Institution lecture - Tuesday 3rd March 2026

Gareth Leslie, Transport for London (TfL) Design Planning and Heritage Manager.

Narrative by John Doyle

The meeting at Palaestra was well atended, after an introduction given by Nick Agnew members welcomed Gareth to the meeting.

Gareth gave a summary of his career which, since starting with British Railway in 1987, had taken him to several areas of the railway in a variety of operational roles. Immediately prior to joining TfL Gareth worked for Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Crossrail as their Policy and Practice Manager.  Gareth is now TfL's Design Planning and Heritage Manager.

Gareth covered TfL's rail activities and principally those of the London Underground. He began by setting out the context: the Underground being an old system dating from 1863, with some 188 of its stations having listed status of one description or another. He outlined some of the issues. The constant need to maintain and update the network, the competing demands on funding and the relatively high cost of conservation and restoration of heritage features on the network. Listed status often made changes to the estate more difficult and expensive than would otherwise be the case.

Gareth then presented a range of illustrated case studies to highlight some of the challenges and successes in preserving the Underground’s heritage. These ranged from very minor, but nonetheless visually significant, interventions such as repainting in original colour schemes to major design input into step free access schemes around the network.

The audience was very impressed by nature and scope of work being undertaken to preserve TfL's rail heritage and asked several questions on detail and policy. Appreciation for Gareth's talk was given in the usual way.