Back to the future with bus stations
I know, it’s not a catchy title, but hang around and see where this blog takes you on a mystery tour around the topic of public transport and the health of the High Street.
If I look out of the corner of our offices I can see where Berwick Bus Station used to be. About twenty years ago the old bus station, off street, with space to park vehicles between journeys, with adequate shelter for passengers, was demolished and its entrance closed off by a new retail development. As part of the same process new on street bus stops were created on Golden Square, competing for space with passing pedestrians and adjacent businesses who see the pavement as a handy bin store.
Berwick was not alone in seeing bus stations as being potential retail development sites. The latest plan for the high street in Blyth envisages a re-development of the existing bus station, to be replaced by on street bus stops, and similar changes to provision for buses have happened in places like Hexham, all in this little corner of England.
One of the issues of being interested in place as a concept, as well as individual places, is that you can’t do it solely in the abstract. You have to do it on the ground, in the place that you wish to study, to manage and to change. You have to study the place with your feet and all your senses, not from your desk.
My understanding of that concept comes not from geography, or the social sciences but from lean management. The idea of going to the place where the work is done, and seeing it through the eyes of the people doing the work, is enshrined in lean culture, although all too often it’s wrapped up in a kind of mystic Orientalism that disguises the fact that it’s not a new concept. Dwight Eisenhower once said ‘“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” He was neither Oriental, not mystical, nor practicing lean management, so far as I can tell, just aspiring to a kind of folk wisdom that isn’t diminished by being so right it’s almost truistic.
In my head I often imagine a debate between F W Taylor, Harry Braverman and Taiichi Ohno about management, not because I’m fond of speculative and counter factual fiction (although I am) but because of the insights it might provide about modern management problems, whether in the organization I run or in the places where I seek to have influence or to contribute to their management. Braverman’s debunking of Taylor’s interventions with Schultz the ‘little Dutchman’ is an important touchstone for me when I look at how places have been managed and exploited in the past. Going to the place where the work is done only works if you take on board Ohno’s humanistic concern for the people doing the work, the element of lean management that often gets overlooked by its more gung ho practitioners. For me, place management is also about a concern for the place itself, for its identity and its concerns,so that I might avoid Taylor’s mistake, of assuming that the worker (or the place) could not produce solutions for themselves.
Eisenhower’s quote rang true for me though for another reason. A staple of geography classes when I was at school was the colouring in of maps illustrating how crop rotation might work on a hypothetical farm. Over concentration on one crop, we were lugubriously advised by a succession of teachers, was a mistake our ancestors made that culminated in man made disasters like the Irish potato famines. George Monbiot’s take on the modern version of the same problem (here for instance) may (like my map colouring skills) lack academic rigour but has a vein of truth about it — possibly more so than my teacher’s over simplifications about the potato famines.
By now you’ll know what’s coming next from me; the rhetorical question that asks ‘what’s that got to do with bus stations?’ If you’re focussed on maximizing the rental income from the land within your town centre, and nothing else, then a bus station is akin to the inconvenient hedgerow that prevents a farmer from getting the largest possible combine harvester onto his two adjacent fields of barley. If you see shoppers as a crop to be maximized by selecting only the best seeds then I can see the argument that people who travel by bus might, as a class, generate a lesser return per head than those who can afford to travel by car if you see possession of a car as closely correlated to prosperity. The problem, as ever, is what happens when there’s a paradigm shift, or a pandemic, or even just a change in the climate.
Suddenly then, you have to start thinking about how you accommodate the demands of the new paradigm. If, as is suggested here, the car is not the essential route to the best cash crop, but, actually, our greatest problem, then we have to start re-imagining how our streets might look if we didn’t put the car first. Would we have valued our bus stations more?
We don’t have to look too far. This map shows how Berwick looked in 1852, before the car predominated. Ancient burgage plots are covered in adjacent buildings, making maximal use of the space available with no space wasted on vehicles. Today, those burgage plots with their multiplicity of individual tenants and businesses opening onto narrow vennels and lanes have been replaced by aggregated plots that serve only a single purpose; medium to large scale retail. Amongst the things we have lost to the curse of over-specialization is the idea of artisan retail, of the maker who produces goods in their workshop then sells them to anyone who pops by.
I don’t want to go full on eco-warrior about this; there was much about how retail was developed in the 70s and 80s that made sense, and the ultimate arbiters, the customers, seemed to like the way in which retail was delivered. As customers often do, they didn’t even care if other people were excluded, so long as they enjoyed their individual experience. The loss of a bus station was seen as a minority concern. However, if this were a geography lesson, this would be the bit where the carefully coloured in map showing how every field was planted with potatoes would be replaced by a graph of the fall in potato production correlated to a graph of net migration from Ireland, even if we all acknowledge the need to have a quiet voice saying ‘It’s more complicated than that…’.
Stemming the migration of activity away from our town centres is a central part of the problem of place management in the here and now.If we are to re-imagine town centres and places without the car, we have to start imagining a world where multi modal journeys, and enabling a choice of modes, is an essential requirement of the infrastructure. So here’s my modest proposal. Let’s have a moratorium on the redevelopment of bus stations; let’s think about how we can re-develop them as inter-modal hubs, and as enablers of modal choice, not as windswept, uncared for, unloved spaces where bored teenagers gather on miserable evenings and potential passengers wonder why there isn’t a bus to their village until next Thursday. (Rurality sucks without a car, if you haven’t noticed…)
I may be at the risk of over-stressing the obvious, but for those places that no longer have bus stations, we may need to re-invent them, or something like them. Losing the ones we already have, in such circumstances, seems mistaken.
