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Ever changing face of Wolves

Wolf Hunting said:
Having only ever visited Wolverhampton on match days and reading the threads on here, I can see how it's a fairly good sell to the manager as Lop has pointed out with the football challenges etc, but how hard a sell would it be to a wife or partner?
I believe there are a lot of boarded up units in the town centre and at night it's a bit grim with many suggesting its almost a no go area, so is any of the town attractive, are there any good bits?
Or are you just going to sell the lovely houses out to the west of the town and then 'For anything else you go to Birmingham...'?
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Yes, there's lots of good bits, along with the not so good bits - and the city centre definitely needs work, but hopefully once all the redevelopment work is finished that will help.

The biggest problem is that many of us locals just completely run the place down; and "comedians" from elsewhere constantly use the name as a punchline so everyone who just hears them thinks it's just entirely some post-industrial hellhole. And of course, that the government have spent the entire time since 1974 pushing any development money at Birmingham and we've never got our fair share since.

People will go visiting other places and only see the best bits, then compare them to, say, Bilston. For example, my parents think that Bristol is lovely - and parts of it are, don't get me wrong, but then they don't visit the scutty bits, do they?

Birmingham outside half a dozen streets in the city centre is a complete dung heap. Coventry I once heard described as "architecture by Luftwaffe". Manchester's like Birmingham except with a dozen nice streets, but most parts are in reality a dump. All the large and large-ish industrial cities are the same with the same problems - ours are just made worse by an utter lack of civic pride, a local authority whose default speed is glacial as far as getting things done is concerned, and also that because the local authority boundary is in a stupid place, we always look terrible in statistics - most places have the surrounding commuter belts as part of the same local authority area, but we have South Staffordshire Actually.
 
If you look just at city centres then Sunderland is one I would definitely say is worse than Wolves.

Doubt it bothered Jermain Defoe living in his mansion 15 miles down the road, with glorious countryside a very short journey away, and nightlife in Newcastle if that's what you want.

Matheus Cunha isn't going to be bothered by how many Paddy Power and Poundland branches there are in the city centre.
 
Thanks for all your answers.
I find this stuff really interesting especially as I've seen the city centre and there really are some lovely buildings there but it just seems there are a lot of 'low end' premises, like tattoo bars and Pound shops or whatever name you use for them, I see The Mander Centre might be getting a boost but that Big departmental store being closed down is just a real kick in the balls for a place like Wolverhampton.
 
Beatties has been steadily run down for 20-25 years. It wasn't worth shit by the end. They are working on the building.

We have House of Fraser now which is fine if you like that sort of thing (I do not).

Pretty much all provincial town/city centres have the kind of shops you describe.
 
Hang on... I thought Beatties (I couldn't remember the name) was part of the House Of Fraser Group?
Along with Kendals in Manchester and Harrods in London, and Beatties in Wolverhampton no?
 
House of Fraser went bust a few years ago. Not sure about in Wolverhampton but Ashley has opened a Frasers in Derby which is essentially a large Sports Direct with a number of concessions
 
Mike Ashley owned part of Debenhams as well as House of Fraser.

Debenhams is a far nicer site so he moved everything there. Beatties is a neglected craphouse, it had everything wrong with it. A 70s/80s relic. Debenhams is only about five years old.
 
Deutsch Wolf said:
Mike Ashley owned part of Debenhams as well as House of Fraser.

Debenhams is a far nicer site so he moved everything there. Beatties is a neglected craphouse, it had everything wrong with it. A 70s/80s relic. Debenhams is only about five years old.
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Will they be able to keep the lovely architecture of Beatties when and if they do something with it? Or will the just flatten it?
 
It's not being knocked down:

www.expressandstar.com

Wolverhampton Beatties building to become apartments as transformation approved

Wolverhampton's historic Beatties store and car park will be transformed into more than 300 flats after the plans were backed by council chiefs.
www.expressandstar.com www.expressandstar.com

I'd argue we don't have room for one department store in 2023 given shopping habits and the state of the local economy. We definitely don't have space for two.
 
machin05 said:
There are very few reasons for anybody to go to the high street or city centre to actually buy goods. Hospitality is the only future, imo
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Hospitality and revamped, affordable residential. I wouldn't want to live in a city centre now but I probably would have when I was in my early-mid 20s.
 
I was going to say they’ll have to keep the beatties architecture as it’s a listed building, having just checked, surprisingly it isn’t.
 
Round my way prime high street locations are being taken by gyms, dentists, yoga, physiotherapy as well as hospitality and residential.
But definitely coffee shops. Lots of coffee shops.
 
Keef said:
I was going to say they’ll have to keep the beatties architecture as it’s a listed building, having just checked, surprisingly it isn’t.
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It’s very art deco. So good to know the facias seem to be staying
 
the original plans for the flats said it was keeping the exterior and a lot of the interior, and the rooftop penthouse flats weren’t going to go much above the old building height.
We’ll have to wait and see
 
Might work, might not, council are at least trying, when that post came up on Facebook, it was loads of people with the usual ‘ waste of money, what are the council doing? Nobody goes to Wolverhampton any more etc’ very few were happy the council were trying something
 
It's a better idea than a lot of the others they've come up with where they seemed to believe it was still 1998.

Some of the comments in that article (doubtless there are worse on the actual Facebook threads), you despair.

Sally Robinson, another Facebook commenter, added: “It will look like an industrial estate by the time they’ve finished instead of an improvement – what a waste of money, and £6m at that.”
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Fuck off Sally. It's derelict shops on a street that no-one goes to by choice, and it's been like that for decades. Anything is an improvement. What would you like the money to be spent on, most of which it seems isn't even funded by the council itself?
 
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