Council New Walk Centre to be Demolished

A while ago a fire tore through a section of one of the councils New Walk Centre buldings, upon the fire being put out it was found the offices were unsafe and many of the council workers were moved elsewhere. Since this time the council have been deliberating as to what to do, move offices elsewhere or look to rebuild the New Walk Centre.

The council has now decided that the best move would be to demolish to New Walk Centre council offices and rebuild them because they need just under 21,000 square metres of space that cannot be located elsewhere.

While this is a great move as it gives the Council a chance to develop an iconic building in the city centre to be used for the council, there is a drawback. The drawback is that to take down the council offices before rebuilding can take place there is the potential for roads around the offices to be shut for up to 5 months. The reason for this is because the offices contain asbetos so cannot simply be detonanted, in fact it means removing everything inside and taking the building down a bit at a  time.

A gentleman who works for a local demolition firm believe the cost of taking down the two buildings would be in the region of £1 million to £2 million.

The council has said:

"There are about 1,200 staff currently at New Walk Centre, which is about two-thirds of its capacity, with a number of staff already having been moved out to reduce the stress on key areas of the building. The other city council-owned buildings are already occupied close to their maximum capacity.

"Even taking into account predicted job losses and redundancies over the coming years, there will still be about 2,450 staff working in council-owned city centre buildings, which need about 20,830 square metres of space.

"Without New Walk Centre, we are left with only about 14,300 square metres of office space, meaning we are short by 6,600 square metres."