Talking Telford: What's becoming of New College and how will we remember it?
Whenever I go through Wellington these days and have a minute or two to spare (never a guarantee with my timekeeping being what it is), I try and stick my head in at the building site formerly known as New College.
The sprawling, multi-level compound between King Street and New Street where thousands of people, myself included, got an education and a first real taste of adult independence as teenagers has not looked like a college for some time, but what I saw there most recently drove home just how much has changed. It’s well and truly a building site now, surrounded by high fences on all sides and populated only by contractors, machines, bricks and tarps while the foundations are hauled up into yet more accommodation.
Almost all of the buildings that made up the college have been demolished, save for the old original structure at the highest point of the campus, a former girls’ school, which will be preserved in some form.
It’s ironic that the college’s oldest, creakiest building is the one that has outlasted all the others while the huge glass-and-light canteen, the 21st century music block with its air of mystery and the computer lab which only opened when I was a student there have all now been reduced to rubble, anything useful having been carted off to TCAT - sorry, Telford College - long ago.
But it was on my last rubbernecking tour that I first noticed the fancy paved driveway that has now been built on what used to be a basketball court in the corner of the site, and the earliest red brick foundations for new homes-to-be dotted around what was once a car park, and it suddenly all felt more real. None of it is coming back, and it will only get less recognisable until one day those red brick foundations will be houses, populated by adults who have only ever known it as a housing estate.
I spoke recently with a colleague who’d made contact with a Telford New Town historian, a chronicler of this young town’s trials and tribulations since it was formed a little over half a century ago.
We were both thrilled that such a position exists - and I hope one day there will be a definitive History of New College too to help preserve the stories of this huge former campus that became a housing estate, with nothing but memories and an old girls' to hint at what came before.
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