The 'other' Station

No doubt lovers of canals stare in horror at railway engines, who to the sound of steam whistles and the smell of smoke, steam and hot oil, destroyed the waterways as Britain's industrial arteries. To the canal boat-men, the peaceful, gentle mode of transport was smashed by the snorting efficiencies of railway mania.

Recently I indulged in a fit of eulogising over Perth station and received an e-mail (and a comment) from Vlad, suggesting that I similarly reflect on Perth's 'other' station, that for buses. I was in that part of town yesterday and went for snoop to see what I could find. The results were spectacularly depressing.

While the railway station might be a festival of nostalgia and crumbling glory, the bus station is an orgy of functional ugliness. When William Tite designed the railway station he did so as an act of opulent grandeur, of railway company egotism, in a hierarchical age when wages were low and company and civic ego's were high. The (long forgotten) draughtsman who put sorry pen to sorry paper to design the bus station on the other hand, was given but one brief, to make it cheap. The building, (1960s technology, with Lego aesthetics) is a place devoid of charm or interest, a sorry place that one longs to leave. Recently they found a corpse here in Perth Bus Station - a grizzly sordid tale made worse by the obvious black humour which darkly mumbles in response that this place is quite unsuitable for the living. In fact the living do not spend long here, but rush on their way to a more humane environment, scuttling from buses to shops, or onto buses that depart for Aberdeen, Inverness, Manchester, London and a list of destination that once would have been the pride of the railway station a stone's throw away.

The end wall of the bus station, with its awful lettering - a sight that cannot have failed to not inspire thousands of people over three decades.

Now I am not saying that the Trekkers cafe at the railway station is anything to write home about. Its coffee is OK, its ice-creams for kids in the summer are the bog-standard stuff, but the lamentably punning Bus 'y' bite (geddit!?) at the bus station makes Trekkers look like The Gleneagles Hotel. I was thinking of braving my way into the place in order to make a more informed comment on the culinary offerings, but was beaten back by the smell, and the ghastly sense that grease was congealing in the air all around me. The Gulag Cafe anyone? .. no thanks.

Buses are cheap, buses are efficient, buses represent a lovely egalitarianism, but for all this they are so graceless, so humourless, so without the sense of poetry or romance that oozes from the pores of Perth's grand railway station. Despite the cheap-tickets, the choice of destinations and the reliability of them, I still find no pleasure in the experience. Neither waiting for a bus, nor travelling on one is as consistently satisfying as watching the view as one pulls out of Perth Railway station from a train. I have spent many hours on buses, even long-distance on the celebrated Greyhounds across the States, but still the overriding impression they leave is of dissatisfaction. Now Perth Bus Station is not as bad as New York's Greyhound bus terminal, which is an underground valhalla from the third circle of Dante's nightmares; but it still is a blot on Perth's architectural map. Bus stations are very empty, devoid, without, well anything really.

I am tempted to write something parodying Betjeman (another eulogiser of the train) and say, "Come friendly bombs and fall on Perth, pummel the bus station for all your worth". But even as I do so, I am aware that I sound like the canal-lovers who once so hated the march of the parallel lines across the land, which robbed them of the tranquility of their dreamy canals and brought noise, efficiency and sordid innovations like Greenwich Mean Time into their lives. I know that that is how I sound. However, this is the view from Perth Bus Station, and it is not pleasing, and has few redeeming elements. The difference between the two can be summarised by the place of litter blowing across their respective tarmac aprons. At the train station the litter looks all wrong, the history, the grandeur and the scale of the place all protest that litter should have no place here! Yet at the bus station the litter looks appropriate, entirely in keeping with the tawdry building, the miserable architecture, the rotten materials, the shoe-box lines of both buildings and buses. They couldn't be bothered to build something worth looking at, so litter billowing through it shows that the public value it every bit as much the architect who once wretchedly signed his name to the plans. Sir William Tite, just turns in his grave.