Scaffolding surrounding one of Bristol's most infamous eyesore buildings was being removed over the weekend, a week after magistrates issued a court order requiring the owners to make the building safe.
Contractors carefully took down the scaffolding that had been surrounding the former Grosvenor Hotel building at Temple Meads for two-and-a-half years, as part of a month-long process to make the building structurally safe again, following the fire which gutted it in October.
Magistrates last Monday, November 28, heard council experts warn the building was 'at risk of collapse' following the fire of October 18, and told the building's owners, Earlcloud Ltd, they had five weeks to make the building safe.
Read more: Bizarre history of fire-hit Grosvenor Hotel from missing millions to a passport-eating dog
Scaffolding surrounded the old hotel at Temple Circus for years before the scaffolding company took it down in June 2020, saying they had not been paid and were owed tens of thousands of pounds. Within a few months, the council ordered Earlcloud to put some back up because masonry and tiles were falling from the building and it was a danger to passers-by.
The scaffolding remained until this weekend, but the council's own experts have decided that Earlcloud either have to demolish the building to make the site safe, or erect new specialist scaffolding to prop up the building's walls, because it is so dangerous.
After the fire on October 18, the building's roof and floors inside basically collapsed, and Bristol City Council widened an exclusion zone around the building for safety reasons, fearing it could collapse at any time. That has continued to impact pedestrians on Temple Way, and meant the closure of a lane of the the road nearby. The court order on November 28 instructed Earlcloud to make the building safe enough so that the exclusion zone around it could be made smaller and stop taking up part of the road.
On Saturday and Sunday, December 3 and 4, a team of scaffolders carefully removed the scaffolding from May 2020, in preparation for more heavy-duty supportive scaffolding to replace it in the coming week. The building's owner Nimish Popat, from Earlcloud, told Bristol Live he wanted to see the building developed, but said his plan for the New Year after the building was made safe was ‘under review’.
Bristol City Council has had years of talking about taking out a Compulsory Purchase Order on the building, and announced its own plans for a replacement development back in 2019, with a developer. Mr Popat’s valuation of the building differs from the council, and the gap has effectively been the cause of the years of delay.
That delay was most recently punctuated by the bizarre episode where a businessman sold student flats to investors that didn’t have planning permission and didn’t exist in a building he didn’t own, as he and his wife spent the millions on luxury shopping sprees around the world. That businessman Sanjiv Varma is currently on the run from a prison sentence for contempt of court over the affair, and believed to be in Dubai.
Read next:
- Before the fire - inside the 'really weird' Grosvenor Hotel
- As it happened - the Grosvenor Hotel fire
- Fugitive Bristol businessman banned and on the run
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