The Poolie Bunker

The demolition team have turned up at the Engineers club.
Only a delay by the…. ‘Looney 70’s Concrete Crap Buildings Collective’ can save it, enjoy the show.

Praise the Lord ...........................The Clansman end of the shopping centre next..........i am on my pray mat!!!

Whilst you're down there on your haunches - could you ask for some white smoke over the Vic (which isn't a cloud)!

If it can be achieved by a 30 ton excavator with an attitude …..it can’t be done.

Yesterday i was listening to the shite Jeremy Vine was spouting about the decline of town centres throughout the country. He was teasing comments from around the country from people who thought the saviour of town centres was specialist artisan bread and cheese shops.Bollocks!
These centres and surrounding streets are becoming more unattractive because they look terrible with numerous closed and dilapidated shops/buildings. The 25-33% to which this relates needs demolishing or immediately re-purposing.The world has changed with online purchasing and lifestyle changes and it aint going to revert back to the good old days of Woolworths and M&S.The jam that the councils have needs to be spread thickly across smaller centres not thinly over vast tracks of unviable buildings (Church Street etc).The centres need to include all sorts of services not just retail.
Will anything like this happen........well maybe and slowly because of nostalgia and the fact the planners are academic slaves to their so called education.
Rant over and time for a cup of tea.

Our biggest mistake was building the shopping centre and completely buggering the town up by moving the town centre about….travelling around the country some councils crazy pedestrianisations where there are vast paved areas instead of roads bugger things up…Stockton did a brilliant job at buggering up a thriving high street to accommodate bleak performance areas used a handful of times a year.
Councillors and Planners are a lethal combination…ignorant ego’s untied with arrogant ego’s are guaranteed to disappoint .

Happened in many town centres demolished to be replaced with concrete jungles with the mandatory multi storey car park which are now struggling due to the out of town Retail Parks with free parking.

basically its too many shops now for todays lifestyles. even free parking in towns is now just a sticking plaster to the problem.

stockton must have a real death wish. who is now going to nip into the town for a couple of cheaper options from the market to pay £1.50 when previously they had a hour free. since the parking charge was introduced it does make parking easier on a saturday when we stop off on the way to the match.

Most town centres in the UK need to be flattened, no need for them, for all the reasons you have outlined above. I do think their demise has been speeded up though, by the building of retail parks all over the place, when there was really no need to ( apart from large supermarkets )and even the thickest person could see it would impact heavily on town centre shopping.

It makes you realise how orderly, organised and how well planned the UK was in the past, up until the 1980s. Looking back now, it was a pleasure ( though it never seemed it at the time ) to have lived through that period of busy high streets and shopping centres. No reasons these days for any shopping centres in the likes of Hartlepool, Peterlee, Billingham etc. They were built in different times, before the car became King and the Internet. Times have changed and like the terraced house, town centres need to be consigned to the dustbin of history, the vast majority of people, rightly or wrongly have voted with their feet, or should I say, pedal or index finger.

It's the index finger that has screwed most towns up with Councils having to pick up the obscene mass of cardboard.

even worse is the bubble wrap mountain.

There’s plenty of towns who have succeeded…the ones where Councillors ego’s and lust for the legacy and bragging rights were ignored and towns allowed to develop…..retail parks are another curse along with mega supermarkets, but the cat’s out of the bag.
Council parking charges and traffic restrictions are another deterrent to potential shoppers….then there’s the High street curse of barber’s, nail bars, pizza shops, mini convenience stores…York Road being a good example.

Covid is partly responsible for the decline in shopping centres, due to lock down people were ordering goods/food online and the trend has increased for food delivery pre cooked and groceries Even if you don’t order online for home delivery for goods you can click and collect for most major retailers.

could be right there as many people found how easy on line buying was. many shops did not open again after the restrictions and the ones that did are the ones mentioned earlier that nobody wants. thought there was a thing called planning permission for change of use for a shop but are certain demographics exempt.

Mind you, I do find the waiting time for delivery a pain in the arse.

The thing I used to dislike was they said they would deliver on a certain day, you wait in all day and they didn't turn up.

thats the easy part. the problems start once delivery drivers refuse to look at the address on it and drop it somewhere else with a similar address to yours. i live at no.3 on a drive but regularly parcels end up at no.3 on the lane leading up to me. they are right bastards who open up the parcels and then tell you they have not got it. that included a peugeot 309 tail pipe that would not fit there new audi but saw it when they opened the door. guess what the police have no interest in all this.

