Vauxhall Bus Station - Bondway, London, UK - Bus Stations on Waymarking.com

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.