Stockwell Bus Garage

Stockwell Bus Garage - A Public Transport Cathedral


I have always had a soft spot for Will Self ever since he was caught powdering his nose with Colombian snuff on the then Prime Minister’s John Major’s campaign plane in 1997. Now the writer and loyal Stockwellian has proposed Stockwell Bus Garage (designed by Adie, Button and Partners, with the engineer A. E. Beer) as his choice for London's Most Important Building. He was speaking as part of a series of Royal Academy lectures on 14th March 2011 at the Geological Society, Piccadilly. Self's appreciation of the garage as grown from passing it every day. It is, he says, "a working building, integrally connected to London’s public transport".


Will Self himself

It is certainly a good choice for this is a Titan amongst bus garages with the buses housed in cathedral like surroundings. Stockwell Garage is a large bus garage in Stockwell, London. It was designed by Adie, Button and Partners, with the engineer A E Beer, and was opened in 1952. Stockwell garage was built to replace Norwood tram depot.



It is typical of much of the concrete architecture built in the post war reconstruction period in London around the Festival of Britain. There was a steel shortage, so concrete was used to support the roof. However, the opportunity was taken to create a bravura piece of reinforced concrete design. The 393 ft long roof structure is supported by ten very shallow "two-hinged" arched ribs. Each rib is 7 ft deep at the centre of the arches, 10 ft 6 in at the end, and spans 194 ft. Cantilevered barrel vaults between, topped by large skylights, span the 42 ft between each pair of ribs. The vaults are crossed by smaller ribs to prevent torsion. Seen from the outside, the main arches are visible as outward-leaning buttresses, with a segmental curve to each bay forming a flowing roof line. The garage provides 73,350 sq ft of unobstructed parking space and could originally house 200 buses. At the time of construction it was the largest unsupported area under one roof in Europe. Since 1988 the garage has been a Grade II* listed building reflecting its importance in post-war architectural and engineering history.




So top marks to Will Self for publicising this wonderful example of inventive post-war utilitarianism. Many wonderful bus garages have bitten the dust for as part of privatisation of London’s Bus services those so clever people at HM Treasury decreed that bus garages should be sold off in another short term asset stripping drive. Clever Wallahs at the Treasury, not only have their policies messed up Britain at large and put us in hock to scores of ludicrously expensive PFI’s but their diktat on selling off garages has meant it is practically impossible to retender bus routes. As Treasury Wallahs don’t use buses they didn’t realise that they need to go asleep near to their customers at night. And bus garages are a bit like buses, BIG!

Many have already been sold off, Battersea is a spectacular apartment complex along the Thames, Victoria is a supermarket with yuppie flats over. Stockwell is a wonderful space which could be adapted to many uses in the right hands if it ceases to be a bus garage. Let us hope that Will Self’s eloquent advocacy and the Grade II* listing ensures that this magnificent space is utilised and loved for years to come.

Nobody wants Grotty Gatwick

Few, other than the Celtic Sage himself, are prepared to acknowledge that I have the gift of prophecy but my followers the evidence is mounting up! In October 2008 I wrote in relation to the appalling privatised monopoly British Airports Authority and Grotty Gatwick Airport the following Sage-like words;

“As for BAA thinking that Richard Branson will give them £1.8 Billion before they go bankrupt for the damaged goods called Gatwick, they must be deeply delusional. Branson won’t offer anything like that and will bring in somebody with him to share the risk, He will discount the income for he’ll have to rip out half the forgettable retail clutter to make the airport work well and ease the passenger’s journey to and from the plane (the PURPOSE of an airport; make a note BAA). However the chaos which is Gatwick shows why BAA does not understand the Airport business and why this smug privatised monopoly is lacking in the core skills to run ANY UK airport. The sooner Grupo Ferrovial and the Gang of Cash Cow Gringos it has bought in the UK with its junk bond status debt goes down the better for UK PLC. Their comes a stage when it is kinder for Old Beasts to be quietly and humanely put down to end their suffering and the upset of those who have to witness their sad and jerky movements.”

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/10/grotty-gatwick.html

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/12/grotty-gatwick-part-2.html

Well yea, yea and yea again verily it is coming to pass although the humanitarians amongst you may not witness the humane killing I predicted, indeed in the established Spanish tradition it may turn out to be a massacre – La Matanza! For Grupo Ferrovial (Spanish Brick Inc.) is wholly dependent on the Spanish building industry and the only thing building in Spain these days are ant hills which don’t require bricks or concrete! So Spanish Brick is in desperate straits and now it can’t even flog one of its Cash Cows as the market has collapsed!!

