53
votes
260 year old Crooked House pub catches fire and is demolished days after purchase by developer
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- Title
- 'You will be missed': locals seek answers about destruction of Crooked House pub
- Authors
- Jessica Murray
- Published
- Aug 8 2023
- Word count
- 844 words
Pub survives centuries of use, indoor smoking, open fireplace, cooking, and bombings in WW2; mysteriously burns down a few days after being sold to a developer that owns the adjacent land, just happens to burn down on a night where rubble is blocking fire trucks from getting to the pub, and is completely demolished within three days.
What a funny set of coincidences...
Apparently there's been a rash of pubs changing hands, burning down and being reduced to rubble lately, very strange 🤔.
Related reading:
Rising from the rubble: London pub rebuilt brick by brick after illegal bulldozing
The Guardian – James Tapper – 21st March 2021
Oh my, yes ....... What a gleeful precedent and I will be following the career of this 34 year old would-be developer with interest.
Reminds me also of this old Reddit story about housing preservation in the UK and someone learning an extremely costly lesson
Edit : archived link part one and part 2/2
2nd Edit:
great photo of the pub in flames from this local forum, which already has 5 pages of comments since Sunday. edit edit: mysterious mound of dirt blocking fire truck access
the article had two people talk about a marble rolling up the hill so I looked it up and found this youtube walk through of the pub when it was standing!
and the companion side bar piece and this commentary names the mayor and a local MP and local council officers as champions for the pub, and the latter commentary mentioned the Carlton rebuild specifically as well.
So arson then, because there is no way this was an accident.
Developer burned down 2-3 heritage homes near me in Brisbane. Now I listen to the construction from the townhouses they're building.
I believe the developer that burned them down went bankrupt and it's a totally 100% different developer^tm building the townhouses.
Yes, see also a weird safety loophole about cladding in the UK. The builders have to get a "competent" person to sign-off to say the building is safe, but the builders can chose who that is. So, the builders get it signed off, they sell the properties, they liquidate the company, and home-owners are stuck with the bill to replace cladding.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/31/uk/cladding-cost-of-living-crisis-grenfell-cmd-gbr-intl/index.html
When I was growing up, I worked summers caddying at a very old, exclusive, and expensive golf club. Some time in the 80s-ish, there was a plan put forward to do extensive renovations on the clubhouse that led to quite a bit of debate among the membership, and when it came up to a vote, the renovation plan lost by only a tiny handful of votes. The next night, the clubhouse burned to the ground.
Update:
Police arrest two men employed to set fire to......ahem... Two men arrested over fire at Crooked House Pub