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Preston Bus Station

‘Preston Bus Station’ are probably not the three most enticing words with which to start writing something that you want people to read, and indeed that particular combination of text may never have been used before in a socialist article. But it’s also a sequence of words that will seldom be used again, in any context, as the forthcoming demolition of this magnificent Lancashire colossus has been announced.

But this article isn’t a paean to backwaters in the North West of England from which Trotskyists, entrepreneurs, professional footballers or even junior under assistant branch librarians all escape through a combination of pure Darwinian evolution and self-interest. This article is about architecture and councillors, public services and lost visions - and the way that capitalist politics screw them all up.

Public transport?

In the traditional bombastic style of local journalism, the bus station has variously been described as the ‘biggest bus station in the world’, the ‘second biggest in Europe’ or just ‘one of the largest in the North West of England’.

I travelled many a time through Preston Bus Station’s roadways and bays, often at dawn on a National Express coach heading north. On quite a few occasions I also ambled in on a Ribble Bus and headed onwards to Blackpool, Blackburn or Lancaster.

I remember the pale blue light there, similar to that which you occasionally see in public toilets (to prevent drug injectors finding a vein) but also quite close to the colour that, rather more prosaically, filled the screen as Robert de Niro’s character rode into Los Angeles, on their newish metro service, at the commencement of the armed car robbery scenes in that excellent film, ‘Heat’.

De Niro’s ride was delayed by decades because rail public transport provision by Californian municipal authorities was suppressed for so long by the auto industry - although things did eventually get better. But my journeys into Preston Bus Station were before British public transport infrastructure got worse.

Last week I waited at a bus stop, on a windswept street in Reading, that was tantalisingly within sight of the now disused, covered bus station that once served the town. Like bus stations up and down the country, it'd been sold off, along with the bus companies, to the pariah dogs, like Stagecoach, who then sold on the infrastructure. These private companies have left bus passengers standing in the street or standing around in railway stations with few seats because of their wish to cram in as many retail outlets as possible.

Brutalism

Preston Bus Station, built in 1968 and 1969, is a tremendous example of Brutalism - a now near totally discredited movement - this was architecture that ‘encompassed a new way of thinking about construction’…fundamentally aimed at architectural honesty - a way of building that exposes the rawness or roughness of the materials and the construction.’

Exposed pipes, open drains and even windows just attached onto the surrounding wall rather than built in flush. And lots of lovely undressed concrete, coated just with pigeon droppings and spray can obscenities - not the white sheen that covered all the faults of its predecessor - and short-lived pretender to the road to the future - Modernism. Brutalism was a fitting, work-a-day architecture utilised by those borough leaders who still thought of building a better Britain. It contained a desire by some councillors to give you somewhere to wait for your bus away from the drizzle - and in some sort of style.

Municipal socialism goes building

Before and during the time of Brutalism, there was a zeitgeist amongst some councillors (right-wing Labour councillors in the main) to think big (developing town centres with public facilities - transport interchanges, shopping centres), run services themselves (like the buses) spend money (on things like council housing) and, on occasion, even tell the government to go hang when it wanted to truncate their big, big plans.

Preston Bus Station can fit a whole fleet of buses into its cavernous interior. The city council owned bus fleet and the state owned local and long distance bus company would disgorge their passengers into this concrete behemoth and from here you could travel further afield via the state owned railway or with the state owned coach company, all the while seeing that Brutalist testament linger behind you for quite some time.

This same strand of architecture was the leitmotif behind many a council housing estate built in this period. Local authorities - from London boroughs, like Islington and Southwark (that were then run by rancid right wing castes) to a few Leftish authorities in the North - acted to ensure the availability of cheap housing but also to keep this provision under their control rather than to subject it to the tender mercies of private landlords.

Throughout inner London, the next largest group of housing estates after the former London County Council’s distinctive set of dark brick estates, are the complexes built in the 60s and 70s by the borough councils - places like the Aylesbury or North Peckham estates in south London. No one now defends the forward thinking that these housing estates once represented. But there’s no reason why such architecture should fail on its own merits.

I lived high in the sky for a long time in a south London 60s council tower block. It was poor maintenance and the social conditions (which made me install steel plate behind the door, to stop it getting kicked in) that made these blocks hard to let in the 80s, not the concept itself. The rich of Mumbai, with a lackey opening every door, don’t mind living a long way above the ground.

Homogenised privatised Britain

Swindon’s a town that once would have looked different. The railway buildings - both for the trains and for the railway workers, as well as the underworld passage that links them under the mainline, make that side of the town different to others. But the commercial heart of the town could now just as easily be Salisbury, Shrewsbury or Sheffield - save for its glorious Brutalist car park, with a spiral car ramp, that picks out the skyline from the morass.

