00:00 I'm not totally against any building work where St Chad's was. I'm not. I just have
00:10 concerns over parking and the disruption of the build. All of which could be dealt with
00:17 with a conversation. Maybe if somebody from fragrance group or the construction crew could
00:22 perhaps pop round and we could have a chat and they could show me exactly what they're
00:27 planning to do. From what I've seen on the planning they are going to allow 30 parking
00:35 spaces to the rear of the building which will border along Bolton Street which is the road
00:40 we share. As far as I can see they're allowing 143 rooms to be built. Now if all of those
00:51 rooms have brought a car and there are only 30 parking spaces as far as I can work out
00:58 that leaves a shortfall of 110 parking spaces. Where do these people park? The roads along
01:07 the sea front are going to be right adjacent to the hotel. They are the ones that are really
01:13 going to suffer and they're already suffering as it is because there's so limited parking.
01:18 If you're a hotel with 8 bedrooms you've got to find 8 spaces for your guests or send them
01:24 to an alternative car park which a lot of them don't want to have to drag their luggage
01:30 or walk back and forth to their car. They want to be near the hotel they're staying
01:35 in. A lot of hotels do not have the luxury of having car parking so they rely on their
01:41 guests parking on the main road and as it is it's a fight during the peak seasons to
01:47 get a space even for your own vehicle. So what people are worried about is that the
01:51 new plans have got less parking than previously and with even more rooms than before the parking
01:58 is going to become a major issue. Before the St Chad's as people may remember was 4 usable
02:07 storeys and then it had a pitched roof. So it would take up the same space as a 5 storey
02:14 building but obviously only 4 of those storeys were inhabited with hotel guests. So we've
02:23 got an extra 2 floors of inhabited rooms looking down on us so it will be considerably higher
02:32 and will blot out a lot more of the sky so it will be quite an impact on us. For the
02:41 people that are right close to the St Chad's, their properties, it is going to have a massive
02:46 effect on the amount of sunlight that they get for their own hotels. So is it considerably
02:52 higher than the old St Chad's? The old St Chad's I believe was 5 storeys. It had a pitched
03:00 roof so if you take into consideration the pitched roof but you still saw sunlight either
03:07 side of the roof as the sun was coming round. And it's just the whole design. I think a
03:11 lot of people are disappointed that the design is not in keeping with traditional Blackpool.
03:18 There's no like really fancy features. It hasn't got any real character. Because obviously
03:34 it's going to probably be peak season by the time they get started now. So not only will
03:39 our guests have to worry about where they're parking, they're going to have to be manoeuvring
03:43 in and out of big lorries, cranes being delivered, parts being delivered. So these roads are
03:49 narrow. You can either get 2 cars down and passing as it is without. If there's a lorry,
03:55 bricks being delivered, whatever, cement lorries, cranes. It will affect where people can get
04:01 up and down our roads to actually even get to our hotels. It was very hard to get information
04:07 about when they were going to demolish it. We didn't really know until plants and machinery
04:12 started arriving on site. They decided to start in May and you may remember back then
04:19 we had three bank holidays. We had diggers, machinery, trucks, the rest of it, for the
04:38 best part of a month while they were demolishing it. A lot of these hotels have got basements
04:42 and they are worried that it's actually going to affect their structure of their buildings.
04:47 I don't know, maybe subsidence, cracking in the buildings. It's just the actual mess
04:53 and everything else that's going to make the dust and stress to the people that are
04:58 living here. No one's actually took into account that or even spoke to any of the local people.
05:03 So do you think they've been quite inconsiderate about the neighbours and the disruption?
05:08 I do, yes. I do think they've been inconsiderate, yes. During the demolition process I was speaking
05:15 to the site manager who was in charge of the overall construction, or the demolition, I
05:22 beg your pardon. He assured me that when the demolition was done they were going to hire
05:27 some cherry pickers and they were going to wash down our building, clean our windows,
05:34 clean our gutters. All of this was promised. I mean it was promised verbally, there was
05:38 nothing written down. But I trusted them and I thought well that's a way to go, you know,
05:46 you build a bit of rapport with your neighbours. None of this happened. There was no washing
05:52 down afterwards. The side of my building was absolutely filthy dirty. We had a letter through
05:57 the post but I've never had a one to one conversation with anyone. So somebody writing down what
06:04 they want to do and then not giving me any recourse to answer that is not really a conversation
06:12 or consulting. Nobody wants to have bad feeling with their neighbours when they're having
06:18 to do what they see as necessary construction. And I'm not against all construction, I just
06:24 want some of my views aired and spoken about.
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