Last night at the West CC meeting in the new community centre Rosemary Young revealed that she had been informed that the demolition of the old Kirk/Community Centre will begin in May.
"Yeah that is going to be great isn't it?" Said Rosemary with a touch of irony. She momentarily paused to catch her breath and continued: "We survived the High Street being dug up. We will survive, tourism is resilient."
Earlier this year it had been reported in the Nairnshire and also here on the Gurn that work would be starting on the 5th of March - it seemed very much that it was game on with new vistas of the town to be opened up from the A96 by June. The 5th of March came and went and a few other Mondays too. Still a few weeks to go then if Rosemary's information is spot on (and it usually is). No doubt when the contractors do start they will need to section off bits of the car parks at different times for health and safety reasons, they will presumably need somewhere to park their vehicles, plant, crew cabins, toilets etc as well. If the community centre and the filling station are demolished at the same time then the disruption will be doubled. It would have been a lot better to have had the work done in March but there we go. If it does start in May at least the candidates in the local elections won't have to receive an earful about the disruption during their campaigns. Any gurning will be resevered for the successful candidates. Rosemary is right however, we will survive and we'll have a nice extra car park too- "The Jubilee car park"?
Concerns were raised also at the meeting over the future of the old finance office and the tourism office/former police station. The West CC want to see these two traditional stone buildings kept and not demolished too at some point in the future.
6 comments:
Not just the West CC wanting to see the old buildings kept. Liz and I also wish them to be brought back into use - business, community or domestic. We are pretty sure they could still be in use in the 22nd Century!
Colin J Macaulay
Will the building now take fright and fall down?
Sometimes its difficult to come to terms with the loss of old buildings.
There is no doubt at all that old buildings can be kept in use as long as we want them.
Reality is though I suppose that comes at a cost, old buildings are expensive to maintain long term, new buildings are energy efficent & much cheaper to maintain so from a Asset management point of view especially with tough budget constraints it gets tougher to fight to keep the old buildings sadly.
fishertoonloon
The reason for the delay is that there were 3 electricity supplies to be disconnected, but the guys who attended from Hydro could only sort out 2 of them as the 3rd was commercial, so another gang has to come to shut it off. These delays are a great pity, as I was hoping the building would be down in time for the Curtis Cup.
The contact was issued to begin on 5th March and I am disappointed that it is not progressing more quickly, prior to disruption of the holiday season, but the main point is at last we will get rid of an eyesore and open up the centre of town.
I did have my eye on the old buildings, hoping there may be a chance to redevelop them.
However, after visiting them earlier in the year, I just don't think the current layout would really suit a modern office or similar development.
I posted some thoughts at the time:
http://www.mynairn.com/2012/01/09/old-hc-offices-may-need-to-go.html
@Brian Turner
I doubt that all the internal walls are structural so it should be perfectly possible to open up the spaces and make them into reasonable offices, and if you really need wi fi just stick in a couple of repeaters if the signal is a problem - all sorted apart from your loan from the banks!
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