Bang goes that idea
So elsewhere I'd commented on turning the old Job Centre into a Police Station. Well the rumour mill is alive with talk that it's going to be a restaurant instead with flats above it. A rumour partly confirmed by the big board set high on the wall advertising 1 and 2 bedroom flats and totally confirmed by the planning permission application. Curious that the applicants are listed as the owners, did Wyre Forest rent the property from them or sell it after they moved out? Also nice to note that Rhys-Davies Properties Ltd is, according to their website
a niche developer of distinctive luxury homesSo looks like we'll be getting some good affordable housing then. Then again the Press section of the site hasn't had any additions since 2005 and the Commercial Development section is still being updated so maybe their focus has changed.
The supporting documentation has a cracker of a quote
inner town dwellings gain popularity with younger persons who want to be less reliant on personal transportAround here? So tie that with the "luxury homes" and they're aiming at young, rich people; who don't want to own a car, who wouldn't mind living above a restaurant, within spitting distance of four/five pubs, and who if they want to travel any sort of distance need to rely on the vagaries of the bus and out-of-town railway. Yeah I can't go into town without bumping into those type of people.
The next bit of supporting documentation is a masterpiece of 'things not said'. Read carefully
The Secondary Shopping Area, in which the application site is located, contains a range of smaller shops, including florists, hairdressers, gift shops, clothing boutiques, [...] solicitors, dentists and doctors.Anyone agree that's a good overall statement of Bridge Street? Oops missed the amusement arcades, the cafes, the chippies and the other take-away places. Well why would you mention businesses like that for? What were they wanting to build here.. oh that's right a restaurant.
Well at least you can park easily. Well okay not any of the roads, but there's a no restriction car-park in New Street after 6.30pm and that'll hold oo what 6 cars? Still there's Raven Street and the Severn Meadow car-parks with again no restriction after 6.30pm that's not too bad. Sure they're next to the meadows, but there's CCTV so if your car does get smashed in they get the cops around in at least an hour or so, if they spotted it.
2.5 referring to the flats apparently they're within range of employment opportunities. Yep check who they're aiming at and there are plenty of solictors, doctors etc. or of course you could work in the new restaurant.
Oh apparently New Street is wide enough to cope with delivery vans. Oops my mistake New Street is "sufficiently wide for deliveries to be safely made outside the premises" it'll just restrict it to one lane, but hey it'll be "safe".
Okay it might sound like I'm against all this, I'm not. Other then the Indian and the cafe/take-aways we don't have a real sit-down restaurant. I'm just concerned that we're going to be building yet more house/flats that won't be bought by locals. That the owners will want to park their cars in New Street and worse yet after the pubs empty and the windows get smashed for the umpteenth time it'll all get vacated and boarded-up again.
Off-thread apparently they've put in half the bowl on the skate-park and other structures are dotted around. Could it be finished by the week-end? If so then it will only have taken them 5 weeks, sorry Dan how long did you say it took to build a McDonalds? ;-)
Oh and a nod to Wyre Forest Planning for not OCRing the documents making them uncopyable and unindexable. I understand why, it's just bloody annoying.
5 comments:
I know that "younger persons who want to be less reliant on personal transport" exist, being one of them. I live not in the centre of town but on the outskirts, outside the region where student demand means you can pay ~£600pcm for essentially a bedsit, but not far enough out to be with the middle-aged families in the surrounding villages. I don't drive. I live within ten minutes' cycle ride of the office, so I come home for lunch (which I still think is one of the hallmarks of civilised living). I can get to pretty much anywhere in Cambridge within half an hour; to most of town, faster than I could by car, on account of traffic restrictions. When I want to go further away, I take the train.
The sort of jobs in question, the sort of people who do them, and the sort of places they live, all go together. I suspect someone at the Council could see one or two of the local pubs you mention transformed into wine bars, graphic design consultancies opening nearby, and the area becoming affluent, and that's not entirely implausible. But they'll need to work hard and be wily to pull it off, and given the amount of faith you've shown in them, I'll believe it when I see it.
Dan you cannot compare Stouport to Cambridge. The average rent for unmodernised flats over the shops in Bridge Steet is currently £400pcm. No public transport after 7.00pm, nearest railway station at Kidderminster 5 miles away with no inter-city train services. My guess is that the developer is going to aim at the retired home owner who is downsizing.
Incidently FlipC, this property was originally Stourport Town Hall and was a listed building. Mysteriously the roof timbers collapsed whilst the developers were "modernising" it, requiring the building to be demolished and the present poor pastiche Georgean town building was allowed to be erected on the site in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
If this were Cambridge or Worcester I wouldn't have even blinked at that statement. If it were London I'd have taken it for granted. I know people around here who cycle to work and will you look at that they've still got cars too, because unless you're a mad-keen cyclist if you want to do anything non-local or at an odd time you've got no choice unless you can book a taxi.
I hadn't even considered the downsizer option seeing as the support documents specifically talk about young people. Would a retiring downsizer want to live above a restaurant with stair only access though?
Pubs turning into wine bars? Hmm well we've one Sports/Wine bar not to far away from the site. I can't recall what it used to be, not a pub though I'm sure. As for the other pubs switching, I'd put that option as negligible.
Graphics consultancies and the like are a possibility, but we'd really need to get the town up from it's current tatty state to attract that level unless we get them onto the Bond Worth site with a new development. That would be... actually pretty good. That type of business wouldn't pull people out of the centre while still provided good level of work and inducing a few low-level eateries to open without a huge competition for the centre. Pah too much hard work let's slap an A3 supermarket there instead.
As for the collapse I hadn't heard how it happened, hmm how 'mysterious' and I've always thought that was an ugly building.
Don, you're right: I can't compare Stourbridge to Cambridge. But it looks like somebody can. I suggest that some starry-eyed romantic in Planning thinks it would be great to turn Stourport into a high-tech metropolis or global village, maybe without thinking it through fully. Perhaps they want people to telecommute? Or perhaps FlipC's original hypothesis was right and somebody is completely off their rockers. I just wanted to offer another perspective. Somebody has to keep FlipC from stating unsupported assertions as gospel truth all the time: we can't have that on a blog, can we?
"Somebody has to keep FlipC from stating unsupported assertions as gospel truth all the time:[...]"
All the time? Surely not that much more then half the time.
"[...]we can't have that on a blog, can we?"
Heavens no, that would bring the whole system into disrepute.
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