Demolition work begins at £33m Bolton town centre housing scheme

Plans were signed off by Bolton Council in April to construct more than 100 flats and 56 town houses around Central Street and Deansgate in Bolton town centre.

Demolition work was scheduled to begin in June but workers were seen on site yesterday beginning to tear down the buildings.

• Council hopes to raise nearly £1M by selling off 17 parcels of land

This started with the back on the Blue Boar pub.

The row of former shops and the pub have been boarded up and derelict for some time and in the hands of the council since at least the start of 2017, with the Blue Boar serving its last pints in July 2016.

Sweetens book shop is also included in this row. The store closed its doors in August 2011. The shop had operated for more than 30 years but closed after suffering from falling sales and rising costs.

Plans were initially submitted by Placefirst late last year to transform the area with homes, commercial space, a new public square.

This is all bound for brownfield land bounded by the River Croal, Ridgeway Gates and Brook Street to the east, Deansgate and Central Street.

The development is set to include 158 homes, including 102 apartments and 56 townhouses, with improvements set to be made to nearby roads and footpaths.

Another pledge is improvements close to the River Croal including a river walk, to open up the waterway to residents and visitors.

The Blue Boar pub in Deansgate, 2016 (closedpubs.co.uk)

The developers said they wished to attract a ‘mixed community’ to live in the the properties, including young families in the town houses.

The now leader of Bolton Council Cllr Maryn Cox said previously: “It is one of the first of the big developments to get started in the town centre.

“Developing on brownfield sites in this way means it takes the pressure of Bolton’s greenbelt land by meeting the government’s mandatory housing allocation without incursion on to green areas.

Works on the site were expected to get underway last year but the pandemic broke and town hall chiefs say all the funding is now in place – with the council putting forward £2.2m from the £100m town centre fund towards site remediation work, such as the relocation of the existing substation and demolition work.

Plans for 158 houses off Deansgate in Bolton town centre

The local authority is to receive £3.6m to carry out remediation work on site so homes could be developed – with Placefirst managing the site, from development to after completion.

Bolton and District Civic Trust had objected to the plans, saying they would damage the heritage of the town centre.

They said it would ‘destroy most of the remaining buildings of merit within the north west of the town centre’, including Georgian buildings dating back to the late 1700s.

They also said the plans crammed too many households onto a limited site with too little green space.