finally turn up to remove the broken glass.
31st May 2026
It was one week's work max, replacing what had been six large glass panels with twelve smaller glass panels. But the scaffolding stayed up.
4th June 2026
I wondered if they were going to add a roundel on the glass again - this seemed the most likely reason for the scaffolding remaining. But they didn't and nothing changed for two months.
Now finally the scaffolding's come down and the end result is clear.
3rd August 2026
It seems TfL have thrown in the towel on the nice glass roundel and it's going to be plain glass forever. Easier to replace if anything gets smashed again but also duller and very much not the design originally intended. A large roundel on the brick wall alongside now suffices.
So hurrah that repairs are finally finished but sheesh, I cannot believe how long it took. The smashed glass was in situ for three years. The scaffolding was up for five months. The actual repairs took one week. As project management goes, it's been Bromley-by-Bodge.
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