What a Waste!

This is what I saw on 'The Causeway' from Egham to Staines;

It used to be an office complex - a typical anonymous, boring office where people worked.

Not any more;

It wasn't beautiful and it certainly didn't have any architectural  merit, so I don't suppose anyone would have objected to it's destruction.

This was what it looked like a few days ago;

And this is today.......if you want to catch it you'd better hurry.

Nearly gone;

It's not so easy to date but in the ruins you can see relatively modern cabling, air-conditioning and it had a very silly name; 'Tamesis'. I would guess that puts it in the 1995 to 2005 bracket.

No one will miss it.

The background story is that a major technology company rented the building from a property company and wanted to move to a prestige office headquarters.

The owners didn't want to lose a good tenant and so they agreed to pull down a perfectly good building and build a newer bigger and better one on the site.

That's a problem because there's no reason to do it, except that when I looked up the property market in the Thames Valley I learnt that commercial property is getting hard to let after a few good years.

The property company didn't want to lose a good tenant and get stuck with an empty building.

When we drove through Slough, I spotted one demolished office and another in the process of coming down, all on one road opposite the Police Station.

These are buildings that replaced previous offices that were built in the 1970's and were never let out at all; they were knocked down because they were out of date before they could find tenants.

Apart from being crazynomics, this is very wasteful. Even if the steel and copper is recycled, the concrete, bricks and all the rest is most likely to end up in a hole in the ground.

Unfortunately, the concrete, clay, gypsum and rocks that went into the building in the first place came out of some different and very ugly holes in the ground, smack in the middle of the countryside.

It also took a lot of oil to process, transport and manufacture all the products that go into a building.

Think of it as a great big bonfire, burning up our grandchildren's planet.

Or to put it another way, here is part of Ian Dury's 'What a Waste';


I could be a lawyer with stratagems and ruses
I could be a doctor with poultices and bruises
I could be a writer with a growing reputation
I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station

What a waste! What a waste!
What a waste! What a waste!

I could be the catalyst that sparks the revolution
I could be an inmate in a long-term institution
I could lead to wide extremes, I could do or die
I could yawn and be withdrawn and watch them gullify

What a waste! What a waste!
What a waste! What a waste!

Neil Harris
(a don't stop till you drop production)

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