New bus station under construction

Image: © Oliver Dixon Taken: 24 Feb 2016

As well as the Hexham parking fiasco Image, the matter of Hexham's bus station is also quite a saga. The old bus station is well beyond retirement age - see Image Clearly it was in need of complete reconstruction, but the Council saw it as a splendid opportunity to sell a bit of their real estate for retail development (not that there aren't plenty of empty shop premises in town already). Their first plan was a complete joke - all bus stop to be on the street along Priestpopple, which would have led to complete congestion both on the roadway and on the narrow pavements adjoining. As most services are from the east and terminate at Hexham, this plan needed to incorporate somewhere for buses to turn round. So it was proposed that buses should continue up the even narrower Battle Hill Image and turn round at a new roundabout at the end of Beaumont Street - a plan which required encroachment onto the Sele park and relocation of the statue to the Boer War hero Image Huge protests - most quite valid complaints about the impracticality of the scheme. Less convincing were the pleas of a descendant of said Boer War hero. So on to the next proposal - to locate the new bus station on the site of the Losing Hill car park. (Despite the hundreds of Geographs in and around Hexham, there is, alas, no image of said car park). Huge protests again, not entirely convincing, as the new site, whilst marginally less central, is within 200 metres of the old one. Another problem was that the whole car park with space for 120 cars would be closed during the many months of construction, although 50 spaces will be restored afterwards. This shows the site viewed from the junction of Maiden's Walk and Dene Park.

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