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Submitted by Richard Layne
Thu Aug 24, 2000

The AMOLAD Bus Station

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Last week's Sunday Times has an interesting article about a new bus station that's just been built in Walsall.

The Sunday Times article seems to be no longer available

It starts:
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Walsall has lifted the humble bus station to heavenly heights, says Hugh Pearman.

When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were making their fantastical 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, there was one consequence they could not possibly have foreseen. Half a century later, a bunch of young architects would watch the film, be bowled over by its surreal depiction of heaven as a modernist paradise, gaze on each other with a wild surmise and declare: "Let's design a bus station that looks just like that."
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There's a photo with the article, and it really does look like Heaven
(cue American airmen: "Bus stations were never like this". "Mine was!")

It doesn't say whether the place is staffed entirely by Kathleen Byron lookalikes with massive hair, or if all the conductors are extremely camp Frenchmen.

     Richard

See also later article

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