Customer benefits or a greedy land grab? So as referred to in your pages North Herts Homes are going to close and demolish Beechridge Lodge in Baldock, together with its Meals on Wheels/kitchen, because it does not meet the modern standards required for

Customer benefits or a greedy land grab? So as referred to in your pages North Herts Homes are going to close and demolish Beechridge Lodge in Baldock, together with its Meals on Wheels/kitchen, because "it does not meet the modern standards required for independent living"! (Move over Alistair Campbell).

Could it be nearer the truth that they see several open acres of development land around the building and does this echo the trumped-up reasons for demolishing the bungalows at Campers Road and Highover Avenue in Letchworth Garden City where a high-density redevelopment is the real end game.

Bearing in mind that Beechridge Lodge was a unique purpose-built hostel partly for homeless people in the early 1980s with independent bedsits, flats, warden and staff housing, pool table/bar and lounge facilities, etc, with a dining room and kitchen the envy of many a commercial establishment, the reason given for demolition is more than suspicious.

This is compounded by the fact that the large building is only about 23 years old when most such buildings normally have a sustainable life of 60 to 100 years plus.

Unfortunately low-income residents are not only struggling to find alternative accommodation but ironically will struggle to find anything of a comparable independent purpose-built standard.

The suggestion that they find lodgings in a shared house only further exposes a callous landlord, (shamefully a Housing Association) and a complicit North Herts District Council, not to mention the effects on the Meals on Wheels service and its elderly customers.

Like Campers Road/Highover Avenue - all for the sake of greedy institutional land-grab.

How long before we hear that, like closures of other public services, it is all done to benefit and improve services to our customers (more bilge)!

Watch the spaces after demolition.

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