I have to say it was with mixed emotions that we all, down at the Marshal's lunch club, greeted the news of the demolition of the multi-story carpark. Work started on Monday to tear the ailing structure down and when I passed by on Thursday morning the demolition was well and truly underway. The building is riddled with that concrete cancer and apparently the harsh winters of recent years have made it's condition terminal and so the decision was made to reduce it to a single level car-park and add additional parking at Seven Brethren Bank sooner rather than later. We all agreed that a redundant car park is not what Barum needs at this moment, especially when there are so many audacious plans afoot to have more visitors flocking to the town with the Barum is a must... campaign and the ensuing TV adverts. A reduction in car parking capacity would be potentially disastrous so grudgingly we recognised the Council's plans to maintain adequate parking spaces in the town centre were well thought out . However, for a lot of townsfolk it's passing will be mourned as many people have treasured memories of the place. as it was a spot where us true locals did our first courting back in the day. I remember after many a night out at Tempo Disco, now Club Toko, taking a couple of maids up to the top deck to woo them as we looked out over the Barnstaple skyline, the looming silhouette of Codden hill and the twinkling of the Huntshaw Cross TV aerial in the distance and we'd stay a while to see the dawn rise above the spires of the town. Of course this was way before they plonked the Hardaway Head tax office in front of it and spoilt the view. Wes Twardo was telling me how as teenagers they'd all be in there prizing anything they could from the parked cars and selling it on to a local garage owner for spares. Cheeky buggers. Anne Carwood remembers the lurid vd posters they used to have in the toilets the memory of which I can can recall vividly to this day. It almost put me off me pint. Charlie Street then went on to tell us that if he couldn't find his eldest boy Wayne of an evening he'd always knew to have a look in the men's down there as odds on he'd be in there along with all the other glue sniffers and pill poppers. Of course let's not forget that this was the first place in the town to install automatic hand blowers, dryers, which as I recall caused quite a stir at the time and provided hours of entertainment. Ah happy days.
I have to say though that once again we bid farewell to another iconic Barum landmark and although the town centre parking situation had to be addressed I think it a shame that more wasn't done to preserve this structure. As to my mind it really was a marvellous example of late sixties British municipal architecture a style which may not be to everyones fancy but still it does hold great social and historical significance. I was convinced of this by Annie's Godson's boyfriend who is an architect and had popped in to the pub to catch up on local gossip. I later read in the Gazette that this initial stage of the demolition is a part of the Queen Street, Boutport Street regeneration plan which is somewhat bleddy ironic given that the multi-storey was actually erected as part of a previous rather ambitious and largely unbuilt exercise in visionary urban planning. Back in the late sixties the town was to be remodelled as a brave new world of ring roads, shopping centres, public piazzas, elevated walkways and verdant gardens, all formed from highly functional and uniformly visual concrete. A blueprint for the 21st Century. I remember seeing the plans laid out in the Athenaeum and at the time it all looked like a very utopian futuristic marvel, they had even depicted little hover cars zooming about. In the short term I think it was just a fancy notion to make the town look more like Stevenage or Plymouth. The multi-storey, the civic centre and the leisure centre remain the only testament to that vision. This is probably a good thing because if they'd used the same dodgy concrete and gone any further with the plan, Barum would now be crumbling into the river.
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