Crossrail's Canary Wharf station is a bridge between two worlds

Standing on the garden above Crossrail's new Canary Wharf station it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast between the glassy towers of London's financial centre and the ragged landscape of Poplar across the main road that runs alongside.

The sheer glass cliffs of Canary Wharf appear as a citadel, another world. Across the dock, Billingsgate fish market and clumps of social housing are spread out in a landscape of neglect.

This new station is, in part, intended as a bridge between the two worlds. The architect of the garden and its eye-catching roof, Lord Foster, tells the FT: "It distances itself from the corporate planning expression of Canary Wharf . . . It mediates in an interesting way between the two parts of the city".

Of course, Lord Foster is partly responsible for that corporate expression. His curved cornered 210m HSBC tower neighbours the site. He is also the designer of Canary Wharf's Jubilee Line underground station, opened in 1999 and arguably the finest new British station since the second world war.

The new Crossrail building is something very different. Unlike the sleek, subterranean concrete cavern of the underground, Lord Foster has crowned it with an attenuated greenhouse, a high-tech polytunnel conceived as a green public space for an increasingly dense Docklands development.

This public garden sits on top of a six-storey structure - four of them below the level of the dock - which includes a retail and leisure complex as well as the Crossrail station.

"It's based on the idea of a communal garden," Lord Foster says. "The trains will be another three years coming and it needs nature to take over until then. In three years' time, I think it really will be quite a lush world up there."

The greenery still looks a little weedy but landscape designers Gillespies (who were also responsible for the "Sky Garden" on top of the Walkie Talkie building - 20 Fenchurch Street in the City) have attempted to create a sense of narrative. Stephen Richards, the garden's designer, said: "The plant collectors of the 18th and 19th centuries who built Kew and the other great gardens would have imported their plants through these docks, in Wardian Cases." Named after Nathaniel Ward, a 19th-century doctor and amateur botanist, these were vitrines or mini-greenhouses to protect delicate exotic species on long journeys.

"We saw this garden almost as a vessel, like a Wardian Case bringing a precious cargo of plants into the dock again," Mr Richards says. "They reflect the geographic split of the plants that would have been imported, with species form the Americas to the west and from the Pacific and Asia to the east."

However, it is the roof, rather than the plants, that makes the structure stand out. It pokes out between buildings like a silvery eel. The timber frame is held together by huge steel nodes with translucent pipes emerging from them like sci-fi life-support systems. These keep the pillows of transparent plastic that make up the roof inflated. The frame is steel on the exterior, its high-tech finish melding with the shiny towers but wooden on the interior. "I like the way the timber is dominant on the inside," Lord Foster says, "it's quite a surprise."

The station, 28m below the water in the dock, was not designed by Lord Foster and looks likely to have the more utilitarian appearance that characterises Crossrail stations - a far cry from the theatricality of the Jubilee Line stations - but it does have a very distinctive, very green and rather surprising crown.

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