For what came later, under the rule of private developers who now run the show in every borough, was the homogenisation of near every town in Britain - the same shops, the same pastel coloured buildings and the same pastel flavoured food from the same pastel themed chains of pastel selling shops.

But this isn't a whinge about the way the distinctive look of so many towns has gone. It’s reporting how the rule of capital causes that but also screws up towns in so many more profound ways.

One of its offences is its attempt to squeeze out every last bit of public space. A favourite trick, that I’ve noticed in London’s Docklands, is to put a barrier half across a public footpath (so not actually blocking the right of way) and erect railings right up to the edge of the public domain to which 'private property' notices are affixed. So, even if you think it’s a right of way, you’re not sure. You're pushed off your right of way through being unsure whether you can go past.

Unfulfilled vision

Post-war municipal socialism was no wonderland. It was the podium of no end of ne’er do wells, like one time Trotskyist, T Dan ‘Mr Newcastle’ Smith - that city’s Council Leader in the 60s who got fat on backhanders from those who rebuilt his city.

This almost, save for the river Tyne, included that sublime bit of Brutalist architecture, Trinity Centre Multi-Storey Car Park, built just across the river in Gateshead - a car park famous from its appearance in ‘Get Carter’, (just about the only decent British crime film ever made) and a movie in which corrupt councillors are an unseen presence.

The standards of these Brutalist and other municipal buildings could be poor, the utopian vision of the architect would often never be even half realised but touches, like putting a challenging Henry Moore sculpture amidst some edge of town council housing, showed a vision and occasional expectation of the best that few modern day councillors would now even be able to conceive how to aspire towards.

Not just buildings

And it wasn’t just the physical infrastructure that interested these councillors and aldermen. There’s no point in building world-class bus stations if no one's going to be riding the buses anymore.

I grew up in various backwater edges of conurbations that were near culturally bereft save for a few amateur dramatics performances and Scout shows in church halls. But even just getting to these venues - well, it was an escape from watching wall to wall Wendy Craig and Richard O'Sullivan - was a lot longer a trek than would be calculated by an overflying sparrow.

All the streets in the suburbs in which I was incarcerated as a kid seemed to be laid out as crescents. It was as if a society of Islamic proselytisers had undertaken secret missionary work through acting as the developers of so many petit bourgeois post-war estates. Rose Crescent would slowly flow into Park Crescent that would lazily turn into Yew Crescent. This all meant that what would’ve been a ten minute cut through some estates in the city, was a 25 minute meander through suburban doppelganger roads. The route that I’d be obliged to follow would map out a strange, multi-sided shape whose name would fox most postgraduate maths students. Yet more ‘Crescents’, interspersed with an occasional ‘Rise’ or a ‘Close’ led back into yet another ‘Crescent’, all in the way on the route to get from home to somewhere interesting.

On the buses

So, like all kids heading towards or just having entered their teenage years, I took the bus. And in that day of council bus fleets, cheap fares and services to places that have now been abandoned, the desire by those councillors to have reasonable public transport made a tangible difference to my quality of life.

First I travelled to the local town (and on my first occasion, ended up getting very lost, following the intuitively correct 'rule' of getting back on the bus at the same stop where I had alighted) and then I went on into the city.

(‘What do you want to go to London for’ asked my mother. ‘There’s all you could ever need in Croydon’).

And then it was as far as I could get on a rover ticket. I kept on going like this until new horizons arose - an interest in music, politics and making longer distance trips, travelling by thumb.

(Did I miss the passing of the law that has apparently made hitchhiking illegal in Britain - or did it just fall victim to paranoia and dirty tactics, such as those used by the US authorities who erect roadside signs saying things like - ‘Hitchhikers may be escaped convicts’).

Until those new interests did beckon, travelling from Croydon I did glimpse the last of the post-war vision before it died. My travels by bus and coach would take me in ever increasing rings to the places just beyond the edges of London - the extensive post-war council housing of Harlow; the cycle ways and open spaces of Crawley and the industrial estates, still full of manufacturers, in Stevenage. These were all post-war New Towns, built to house the Blitzed population of London.

Later, returning to the North West, the 10p kids bus fares in the metropolitan counties would get me, by local bus, from Stockport to Sheffield or to Wigan or to Liverpool. I developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of good record shops across the North (including the one in Liverpool where I was served by an amazingly-dressed young Pete Burns -and who was surprisingly later beaten in the unconventional dress stakes by George Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother).

But that’s not something a kid could do now. South Yorkshire was famous for its low bus fares in the mid to late 70s - pennies from Sheffield to Doncaster or from Barnsley to Rotherham. It was also famous for the resistance its Labour councillors put up when the Labour government of that period forced them to jack up these fares.

