Nathan Quainoo

‘You talk about the end of the world – we are worried about the end of the month.’

The history of London Transport’s (LT) bus garages chart a course through the 20th century and the making of modern Britain, from colonial to postcolonial state. SUPPORTS: In Pursuit of a Common Wealth is a critical examination and response to the typology of the bus garage as one of fostering community endeavour and resilience against the nation’s regimes of systematic exclusion. The project approaches the workings of complex spaces of multi-culture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value. Examining how the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multi-culture are at best unprotected and at worst are unrecognised, unrecorded and receive a lack of representation in general discourse. Not aiming to solve an issue through the lens of architecture, however, using it as a tool to legitimise a community. 

Within the discourse relating to climate breakdown very little attention is given to the dimensions that caused our current global predicament. To scrutinise the extractive economy is to also take into account the history of colonialism and its current neocolonial repercussions. Beginning in 1948, there has been a relationship between immigrants from the global south and London’s buses. The changing ethnic composition of inner London is the most significant sociological change the city has seen in the past half-century, and LT garages in many ways served as a witness to this, as varying migrant and class groups formed support networks of services centred around unionised and secure work. This investigation aims to make the case that these ‘banal’ expressions of everyday culture are highly political. Challenging the blindspots of the climate movement and also the nationalist stereotype that working classes only exist as socially conservative caucasians in the northern heartlands of Britain. 

This project presents itself as a multi-programme building, bringing spatial focus to an under-represented neighbourhood and community, through labour and education. Positioning itself to speculate on varying scales of socialist intervention, whether it be the moments of joy due to playing a game of dominos during a lunch break or daily rituals which occur during the working day. To the small moments wonder such the 228 arriving at the depot as a night class takes place or a youth scores a hoop in the youth club, while his mother watches from below during her six-hour cleaning shift within the bus garage. Using the layering of architectural strategies such as urban courts, frame and infill and interwoven programming to not only tell a story but also to challenge the viewer to discover the textures and the multiplicities of varying narratives, particularly the silences within the dominant narrative.