balcony

I'm slightly obsessed with this sea front building... ever since I realised it had appeared in an episode of 'Men Behaving Badly'. It was odd watching an old repeat of this sitcom in my new flat - knowing that only yards away was the very building that was in the show.

Now after the relative success of the new Warnes Building next door - developers have been given the go ahead to 'convert'* this building into (yet more) luxury apartments. Country councils up and down the UK have been doing this - allowing property developers to build nice looking apartments and housing estates for well, millionaires. Except none of these councils seem to be able to grasp the plain and simple fact that just aren't enough millionaires in this country that can afford those places... so all these buildings end up standing empty. (There was a very similar phenomenon that took place in the Eighties - where because of the boom years - developers went mad building lots and lots of office space - and totally forgot all about building houses for people to live in. Of course boom turned to bust - and oh so many brand new office buildings stood empty for want of any new businesses to move into them.) Of course we're now on the brink of a massive credit crunch and those cheap mortgage deals that have feed the housing price rises and rises and rises of the past decade or so - are no longer to be had. I've got a feeling that once these apartments have been finished - there's a good chance they're going to be standing empty for a long while.

2006 article in the Argus.


*I say convert - because I think the whole interior is being totally gutted and rebuilt from scratch with only the facade remaining in place but radically cleaned and tidied up - that's if it doesn't accidentally collapse meantime.