The bus station in Conway Street in Hove is to close, marking the end of an era dating from the 19th century.
Brighton and Hove Buses plans to move to the premises occupied by The Argus newspaper in Crowhurst Road on the industrial estate opposite the Hollingbury Asda.
Staff at The Argus, the daily newspaper for Brighton and Hove and the wider Sussex area, will remain in the building.
But with staff numbers falling over the past four years, the newspaper staff need much less room. The rationalisation is expected to save money for the paper’s operating company Newsquest and its American parent company Gannett.
Property company Matsim has been putting together a number of sites between Ellen Street and the railway line with the Conway Street bus depot buildings bringing a critical mass.
And any development there is expected to consoder links with the other side of the tracks – between the railway line and the junction of Sackville Road and Old Shoreham Road and including Newtown Road.
A bus depot has been on the Conway Street site since at least 1884 when the buses were horse-drawn.
The Hove Station area is earmarked as having the capacity for 575 houses and flats in the latest draft version the City Plan.
The plan – a 20-year blueprint for Brighton and Hove – said that the site was suitable for securing long-term regeneration opportunities.
I have lobbied persistently over many years for exactly this – first when the Local Plan was in preparation and ever since. The potential is fantastic.
In a recent featured, headlined, letter in the Argus, I called for a re-siting of the King Alfred leisure centre away from the seafront and into the Newtown Road/Hove Station area where access from trains, buses and taxis would make using it much more widely and easily available.
Hove Station is a terrific transport hub and a lot of car use could be chopped away by appropriate redevelopment of this area (which is also a tall building node)and siting things like a new leisure centre there.
There is a chance here to reverse the appalling destruction of this area from 1960-1970 and beyond when streets and streets of housing, a huge school (like Connaught), businesses and loads of shops were just swept away. The Cliftonville Inn closed and boarded up the back entrance to its pub by Hove Station and the bleakest of cheaply thrown up office/light industrial buildings went up in Conway Street as well as the good quality Clarendon and Ellen blocks of flats.
This is a disaster for the drivers such as my daughter. Many of them travel into work by train from the west, or live in west Brighton and who chose to work at that garage because it’s nearest to home and next to Hove station.
Getting buses from west and/or central Brighton will be too time consuming and when drivers start early or finish late they will not be able to a catch a bus at all. This means they will be forced to buy cars, so there will be more cars on the road, caused by the public transport company, who needless to say will not provide parking for all the extra cars needed by staff to get to work.
The result will be a shortage of drivers who will be better off working for Stagecoach who pay less, but there will be no transport cost in getting to work which counterbalances the drop in wages, not to mention the time saved in getting to and from Hollingbury from Shoreham and beyond.
Relocating the bus garage from a central location to the outskirts of the city makes no logistical sense. Have the council and bus company been paid off by the property developers? That is the only explanation that makes sense to me. The bus service in Hove will definetely suffer as a result of this.
As a resident of Conway St I will be sad to see the Bus garage go – if the council really want to improve the area around Hove station they should start with the closing the coal depot which continues to cover the whole area in coal dust and do something about the shoddy office buildings in Conway St.
Dear councillor
Once again I must congratulate Brighton and hove council on their amazing ability to convince the people they represent, and who’s employment you are in,namely the people who live in Brighton and hove, that the council are putting them first and taking the quality of life into account, and not just making it possible for Mr French and his associates to increase his personal wealth probably by several millions, but also pander to the most self serving ,self righteous greedy and self indulgent members of the human race namely architects and property developers. Many examples of concrete boxes stacked one on top off the other have have been built only to be demolished after a few years ie within my life time which is testimony to the build quality and quality of life they provided. Architects seamed to have discovered the art of making money out of nothing by building this with a short life span so they can redeveloped the same space over and over again.
This development. Will block out a vast section of the sun light for those who LIve closest to them and create a feeling of oppression and over crowdedness,over looked and depressing site, it’s an already an industrial site may be it should be given a new lease of life as small industrial units and studio type units where people could live above their business, at a reasonable hight, no more than three story’s.
Hears hopping you see the Light and put the people first.
Master H murray
The council does not own the land to be redeveloped, MATSIM do; and architects can be rightly pilloried as a generality for putting their names to ugly boxes.
The reality, however, is that the area to be redeveloped has been a designated Tall Building Node for nearly 10 years: council policy through Labour, Conservative and Green Administrations.
The comment about coal dust is very important. In the Waste Local Plan and in the City Plan, that whole north side of the tracks from its Sackville Road edge over to Hove Station is allocated in policy documents for a Waste Transfer Management station. I hope Erich put in a City Plan consultation response about that. What do you want there instead?
To get a good development with designs for the buildings that respect the residents to the north of the railway lines is going to require more than good architecture. It will require the will of the developer to do the right thing and not just lowest common denominator rubbish that squeezes the area for profit till it implodes.
It will be the responsibility of the planners and residents responding responsibly (after really studying the application when it arrives)to decide outcome. Demolition and newbuild are a few years away yet.