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any civic and public buildings are designed to send a message, but the UNISON building on London’s Euston road beats all comers as far as perception and
reality are concerned. Its 360-plus employees are making them- selves comfortable in a nine-storey building that could be the headquarters of an FTSE-listed company: a steel-framed build- ing complete with roof garden, portico and atrium. At the same time, general secretary Dave Prentiss is vowing that his 1.3 million public sector members will unleash strikes “on an unprece- dented scale” to protest against pension changes to pensions and job cuts. Regardless of the politics of the situation one hardly expects
such ultimatums to be issued from a tall, slender skyscraper. Rather a dark, dingy building full of dusty corridors, locked rooms and curly ham sandwiches, probably somewhere up north. As it happens, the building over the road that UNISON
moved out of answers to that description. It’s well known that every time a person walks past this 40-year-old, 10-storey pile of roughcast slab jutting from the streetscape like a rotten tree stump, a little part of them dies. While they are both in North- ish London rather than North Yorkshire, the Kings Cross loca- tion was retained because it was so well-suited to regional reps arriving by train from upcountry. According to Squire associate and project architect of the new
building, Michael Poots, the inside of the old building was even worse than the exterior. “It was so dark and dingy even we used to get depressed,” he
tells me. “There were spider plants everywhere. People could sit in their offices and not see another living soul all day.” That may have been because, at any one time, 120 of the staff
© Morley von Sternberg
were in the field. They were either “liaising” in the regions or working from home. Even when they were notionally present,
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