Vauxhall Bus Station - Bondway, London, UK
N 51° 29.179 W 000° 07.423
30U E 699691 N 5707830
Vauxhall bus station lies to the south west of Vauxhall railway station to the south of Vauxhall Cross.
Waymark Code: WMHEB5
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 06/30/2013
Views: 8
Wikipedia
carries an article about the bus station that tells us:
Vauxhall Bus Station serves the
area of Vauxhall in the London Borough of Lambeth, England. The station is
owned and maintained by Transport for London and is the second busiest in
London.
The bus station, which is adjacent to the Vauxhall railway and tube
stations, is situated on Bondway between Wandsworth Road, Kennington Road
and Parry Street.
Bus stops were moved from outlying roads (South Lambeth Road, Wandsworth
Road, Vauxhall Bridge) to a central point at the Vauxhall Cross road
junction to create an improved transport interchange.
The bus station was designed by Arup. It incorporates two cantilvered arms
that contain 167 solar panels, which provide a third of the bus station's
electricity.
There are nine stands at the bus station whose main operators are Arriva
London, Go-Ahead London and Abellio London.
The Guardian newspaper website carried an article about the "new" bus
station in 2005:
The latest building by Arup
Associates isn't - though it might be tempting to think it - some wilfully
extravagant public artwork, or a fashionable "iconic" building with a vague,
ironic purpose and a funny roof. It is a bus station, nothing more, nothing
less, and its opening in Vauxhall Cross, south London, happened without
fanfare. And yet, architecturally, it is a trumpet blast: an extraordinary
structure that is striking, clear and unmissable.
The British bus station is rarely glamorous. The very words conjure images
of some grim, diesel-soaked, piss-streaked, fluorescent-lit hellhole. In
another location, the Vauxhall station's stainless-steel structure, at once
flamboyant, thoughtful and glamorous, might be considered altogether too
exciting.
But part of what makes Arup's work so special is the fact that it is
localised. This bus station - and the Underground and mainline stations it
also serves - has long been trapped in a sulphorous tangle of roads,
themselves overshadowed by such poisonous postmodern structures as the MI6
building and a development of showy flats with madcap roofs that resemble
the rear ends of Chevrolet Impalas. To stand out in this jungle, the Arup
building needed to have a strong, clear voice - and it does.
The architects won a competition for the £4m scheme in 2002, commissioned by
Transport for London, the Cross River Partnership and London Buses. The
structure Arup produced is fascinating: a 12m-wide, 200m-long, stainless
steel ribbon that dips and rises as it stretches away from the Tube and
main-line stations. As it reaches the street ahead, it rises up by 20
degrees and launches itself precipitately skywards.
This projecting ski-slope roof is not purely gestural: it is studded with
photovoltaic cells, which are angled towards the sun and generate
electricity for the bus station's lighting. Nor is the undulating line of
the roof as wayward as it appears. It has its own logic: the lines are meant
to echo those found in maps of the London Underground and London bus routes.
They are also designed to rise up to the height of double-decker buses and
drop to integrate rows of seating down below.
The streamlined nature of the structure will, it's hoped, make it easy to
clean and - more importantly - easy to see up and down at all times of day
and night. This is not always the friendliest manor in London, and Arup has
worked closely with the Metropolitan Police to make the bus station as
crime-free as architecturally possible. Slotted underneath the sloping roof
is a tilt-nosed, two-storey building clad in ribbed stainless steel that
looks a bit like a 1950s caravan and encloses public lavatories, lifts to
the new Underground ticket hall, staff offices and a police station. This is
a particularly busy building, served by 2,000 buses a day, with tube trains
stopping here 712 times, and main-line trains 730 times. Vauxhall is
London's second busiest bus station; the first is Victoria. It needs to be
well-policed and well-maintained.
Arup has certainly done its best to make the station as easy to use as
possible. There are modern versions of old-fashioned French pissoirs for the
many people who are apparently unable to use more ambitious lavatories with
any degree of success. And the imaginative lighting could encourage a more
friendly and relaxed atmosphere than you might otherwise expect in a
city-centre bus station. The whole structure is floodlit, while the
underside of the 200m canopy is provided with two parallel rows of lights,
which change to blue as the roof tilts up. (The lighting marking the
entrance of the Tube station is programmable, so perhaps it might be
energising red in the morning.) One thing transport managers might learn
from Vauxhall is that crude, artificial fluorescent light in bus and tube
stations encourages nothing more than a sense of alienation and ill-feeling;
passengers are happier and calmer in public spaces that are calmly and
happily lit.
The one weak aspect of this structure is the surrounding landscape -
unfortunately, a separate firm of designers was engaged to work on that.
Whereas Arup has tried its hardest to integrate every last lamp, seat, sign
and CCTV camera into one seamless design, its structure feels abandoned in a
sea of banality. The whole area needs to work seamlessly if it is to cope
with the numbers of people passing through.
There will, of course, be those who think such a building is too grand for
its own good; equally, there will be those who will say that, however good
the intentions of those who commissioned, designed and built it, it will
soon enough be covered in grafitti, vomit and urine and dominated by
dossers. But this bus station is a harbinger of what could be achieved in
the future.
There has been a disintegration of public transport services in London. The
last truly inspired building for the London bus network before Arup's at
Vauxhall was the Stockwell bus garage, designed by George Adie and Frederick
Button and opened in 1953. The old core of London's public transport network
has half a century of cultural, financial and political neglect to catch up
on. What the Arup building can't solve is the problems of privatisation, PPP
and poor design in general, all exacerbated by the aggressive stance adopted
by London's mayor to any form of criticism. But the Vauxhall bus station
does show what can be done as public transport in London is taken
increasingly seriously again. It is not perfect, but it points to a new
ambition, however crudely expressed by politicians, to make London's public
transport system among the finest in the world.
Interesting architecture: Arup Associates are the architects and the prominent feature of the bus station is its ski slope roof.
Website: [Web Link]
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