Stockwell Garage

Stockwell Garage

Routemaster RM1305 in Stockwell Garage

Stockwell Garage is a large bus garage, coded "SW" by London Transport, in Stockwell, London. It was designed by Adie, Button and Partners, with the engineer A E Beer, and was opened in 1952.

On a cursory view of the exterior, it is typical of much of the architecture built in the post war reconstruction period in London around the Festival of Britain. There was a steel shortage at the time, so concrete was used for the roof structure instead of the steel girder structure which had previously been the norm.

At Stockwell the opportunity was taken to create a bravura piece of reinforced concrete design. The 393 ft (120 m) long roof structure is supported by ten very shallow "two-hinged" arched ribs. Each is 7 ft (2.1 m) deep at the centre of the arch, 10 ft 6 in (3.20 m) at the end, and spans 194 ft (59 m) Cantilevered barrel vaults between, topped by large skylights, span the 42 ft (13 m) between each pair of ribs. The vaults are crossed by smaller ribs to prevent torsion. Seen from the outside, the main arches are visible as outward-leaning buttresses, with a segmental curve to each bay forming a flowing roof line.

The garage provides 73,350 sq ft (6,814 m²) of unobstructed parking space and could originally house 200 buses. At the time of construction it was the largest unsupported area under one roof in Europe.

Since 1988 the garage has been a Grade II* listed building reflecting its importance in post-war architectural and engineering history.

Bus Number Routes

There are a few bus number routes in the Stockwell Bus Garage. These are some of them:

345 from Peckham to South Kensington

333 from Elephant & Castle to Tooting Broadway

References

• Images of England

External links

• London´s most important building