Blears Station

Watching the news this week, rather idly whilst eating my breakfast (a bowl of cereal and some apple juice), a face appeared on the screen that rather put me off my morning consumption – Hazel Blears. We’ve talked about Hazel ‘I’ll just put that flat on expenses’ Blears on here before. I won’t put you through the inconvenience of another picture of her face.

So what was Blears on about this time? Apologising for buying a Lamborghini on expenses, because she didn’t quite understand the rules? No, not this time. This time she’s getting all self righteous about the planned Power Station live music venue which is due to submit its proposal to the council shortly. For those of you not up with this development, it’s a big gig venue planned for a warehouse in the industrial wasteland of Trafford Park. ‘Manchester’s O2’ is how they’re billing it. Full story here.

So what’s Blears got to do with it? Well, she’s MP for Salford and Eccles (yes, still!) and has jumped on the bandwagon with the elderly Salford Quays residents who oppose The Power Station in order to secure the votes of the elderly majority of her constituency...sorry, I mean she’s really concerned about the disruption to the lives of the Salford Quays residents.

She’s quoted in the press as saying: “This development is in a totally unsuitable location, so close to residential areas, and will have a big impact on the quality of life of people living in Salford Quays.” Let’s just take a look at that location – we got a seven year old to do some photoshop work for us:

So to clarify – A is the proposed main entrance of the ‘superclub’, from where punters will be dropped off and collected, B is the building itself, C is the Imperial War Museum North, D is a couple of large, noise absorbing office buildings, E is water and the area roughly highlighted above is the loosely defined ‘closest residents’.

In an effort to appease the vocal public outcry from the Sleepless in Salford collective, the people behind The Power Station held some public consultations the other week to try and answer questions and welcome some input from local residents before they put their official application in. One of the main concerns was, predictably, noise. This was answered with the statement that plans were in place to invest a large amount of money in sound proofing the building and, to be honest, you probably won’t hear it anyway. That didn’t stop Blears though – the major disruption to people’s lives, she was claiming on the news, would come directly from ‘people being dropped off and picked up late at night, slamming car doors.’ Brilliant. Now the massive sound system has been dealt with let’s move on to the next most inconvenient thing – car doors being slammed.

In truth this, like many such things, boils down to people reading the Daily Mail too much. A new large club in the locale will, obviously, result in drink and drugged fuelled youths rampaging previously-quiet neighbourhoods and causing untold pain to local residents. The fact that most of the nimbys probably live on the eighth floor of some distant apartment block, facing the opposite way and nowhere near the club or its detritus, is, of course, irrelevant. Still, it gives them something to gossip about in between lunch at Harvey Nicks and afternoon tea in the Lowry hotel.