Heart and Souled

By DebsP

Having a wobble

I too am having a wobble this week.
Today the last transmission was broadcast from the home of the BBC World Service, Bush House.
I first slid through its huge doors age 17 wandering London looking for somewhere to study. You could sit in reception and flick round the dial and listen to the different languages beaming out. I was transfixed. Five years later through a quirk of fate I started my sound career there. I'd dropped my radio, it stuck on long wave, which carried the World Service when Radio Four went off air. As one of the few applicants who'd listened, I was posted off to Bush House and not its stuffier sister Broadcasting House where you had to wait for dead mens' shoes to so much as touch a fader.
Bush House was a prototype office block built in the 1920s with its various wings and courtyards being added over time. Radio studios were wedged in here, there and everywhere between its spacious elegant marble landings. The far less grand interconnecting corridors were impossible little rabbit warrens to the uninitiated. With the wings overlooking each other, it was like Rear Window on speed and many a beau you could 'bump into' by extrapolating their trajectory!
Before email and mobiles this constant criss-crossing of people meant things got effortlessly sorted, and every day was a buzz. The building made it that way.
I went back for one last dance there to a management role some years later. My passion I had left in the studio. I'm relieved I didn't have to walk out of there today: I would have to have been dragged. So much of my life and so much of my happiness was there.

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