THE Star has recently reported how the St Helens Bus Station will soon be demolished to make way for what the council is calling a "multi-modal transport interchange" – although I've a feeling St Helens folk will still call it a bus station!
As always with any new development, it's interesting to look back on its history and the first striking fact is how short-lived the present buildings have been.
The Bickerstaffe Street bus station has served the St Helens public for less than thirty years and it was in the planning stage for a far longer time than it has been in use.
The official opening took place on February 1, 1996 after being in partial operation for some months.
The ceremony was officiated by the then Mayor of St Helens, Councillor Keith Deakin, and Merseytravel's vice-chairman, Hugh Lloyd.
The newspaper reports don't indicate whether any ribbons were cut. But hundreds of bright yellow balloons were released and as they soared off into the air musicians from the Harmony Hounds trad-jazz group gave the launch a swinging send off.
The St Helens Star at the time dubbed the £2 million, 9-bay station a "showpiece" and the St Helens Reporter called the facilities "state-of-the-art".
Closed circuit TV, good lighting, a public address system, information screens, toilets, tactile paving for sight-impaired travellers and an information centre don't seem all that remarkable today.
But they were quite impressive for the ‘90s and the Chief Executive of Merseytravel, Roy Swainson, said at the opening of what was the town's first bus station: "This is a high quality station of which we should all be justifiably proud. It is part of a new generation of bus stations and not what people have been used to in the past."
But it had been an awful long time in coming. Motor buses had first been run in St Helens in 1916 to connect the town with the expanding mining district of Sutton Manor.
Services were slowly expanded – although for a long time trams and then trolley buses ruled the roost on the town's roads.
Immediately after WW2 plans were drawn up to create the first bus station in St Helens on land that in 1922 had been designated the town's first car park.
That was at the junction of Bickerstaffe Street and Hardshaw Street where Century House now stands.
But nothing happened and the nearby Victoria Square became the de facto station with bus shelters dotted all around.
Their roofs also served as vantage points for the adventurous when royalty visited the Town Hall!
In 1957 the council stated that when trolleybuses stopped running in St Helens later that year, it was hoped the cash could be found to pay for a combined bus station / garage costing £200,000. But in the end only the garage was built and that opened on Jackson Street in 1964.
It was not until the late 1960s that a dedicated bus station was back on the council's agenda, although with many other town centre improvements in the pipeline finding the necessary cash remained problematic.
And there was also the question of its location – although the decision by Greenall Whitley to close its Hall Street brewery solved that conundrum.
Four acres of land in the centre of town became available and the council snapped it up for £1 million – although some stores fronting Church Street, such as Woolworths, later took some to expand their own operations.
In September 1974 the council's Planning Committee approved in principle the creation of the bus station on part of the brewery's site.
But it took a further twenty years before the principle could be turned into reality as a joint project between St Helens Council and Merseytravel, with some additional funding from the EU.
In today's money its £2 million cost equates to around £22m – which, incidentally, is exactly the same figure that the new "multi-modal transport interchange" is budgeted as costing.
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