55 Broadway to be sold

Its listed isn't it, so very little can be done to alter its general appearance. Isn't a lot of the place underused now anyway? It seems its the St Pancras of the Underground!

Oh what a waste after all the money that has been spent upon it over the years. Of course it won't be cheap shifting what is left to somewhere else. Where will the BTP go to one wonders and the NCC/NOC or whatever it's called this week and will the MICC be devolved into it's component parts at separate locations? Who will foot the bill, the taxpayer or the fare payer? LT used to spend £millions relocating offices or floors in offices, cycling every department into a new one every few years or so to keep useful in house staff in work and contributing to the Treasury purse in income taxes but one has to wonder at what justification there is now when all those 'in house' jobs were privatised/contracted out from the 1980s onward.

LU to Palestra?

BTP to Camden Town?

One might have thought that 55 would be sacrosanct and preserved as a working premises for decades more. Unfortunately it seems that nothing lasts forever especially with accountants ruling the roost. Over the years LT/LU has occupied properties all over the capital, some owned, some rented, and spent fortunes only to let them go, one thinks of Osnaberg Street, Newman Street, Southampton Row, Telstar House, 10A Wood Lane, 15/17 Long Acre and others. Departments were also housed in spare office space above stations, some still are of course but places such as Lambeth North, Holloway Road, Stamford Brook railway arches, South Kensington (other than Pelham Street offices), Baker Street and Kennington come to mind. Of course there is still much at Baker Street but there was always a lot of unused office space too.
Devolution to lines in the 1990s spawned lots of new buildings for operational use.
Of course LUL Property was hived off to a private company under a PFI IIRC and no doubt like all the other very expensive sell offs LUL is probably the loser.
I certainly don't see how it is justifiable to keep on spending public money in times of austerity and yet there do not seem to be any checks and balances to keep fares and subsidies to affordable levels for the average commuter who has been paying through the nose for flawed service for several years now. If LUL was an actual business having to survive on its investments and cash takings I doubt it would be a going concern for long. As it is it can apparently take advantage again and again hiking fares above inflation and looking for a bigger annual subsidy from London's council tax payers! In many ways LUL still operates as LT and other once nationalised companies all did, money no object, indeed despite all the hype about part privatisation it has never really been anything else!

55 Broadway is a grade 1 listed building. No chance of it being knocked down.

LU/ TfL already own enough buildings and IF a new building was being discussed then the public should be asking questions.

I'm guessing that when service control leave Baker Street and with the empty BTP offices there is more than enough space their alone to house the LU only services?

But do they own them or have they sold them off and leased them back? I'm not au fait with the details of the LUL Property PFI so I don't know if all the offices buildings were lumped in with the houses, flats, shop units and other property.

The suggestion is that certain operational LU roles in 55 Broadway will transfer to Palestra House, Southwark; to be sited alongside London Buses Centrecomm, London Streets, Met Police TOCU etc; like battery hens in a big open plan office. All the eggs in one basket it seems. The driving force for all this appears to be a certain LU senior manager, recently returned, who apparently has a desire to work in a "modern office building".

Operational efficiencies... Faster to get yer coffee?

I can't see the benefit. If you need to communicate with someone else, you do it by telephone or email, otherwise it's a simple matter of a quick walk to the right part of the building. The cruciform arrangement of 55B means one person is never more than a couple of minutes from everyone else.

It's been a while, but I *think* only floors 1 to 7 are used as office space, plus a restaurant and roof garden on the top floor.

55B may lack some of the features of modern offices, but it is nonetheless a highly decent building to work in.

Interestingly I cannot find any reference to the 'LT Property' PFI though I recall that 'LT Property' was definitely outsourced to a property management company. Perhaps that deal was done and dusted some time ago because modern references all point to TfL Property based on the 7th floor at Palestra ! When I think about it the LT Property outsourcing was long ago perhaps as long ago as the late 1980s when Power was outsouced to Seeboard and when data networks was outsourced to a, IIRC, subsidiary of ICL.

So I guess all 'LT Property' is now in the hands of TfL except that occupied and managed by partner organisations.

From a financial perspective, the sale of 55B makes perfect sense. Running a listed building is not cheap at the best of times, running such an iconic one means that English Heritage are all over you if you need to do anything. Couple this with the business rates and you've got a huge bill before you've done anything.

Capital asset value aside, I would venture that by relocating those that remain in the building to vacant space in other sites or to a single site outside of Z1, savings would be realised in 3-5 years against the running cost of 55B - maybe even sooner.

Money from the sale should (IMO) be 100% put into upgrade and maintenance of the core infrastructure - not overheads or other "non-operational" areas.

Keeping EH happy doesn't make running an old building any cheaper though.

If they can get a lump of cash and save costs in the long term - why not do so?