When the Martin Place metro station opens in the “civic heart” of Sydney, due some time in the middle of the year, commuters will experience a kind of inverted cathedral. From the soaring, light-filled atrium of the Hunter Street entrance, the view from the top of the stainless-steel escalators plummets towards the centre of the earth – or at least to the almost 200-metre-long dual platforms of the new Sydney Metro line.

At 44 metres “high”, it’s as if the nearby St Mary’s – the central tower of which reaches a tad over 46 metres into the air – had been flipped into a luminous netherworld. If not quite a religious experience, it is certainly – and literally – moving.