See the end of the world unfold at Preston bus station performance

Transport interchanges are usually places of constant coming and going, but an innovative literary event invites visitors to hang around Preston bus station for an evening, taking them on a promenade tour of one of the city’s most prominent buildings. The bus station, which was built in the Brutalist style in the late-1960s, has attracted much debate in recent years between those who want to pull it down and fans of 20th Century architecture who would like to see it remain part of the city’s skyline. Love it or hate it, the building will provide a unique venue for an evening of storytelling and performance created especially to complement the space, dubbed Journey to the End of the World. Tyneside’s Noize Choir will highlight the acoustics of the building in a ten-minute experimental ‘human-voice-as-instrument’ piece, and elsewhere in the bus station visitors will encounter poetry by Manchester poet Shamshad Khan and new live prose from Preston/Manchester author David Hartley. Leading visitors from one performance to the next, meanwhile, will be members of local grime and drum n’ bass MC collective Shotta TV. The evening culminates in the bus station cafe, where London-based writer Phil Ormrod’s new work ‘An Hour Before the End of the World’ will imagine two old people in the cafe, an hour away from the end of the world, seeing apocalyptic events unfold.

Sat 23 Mar, Preston Bus Station, Tithebarn Street, PR1 1YT, 6.30pm & 8.30pm, £7/£5/£4, blogpreston.co.uk