Preston bus station: a sublime choice for grade II listing

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/24/preston-bus-station-grade-ii-listing

Version 0 of 1.

Preston bus station, which only a few months ago was consigned for demolition by the local council, has just been granted what appears to be a total reprieve – a grade II listing. This is a spectacular victory for a conservation campaign for the sort of building that conservationists used to oppose bitterly.

Preston bus station is a brutalist building – brutalist as it was defined by architects in the 1950s and 1960s, before the word came to denote any offensive postwar building. Brutalism entailed simple, sublime forms built with a "truth to materials", in this case "béton brut", ie, unpainted, unadulterated concrete. Buildings like this have been gradually listed over the last 20 years, sometimes in the face of opposition or public distrust. This time, though, the public, inside and outside Preston, have been the building's champions: the station won a local newspaper poll for the best piece of architecture in Preston. Previously, popularity and architectural quality weren't nearly enough. English Heritage actually tried to list the bus station twice before, only to be refused by the relevant architecture minister (at that time, Margaret Hodge). How did they manage this time?

Central to the listing process is English Heritage, a quango started by the Department of the Environment in the early 1980s. English Heritage makes a recommendation for a building to be listed, and the minister only has to approve it; most of the time, they do. Of late, mostly during Hodge's tenure as minister, but also under her Tory successors John Penrose and Ed Vaizey, several buildings were refused despite English Heritage's recommendation, ranging from the neo-Georgian of Slough town hall to the hi-tech of Redcar library. In the most publicised cases, these were large, concrete, brutalist structures, and so the issue was presented as solely an architectural one – it was about drawing some sort of line in the sand to stop "concrete monstrosities" or "eyesores" from receiving statutory protection.

Birmingham central library was also recommended by English Heritage for listing more than once, and refused more than once. English Heritage considered John Madin's upturned ziggurat, a building proportioned according to the Golden Ratio and placed precisely in dialogue with the city's Victorian civic centre, to be the finest 20th-century building in Birmingham. It is unlikely that it was a specifically architectural disagreement that caused the government to refuse it protection, more the lobbying of Birmingham city council and the developers Argent, who were planning a speculative office block on the site. The council managed to get a certificate of immunity from listing, to make sure that English Heritage didn't try again.

Lobbyists have a role during the listing process, usually representing commercial interests – the decision on listing is not entirely a matter of architecture. Without the arguments of Birmingham council and Argent, Birmingham central library would now be a protected building, rather than an empty, soon-to-be-levelled shell. The same would be happening in Preston now were it not for the recession.

For most of the 2000s, Preston bus station and the area around it were to be knocked down to build Tithebarn, a "mall without walls" on the model of Liverpool One – ironically, designed by Building Design Partnership, the firm that designed the bus station three decades before. When its developers, Grosvenor and Lend Lease, pulled out in 2011, the interests that wanted the bus station out of the way had gone; in that context, the council's determination to demolish seemed like some bizarre act of fealty, especially as it had no real plans for the area.

Even listing, however, is no guarantee against destruction. Despite a major local campaign, the listed, neo-Tudor former Jessop hospital in Sheffield is being demolished, after the intervention of Eric Pickles gave Sheffield University carte blanche to destroy it, to make way for a new engineering building. This was widely thought to be a precedent, because the government was turning a blind eye to the demolition of listed buildings if there was a commercial, or rather "public", interest at stake. The new building would apparently have created 500 jobs, so it was ruled as being in the public interest. Preston's magnificent sweep of a bus station fully deserves its listing, and campaigners are right to celebrate – but perhaps it was lucky that this time, there were no vested interests in its way.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.