We need action to stop the stagnation
Anton wonders why the record seems to be stuck yet again on getting on with improvements to run-down areas of Derby
SO, it’s “the wrong building in the wrong place”. At least that is the view of Derby City Council’s conservation area advisory committee to the proposed £45 million performance venue in the Becketwell area.
My reaction was to mutter: “Here we go again.” My mind went back to December 2016, and a piece I wrote about my hopes for Derby in the new year. The Assembly Rooms was still closed – the Derby Telegraph had recently marked 1,000 days since the fire that resulted in a decision to keep Derby’s major entertainment venue shut – and Duckworth Square still looked like one of those post-war bomb sites that provided us kids with a readymade adventure playground.
The weeds growing out of what remained of the Hippodrome seemed taller every day. The giant railway warehouse off Friar Gate was also playing on my mind as 2017 dawned. I’d been told that it would cost £1 million even to repoint the brickwork, so no decision on its future could be taken lightly. But do something, I implored. Neglect had taken its toll, which seemed to be a recurring theme when discussing Derby’s city centre’s problem areas.
Whenever people talked about their hopes for Derby, it was difficult not to sound like a long-playing record that had become stuck on the turntable. Five years later, that record is still stuck.
In the words of the great American baseball character, Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
One of my hopes for 2017 was that the future of the Becketwell area would be decided. We didn’t need another pie-in-the-sky scheme that may amuse people with coloured pencils (thinking about it, they probably use computers nowadays, but it amounts to the same thing). What we needed was action. In 2021 we’re still not off the drawing board.
Even in my wildest dreams I didn’t expect to find that on New Year’s Eve 2017 all these situations will be completely resolved. I didn’t expect to be booking pantomime tickets at either the Assembly Rooms or the Hippodrome or seeing a block of flats rise on Duckworth Square. I just hoped that firm decisions – whatever they might be – had been taken, that work was in progress, and that these parts of Derby would no longer be allowed to stagnate.
Well, in 2021 they have demolished the old Debenhams building, so that’s a start. But now we are apparently stalled again as conservation area advisory committee chair Chris Twomey says that the venue building and the storage yard next to it would “sterilise” Becket Street.
Becket Street has, for many years, been a bit of a dump anyway. But it wasn’t always so. I was born just up the road, in Gerard Street, and Becket Street was my usual route into the town centre, mainly because my first port of call was generally the Central Library in the Wardwick.
It was pleasant enough street with a few attractive old buildings, most of which have now long been disused, scarring the city with yet more decay.
But the problem is bigger than Becket Street. Bigger than Duckworth Square. The wider area – Abbey Street, Monk Street, Curzon Street – has suffered over past decades.
I remember it as a thriving, pleasant place in which to grow up.
One of our neighbours, the lovely, late-lamented Jessie Manning, was always keen to point out that everything they needed was in Abbey Street and that her mum ventured further afield only twice a year, to collect her “divi” from the Co-op offices in Albion Street.
That’s just me looking wistfully at the past. We can never recapture those days, of course we can’t. The whole nature of such areas has changed forever, not just in Derby but everywhere there was once a terraced street and a corner shop.
Derby must do something, though. We don’t want to be here in another five years’ time, wondering what to do with Duckworth Square, that long-playing record still stubbornly stuck.