Another Slip of the Planners

Time washes everything into the past. It is a fact of life but it doesn’t mean that we cannot mourn their passing.

There are a series of old council-owned garages on Tragus Rise that were built the year Harold was born. Over the intervening years a couple have been lost as the house on the end surreptitiously expanded its boundaries, swallowed fifty square yards of public-owned property and put up a fence topped with barbed wire. You’ve got to love avarice.

By the end of the seventies there were six left and one “fell down” suddenly when the lease was given to someone other than the owner of the house it was built behind. That left five, mostly well-tended, annually painted affairs housing the Austins and Truimphs of the local residents who leased them.

After the turn of the century the original leases lapsed and the garages began to fall into disrepair. When it was pointed out that the roofs were made of Asbestos the council sealed them with a polymer coating on the inside but insisted the new renters signed a waiver.

And now they are being dismantled. The council have paid a vast sum for ‘professional dismantlers’ (three blokes and a transit van) who are very sensibly wearing coveralls and masks to remove the asbestos, but stand to make a tidy profit on the steel structures beneath.

You should have seen how cross the chap on the roof (obviously the gaffer) became when I took the photograph. You can’t tell who they are, and their van was unmarked, but it’s a good indication they were up to no good.

Bless ‘em.