by gap74 » Sat Oct 02, 2010 2:37 pm
I was at the meeting, and whilst folk were happy to see the building brought into use again, there seemed to be two aspects of concern to residents.
First up was that these proposals had already been decided - there seemed to have been little in the way of consultation, and Cllr Redmond tried to counteract this criticism by saying that he'd been telling folk for months about them. Nonetheless, I got the impression that "the community" had felt a bit put out by having had little say in the final outcome, regardless of how worthy the final ideas were.
Secondly, the current library is in a pretty handsome B-listed building of a similar vintage to the Olympia, and there was concern that these proposals would simply rescue one derelict B-listed building whilst creating another. Assurances were given that proposals for the old library would be looked at in due course, but nothing concrete was evidently in the pipeline for the time being.
I should add that the proposals were for a library at the ground floor, the new homes for Scottish amateur boxing and wrestling bodies at the first floor (which would be used for Commonwealth training in 2014 too) and office space above. The build would essentially be a facade retention job, which is fair enough, since even the most hard-line of us cinema preservation geeks would be hard-pressed to say there's much left worth saving in the old auditorium.
I guess on that score, though, we were a wee bit disappointed that even a small auditorium wasn't included in the plans for cinema or simple stage use, since I'm not sure that such a thing exists in Bridgeton at the moment.
PS The meeting was held in the Learning Campus building in Dale Street - what an awful cheap building, can't have been more than a few years old but the low-quality wooden floor looked like domestic laminate - under such heavy use, it had certainly worn as if it was, and don't get me started on the exposed ducting!