One of the factors leading to the decline of shopping centres and high-streets is the greedy, blood-sucking bastard landlords.

Plus the business rates levied by local councils usually don't come cheap either.

Amazon and their ilk are simply the final nails in the coffin.

A black sheep coffee house, retail units and storage units
Just what the town needs

Weren’t they going to build student accommodation on the site, that was the original planning application ?

New owners I believe.

On the 3rd of May, I'd pre-booked a room in the Grand so I didn't have get back to Yackerland at some ungodly hour following the (slightly early) celebration of my 60th birthday with friends and family.

While I was out having a tab, I noticed the Engineers (pretty difficult not to) and even after reading about the state of it a few times on the forum, I wasn't prepared for just what a dangerous eyesore it had become. I can fully understand the comments on here very clearly after witnessing this monstrosity first hand.

The old Binns building looks a bit shabby too, though to my surprise the Wesley looks a lot better than the last time I was in the vicinity.

Oh, and the Indian in the cellar of the Grand is fucking awesome..!

Yes the Indian is FAB

The last company went into administration and these new owners have been quite quick to act.

Group First Ltd

Storage units as in warehousing……??????….as I sit in the sun at Warton deafened by the jets.

My thought is that the storage units will be at the land at the back. Great for growing weed!

The storage units should be opposed as unsuitable for the location, stick em up Brenda Road.

What's happening to the mill house pub?

They had a stoppy back and got boarded in.

Looks like it’s gettng done up.

Possibly a Care Home

If it is they'll likely get a few old regulars back in

That was one ugly building…looks like a water tank…..the new leisure centre could be mistaken for a dockside loading facility, a surprising lack of glass in it’s structure.

A shit hole for sure, but the discos the local CBers ran back in the 1980s were legendary.

As was "Toyah" from Skelton.

She once asked me why I was staring at her. I replied "It'thh a mythhhtery" with a twinkle in my eye.

Bitch punched me. Fair enough mind, she was in the women's bogs at the time...

Driving past the new Mail office building which ain’t too bad, they’ve plastered it with advertising boards advertising their storage units, looks a right eyesore…totally out of place.

A strange location for storage units but at least the building is alive unlike many others.
The restoration of the building 2 x down from the Dilshad in Church Street is looking good if you look up to the 1/2 floors. Its been done by/the a specialist Historic Buildings Restoration Company.

A place I use is called Pandora Storage on Brenda Road, it’s a warehouse with purpose built storage units inside not containers, the only down side it’s not heated and belongings can get damp if you leave them for an extended period.
https://fb.watch/zRjHZ6UF1s/?

I would imagine this place is heated due to its history?

If they start moving shipping containers in and a time expired Ford Transit as a topping, be worried.

Just walked past the Engineers earlier and the whole of the back is down and the front overlooking the road is looking precarious. I am sure the demo company know what they are doing but at least one taxi driver has parked his car there and people are walking past on the footpath.I was glad to move over the road after this photo.

I would imagine this place is heated due to its history?[/quot

I have never noticed any form of heating when I have been there, the storage places are like small individual rooms of various sizes are totally enclosed, it would cost a fortune to heat place, it’s a very large factory unit. It’s not an ideal to leave any clothing items but ok for furniture.
A unit to store furniture from a 2 bedroom house is £120 a month, it’s a great earner for the owners but as I said the units themselves wouldn’t have been cheap to assemble.

The upper floor and roof was brought down late last night or this morning so this video is from early on yesterday.
The driver of the m/c is a brave guy imo.https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=bEtviM ... e=youtu.be

https://youtu.be/Mouiovku92Q
Not much of it left now.

Yesterday morning. As the first floor front was demolished so bricks look like they ended on the road (if you look carefully).

Not much health and safety there, you would have thought at least they would have barriered the pavement off and knocked the front part in over on to the site.

That's all well and good Bluey, but I'm more concerned as to what's in the spazz-trolley that middle-aged bewer is dragging along behind her.

She's up to no good I tell ye - and nobody spots a nefarious nana better than me..!!!

I must of supped well over 15000 pints in there.
Only 17 a week over 17 years.
Was a popular place back in the day.
Committee was a lot corrupt like