Removing the bang from Bangor…

Warning: Contains middle aged male rants about derelict buildings, please walkaway now if you fear boredom

I was in Bangor recently (ish) with the younglings. I had heard about the state of the town on previous rants about the state of Northern Irish towns. I parked at Asda and came on to a main street which seemed healthy enough (so, I’m still running with the theory that supermarkets should be placed in towns rather than outskirts, fyi).

However, the closer I got to the Marina the more ’28 Days Later’ it became in terms of abandonment, the Flagship shopping centre appears to be completely abandoned, like one of those creepy empty American malls.

I asked a lady in a shop about the derelict terrace on King Street (fine old Vic Red Brick terraced houses), how could so many nice houses end up abandoned?

King Street

As it happened she was a former resident and according to her, she and many of the neighbours were subject to compulsory purchase orders to aid with the Marina redevelopment. I was baffled, why did they have to be sold? Surely they’d be of more benefit to the locality if they were lived in and tarted up?

She said that they were to be tumbled, the road widened and some banal carbuncle (my term) of an apartment complex was to be erected in its stead. As part of the ‘development’..

She said that if I were to walk around the waterfront I’d see numerous empty buildings that were either purchased by a developer or vested by the council for this development.

So, like fool who can’t help but look at the wreckage at a car accident I looked.

We walked down derelict King Street, then the partially abandoned Southwell Road, then Queen’s Parade;

Dereliction worthy of a 1980’s Smith’s video.

King Street

Corner of King Street and Southwell Road

Queens Parade

Queens Parade

I was overcome with horror and sought refuge in an ice-cream café on the corner;

“Ah, these caffeine providers will soothe my jangled nerves” thought I.

NO.

The café in question has as its décor ‘Old Bangor’ – I was subjected to inflated sized sepia photos of Bangor in her prime everywhere I looked.

“Finish your ice creams children, Daddy has a headache coming on”

“But daddy, my brain is cold!”

“Eat it!!!!! Let’s go, Let’s go!!!”

The Monorail

Many of us know of the Monorail episode in the Simpsons – long story short a hustler manages to talk the town into spending their newly acquired money on a dodgy monorail. He uses a snazzy song to convince everyone.

Back in the noughties the equivalent of the Monorail song for councils was cool graphics of a townscape – remove the silly Victorian buildings, airbrush in some glassy rectangles and squares and populate the thoroughfares with implausibly thin people and an unlikely absence of cars.

Councils lap it up.

But we’re nearly a quarter of a century on from this and we now know that wholesale demolition of pre-war buildings to be replaced with Premier Inn style carbuncles does little to upgrade a town’s character, it’s been tried in England repeatedly.

Part of this redevelopment plan includes a hotel.

There already is an empty hotel for sale, at this very moment, on the sea front.

https://www.propertypal.com/royal-hotel-windsor-bar-22-28-quay-street-bangor/1075261

A million pound makeover could do it the world of good, but without the detriment to the local townscape that wholesale demolition brings (see the Avoca Hotel in Newcastle as an example of a stylish upgrade https://avocahotel.com/ )

i.e. let the HOTEL be the hotel and the other buildings that are earmarked for demolition serve a more bespoke and suitable purpose – the set-up reminds me of scenario outside Ballymoney where old buildings (including a post office) were demolished to make way for apartments and a petrol station (including a post office), while the existing petrol station across the street a bit was demolished to make way for housing (which hasn’t been built yet)

In addition to the above there is some hullaballoo in the town about the plan to tarmac over the local greenery to make way for a car park.

https://www.savemarinegardens.co.uk/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m2ywy1y17o

These plans, as is always the case when our local councils get big ideas, fly in the face of their own environmental and sustainability ‘commitment’ – it’s fortunate that these PR exercises are seldom committed to paper it as robs us of the opportunity to claim that they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.

https://www.ardsandnorthdown.gov.uk/article/2039/Roadmap-to-Sustainability

• “natural asset protection and enhancement”
• “high quality shared spaces”
• “sustainable development of the Council’s physical infrastructure and shared spaces”
• “community resilience”

How does turning the area into the architectural and cityscape equivalent of a Mega Walmart facilitate these pledges?

It’s just a pointless word burger.

The blueprint for regeneration seems to come from playing Sim City or other 3^rd party sources, rather than going around and seeing what actually works – Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, Glasgow’s Merchant City and Trongate and large swathes of Liverpool (I thought it was a hole in the late 90’s, now it’s one of my favourite cities) show what can be done with some consideration and renovation.

Portaferry

Or indeed Portaferry.

I took Mrs AG on a tour of NI many moons ago and we decided to lunch at Portaferry. We got out, walked to the square and couldn’t believe how much of the village square was boarded up.

In a Father Ted style moment the only 2 people we came across were 2 men carrying a huge board on their way to board-up another building. So dismayed were we that we backtracked along the peninsula to eat in a pub out in the country.

Fast forward to now and the village looks delightful, a great contributor to this turnaround is Portaferry Regeneration Ltd https://portaferryregeneration.com/

They buy the buildings, redevelop them and rent them out – no demolition, no ‘exciting developments’ and no ruddy architects’ ‘visions’.

Further afield Amsterdam had large areas of squalor and dereliction in the 80’s (at least according to a colleague of mine who bought a full house in the lovely Jordaan area for buttons back then – the git). Imagine if we were to apply Northern Irish style redevelopment to Amsterdam city centre?

NO pedestrianisation, petrol stations everywhere, old townhouses torn down and replaced with car park laden apartment blocks, bland hotels and townhouses squeezed into every back yard.

Anyway, back to Bangor;

I walked along the harbour wall and looked over to the west side of the town, an area presumably free from council interference – it’s gorgeous, an enviable view and set-up, very much worthy of the reputation Bangor had when I was a kid.

That the council has been responsible for so much of the dereliction with its interference is incredible – it would be better if it just sold the sequestered buildings on auction to small time developers with firm understandings that the buildings cannot be demolished and are to be renovated to a certain standard in keeping with the town’s (former) character.

It is also worth pointing out that North Down council has over 50 million of debt – perhaps selling off this portfolio as opposed to going all-in financially speaking may help its financial affairs somewhat?

Here is the email address of the council should you feel the need to pass comment on their plans, critical, supportive or otherwise.

[email protected]

Note; I’m happy to hear corrections to this bar stool analysis, it is no doubt more complicated and far reaching than what my minor research has unearthed, thanks in advance.