The future of Gatwick has turned from the uncertain to the farcical after the forced sale of London's second airport was derailed by news that no one wants to buy it. Gatwick has been put up for sale after the Competition Commission ruled that BAA's monopoly ownership of it, Heathrow and Stansted is giving consumers a raw deal. However, an auction process kicked off by BAA and its Spanish owner Ferrovial appears to have fallen apart with the withdrawal from the process of the Manchester Airport Group.



The Manchester Airport Group, which also owns East Midlands and Bournemouth airports and is owned by the 10 borough councils that form Greater Manchester, has reportedly walked away after refusing to match BAA's reserve price of £1.5 billion for Gatwick. Of the original three bidders in the auction that leaves the owners of London City airport, the investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners, a joint venture between General Electric of the US and Credit Suisse which in the UK also owns the Port of Great Yarmouth and the waste company Biffa. GIP, it is understood, is also refusing to match the £1.5 billion price tag.

The third bidder, a Citigroup-led consortium, quit the bidding process two months ago. Though industry insiders believe Manchester's withdrawal may yet be a tactic to get Gatwick to drop its price, the sale of the busiest single-runway airport in the world appears to be in limbo. BAA is, in any case, appealing the forced sale of the airport. The Competition Commission ruled it must dispose of Gatwick and Stansted and north of the border, where it also enjoys a regional monopoly, either Glasgow or Edinburgh airports.


German Railways - Achtung! coming to a station near you but not visa versa!

However, Ferrovial, the Spanish Brick Company which bought BAA as a cash cow to milk, also desperately needs the money from the proceeds of a Gatwick sale. The Spanish have a £12 billion BAA debt mountain, a hangover from the hugely-leveraged £15 billion takeover of the airports group and a refinancing of those borrowings has left it with a repayments schedule of £1 billion a year.

Has the passenger experience at Gatwick improved since I slated it? Well don’t take the Sage’s word for it here is a (fair) comment left on a UK paper today;

“Gatwick is a nightmare in the summertime. Needs millions and millions spent on it to make it easier to use. Queues at check-in desks merge with each other and stretch across into those on the opposite desks making it impossible to pass through. At the incoming end the people awaiting passengers spill into the incoming passenger way. The seats that were there for people waiting to meet people have been removed to force them into the coffee shop making it very difficult for people with any sort of handicap. The walkways to and from the aircraft are far too long and not mechanised. And the queues through the security checks merge with check in and pass through traffic. About the only improvement is the car park, but even here the two park ticket machines are not adequate to clear the back up of passengers arriving to them.”


National Rail Awards - Spot the customer?

And here is the lie of the great Thatcher privatisations. Other than selling assets which we all owned at a great discount (putting up taxes for the future) there is a compelling competitive argument against creating privatised monopolies into a world where for all the pious guff about “regulation” nobody stands up for the customer. So BAA can impose its abysmal service and high charges on us, Thames Water owned by a near bankrupt German utility operator can impose above inflation charges, waste a huge amount of water whilst laughing at the derisory fines for poor customer service from the wishy, washy water regulator. On the railways the banks who bought the rolling stock companies can realise 10 times their investment in 20 months and then have the brass neck to sponsor “National Rail Awards”, an orgy of mutual industry backslapping where no customers appear to spoil the show. DBAHN, the German State Railway (and the successor of the company which ran the trains to Auschwitz and Treblinka to facilitate war crimes and genocide) can buy Chiltern Railways, EWS Freight and Wrexham and Staffordshire whilst no British company can invest in German Railways or Utilities, probably because Germany (like France) appreciates the efficiency of National Networks or indeed State Sponsored banks and a proper Post Office / Bank.


Richard Bowker - I'm off to sell railways to the Arabs!

And National Express under the incredibly self serving and self promoting Richard Bowker can walk away from the East Coast Mainline which it took over using a Special Investment Vehicle (SIV) after it took over from GNER’s SIV registered in Bermuda after they bid too much for the franchise to the Strategic Rail Authority whose head at the time was one Richard Bowker! Am I missing something here or am I just too simple a Sage?


Baroness Shriek - 46, single, poor social skills, beloved of Gordon, never run anything practical, first rate mind!

So the Great British Taxpayer will not just be impoverished for years to come by paying for monopoly profits, incontinent Bankers with short memories but also for the good work of Shriti Vadera and the other “First Rate Minds” who have ensured that Britain will be paying a premium for privatisation for years to come. Or to put it another way we will be paying money for nothing and have the economy dragged down because of Treasury Geniuses who have never even run a lemonade stall. Against this dismal perspective the fact we won’t have to deal with BAA / Spanish Brick and their abusive monopoly is only a small grain of comfort!