Walsall Bus Station

The project is composed of three elements: the main roof which covers 11 bus stands, a concourse building and a smaller canopy with another three stands.

The design grew out of the observation that buses travel in curves rather than right angles. The station’s open sides allow people to enter and leave from all directions. Additionally, the project opened up an adjacent public square, framed by the existing bank and church.

The large oval roof demanded a high degree of engineering input – it is 45m wide, resting on 12 irregularly spaced steel tree-like columns. It has 17 small oculi and ten large cowls cast into it to let in daylight and frame the sky. At night, uplighters on the columns shine on to the reflective painted underside of the roof. The hollow columns take rainwater and services, so the soffit is clean, apart from the tripartite column heads.

Artists Tanya Kovats and Alex Hartley were appointed to rework the glass screens between the bus bays with large opaque circles, both to meet the building regulation condition that glass should not be entirely transparent and to reflect the giant oculi in the roof.