PRESTON'S central bus station and its multi-storey car-park, is the key to the town centre's future. Would Preston have done as well in the past 30-years without it?

The recent threats to its future, have made the public realise this magnificent building has been badly neglected over the past three decades.

The bus station is more a victim of bad management, than bad design. If its principal architect, Keith Ingham, were alive today, he would be enthusiastically working to demonstrate how this substantive building, could be brought into 21st century use.

In the future, this environmentally good, appropriate scale building, can have an important part to play as the public transport hub of town centre life as a local, regional and national bus transport interchange including, the ability to cope with the 10ft longer Euro buses.

It should be run like a motorway service area for bus and coach services. Open 24-hours a day, seven-days-a-week, to provide an arrival and departure point where travellers could find a welcome.

Developed to provide the range of services that public transport passengers have a right to expect in today's world. It needs to be a place where people will choose to spend time and money, as they do in airport terminals.

Managed properly, the bus station and its multi-storey car-park, could be a viable business in its own right, producing profits to help keep rates down.

Linked from the eastern side of the passenger concourse by a surface level shopping mall through to existing and new town centre developments, it could provide an exciting and valuable range of facilities.

It could provide a vital 24-hour centre for Preston, with cafeteria, coffee houses, bistros, bars, mini cinema and a wide range of shopping, including a 24-hour convenience store and chemist. It could be the one place, where one could guarantee to find a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, a policeman a true 24-hour centre for Preston.

One would like to believe, that in the future, visitors to Preston, would not only be impressed by the bus station's architecture, but even more impressed by the service that visitors received within the building.

It is not that it is fundamentally wrong, it is the way later developments have not been integrated into it, in the way the Guildhall has, that has caused what are now cited as problems.

The opportunity now exists to solve those problems, by integrating the bus station into all weather links to new developments, and to improve and enhance the massive investment already made.

Ray Johnson, Ribbleton, Preston.