For most kids now, it’s high bus fares (although not in London), privately owned town centres that frown on non paying customers or corporate owned leisure centres that squeeze the last penny. When a little older, it's staying at your mum and dads for ever with no chance of being able to rent or buy somewhere to live with the prospect of being given just social housing being hopelessly remote.

When Labour fought

The 1974-1979 Labour government was not, by any means, a time when the Labour Left had much of base. It was to be a few more years until the rise of Bennism. But still some Labour councils then actually tried to fight back against cuts - from the earlier period of the Clay Cross councillors right up until after the IMF intervention in 1976. Conferences against these first cuts happened in places like Lambeth, then under the leadership of Ted Knight. A few then would fight back.

When’s the last time you heard of a Labour council that decided it was going to defy the government or even the advice of the Audit Commission?

Where are the Left councillors engaging in internecine warfare against the rightwing leadership of their Labour groups?

(This happened for years and years, in places like Manchester, where the old manual worker right was gradually driven out by the once Bennite left, but which in fact was the progenitor of the professional class right-wingers who run nearly all Labour councils nowadays.)

Even in the old right-wing Labour fiefs during the first days of Thatcherism, councillors would be expelled from the council Labour Group for buying their council house. Nowadays such a councillor not doing this would probably be removed from any positions they have for not showing enough entrepreneurial savvy.

Whilst the icons of municipal Brutalist architecture are slowly felled - from Preston to Portsmouth - also spare a thought for the strong willed right wing Labour councillors of thirty and forty years ago who wanted and acquired innovative architecture and provided a wide range of council owned services for the population of their towns.

And compare them to political pygmies who now follow them - they may share the social democracy of their predecessors but the modern councillors also now just a cipher for business interests, they’ve an overwhelming identification with the bourgeoisie and they’ve never had the guts to stand up to their national party leaders.

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More de Menezes

When the pigs executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a London tube train in July 2005, does anyone remember being reported what is now transpiring in the prosecution of the Metropolitan Police for, er, allegedly breaking Health and Safety laws?

The BBC reports from the trial that - At the same time, (as executing de Menezes), one of the armed officers physically dragged 'Ivor' (who was the cop first cornering de Menezes on the tube train) onto the platform while holding a gun against his chest. 'Ivor' shouted he was a policeman and heard more shots in the carriage. Terrified, the tube driver fled his cab - but was chased by another armed officer into the tunnel. I’ve furthermore seen it reported elsewhere that the driver was threatened with a gun.

Never mind shooting de Menezes seven times - I understand professional killers generally find one to the head and one to the chest to be sufficient - was that cop ever prosecuted for whatever crime he committed in threatening the tube driver with a loaded gun - you would have thought the driver’s uniform and the fact that he was driving the train would have alerted even the most atavistic pig to that fact that he didn’t need to pursue him.

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Facebook

I’ve set up a Facebook account as Southpaw Punch (I’m unable to use the correct term - Southpawpunch) - also see link, top right.

This account will carry each post from this site and a few that are immediately previous. It’s aimed at distributing Southpawpunch content to members of the ‘Facebook Left’ (what a term!) who don’t otherwise visit this site. So whilst it’s possible to read my website there, it’ll remain a better experience to follow it here - better design, comments, side features, etc.

I’d be happy to make ‘friend’ links on Facebook with anyone who wants to. If I stick to just those with communist politics, I’ll only be talking to myself. Or put another way, when the revolutionary period unfolds, it’ll be useful to have the fine detail on where the counter-revolutionaries are and what they’re doing, so that arrangements for their 're-education' can be quickly implemented.

I can assure all that there won’t be any of the puerile and inane behaviour on my account that bedevils the Facebook presence of even ostensible Marxists. It appears that those members of Left groups - who throw virtual sheep at each other or post the modern equivalent of saucy seaside postcards on each other’s profiles - are not being given harsh enough paper selling targets by their organisations.

I think it's interesting to observe the large amount of time, that is being invested by some, in writing user generated content for commercially owned sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, etc. There’s nothing to stop these companies setting up a pay wall around any of their property on which we squat. People could yet find themselves investing a lot of time and effort in their ‘own’ profile only to find they’ll have to pay, or others will have to pay, to access ‘their’ content.

Even now you’re obliged to sign up to the service to get access to content. If you click on the Facebook link I have given above, you won’t see content unless you're a Facebook member. If it was a ‘normal’ web page, you would.

This parallel has flaws, but it’s almost as if you rent a flat and then fix it up for free for the landlord. Companies like Facebook should be treated like any other utility. Would people go online and contribute to forums and join communities to promote and preach for their telephone company or electricity provider? I hope people will learn to treat Facebook, and the other Web 2.0 sites, with less naivety and adopt a greater awareness of the sassiness of newer forms of capitalism.