MP calls for wholesale demolition of Surrey town.
In an announcement that will be music to the ears of Surrey demolition companies (and to DemolitionNews as it’s just up the road from DemolitionNews Towers) a local MP has said that Leatherhead’s “unattractive” town centre needs a “wholesale demolition and rebuild”. .
Sir Paul Beresford, who was re-elected to parliament for the fifth consecutive time in May, has called on Mole Valley District Council (MVDC) and planners in charge of the Transform Leatherhead Project to take radical action to rebuild the ailing town centre.
The district council is currently working with Nexus Planning to put together a £500,000 ‘masterplan’ for the future of Leatherhead and have been consulting residents, visitors and businesses on how the town could be transformed to attract big companies and tourists to the stagnating centre.
Sir Paul told the Surrey Advertiser he believed this is an opportunity to completely overhaul Leather-head and learn from radical planning techniques he has witnessed in the London Borough of Wandsworth, which he claims will build more homes than the whole of the rest of London over the next four years.
“Perhaps a whole-sale demolition and rebuild of Leatherhead is opportune, using some of Wandsworth’s style of thinking,” he said.
“Full use of the riverside for restaurants, cafés, shops and even a hotel, by building over the present Swan Centre site and linking to the rail station by development on the two current unattractive tarmac car parks. Redeveloping the station will make Leatherhead more attractive to the rail visitor.”
Read more here.
