Great British sell-off: how desperate councils bought £nine.1bn of public assets

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Bureau for Investigative Journalism and HuffPost UK studies show that more than £9.1 billion worth of publicly owned assets are offloaded to plug gaps left via authorities’ cuts. Stretford Public Hall is a building that accurately embodies the general public’s ideas. A staggering, Grade II indexed pink-brick Victorian edifice has served the area people in Trafford, Manchester, given 1878.

Home to one of the first libraries in the metropolis, as well as public baths and a civic theatre, it has hosted community celebrations for the give up of each international war as well as events starting from debates, meetings, plays, and speeches with the aid of anyone from Oswald Mosley to Tony Benn to dances and ancient Rock Against Racism live shows providing the Fall and John Cooper Clarke. In December 2013, Annoushka Deighton, chair of the Friends of Stretford Public Hall, determined through a news story on Facebook that the cash-strapped nearby council had marketed it – and the most probable buyer turned into a “heavyweight” assets developer who wanted to turn it into apartments. “The council had been under full-size pressure because of cuts to their budget and desired to look at the nice deal they could get for it [was].”

It becomes, Deighton and her neighbors quickly realized, “a tragedy in the making. Once you sell off a construction like that, it’s lost to the community forever. Stretford has completely overlooked a part of quite a rich borough. We had usually been seen as the rubbish ceases of the metropolis, the pubs and bars had all been remaining down, there’s little or no social area, and it’s surely looked down on. Directly contrary, the Corridor is a 1930s cinema that’s privately owned and hasn’t been open for two decades. If [Stretford Public Hall] had shut as well, it felt like that would be the top of the city.”