Saturday, July 14, 2012

It's taken a while....

Now the tears have dried, it's probably worth reminding people that the BBC have been trying to get out of Bush House since the 1970s. There was a study which considered roofing over the car park and refurbishing, but the problem for all broadcasters is always how on earth you keep on air when builders need to stop major services and gut huge areas; a move to new premises is almost inevitable. In the eighties, there was a range of feasibility studies, and sites as far north from Bush's beloved Waterloo station as King's Cross were considered. This all stopped when John Birt arrived at Auntie in 1987; his quest for a bi-media news palace took precedence. There had also been a slow realisation at Bush from the arrival of Thatcher that the Foreign Office was increasing unlikely to cough up for a capital project of the scale the Bush builders had contemplated.

Birt really didn't notice Bush's existence at first, and it took him until 1998 to get round to control, ousting Sam Younger and installing Mark Byford in the 3rd floor of Centre Block to do his bidding. At that time, the World Service boasted 2,500 employees. From that moment, the English newsroom and news programmes were transferred to the management control of "BBC News".

So, fourteen years later, with Birt and Byford gone, BBC News, national and international, is coming together on one site, at the redeveloped Broadcasting House. Somebody else can tell me how many of those 2,500 posts remain.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Other people who read this.......