On Sunday morning almost 30 years of my history, and a little less of Chantals, disappeared in a cloud of dust when New Walk Centre, my place of work between August 1985 and June 2014, was demolished.
I remember my first day clearly, having blagged my way into a technical job about noise, with no experience other than spending 30 minutes in the adjacent public library looking up a few key acoustic words in a text book. After several years in the hard grind of retailing at Waitrose, the City Council was a relaxed and friendly affair. Between my interview and starting work, I received a payrise, an extra two days of annual leave, and two week of paid paternity leave (Simon was born two months later).
For most of my time at New Walk Centre I thoroughly enjoyed my work – pay was good, conditions were good, and the work was enjoyable. I suppose that the pay and conditions aspect started to crumble at about the same time as New Walk Centre.
We had known for some years that the building was becoming structurally unsound, and about three years ago red tape demarked areas on each floor that were not strong enough to take the weight of paper files, and these areas were kept clear of all furniture, a policy rigorously enforced. The ongoing process of becoming paperless was accelerated, and a scanning company and shredding company were kept busy.
Deadlines by which we must evacuate the building and move elsewhere came and went, as potential alternative workplaces were proven unsuitable. Eventually an absolute deadline of June 2014 was set, when the building’s insurers announced that they would no longer insure the premise. The weeks leading up to the move coincides with my two Team managers each being on maternity/paternity leave (separately!), and I inherited the task of managing the move.
After proposals to move us to various building across greater Leicester, we ended up just 20 feet from New Walk Centre, a newly refurbished office, where we had to get used to “hot-desking”, having no personal desk, and fetching all our belongings, both work and personal, from our locker each morning. The Noise Team have always worked well together, and we have all settled in comfortably, making the most of the encouragement to work at home on at least one day a week.
I was working last Saturday night, but with New Walk Centre, 20 feet from the office, due to be demolished 8 hours after the end of the shift, we were evacuated to “City Hall”, the plush, but corporately bland, Council HQ, our own office having been closed down and sealed up earlier in the day.
We had toyed with the idea of going to Leicester to watch the demolition on Sunday morning, but since we didn’t know how close we would get, and in any case after a late night I wanted a lie in, we opted to watch it on the internet instead. It was still quite a social occasion, as we exchanged texts with colleagues also watching from home, or, in the case of one member of the Team, from the Control Room (he was instructed to be there in case of excess dust and noise, although what precisely he was supposed to do with inevitable excessive dust and noise was beyond him).
At 10.00am, preceded by 15 minute and 5 minute warning sirens, the explosives detonated, and we watched as our professional home of almost three decades collapsed in on itself before disappearing inside a huge plume of dust. We could hear crowds cheering, but we were surprisingly sad. It had been ugly, tatty inside, and unsafe, but it had been part of who we are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58T1vlrKzQs ((you will probably need to copy and paste link)
Our office remained closed on Monday due to debris blocking the route away from the fire exit (some worked at home, other decamped to other offices), but on Tuesday I saw the 2-3 storey high piles of rubble that had been New Walk Centre. Fences less than 20 feet from the building were intact, and only one window of the many surrounding buildings, all evacuated on the day, had been broken.
Technically we live in Oaktree House, but sadly the tree had to go.
We now have a thriving Oakstump at the front of the house.
