Lower Mosley Street Bus Station

MANCHESTER’S NEW MOTOR BUS STATION -  The station is everything that its name suggests, doing for bus passengers what the railway station does for train passengers. It provides convenient inquiry and booking office facilities for example. It provides spacious and comfortable waiting rooms, and also seats on the outside "platforms”. It provides cloakrooms and left luggage offices. Very fully and handsomely too, it provides toilets and sanitary quarters. As the scheme is developed to its full, there will be little kiosks for the sale of newspapers, tobacco, refreshments and such like. No trouble or expense has been spared to make the station efficient and pleasing, for the proprietors, Omnibus Stations Limited, have had the full support and co-operation of the various bus companies which run their services to and from the station. It was a very brilliant idea on their part as has appeared since, to secure as architect Lieutenant-Colonel George Westcott, for he is now none other than the Lord Mayor of Manchester, and he can point with full confidence to the new structure as a practical example of those ideals of city architecture which he has so consistently advocated.

Dignity, neatness and brightness, qualities which the city streets so urgently need, are all exemplified in this simple construction. The facing material is white terra-cotta which can be washed to get rid of smoke deposits. The main building, a single storey structure, relies on good proportion and good grouping for its effect. There are no loose ends and no fussy ornamentations. The windows, metal frame in simple geometrical design, emphasise the quiet efficiency of the whole design. Both facades of the building, the one fronting Lower Mosley-street and the other overlooking the bus yard, have received equal attention. The yard itself is spacious enough to hold fifty buses at once on its concrete surface, and its outlets give on to the two side streets. At the farther side of the yard is a long Aplatform” covered in real railway station style with a sloping slated roof. A clock is a conspicuous feature here and all buses work to its dictation.

The main building of the station - which incidentally occupies the block next to Lower Mosley-street Schools and is opposite Central Station - provides on the street frontage a spacious booking office. The windows have wooden fittings for displaying announcements. All the other features open on to the yard side. There is a very large waiting room, with centre table and seats round the walls, simply fitted out but quite light and cosy, a useful feature being the wood-block flooring. From it open out the left-luggage office counters. A door mid-way between the waiting room and the booking office leads to the upper floor, where there are two very spacious rooms, not yet in occupation. The end section of the building is the block containing the toilet and sanitary conveniences, excellently carried out with white tiled walls, fancy tiled floors and glass roof. The corner of the site is rounded off with an ornamental terra-cotta wall. The bus yard, it may be added, has tall electric standards for illumination at night.