Kentish Express Ashford & District
Outlet outcast and a fond Flume farewell
Last week McArthurGlen unveiled details of how and where the Ashford Designer Outlet will be expanded.
Yet while there will be lots more shops arriving there in the coming years, no actual names were unveiled.
So, much to the disappointment of many in Ashford, we can exclusively reveal that the one you all want – Primark – will not be among the stores gracing the expanded Outlet.
Despite the almost universal clamour among residents for a Primark store it is one retailer which doesn’t ‘fit’ in with the Outlet ‘offer’ – so you lot out there are all going to have to wait for the miracle of Primark to materialise here.
And it was interesting to see in the McArthurGlen artist’s impressions of what the expanded Outlet will look like that the stores displayed all had fake names, unless there’s something in the fashion world we’re not aware of.
Thus stores called Acbe Sueq, Valdemar, Nadychem and Morello were visualised.
And so The Flume – surely one of Ashford’s biggest ever white elephants – is set to be ripped up. And ripped up is an appropriate term as the Nuts and Bolts team (one of The Flume’s biggest critics) are thinking of setting up an ‘RIP – The Flume’ page on Facebook, to mourn (actually celebrate) its demise.
The Flume was surely one of the most ridiculous pieces of public art ever created (and there’ve been a few).
It’s sat there for about six years now, surrounded by broken paving slabs, with patches of tarmac filling its faults, choked with fag ends, grass and bits of rubbish.
While we’re sure Simeon Nelson, the artist who designed it, and those who commissioned it had the best of intentions when the shared space it sits in was dreamed up, it was just one of those things that someone, before it was laid, should have had the common sense to say: “No, this will never work.”
Instead, £100,000 was spent (many would say wasted) and now it’s about to be binned and will no doubt be recalled in years to come when people say: “Do you remember that weird Flume thing that used to sit in the pavement in Bank Street? What was that all about?”