Ka-bloowie! New Walk Centre demolition, Leicester

It has been a momentous day for Leicester. New Walk Centre, the old Council offices, or ‘The Tower of Doom’ as I knew it, has been subjected to a ‘controlled blowdown’. Evidently this is an attempt to make it sound not very exciting, but hundreds of locals turned out to watch the event nonetheless.

My final visit to A12 – summer 2014

I was never based in the Tower of Doom, but I did have a few months solidly working there during one project, a singularly depressing experience. It was a concrete blot on the landscape and the only good thing about A12 was the view, which I remembered to record during my last visit there in the summer of 2014 before Council staff were duly evacuated.

It was also fun that for the last year or so that the building was in use, vast swathes of the floor were allocated as ‘no go’ zones, with exciting gaffa tape delineating where you were (probably) safe to walk and where you (probably) weren’t. I liked to cross over the tape sometimes, because I like living on the edge.

So now it is gone and the Leicester cityscape is forever changed for the better. And now we wait with baited breath to find out what will be replacing the towers on this prime bit of city centre real estate. Let’s hope its something less gloomy, a bit more pretty and, most of all, not more than a couple of stories high. The news so far is just that it will be ‘mixed use’ – offices, I guess some flats and maybe some commercial use. I guess another oasis of green in the city centre would be out of the question?

Happily while I did not take the wind direction into account in the slightest whilst picking a prime viewing spot, we did completely escape being covered in dust, not like those individuals watching from Pocklington’s Walk. Sadly The Tank, waiting patiently on Hotel Street, was not so fortunate… Oh the humanity!