Ronnie's Rant

Masterplan is a Disasterplan

So back to the same old subject of Town Centre Redevelopment.

I and other residents of Dukes Court and Duke Street were treated yesterday to Wilson Bowden's new masterplan (their word by the way) for the future of Macclesfield.

They informed us that due to the current financial climate they've had to make a number of cost savings and come up with a new streamlined vision of the future of the town that has Debenhams at the heart of it. This, they assure us, along with the new Cultural Quarter at Park Green is going to make the town very wealthy and a place to be proud of. It was of course utter nonsense.

The Town Centre redevelopment has now metamorphosed into a large new shopping mall running parallel to Mill Street. It doesn’t redevelop the town as a whole, it redevelops part of the town, in an area that doesn’t need that much redeveloping and at the same time leaves the rest of the town to rot in its own excrement.

Wilson Bowden told us very condescendingly that they are creating 'prime' retail sites opposite the new Debenhams specifically for well known high street brands to take over. And only by creating these 'prime' sites will the scheme become commercially viable to them.

This of course means that the well known high street brands we already have on Mill Street (Next, Mothercare, New Look, etc) will have to relocate to these new 'prime' sites, leaving a mass of empty properties on Mill Street. (If they don’t move then how many other national high street brands are left to fill the new units?)

What right minded thinking can possibly think this is beneficial for the town? It beggars belief that Wilson Bowden has the audacity to present this as a masterplan and I’m absolutely apoplectic that our council would even consider for one minute that this is at all acceptable to anyone who lives and/or works in Macclesfield. Oh and another thing. Wilson Bowden s representatives stated that they have retained most of Dukes Court in the new masterplan.

They appeared to want a round of applause for this.

The fact is that what they are planning to leave behind is not a courtyard but a characterless cut through from rich shops to poor shops surrounded by car park and the backs of retail units. The plan is for whole of the building at the back of the courtyard to go, which means that both Ronnie’s and Toast Bars will go as well as the offices above; they also plan to take away the buildings that I’m expanding into, taking away the whole of the unique atmosphere my bar generates through trading outdoors.

Even if I liked the new masterplan and they went ahead with the town centre redevelopment as put forward yesterday, they still really didn’t have to destroy Dukes Court but they chose to anyway purely for their balance sheet reasons.

All taking away the back end of Dukes Court is doing is giving Wilson Bowden an extra 15,000 square feet of that prime retail space they keep banging on about. Never mind the existing prime retail space they’ll be destroying. And in the great scheme of things 15,000 square feet is not a great deal of space to lose.

And I ve not even touched on the environmental issues, traffic flow, car parking or even the cultural and arts issues. None of that has been considered in the masterplan. It’s all about prime retail and a cinema (which incidentally will now have no carpark because all the car parking spaces are to be situated around Debenhams!)

In conclusion this current masterplan is a disasterplan. Macclesfield will be split in two; a shiney new bit of modern construction buildings and a shabby old bit that used to be called the main shopping area. It is just downright offensive to try and pass this garbage off as a town centre redevelopment when it threatens to leave the majority of the existing town centre in a state of decay.

So what do we do? Well for a start join the Maxonian Society. This is a movement created to preserve the environment, arts, culture and heritage of Macclesfield. It’s for Maxonians who have pride and/or commercial interest in their town.

It’s not for large property developers with no connection to the town whose sole desire is to improve their short term profit margins at the expense of quality and long term prosperity.

Neither is it for those gullible town councillors who don’t live in the town who haven’t got the first idea about local commercial life let alone arts, culture and heritage. The Maxonian Society wants the Council s commitment to redevelop the town centre to actually mean redevelop the whole town centre not one small part of it at the expense of the rest.

It wants a town centre that allows businesses of all sizes to thrive and develop not just pandering to needs of the giants of the high street. It wants to promote all that’s good in the town, e.g. musicians past and present, artists, writers, DJs, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, sports men and women, its rich history, interesting courtyards, etc. It doesn t want a clone town and certainly doesn’t want any more new hideous architecture (i.e. in the same mould as the recent architectural delights of the Super Surgery, the Railway Stations supposed facelift or the police station extension) springing up to completely drown out the quality and characterful buildings of the town.

If you re interested in knowing more about the Maxonian Society then please contact me now, because if we do nothing we’ll end up with an almighty big mess that we and future generations of Maxonians will absolutely detest and despise.

Ronnie
ronnie@ronnies-bar.co.uk