Mill House Development

[popgoestheweasal.]

Meeting Tuesday 3rd July.

The meeting will be held in the centenary lounge at Hartlepool United Football Club at 7-00pm.
There will be a tour of the ground and facility's at 6-15pm for those who wish to see what HUFC offer to the community during the week.
There will be Representatives from Gus Robinson. Cameron's. The colleges and HUFC.

I,m taking my mother to this meeting as she has a question to ask the rep from the art college and college of FE.

[GXDN]

One thing that I have noticed from these artist impressions and from posts I've read on here is that there is no apparent provision for a multi-story car park. This to me seems a ridiculous ommission considering the parking along the roads around the ground and on the retail park/ASDA/Morrisons on  match days.
Single level car parks are a seriously inefficient use of space when extra buildings could be erected in their place or even a split use building with the lower floors used for parking and the upper floors for other uses. There is also the opportunity to generate income from the parking which would help fund the development given that lack of funding may well stop the development going ahead in the first place.

[hartlepool65]

There is more chance of Nelson getting his eye back than this development happening.

[not4me]

is that really true? Sooner or later the Odeon will have to be dealt with when the council can find the money and the land will probably end up being used for housing. The same goes for the bowls club and the swimming pool - sooner or later they will have to be rebuilt - again when the council can find the money. If they stick a few more trees around the place then than will look not far off this thing that people keep calling 'the plan'. Except it won't involve the council giving away public assets for nowt or next to nowt and it won't help put the family run hotels at Seaton out of business. 

[no6bus]

it will be the likes of the travelodge that puts the seaton hotels out of business. looking at trip advisor the premier is now hartlepools top hotel.
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotels-g191274-Hartlepool_County_Durham_England-Hotels.html

[steveL]

The Travelodge will impact on the Seaton Hotels for sure but why not any new additional hotel built at Mill House? The issue is really whether the hotel market is becoming saturated. Premier Inn already think so which is why they are still sitting on a planning application granted for the 'floating' hotel. There are also plans for a Travelodge at A19 Services (which might have already been built) and a hotel at Wynyard Golf Course.

The point being, how sure are we that any hotel on the Mill House would actually be built and if it was built, how sure are we that all it would do is take even more business away from Seaton at a time when the council is trying to upgrade Seaton.

The same could be said for the shops that are supposed to be included in this plan. What demand for additional shops is there in the Mill House area? None I suspect, bearing in mind that the town already has the highest percentage of vacant retail units in the North East.

This is the frustration of this plan; it just hasn't been thought through properly. The artist impression says it all really; very pretty but with nothing solid behind it.

[The Great Dictator]

I love these artists impressions, they never show the uprooted trees, burning cars and schoolkids shooting up in the phonebox..

[testing times]

I see a lot of irony in this whole debate.
I'm old enough to remember when the taxman was close to causing the club to be wound up and I also remember the furore of the fans demanding that the council helped the club out by buying the ground. The fans called the councillors worse than muck then because they hesitated before agreeing to do so - now they are doing the same for the opposite reason. All of which tells me that if this plan ever does go ahead it will not be down to the rantings of the pools fans but because of the cooler heads of those more anchored in the reality of how things actually work.

I don't think we should give up on this plan even though, as it stands, it's clearly half-baked, especially on how it would be financed. I'm still not convinced that it is anything more than the decorative wrapping paper covering the real contents which is the giveaway of the ground to IOR.

Even so, there have been some interesting ideas such as the multi-storey car cark which, when you think about it, does seem to be a sensible idea considering the amount of traffic at a home game and an obvious way to raise revenue to help finance the whole scheme.

Also, regarding the demand for retail units - there is none at present. However, sometime soon, that row of shops opposite Belk Street is going to have to go. They are in a really bad location where it's impossible to park and the existing shops will be losing custom because of this - most of them have signs in the window pointing to 'parking at the rear' but does anyone ever park there? These shops also force Raby Road into being seriously narrowed and at the moment there's not much the council can do about it.
If you imagine the Odeon, this row of shops and the streets around Belk Street all gone then the whole area is opened up for redevelopment and the shops themselves could be relocated in a more sensible and safer place with better parking. These buildings will go at some point in the next few years so why not now as part of the Mill House redevelopment? It may help make the plan more viable and therefore more likely to go ahead.

[Inspector Knacker]

... and eventually we'll end up as Backwater on Sea, a town where the main entertainment is watching the traffic lights change to a constant background hum, once blamed on wind turbines but found to be the whining of the Luddites busy shooting down any and everything that doesn't conform to their world vision of a town that should be going nowhere in particular very slowly .... a town with a 'not for the likes of us' attitude and happy to stagnate as long as the rates  are as low as possible but with expectations of the highest standard in a tidy little town with champagne expectations on a lemonade budget ... a Mrs Bucket of towns, happy to pick away at itself in the misbegotten hope it's for the better..... but only undermining the foundations.

[steveL]

However bad it gets, the town will always amount to being more than a football club with a few supporting bits added on.

[popgoestheweasal.]

Why does every point come back to the football club you lot on here are a bunch of moaning mini's. 

[marky]

When I look at that artist impression, all I see is a football ground, a bowls club and swimming pool. a 5-a-side pitch and a few trees. Isn't that what we have now?

[no6bus]

... and eventually we'll end up as Backwater on Sea, a town where the main entertainment is watching the traffic lights change to a constant background hum, once blamed on wind turbines but found to be the whining of the Luddites busy shooting down any and everything that doesn't conform to their world vision of a town that should be going nowhere in particular very slowly .... a town with a 'not for the likes of us' attitude and happy to stagnate as long as the rates  are as low as possible but with expectations of the highest standard in a tidy little town with champagne expectations on a lemonade budget ... a Mrs Bucket of towns, happy to pick away at itself in the misbegotten hope it's for the better..... but only undermining the foundations.

sorry i thought we were already there due to the "VISION" of our previous civic leaders, i give you middleton grange as a example, a bustling town centre of yesteryear eradicated to give us greggsville!

[GXDN]

sorry I'm only new here but you seem to insult councillors at every opportunity yet at the same time isn't it obvious what you are wanting isn't going to happen without their support. Can you not see the flaw in this approach?

[Lucy Lass-Tick]

Unfortunately, it seems that a somewhat nebulous plan (however ambitious and theoretically desirable) stands to fail because too many aren't prepared to honestly address the flaws and work out just what can be done with whatever funds are affordable (and can be justified to all of us who might be expected to foot the bills).

There does seem to be an 'all or nothing' air to this issue; as with previous grandiose schemes, getting the go ahead seems to be viewed as Hartlepool's panacea.  Could the project be broken into more manageable and affordable chunks?

I don't hate football; football simply fails to interest me.  What does fire me up is that the town is in desperate need of a shake up, but only wants the gold-plated options.  I'd love to drive a Jaguar, but real life means that there's a Nissan parked outside...