Unlike so many global landmarks — the Sydney Opera House, say — Preston Bus Station is actually much bigger than it appears in the photos. A decade ago, the undulating brutalist rib was considered an archetype of the failure of Sixties urban planning, an avatar of a North in decline. Plans circulated to knock it down.
In recent years, though, Europe’s largest bus station has had the sandblasters round; the facade doesn’t exactly shimmer, but now it seems friendly. One side of the terminus has been pedestrianised. It has always been a great way to get out of Preston. Now, it might even be a great way to arrive.
“It’s about investing,” Matthew Brown gushes. “All it needed was someone to think long term.” The Leader of Preston City Council is a Labour man almost to the point of caricature: a lanky Lancastrian in a flat cap and thick British Racing Green workers’ shirt. Increasingly, he is also an unlikely Lenin to a new wave of global leftism. The stuff he’s doing here, not too far from the factories whence Friedrich Engels once minted his champagne kitty, has been profiled all over the world as “The Preston Model”.
Until their defeat, when Corbynites wanted to point to an economic policy, they would often wave towards Preston. John McDonnell was a frequent visitor. Funds had been earmarked, in the event of a 2019 Labour victory, to frank Prestonist policies across the country. More lately, yesterday’s man Ed Miliband devoted an entire chapter of his new book, Go Big: How To Fix Our World, to the town’s schemes. In an age of thinning possibilities, Preston seems to suggest somewhere that the Left can go.
From the brow of the hill, Brown points to a big hole in the centre of town, where a slew of brutalism has been torn down. Soon, it will rise again, as a cinema, owned by the council, and run by an independent contractor: the Preston model is based on keeping money in circulation in the town, rather than having it bleed back to some distant corporate HQ. The contracts for the old building’s demolition were won by local businesses.
But the problem with buying local is so obvious entire books have been written about it. The nation-state is inherently redistributive: that’s part of the bargain. The block grant that Preston receives from central government is funded through the dark satanic number mills of Canary Wharf. But once it arrives, they convert capitalism into socialism: a perfect economic cycle.
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