A corner of Middleton where dreams once went to drink and die may soon host “Longview House”, a bafflingly optimistic name for a building facing the back of a vape shop and KFC.
Once the proud home of a terraced row and a boozer that smelt of regrets and pickled eggs, the site at King Street and Long Street has sat unloved since the early 2000s, a time when men were men and the Nokia 3310 was still a weapon of social power.
EA Town Planning, clearly unaware of the karmic curse placed upon the land during a drunken darts tournament in 1997, has submitted a proposal on behalf of one Mr McDonagh. The plan? To erect nine modern flats with “open-plan living”, which we all know is code for “we couldn’t be arsed putting in walls”.
The new L-shaped building, described by its designers as a “modern take on the classical Victorian terraced dwelling form,” will use “high-quality materials” and “simplistic design form,” which presumably translates to “bricks and windows, probably.”
The three-storey monstrosity, sorry, statement building, is to be called “Longview House,” perhaps as a nod to the scenic vistas of bin storage areas and that bloke who shouts at pigeons outside the Londis.
The plan includes a quaint 3.6-metre “undeveloped area” at the back, where dreams of biodiversity will go to die next to some depressed saplings and a broken patio chair.
JCD Architecture and Planning chimed in to remind us all this is a brownfield site, in case you thought it was a unicorn habitat. They optimistically stated the new flats would “reinstate a strong built frontage,” though why anyone would want to reinstate anything in that corner of Middleton remains unclear.
The site, once graced by a terraced row and a pub that definitely saw at least three illicit boxing matches, has long been considered a prime location for ambitious planning applications that go absolutely nowhere. Indeed, planning permission was once granted for three apartments in 2008, back when hope was still a thing.
Local historians, or the bloke down the road who remembers everything from 1983 onwards, have confirmed that other plans, including office developments, have also failed to materialise, proving the site to be the developmental equivalent of a cursed monkey’s paw.
Still, with Rochdale Council set to make a decision, local residents remain cautiously uninterested. One passerby summed up public sentiment by muttering, “As long as it doesn’t become another Domino’s, I don’t care.”
