Nostalgia

The BBC has sold its rather tired Woodlands site, just to the north of the A40 flyover of Wood Lane, to Imperial College.

I spent nearly two years working out of A100 Woodlands in the early nineties, with colleagues Mike Scarlett and Dick Stibbons, writing design briefs for a never-to-be-built news centre on the White City site. We had to be at Woodlands to be under the beady eye of Tim Manning, project manager from Planning and Installation Department (TV) who thought he was in charge; and Peter Jeffree, from the BBC's Architectural and Civil Engineering Department, who was probably in charge because he held the biggest budget.

Mike and Dick loved computers and other toys. They would compete against the clock to install additional memory boards. We had an Supercalc accommodation schedule so large and complicated (for those days) that if you hit the recalculate button just before lunch, there was no point coming back for two hours. One day I said we could do with some more professional-looking communications; the next day all our PCs had the then pioneering (and expensive) Quark Express installed. At one stage, Dick was buying so much stuff his next purchase became obvious - our own trolley to get the stuff in from the delivery bay.