The Great White Elephant of the Euston Road

 

Just when you thought it might stop here is yet another extract from my memoirs (which you can purchase at https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/an-obscure-footnote-in-trade-union-history). This concerns the UNISON Centre, a large erection on the Euston Road;

“The first half of my time on the UNISON NEC was (literally) overshadowed by the construction of the “New UNISON Centre” in the Euston Road. The decision to build the new headquarters building had been taken during my first term on the NEC, and I had voted to support the decision (indeed I think everyone voted in favour, although my fellow London NEC member, Fiona Monkman, a qualified architect, was not - as I recall - in the room when the vote was taken, and so escapes responsibility for the decision).

I was wrong to vote as I did. We all were.

The NEC was sold the decision on the basis that - although it would have been marginally cheaper to have refurbished the old NALGO headquarters in Mabledon Place - once the cost of having to relocate all the staff twice, rather than just once was taken into account it was a better deal to build the new headquarters. Over the following years the NEC would receive periodic reports of the gradual progress in implementing the decision, the acquisition of the site of the former Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) hospital (and the agreement to include in the site a museum commemorating that association), obtaining planning permission from Camden Council and - in 2010 - accepting the Finance Committee recommendation to retain the freehold of Mabledon Place, selling a lease in order to repay the loan which had been taken out from the Co-op Bank to finance the building.

UNISON officially moved into the building in 2011 and it was an improvement as a workplace on Mabledon Place. The ground floor included a cafeteria and a large atrium with walkways between the refurbished EGA Hospital building and the new offices above. The new building went up much higher, to a ninth floor Conference centre above an eighth floor “activist suite” including working space for members of the NEC and other national committees.

However, the building was much larger than we really needed, and the floors between the offices on the fourth floor and the (little used) activist suite on the eighth floor were kept empty for several years, a state of affairs about which I made a bit of a fuss as time went by (not least because I thought - and still think - that it is daft that UNISON pays rent of the first floor of Congress House to accommodate the staff of its Greater London Region when there has, for a decade now, been more than enough space at the UNISON Centre to make room for the Regional staff).

Eventually the empty floors were turned over to (occasional) use as training/meeting rooms, but the cost to the Union of the income foregone by not making use of expensive central London workplace accommodation over such a long period has never been calculated by UNISON (because it wouldn’t support the case against increased funding for branches which the Centre has consistently tried to make). As remote working and working from home become ever more common, the UNISON Centre will become ever more obviously an expensive white elephant.”